TEXT [Commentary]

4.   Formal renewal of the covenant (24:25-28)

25 So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day at Shechem, committing them to follow the decrees and regulations of the LORD. 26 Joshua recorded these things in the Book of God’s Instructions. As a reminder of their agreement, he took a huge stone and rolled it beneath the terebinth tree beside the Tabernacle of the LORD.

27 Joshua said to all the people, “This stone has heard everything the LORD said to us. It will be a witness to testify against you if you go back on your word to God.”

28 Then Joshua sent all the people away to their own homelands.

NOTES

24:26 rolled it. Lit., “set it up” or “erected it,” implying a stone sculpted into the shape of a stela, a standing stone monument, such as have been recovered in many places in the Near East. Though the text does not say so, Joshua also may have had a memorial inscription chiseled into this stone monument (cf. the inscription at the altar on Mount Ebal, 8:30-32).

beside the Tabernacle of the LORD. Lit., “at the sanctuary of Yahweh.” The Tabernacle was at Shiloh, not Shechem (18:1). See commentary.

24:28 to their own homelands. Lit., “each man to his own inheritance.”

COMMENTARY [Text]

After the people’s second affirmation (24:19-24), Joshua led them in a covenant renewal ceremony (24:25); literally, Joshua “cut (karath [TH3772, ZH4162]) a covenant with/for the people that day.” The verbal root karath occurs in most of the ancient Semitic languages. “To cut a covenant” became the technical term for entering into a covenant treaty, and was used regularly to record the making and ratifying of covenant treaties in the ancient Near East. As a technical term, “to cut a covenant” arose in the practice of dividing (one, or each of several) sacrificial animal(s) lengthwise into two pieces. The covenant parties then walked between the two halves as they lay on the ground (e.g., Gen 15:9-10, 17, but note here that only God passed between the halves of the sacrificial animals—God visible to Abram as a “smoking firepot and a flaming torch” [v. 17]). This action symbolized the intention of each covenant partner to be hewn in two like the sacrifice if he violated the terms of the covenant. Though our passage does not record it, Joshua probably did perform this sacrifice as part of this covenant renewal ceremony. In any case, the term “cut a covenant” continued as a reminder of the seriousness of entering into a covenant.

“The Book of God’s Instructions” (24:26) is, literally, “the scroll of the Torah of God.” Whether this particular scroll contained anything from Moses’s time, or from earlier in Joshua’s life, or only what Joshua recorded in writing from this covenant renewal ceremony, we cannot say. If any of its content survives in the scriptural record, beyond the events recorded in this chapter of Joshua, it no longer is identifiable as having its source in this scroll.

Joshua probably carried the scroll to Shiloh following this ceremony, and deposited it with the priests there, for safekeeping with other items of national importance. The Tabernacle was at Shiloh, not Shechem (18:1). However, Shechem had been a sacred location for Israel, with a holy place, since the time of Abraham (Gen 12:6), when a venerable oak, or “terebinth,” also stood there, perhaps even the same tree mentioned in 24:26. Down to the present day, ancient trees in western Asia usually have been preserved as sacred or venerable, rather than being cut down. Joshua knew what he was doing; a memorial stone (not an altar) set up under this tree indeed would be a powerful “witness” to Israel’s faithfulness—or, as it turned out, to their unfaithfulness toward God.

Whether Joshua had an inscription placed upon the stone or not, he was saying that everyone who had been there would remember the stone was there, too. What they had done was real; the necessity of remaining faithful to God was real. Every Israelite who saw the stone would remember that day and the ceremony of covenant renewal, either because of being there or because of being told about it. As Joshua intended, this ceremony at Shechem had a lasting effect on its participants. The author recorded (24:31) that Israel served God faithfully as long as that generation lived.