Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

Joshua Chapter 13, the Strange and the Spectacular

Vital Stats:

Verses: 33

Is It Read At Synagogue?: There is a custom in some Italian Jewish communities to chant the second half of this chapter, starting with Verse 15, as the Haftarah for the Torah portion of Matot, presumably because that Torah portion introduces the topic of the 2½ Israelite tribes that wish to settle east of the Jordan River.

Famous Quotes/Phrases: The phrase “old, advanced in years” is mentioned twice in Verse 1, and it is also found several other times in the Hebrew Bible when describing an elderly person.

Basic Plot: We have a time jump! As will sometimes happen in the Hebrew Bible, the plot moves forward a number of years to find that Joshua is nearing the end of his life. With his leadership over Israel coming to an end, Joshua is called by God to remind him that there are still parts of the Promised Land that need to be conquered. Don’t worry, God says — I’ll make sure they’ll be conquered after you’ve died, but in the meantime, Joshua, you need to assign the various territories to the 12 tribes (the Levites are not included among the 12 since they will not inherit land). Joshua is reminded that Moses had promised the tribes of Reuben and Gad as well as half of the tribe of Manasseh that they could settle east of the Jordan River, provided that they would full participate in their fellow tribes’ conquest of the Promised Land.

What’s Strange: But wait … why does Chapter 13 start by saying that there are still territories left to conquer? Didn’t we read at the end of Chapter 11 that the conquest of the land is complete? It turns out, according to Together in the Land: A Reading of the Book of Joshua by Gordon Mitchell, that this is statement of incompletion is placed out of chronological order. It can be frustrating to read portions of text without realizing what should be described first or second.

What’s Spectacular: Speaking of time jumps, I feel like I’ve come across more and more stories that are not told in chronological order. Sometimes, the impact can be riveting. A couple of examples that come to mind include Emily St. John Mandel’s modern classic Station Eleven, a novel that follows several different characters as they cope with the impact of a pandemic that kills more than 99 percent of humans on Earth, as well as Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, which follows the story of a man suffering from short-term memory loss who tries to discover the person who killed his wife. These stories reward their audiences’ patience with the satisfaction of putting the narrative pieces together at the story’s conclusion.

But there are other times when narrative time jumps make the audience do too much work. To me, an example of this is The Kommandant’s Mistress by Sherri Szeman, an ambitious novel about the Holocaust that frequently changes time and setting without warning. While I appreciated Szeman’s courage to tell a story uniquely, I found the unexpected shifts to be too difficult to track and therefore distracting from the main plot.

So, what are we to make of the long-accepted idea that the Hebrew Bible doesn’t have “an early” or “a late”, as the great commentator Rashi put it? Is it too much to ask readers like us to guess the proper order of biblical narrative, or does such creativity add a valuable richness to the story? I guess it depends on what kind of reader you are. This chapter of Joshua reminds us to never make assumptions or over-generalizations about what we’re reading, and to be willing to question where we stand from one sentence to another.

Shabbat Shalom!