J12-1: Why The Bible Is Filled With Generalized Statements That At First Glance Don’t Seem To Be True

Today we begin Joshua Chapter 12.

For the Complete Jewish Bible, click HERE.

For the King James version, click HERE.

Alrighty, from today we enter into a totally new section of the Book of Joshua.

At this point in the Scriptures, the land has been sufficiently taken over to a degree that the process of settling the land can begin.

When I say “settling the land”, I’m talking about the proverbial process of turning the weapons of war into plough shares.

After reading Chapter 11 with its tedious list of ancient kings and their territories, you may be wondering…

…what theological relevance if any does this content have?

Well, if you don’t know Torah, I would agree, you would have a heck of a hard time trying to derive any theological value from this chapter (and many chapters not to mention the other books in the Tanakh).

However, if you do know Torah (especially if you have faithfully studied with me over the past couple of years), then it will soon become quite apparent why this listing of cities, rivers, mountains and so on is quite important.

This should also serve as a reminder why it’s so important to begin your Bible studies from Genesis Chapter 1 instead of John Chapter 1.

Minus the foundational understanding provided by the Torah, I betcha it’s chapters just like Joshua Chapter 11 that will stop you dead in your tracks.

Because you’ll dismiss them as boring and irrelevant and as a result just quickly gloss over the contents.

Anyways, the first main point I want you to get is that when the Scriptures say that Joshua took over the whole land, technically speaking, the truth is he did not.

Why is this important to know?

There are 2 reasons.

First, this is a good example why we need to move from drinking milk to eating the real meat of the Scriptures after the first step of our faith when we first accepted the one true God of Israel and His son Yeshua.

In other words, we gotta move beyond our childlike bite-sized doctrines into a much deeper and mature understanding of Hashem’s Word…

…and again, this can only be achieved by studying God’s Word from the very beginning (from Genesis Chapter 1, verse 1).

Second, it should be apparent by now that the Bible is chock-filled with generalized statements besides the one I just mentioned that “Joshua completely conquered the whole land”.

The pattern you’ll begin to notice in the Scriptures is that first a generalized statement is made and then afterwards finer nuance and details are added.

And sometimes these generalizations have certain contextual conditions attached to them.

But if you just stop at the generalization without digging deeper, you’re only going to grasp a part of the truth.

In other words, you’ll still be only drinking milk.