Joshua 16: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter marks out the land given to the descendants of Joseph. It first traces the southern boundary of the whole Joseph allotment, from the Jordan near Jericho west to the Mediterranean, then gives the borders of Ephraim's territory in more detail, including towns set aside for Ephraim inside Manasseh's land. It closes by noting that Ephraim did not drive the Canaanites out of Gezer, and that those Canaanites still lived among them as forced laborers when this was written.

Claim by Claim

1. 16:1
   • The lot for the children of Joseph went out from the Jordan at Jericho.
   • It ran to the waters of Jericho on the east.
   • It ran to the wilderness that goes up from Jericho into the hill country of Bethel.
2. 16:2
   • The border went out from Bethel to Luz.
   • It passed along to the border of the Archites at Ataroth.
3. 16:3
   • It went down westward to the border of the Japhletites.
   • It went as far as the border of Lower Beth-horon.
   • It went as far as Gezer.
   • Its end points were at the sea.
4. 16:4
   • The children of Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim, received their inheritance.
5. 16:5
   • This was the border of the children of Ephraim according to their families.
   • The border of their inheritance on the east side was Ataroth-addar.
   • That border ran to Upper Beth-horon.
6. 16:6
   • The border went out toward the sea.
   • Michmethath was on the north side.
   • The border turned eastward to Taanath-shiloh.
   • It passed by it on the east to Janoah.
7. 16:7
   • The border went down from Janoah to Ataroth.
   • It went down to Naarah.
   • It reached Jericho.
   • It went out at the Jordan.
8. 16:8
   • From Tappuah the border went westward to the brook of Kanah.
   • Its end points were at the sea.
   • This was the inheritance of the tribe of the children of Ephraim according to their families.
9. 16:9
   • There were cities set apart for the children of Ephraim within the inheritance of the children of Manasseh.
   • These included all the cities with their villages.
10. 16:10
    • They did not drive out the Canaanites who lived in Gezer.
    • The Canaanites dwell among the Ephraimites to this day.
    • The Canaanites became forced laborers subject to tribute.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

16:1

"The lot" was a physical procedure, not a figure of speech: marked stones or sticks were shaken or drawn to decide which tribe got which stretch of land. The idea was that the outcome was taken out of human hands. The boundary descriptions in this chapter are drawn as lines running from landmark to landmark (river, spring, ridge, town) the ordinary way of recording a property line before maps.

16:2

The Hebrew here can be read two ways, and translators split over it. Read one way, the border runs from Bethel on to a separate place called Luz; read another, the phrase is an aside meaning "Bethel, that is, Luz", Luz being the town's older name (Genesis 28:19). The Archites were a clan or people group living in the area; "the border of the Archites" means the edge of the land they occupied, not a fortified line.

16:3

The Japhletites, like the Archites, were a local clan whose territory served as a landmark. Beth-horon was a pair of towns on the same ridge road, an Upper and a Lower, guarding the main climb from the coastal plain into the hill country; the King James "the nether" simply means the lower of the two.

16:4

"Inheritance" here does not mean property left by someone who died. It is the standing term for the share of land permanently assigned to a tribe or family, held in trust and passed down rather than bought and sold. Joseph, one of Jacob's twelve sons, was not himself counted as a tribe; his two sons Ephraim and Manasseh each became a tribe, so "the descendants of Joseph" covers two allotments, described here and in the next chapter.

16:5

A clan was the unit between the tribe and the single household, an extended kinship group descended from a common ancestor. Land was parcelled out clan by clan, so a tribe's territory was in practice a mosaic of clan holdings.

16:6

The description doubles back because the writer traces the northern border first westward to the sea, then returns to the same starting point and traces it eastward. Several of the places named here cannot be located today with any certainty.

16:8

The "Brook" of Kanah was a wadi: a watercourse that runs during the rainy season and lies dry the rest of the year. Dry or not, its bed was a permanent, visible line in the landscape and so made a convenient boundary.

16:9

Boundaries drawn on the ground rarely came out tidy. Some towns belonging to Ephraim sat inside the block of land assigned to Manasseh, and the text records this rather than smoothing it over. "Villages" translates a word meaning the small unwalled settlements that clustered around a walled town and depended on it.

16:10

The Canaanites were the peoples already settled in the land before Israel arrived; Gezer was a major fortified city on the route from the coast into the hills. "Forced labor" translates a term for conscripted work gangs, a subject population made to supply unpaid labor for building and public works, distinct from being individually owned as slaves. "To this day" is the narrator speaking to his own readers, noting that the arrangement was still in place when the account was written down.