J15-9: Can You Guess Which Tribe Received The Biggest Piece Of Real Estate In The Promised Land?

“The territory chosen by lot for the tribe of the descendants of Y’hudah according to their families extended to the border of Edom in the Tzin Desert, toward the Negev in the far south.”-Joshua 15:1

Okay, so let’s start jumping into the detail of Joshua Chapter 15.

In a nutshell, Joshua 15 is all about the distribution of the land to Judah.

As discussed, the clan of Caleb (who was part of the Tribe of Judah) had already received its designated piece of real estate.

 Now it was time for the rest of the clans of Judah to receive their due.

Keep in mind, it’s absolutely NOT necessary for us memorize or examine every little city and boundary written down here.

The truth be told, it’s probably much better to look at a map to see what territory was given to Judah.

In a nutshell, the basics of what you need to know is that…

…because Judah was a whopping huge tribe, they received a whopping huge piece of territory and…

…the objective behind this second round of lots (oversaw by Moses many years earlier) was to match up the basic location already decided for each tribe.

Also, keep in mind, the piece of land each tribe got was pretty much determined by how big or small their population was.

Okay, so let’s get into the specifics for the Tribe of Judah.

The land mass that Judah received stretched from the northern part of the Dead Sea all the way to the Mediterranean ocean and continued on southwards extending along the shores of the Dead Sea.

From there, it continued towards Kadesh-Barnea then shifted westwards towards the Wadi or River of Egypt (also called the Wadi el Arish).

Now one thing to keep in mind is quite often, a given tribe’s territorial boundaries would bump up against each other.

A good example is that the southern boundary of the Tribe of Benjamin was actually the northern boundary of the Tribe of Judah.

That’s why from time to time in the Scriptures, we’ll see the exact same border lines being repeated for other tribal territories.

This ain’t no contradiction man.

It’s just that the pieces of land assigned to the 9 1/2 tribes in Canaan were contiguous with each other.

“Contiguous” means “sharing a common border” or “touching up against each other”.