Joshua chapter 4

After reading chapter 4:

*The whole nation of Israel has finished crossing the Jordan and they are again told to pick twelve men, one from each tribe. This time they are told why. The men are commanded to go back to the middle of the river, where the priests are still standing with the ark, and each pick up a large stone. They are to bring the stones back to their camp. The stones are to be a memorial of the river crossing. Joshua took the stones and set them up. Supposedly, they were still there at the writing of this book, which would have been hundreds of years later.

*The priests stayed in the middle of the river till all the Israelites were out. Then they took the ark to the other side while everyone was watching. As an aside we are told that 40,000 armed men of the Reubenites, Gadites, and the half tribe of Mannasseh had also crossed. Plus, Yahweh exalted Joshua and he became just as revered to the Israelites as Moses had been. Do you remember that Moses had been downright hated at times? The author of Joshua doesn't seem to remember.

*Again, we are told that the priests came out of the river with the ark. There are so many redundancies in scriptures, many in odd places, that it is becoming easy to understand why many scholars think that they were composed by multiple authors and kind of smooshed together. Anyway, as soon as the priests set their feet on dry ground (Wait. We had been told that the river bed was dry ground while the priests had the ark there. ) the waters of the Jordan returned to their place, at flood stage as before. Except now, the floods should have raged out of control after being held up for long enough to let hundreds of thousands of people pass. Apparently this was a peaceful flood.

* On the tenth day of the first month (the day the passover lamb was to be selected, Exodus 12:3) the people went up from the Jordan. They had to go up because the Jordan is in a  Rift Valley. They camped at Gilgal on the east side of Jericho. The Wikipedia article on Gilgal is very interesting. Essentially, it is not clear where this may have been. Again we are told Joshua set up the twelve stones, but now it appears they were set up at Gilgal. Again, the Israelites are told what the stones mean: Yahweh did to the Jordan what he did to the Red Sea. According to the Gilgal article, this story may be the author's attempt to explain a Neolithic stone circle.