Meditate

Who was this said to, and what was standing in front of him when he heard it?

Joshua is on the wrong side of the Jordan with a nation behind him and a military campaign ahead, days after burying Moses. Then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success is a promise about that campaign. The chapter says so twice over: land, coast, inheritance, and no man able to stand before thee. Lifting the line off a general and hanging it over a salary or a house sale turns a war commission into a technique, and the same book shows the terms running the other way seven chapters on, when Israel takes the accursed thing at Ai and could not stand before their enemies.

Which leaves the word in the middle, and the word travels where the promise does not.

Meditate is hagah, and it is a noise. Isaiah uses it of a lion over its kill, roaring on his prey. Isaiah uses it again of a sick king in the night: I did mourn as a dove. Growling and moaning, both audible, neither of them quiet reflection. That is why the first half of the verse says shall not depart out of thy mouth.

The picture is a man muttering a text to himself all day, the way you mutter a number you cannot afford to lose before you can write it down.

The practice outlives the promise bolted to it. Psalm 1 puts the same verb on anybody at all: in his law doth he meditate day and night. Deuteronomy required a king to write out his own copy of the law by hand and read therein all the days of his life. Neither of those comes with Canaan attached. What they come with is a text worn into a person by repetition until it is what he says under his breath when nobody has asked him a question.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 80 is I Am With You (Haggai 2:4).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two