1250 BC to 1200 BC
Entering the land
Israel crossing into Canaan and contending with fortified city-states, each with its own king, in a land Egypt had recently dominated and was now losing its grip on.
Joshua
About the dating
Tied to whichever date is taken for the exodus. How the settlement happened is separately debated: a rapid military conquest, a gradual infiltration, or an internal upheaval among Canaanites are all proposed, and the biblical account itself describes both sweeping victories and a great deal of land left unconquered.
The world at this moment
What everyone else was doing while this part of the story was happening.
The collapse
The whole eastern Mediterranean is coming apart. Within about fifty years the Hittite empire falls, its capital burns, the Mycenaean palaces are destroyed, Ugarit is wiped out mid-correspondence, and Egypt is fighting for its life against seaborne invaders. Nobody fully knows why. Drought, earthquake, migration, and the failure of interlocking trade are all in the explanation.
Egypt
Still strong enough to record a victory over a people called Israel on a stone monument around 1207 BC, the earliest mention of the name outside the Bible. But Egyptian control of Canaan is slipping, and within a generation it is gone.
Canaan
Not a country but dozens of walled towns, each with its own king, its own god, and its own quarrel with the next valley. This is why the book of Joshua reads as a list of kings rather than a war with a nation.
Further afield
Iron is beginning to replace bronze across the region, partly because the tin trade that made bronze possible has broken down. The Olmec are building San Lorenzo. The Zhou are about to overthrow the Shang in China.
What you would be reading
One book sits here. Open any of them and every card in the margin will describe itself at this moment.
Who was alive
2 of the people written up in the Hall of Witnesses belong to this stretch of the story.
A prostitute in Jericho who hid Israel's spies and asked for mercy for her household, and got it. Matthew names her in the genealogy of Jesus, and both Hebrews and James hold her up as an example of living faith.
He kept a robe, silver, and gold from Jericho when everything had been devoted to destruction, and hid them under his tent. Israel's next battle, against a tiny town, failed because of it, and the search narrowed tribe by tribe until it reached him.
The world as it stood
29 entries describe themselves differently at this moment than at any other. These are the same notes that appear in the margin while you read.
The land
Cities, regions, rivers, and kingdoms, as they stood.
A Jebusite stronghold that Israel does not take. Judges notes plainly that the Jebusites went on living there, which is still the case when David arrives centuries later.
The first obstacle for anyone entering from the east, and the first city taken. The archaeology is genuinely contested: the site has walls that collapsed and a burn layer, but dating them to Joshua's period has been argued over for a century.
Where the tent of meeting was set up once the land was taken, and where the remaining allotments were decided by lot.
Given to Caleb, who at eighty-five asked for the hill country with the giants on it rather than an easier allotment.
Where Joshua gathered the tribes between Ebal and Gerizim to renew the covenant, with the blessings read from one mountain and the curses from the other.
Israel's first camp inside the land, where the men were circumcised, the manna stopped, and the produce of Canaan was eaten for the first time.
One of the Canaanite royal cities Joshua's list names, guarding the pass where the coastal road enters the Jezreel valley.
The barrier and the threshold. The waters stand in a heap while the ark is in the riverbed, and twelve stones are set up at Gilgal so that children would ask what they meant.
The peoples
A nation's name outlives its power, often by centuries.
The population Israel is told to displace, and largely does not. The Amarna letters, sent to Egypt from Canaanite rulers in the fourteenth century BC, show exactly the fragmented and quarrelsome situation Joshua describes.
The empire falls, its capital burned in the general collapse around 1200 BC. What survives in the biblical record afterwards are small successor states in Syria and individuals in Israel like Uriah, Bathsheba's husband.
Hold Jerusalem, and Joshua and Judges both admit plainly that they were not driven out, which is a rare and useful piece of honesty in a conquest account.
The tribes
Where each stood, and which of them can still be traced.
Settles east of the Jordan with good grazing, having asked for land before the crossing rather than after it. The request nearly starts a war, and the altar the eastern tribes build afterwards is nearly taken as rebellion.
Given towns inside Judah's territory rather than a territory of its own, which is Jacob's word about scattering coming true in the least dramatic way possible.
Given forty-eight towns scattered through the other allotments rather than a territory. The arrangement puts a Levite presence within reach of everyone.
Allotted the southern hill country, the largest single share, including Hebron and the site that would become Jerusalem. Judah goes up first, and the book of Judges opens with its campaign.
Allotted a small area on the coastal plain that it could not hold, because the Philistines and the Amorites were already there and stronger.
Allotted the hills west of the Sea of Galilee, good country on a dangerous road.
Settles east of the Jordan alongside Reuben, on the exposed frontier facing Ammon and the desert.
Allotted the northern coast toward Tyre and Sidon, fertile country that the tribe never fully took from the Phoenician cities already there.
Allotted the Jezreel valley, the best farmland in the country and the route every invading army used. Jacob's blessing about a strong donkey bowing its shoulder to bear a burden reads as a comment on exactly that trade-off.
Allotted the lower Galilee between the coast and the lake, with Nazareth inside its old borders.
The house of Joseph takes Bethel and holds the central hills, and the double portion means Joseph's descendants end up with more land than anyone.
Allotted the central hill country, with Shiloh inside it, where the tabernacle stood for generations. Joshua himself was an Ephraimite, and the tribe never quite forgot it.
The only tribe settled on both sides of the Jordan, half of it in Gilead and Bashan to the east and half in the hills west of the river. Being split by a river shapes everything that happens to it afterwards.
Allotted a small strip between Ephraim and Judah, containing Jericho, Bethel, Gibeah, and the ridge Jerusalem sits on. Small, central, and strategically valuable out of all proportion to its size.
Worship and institution
The temple in Ezra is not the temple in Kings, and neither is the one Jesus taught in.
Carried ahead of the people into the Jordan and around Jericho. It functions as the visible sign that God goes in front rather than behind.
Israel is commanded to destroy them, and the command is repeated often enough to suggest it was not carried out.
The gods of the nations
What was actually on offer, and how strong the pull was just then.
One of the first dangers named, and for a practical reason. Baal is the god who is supposed to make the land produce, and Israel is moving from herding into farming.
The wooden poles that stood beside altars are to be cut down, which suggests they stood beside a good many of them.
And then
The land is entered but not held. Joshua dies with large parts of it still in other hands, and the book of Judges opens by listing exactly which parts.