Today we begin Joshua Chapter 15.
For the Complete Jewish Bible, click HERE.
For the King James version, click HERE.
Joshua chapters 15, 16, and 17 deal with the assigning of the land on the west side of the Jordan River to 2 of the most influential tribes out of all the 12 tribes of Israel.
Can you guess which 2 tribes I’m talking about?
I’m referring to Judah and Ephraim (and to a lesser degree Manessah).
Technically speaking however, the 2 tribes were actually Judah and Joseph.
However, as we’ve already learned, because of Jacob’s cross-handed blessing, the Lord decided for His own good reasons that the two tribes of Ephraim and Manessah would replace the tribe of Joseph for a time being.
In the Book of Revelations, we’ll see that the Tribe of Joseph has been restored.
Now let me make it clear in order to avoid any confusion that the land on the west side of the Jordan River was Promised Land territory.
And the land on the east side of the Jordan River given to Reuben, Gad and 1/2 of the Tribe of Manessah was NOT Promised Land territory (I feel like I’ve gone over this about a million times already).
So why do I affirm that Judah and Ephraim were the two most dominant tribes of the bunch?
Again, it all goes back to the cross-handed blessing Jacob performed on his sons when he was on his deathbed.
This was when he split up the traditional firstborn blessing in half with one half going to Judah and the other half going to Ephraim.
I’m not going to give a complete review of the cross-handed blessing because I’ve already been over this before in super detail.
You can just go to my posts on the last chapters of Genesis to review.
However, over the next couple of posts, I do wanna give a quick summary because this event is pivotal to understanding God’s salvation plan for mankind and the instrument of that redemption he sent in the form of His son Yeshua.
The first and most key thing you need to understand about the ancient Middle East is that the way wealth, leadership and power was passed down through the tribal, clan and family structure was via the firstborn blessing.
This applied to ALL tribal societies in the ancient Middle East and not just Israel.
In fact, this is custom is still quite firmly entrenched throughout the Middle East to this day.
The firstborn blessing was considered so key and foundational that once made it was considered inalterable for any reason whatsoever.
It was so strong and powerful that it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it was literally the equivalent of a Supreme Court-enforced contract that could never be overturned under any circumstances.
We’ll continue this discussion the next time we meet.
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