Joshua — Chapter 24

Lapide: \"Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel in Shechem.\" Shechem chosen because: Abraham first sacrificed to God there upon entering Canaan (Gen. 12:6-7); Jacob buried foreign gods under the oak there (Gen. 35:4); it was where God first promised the land to Abraham's seed. Lapide: where the first heir of Canaan received his title-deed from God, there his descendants already possessing it renewed their covenant with God.

Lapide: \"Your fathers... served strange gods\" — Thare and Nachor served idols, but not Abraham, who was always a true worshipper of the one God, as S. Augustinus, Abulensis, and Pererius demonstrate from Gen. 11:34.

Lapide: \"Now therefore fear the Lord and serve Him with a perfect and most sincere heart, and put away the gods which your fathers served in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.\" The solemn exhortation — \"fear\" in Scripture signifies all religion and worship, comprising love, reverence, gratitude, and obedience.

But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. — Joshua's great declaration, which Lapide reads as a rhetorical device of false option (not a true choice to serve idols, but using the pretence of choice to highlight the manifest superiority of serving God) — \"for none but a madman would neglect the true God and choose false gods.\" The oration of Joshua as model of sacred rhetoric.

Lapide: \"You cannot serve the Lord; for He is a holy and mighty God, and jealous\" — Hebrew Elohim kedoscim hu (\"holy Gods He\"), with the plural adjective. Lapide: the plural is used (1) to intimate the plurality of Persons in the Holy Trinity, (2) because Elohim is grammatically plural, (3) to contrast the pure and holy God with the impure gods of the nations, (4) to signify the absolute and all-comprehensive sanctity of God which surpasses all the holiness of all Angels and men together.

Lapide: \"You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord to serve Him.\" The people answer: \"We are witnesses.\" — They become witnesses of their own covenant obligation; this public testimony before God and man binds them the more solemnly.

Lapide: \"So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and proposed to them statutes and judgments in Shechem.\" The covenant was ratified by sacrificial victims (\"percussit foedus\" = struck the covenant, from the slaughter of animals); the priests read publicly from Deuteronomy all the precepts of God, moral, ceremonial, and judicial.

Lapide: \"He took a very great stone and set it under an oak that was in the sanctuary of the Lord.\" This oak may be the same under which God appeared to Abraham (Gen. 12:6), and under which Jacob buried the idols (Gen. 35:4). S. Augustinus (Quaest. ult.): the stone under the oak/terebinth signifies Christ crucified — \"there was no stone without wood; and it was placed beneath, because He would not have been exalted on the Cross had He not first been humble.\" The terebinth exudes healing resin = type of Christ's salvific Passion.

Lapide: \"This stone shall be a witness against you\" — prosopopoeia; the stone, being present at the swearing, is as a mute witness. The Chaldean: \"This stone is for us as the two tables of stone of the covenant; for the words written upon it are from the eye of all the words of the Lord spoken with us.\" Hence it is clear the words of the covenant were inscribed upon the stone.

Lapide: Joshua died at 110 years — three periods: 53 years in Egypt in servitude, 40 in the desert in pilgrimage, 17 or 18 in the Promised Land (7 in wars, 10 in peace). Joshua's life = type of the three states of Christian life: servitude (sin), pilgrimage (penitence), inheritance (beatitude). His death was probably 25 Nisan — Hebrew tradition holds this coincides with 25 March, when Jesus Christ his antitype died on the Cross for the salvation of the world.

Lapide: Joshua buried at \"Thamnath Sare\" — Hebrews (Seder Olam, R. Salomon, Masius, Arias, Serarius) hold this is \"Thamnath Cheres\" (image of the sun), so named because the Israelites placed on Joshua's tomb an image of the sun in memory of the miracle of its standing still. Plinius celebrates the Colossus of the Sun at Rhodes (70 cubits); but that is nothing compared to Joshua's miracle of halting the very sun itself.

Lapide: \"And Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the ancients who overlived Joshua.\" Lapide cites Tullius (Cicero) citing Plato: \"Of whatever character the princes of the Republic are, such also are its citizens wont to be.\" The virtue of the ruler is the life-source of the virtue of his people.

Lapide: Joseph's bones buried at Shechem — Joseph commanded this lest he be buried among the infidel Egyptians, but among the faithful in Canaan, especially because he knew Christ would be born, suffer, and rise in Canaan; he hoped to rise with Him. Lapide: Joseph animated the Hebrews to depart Egypt and enter the Promised Land by this very provision for his bones.

Lapide: Eleazar son of Aaron died and was buried in the hill of Phinees his son. Eleazar = \"help of God\" (Hebrew); he directed Joshua and consulted God for him in difficult matters as God had commanded through Moses (Num. 27:21). Eleazar was succeeded in the High Priesthood by his son Phinees, a man of great zeal (Num. 25:11).