Five-minute study · Day 139 · Joshua 24
Joshua 24:26
A word worth stopping on: book סֵפֶר sepher
Joshua is old. He has gathered all the tribes of Israel at Shechem for his final address. After recounting God's acts from Abraham to the conquest, he delivers the famous challenge: 'Choose you this day whom ye will serve.' The people answer. They choose the LORD. Then Joshua does something specific: 'And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, and took a great stone, and set it up there under an oak.' The word for 'book' is sepher. Joshua was not writing in the margins of a personal journal. He was adding to an existing document, the book of the law of God, the same scroll tradition that would be rediscovered in Josiah's temple four centuries later.
Word study: book
- Hebrew
- סֵפֶר
- Pronounced
- sepher
- Strong's
- H5612
- Definition
- A book, a scroll, a written document. From the verb saphar, to count, to recount, to inscribe. Any formal written record, from a single-page certificate to a multi-scroll literary work.
Sepher derives from the verb saphar, which means to count and to tell. The connection between counting and writing is ancient: the earliest writing systems in Mesopotamia emerged from the need to count livestock and grain. Writing was accounting before it was literature. The sepher carries that origin. It is a counted, inscribed, official record.
The word appears over 180 times in the Hebrew Bible, covering an enormous range of documents. The 'book (sepher) of the covenant' (Exodus 24:7) is the written terms of the Sinai agreement. The 'bill of divorcement' (sepher, Deuteronomy 24:1) is a legal certificate. The 'book (sepher) of the wars of the LORD' (Numbers 21:14) is a now-lost military chronicle. The 'book of the living' (sepher, Psalm 69:28) is God's register of the living. Jeremiah buys a field and puts the deed in a sepher (Jeremiah 32:10-14). The range demonstrates that ancient Israel was a writing culture with diverse literary and administrative needs.
Joshua 24:26 says Joshua wrote 'in the book (sepher) of the law of God,' using the preposition be (in), indicating he wrote within an existing document. He was appending material to a scroll already in use. This detail is significant for understanding how biblical texts developed. The Torah was not composed in a single act and sealed. It was a living document to which authorized figures contributed across generations.
Alan Millard's study 'Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus' and his earlier work on literacy in ancient Israel demonstrate that writing was widespread in the Levant from at least the second millennium BC. The Gezer Calendar (tenth century BC) is a schoolboy's exercise tablet, evidence that writing instruction reached agricultural communities. The Lachish Letters (sixth century BC) are military correspondence between field officers, written in fluent Hebrew cursive. The notion that Joshua's era lacked the literacy for sepher production finds no support in the archaeological record. Writing materials, scribal practices, and document archives were established institutions throughout the ancient Near East well before the period of the conquest.
Historical context · Late Bronze Age, circa fifteenth or thirteenth century BC
Writing the Covenant at Shechem
Shechem sits in the narrow valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim in the central highlands of Canaan. The site (Tell Balata) has been excavated extensively, revealing occupation from the Middle Bronze Age through the Hellenistic period. A large fortress-temple (migdal temple) dating to the Late Bronze Age has been identified by some scholars with the 'house of El-berith' mentioned in Judges 9:46. Shechem was already an ancient city with deep religious associations when Joshua assembled Israel there.
The covenant ceremony at Shechem follows a recognizable treaty pattern. Joshua recounts God's acts (the historical prologue, 24:2-13), issues the terms (choose whom you will serve, 24:14-15), records the people's acceptance (24:16-24), writes the agreement in the sepher (24:26), and sets up a stone witness (24:26-27). The large stone under the oak serves the same function as the divine witnesses in Hittite treaties: a permanent marker that can testify against the parties if they break the covenant. Joshua says, 'This stone shall be a witness unto us; for it hath heard all the words of the LORD which he spake unto us' (24:27).
The Gezer Calendar, discovered by R.A.S. Macalister in 1908, is a small limestone tablet inscribed with a list of agricultural months and their associated activities. Dated to approximately 925 BC, it demonstrates that even routine, low-status writing (possibly a school exercise or a farmer's aide-memoire) was practiced in Canaan during the early monarchical period. Earlier evidence includes the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions (circa 1800-1500 BC), alphabetic writing found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, created by Semitic-speaking workers in Egyptian turquoise mines. These inscriptions prove that alphabetic literacy predates the Israelite settlement of Canaan by centuries.
Demsky's research on literacy in ancient Israel argues that the spread of the alphabet, simpler to learn than cuneiform or hieroglyphic systems, democratized writing. A cuneiform scribe trained for years. The alphabet could be learned in weeks. By the time of Joshua, the technology for recording a covenant at Shechem was well within reach. The sepher was not an exceptional achievement. It was an expected one.
For reflection
Joshua wrote the covenant in the sepher and set up a stone witness. He created a physical record and a physical monument so the agreement could not be forgotten or denied. What commitments have you made to God that exist only in your memory? What would it mean to write them down, to create your own sepher, a document you can return to when the memory fades?
The stone at Shechem 'heard all the words.' Joshua gave the covenant a physical anchor in the landscape. Commitments that live only in your head are easy to revise. Commitments written down hold you accountable to the version you meant when you made them.
Sources: BDB Lexicon; Demsky, 'Literacy in Ancient Israel' (JBL); Millard, 'Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus'