Sunday Sermonette: My eyes glaze over

Joshua 14 continues with the division of the land among the tribes, with specific bequests to a couple of individual characters. Again, I ' m really not sure why the writers in the 7th Century BCE thought it useful to tell this tale. It must have something to do with regional and national politics at the time but I haven ' t found any efforts to reconstruct it. And I don ' t really have anything to say about it, except that it is clearly completely irrelevant to any contemporary religious interest, or any interest for at least the past 2,000 years at the very least; and has no historical reality either. Yet here it is, taking up a good chunk of the holy book which is supposed to guide people ' s lives. Whatev.14 Now these are the areas the Israelites received as an inheritance in the land of Canaan, which Eleazar the priest, Joshua son of Nun and the heads of the tribal clans of Israel allotted to them.2 Their inheritances were assigned by lot to the nine and a half tribes, as theLord had commanded through Moses.3 Moses had granted the two and a half tribes their inheritance east of the Jordan but had not granted the Levites an inheritance among the rest,4 for Joseph ’s descendants had become two tribes—Manasseh and Ephraim. The Levites received no share of the land but only towns to live in, with pasturelands for their flocks and herds.5 So the Israelites divided the land, just as theLord had commanded Moses.Allotment for Caleb6 Now the peop...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs