[Week 5] Have I Not Commanded You? (Joshua 1:9)

This week, we are memorizing Joshua 1:9.

• Check out my latest Scripture Memorization song here: Joshua 1:9
• If you're new here, see my introduction to this series here.

"Haven't I commanded you: be strong and courageous? Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go." — Joshua 1:9 (CSB)

The Weight of Joshua 1:9

A note to readers: WARNING This post discusses archaeological evidence of the actual detestable practices that grew so severe that God needed to act. Some of the historical details are disturbing and may not be appropriate for younger readers.

Joshua 1:9. We often read this verse as a motivational poster. Something you put on a coffee mug or cross-stitch onto a pillow. But when we actually sit with the weight of what Joshua was being asked to do, the words take on an entirely different meaning.

This wasn't God giving Joshua a pep talk before a job interview. This was God commissioning a man to lead an entire nation into a land filled with people who had become so corrupted that their practices included burning their own children alive. And Joshua had to be the one to execute God's judgment on them.

The Shoes He Had to Fill

Consider for a moment who Joshua was replacing. Moses, the man who spoke with God face to face. The one who stretched out his staff and the Red Sea parted. The one through whom God delivered the Ten Commandments. The one whose face literally glowed from being in God's presence.

And now Joshua, his assistant, had to step into that role.

The Hebrew word for "courageous" here is amatz (אָמַץ), and it carries the sense of being firm, increasing in intensity, and being hardened for a task. God wasn't telling Joshua to simply feel brave. He was telling him to harden himself and to set his resolve because what lay ahead would test everything he had.

What Was Actually in the Land

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WARNING: This section describes evidence of the detestable abominations of the Canaanites.

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We get glimpses throughout Scripture of what the Canaanite nations were doing. The Gibeonites tricked Joshua into making a treaty with them (Joshua 9). The kings pooled their resources to hire Balaam to curse Israel (Numbers 22). But these are just glimpses.

The archaeological record fills in the picture in disturbing detail.

In 1902, British archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister began excavating at Gezer, a city in the hill country of Canaan. On the acropolis of the site, he unearthed twelve standing stones in a row, with a large altar stone nearby containing a basin for catching blood. This was a Canaanite high place where the Amorites worshipped their gods.¹

What Macalister found next around these standing stones is deeply disturbing. In his excavation report, Macalister described finding "a pit... filled with a great number of bones of human beings in a confused heap. And nearby was the skeleton of a young girl who had evidently been sawn [in half]," along with "the skulls of two other girls who had been decapitated."² All around the base of the standing stones, Macalister discovered jars containing the skeletal remains of infants, and as Kramer notes from the excavation report, "the skeletons showed marks of fire."³

Burned babies. Ritually buried at a place of worship.

(Joel Kramer pulled this information together in this video about the excavated Canaanite high place.)

Macalister wasn't interpreting these finds in some bizarre way. Other archaeologists excavating Canaanite cities were finding similar remains and interpreting them the same way. Kathleen Kenyon, excavating at Jericho in the 1950s, wrote in her book Digging Up Jericho: "There is an unpleasant suggestion of infant sacrifice. Besides one complete infant burial, a collection of infant skulls with a neck vertebrae attached, showing that the heads were cut off and not merely collected from burials."⁴

God addresses this directly in Deuteronomy 12:31: "You must not worship the LORD your God in their way, because they practice every detestable act, which the LORD hates, for their gods. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods." (CSB)

God's Patience

Here's what often gets missed in our reading: God gave these nations centuries to turn from their ways.

Back in Genesis 15, when God made His covenant with Abraham, He told him that his descendants would be strangers in a land not their own for four hundred years. And then God said something remarkable: "In the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." (Genesis 15:16 CSB)

God waited. Four hundred years. He gave the Amorites time to turn, to repent, to stop sacrificing their children. They didn't. They got worse.

By the time Joshua stood at the edge of the Promised Land, the iniquity had reached its full measure. This wasn't ethnic cleansing. This was divine judgment, executed through Israel, on nations that had become so corrupted they were burning their own children alive to appease gods represented by bronze serpents.

Attacked on All Sides

Joshua didn't walk into a land that surrendered peacefully. He was immediately attacked on all sides.

We have remarkable evidence for this outside the Bible. In 1887, clay tablets were discovered at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt. These tablets, known as the Amarna Letters, were correspondence between Canaanite kings and the Pharaoh of Egypt. Many of them are desperate pleas for help against invaders they call the "Habiru."

One letter from Abdi-Heba, the king of Jerusalem, reads:

"The land of the king is lost. I am at war. I am situated like a ship in the midst of the sea. Now the Habiru have taken the very cities of the king. Not a single mayor remains to the king, my lord. All are lost. The king does nothing. May the king provide archers."⁵

A ship in the midst of the sea. The Canaanite kings were surrounded, crying out for help that never came. The letters show them writing to each other, pooling resources, begging Egypt for military support.

Pharaoh never replied.

(Joel Kramer pulled all of this information together in his video about evidence for Israel's conquest.)

This is the historical backdrop to Joshua 1:9. Joshua wasn't walking into an empty tropical paradise. He was walking into a hornet's nest of kings who would do anything to stop him.

Not Handed to Him

After the miraculous victory at Jericho, where the walls simply fell, Joshua might have expected the rest of the conquest to go the same way. But at Ai, he learned otherwise.

The first attack on Ai was a disaster. Israel was routed. Thirty-six men died. And while the sin of Achan was part of the problem, the second battle at Ai required something else entirely: military strategy.

Joshua had to set an ambush. He positioned 5,000 men on a hill west of the city where they couldn't be seen from either Ai or Bethel.⁶ He set up his main camp north of the city in plain view. Then he feigned retreat to draw the defenders out. When the city was left unguarded, the ambush troops took it and set it on fire.

This wasn't "pray and watch God do everything." This was God working through Joshua's careful planning, his understanding of terrain, his willingness to adapt after failure. The archaeology of the site matches the biblical account remarkably, right down to the destruction layer filled with black ash.⁷

(You can see the excavation of this site and Joel Kramer shows how the topography matches the biblical account in his video about the “Problem of Ai”.)

The Weight of the Command of God

So when God says to Joshua, "Have I not commanded you: be strong and courageous? Do not be afraid or discouraged," He isn't handing out a feel-good platitude.

He's speaking to a man who is about to lead a nation that watched their parents die in the wilderness for unbelief and unfaithfulness. A man who must replace the greatest prophet Israel had ever known. A man who will march against fortified cities defended by desperate kings. A man tasked with executing judgment on peoples who sacrificed their own children. And he must do all of this while learning that faith doesn't mean ease and passivity, but strategy, adaptation, and obedience even after failure.

It ends with a promise: "For the LORD your God is with you wherever you go."

That promise wasn't just comfort. It was the only thing that made the impossible task possible. Joshua couldn't do this in his own strength. But with God going before him, even the walls of Jericho would fall and the letters of desperate kings would go unanswered.

God is no longer calling His people to execute judgment on nations. Praise God for Jesus and hearts of clay! But the question for us is whether we believe this same God is with us in whatever impossible situation he's called us to. Not as a coffee mug verse, but as the actual reality that the God who executed judgment on Canaan, who parted the Red Sea, who raised Jesus from the dead, is with us wherever we go.

So, God echos this to us now through his word: “Have I not commanded you?”

References

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash