So the book of Joshua is not just some military tale. It's this layered meditation on the boundaries

between what's holy and what's not, what's holiness and what's defilement, life and death,

faithfulness and failure. Here's the people. They're kicking others out of the city so they can

inhabit them. And we, the reader, understand what's going to happen in their future, knowing the

difficulties that will come with exile.

They're going to possess this land, but really not for all that long.

So it's much more interesting kind of to look at it that way than just like who wins which wars.

Hello, welcome back to come follow me with Fair Old Testament year.

I am Jennifer Roach-Lee's.

Today we are talking about the book of Joshua.

Joshua is a fan favorite of the Old Testament.

It has action, wars, killing. If you love the war chapters in the book of Mormon, you probably love the book of Joshua. And we could spend hours, like literally a month, going through all the details and kind of the nitty gritty of how all that goes down. And there's actually a lot to be gained by doing that.

Not exactly what we're going to do here today. Come follow me gives us exactly one week to think about Joshua, which is just not enough time. We will take what we can get. But it isn't very long.

So instead of getting into the nitty gritty of every battle, I want to talk to you about what the book is

trying to accomplish and kind of give you a couple hooks to hang some meaning on. The war

stories are fun, but it's a little bit harder to pull meaning out of them. It's actually harder

to pull meaning out of them than it is the Book of Mormon War chapters. The war chapters

kind of feed us meaning all along. So Joshua, it's kind of harder to do that. So I hope

these are some hooks that you can hang some meaning on. So to the casual observer, the book of Joshua

might play out like a Bronze Age action movie, this really like straightforward chronicle of trumpet

sounding and walls crumbling and people dying, this like relentless military march toward victory.

But if we step back and take a look at the whole book, we can see that the structure used in this book, we don't

...