TEXT [Commentary]
4. The memorial stones (4:1-9)
1 When all the people had crossed the Jordan, the LORD said to Joshua, 2 “Now choose twelve men, one from each tribe. 3 Tell them, ‘Take twelve stones from the very place where the priests are standing in the middle of the Jordan. Carry them out and pile them up at the place where you will camp tonight.’”
4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had chosen—one from each of the tribes of Israel. 5 He told them, “Go into the middle of the Jordan, in front of the Ark of the LORD your God. Each of you must pick up one stone and carry it out on your shoulder—twelve stones in all, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. 6 We will use these stones to build a memorial. In the future your children will ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ 7 Then you can tell them, ‘They remind us that the Jordan River stopped flowing when the Ark of the LORD’s Covenant went across.’ These stones will stand as a memorial among the people of Israel forever.”
8 So the men did as Joshua had commanded them. They took twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan River, one for each tribe, just as the LORD had told Joshua. They carried them to the place where they camped for the night and constructed the memorial there.
9 Joshua also set up another pile of twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan, at the place where the priests who carried the Ark of the Covenant were standing. And they are there to this day.
NOTES
4:1 all the people. See note on 3:17.
4:2 Now choose. Lit., “Take”; Joshua was to “take” the 12 men previously chosen (3:12), and give them the task for which they had been chosen.
twelve men. Jacob’s 12 sons were the ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel. However, the tribe of Levi was consecrated to the priesthood and the service of the Tabernacle; its families were to be settled in designated cities throughout the territories of the other tribes to be teachers of the Torah (ch 21). To complete the number of 12 tribes for the settlement of the land, Joseph was divided into two (half-)tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh, named after Joseph’s two sons.
4:5 on your shoulder. The men were to choose stones large enough to require the strength of their legs and backs to carry them. Each stone could have weighed 100 pounds or more. When I first lived in the Middle East as a student in the 1960s and 1970s (Turkey, Egypt, Israel), I often used to see a variety of such large and heavy items carried this way, on the porter’s upper back and/or shoulder.
4:6 a memorial. Lit., “a sign in your midst.” The heap of stones would be a sign, a reminder, a memorial, of what God had done for Israel that day.
What do these stones mean? Lit., “What are these stones to you?” The pronoun is plural; every Israelite that day participated personally in this great event. In years to come, each would have opportunities in many different settings to relate their memories personally, besides the regular occasions of community and national remembrance.
4:7 as a memorial. Or, “as a remembrance.”
4:9 another pile of twelve stones. “Another” is a translation that resembles those of the LXX and Vulgate. The Hebrew text does not say “another,” though the straightforward meaning of this verse is that this is another memorial—in addition to the one already mentioned in 4:8 (see commentary).
COMMENTARY [Text]
Many commentators have struggled with this chapter, as well as the chapter’s relationship with chapter 3, thinking perhaps too much in Western narrative categories and customs, and making the whole account more complicated than necessary. Woudstra’s advice (1981:90) is excellent: “if the chief purpose of ch 4, the erection of the memorial stones, is kept in mind, the apparent lack of order and of composition, which many have thought to characterize the account at this point, ceases to be a pressing problem.”
In the Hebrew text, the first clause of this passage repeats the last clause of the preceding passage, “[When] the whole nation had completed the crossing of the Jordan,” a literary technique tying the two narratives together, to show that the second is intended to follow the first. But chapter 4 is not a sequel. The first section (4:1-9) brings the reader back to the 12 tribal representatives of 3:12 and their task of gathering stones. Likewise, 4:10-18 reports the movements of the priests who carried the Ark. Both paragraphs fill in details that would have distracted from the straightforward narrative of chapter 3. Only in 4:19-24, then, does the author recount Israel’s arrival at Gilgal and the setting up of the 12 stones as a teaching memorial.
Moreover, chapter 4 contains a classic example of the literary pattern (already noted) of command, execution, and report. God told Joshua what to do (4:1-3); Joshua relayed the command to the stone bearers representing the 12 tribes, amplifying it to reveal to them its purpose (4:4-7); then, by way of a satisfying climax for the ancient reader/hearer, the author reports: “the men did as Joshua had commanded them” (4:8).
The modern reader who is tempted to find the account too repetitious is nevertheless invited to reflect on the faithfulness both of God and of God’s ancient people. God was, is, and always will be faithful; God’s people were, are, and always will be invited to respond in trust and obedience. This report of Israel’s faithful response encourages our own faithful response to God. We are reminded by the repetitions in the account that many of life’s most important lessons—this surely is one—we begin to learn early, and we continue to learn often. As is also common when repetition occurs in ancient narrative literature, new elements are added. From Joshua’s instructions to the stone bearers, they (and we) learned the stones were “to build a memorial” (4:6), a teaching device to instruct their children in the great things God had done for Israel.
It cost the 12 unnamed Israelite men who carried the stones from the bed of the Jordan a good deal of effort, and most probably some pain, to bring those stones to the site where the memorial would be erected. But their memorial would be worth its cost. So shall we find our memorials to be worth their cost as they help our children to make the faith their own.
If 4:9 reports another memorial of 12 stones in the middle of the Jordan itself, as it seems to, then that memorial was submerged beneath the waters of the Jordan as soon as they resumed their flow, only becoming partially visible again in the dry summer season, when the volume of the Jordan’s flow decreased. One reason to think Joshua really did build a memorial in the Jordan, in addition to the one at Gilgal, is the prominence of the Ark in this account. One could summarize the point of view in both chapters 3 and 4 as follows: This is the account of the Ark of God crossing the Jordan—oh, and by the way, God brought Israel across with him. It would have been only natural for Joshua to mark the exact spot all Israel had seen and passed the Ark as they crossed this second “uncrossable” body of water by God’s gracious power exercised on their behalf.