1. And Joshua gathered all the tribes. The book appropriately ends with a renewal of the covenant between Israel and its God, followed by the obituary notices for Joshua and Eleazar.

2. Your forefathers dwelled across the Euphrates . . . and they served other gods. Joshua’s recapitulation of national history begins all the way back with Abraham’s ancestral family in Mesopotamia. (“Euphrates” in the Hebrew, as elsewhere in biblical usage, is “the River”). But he immediately reminds his audience that before Abraham these people were idolators, for the danger of backsliding into idolatry is uppermost in his mind throughout the speech.

4. Jacob and Esau. It is noteworthy that Esau, together with his territorial inheritance, is mentioned with Jacob. There may be a gesture of restitution here for Jacob’s stealing the paternal blessing.

5. I struck Egypt with plagues that I wrought in its midst. The Hebrew text shows what looks like a small glitch: “I struck Egypt with plagues as [or when, kaʾasher] I wrought in its midst.” The Septuagint has a smoother reading: “I struck Egypt with plagues as I wrought signs in its midst.”

7. a veil of darkness. The Hebrew maʾafel, cognate to the more common ʾapheilah, “darkness,” is unique to this verse. The clear reference is to the pillar of cloud in Exodus.

8. the land of the Amorites dwelling across the Jordan. These are the trans-Jordanian kings vanquished by Israel under Moses, as reported in Numbers and in Deuteronomy.

9. Balak . . . did battle against Israel. Because no actual battle is reported in Numbers 22:36–41, some commentators have claimed that a variant tradition is reflected here, but this is an unnecessary inference. Balak clearly saw Israel as his enemy and sought to destroy it using the curses of a professional hexer as his weapon of choice.

11. the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Girgashite, the Hivvite and the Jebusite. It is odd that all the seven peoples of Canaan are introduced here as though they had fought at Jericho, whereas no mention of a Canaanite alliance appears in the Jericho story. Perhaps Jericho, as the gateway town of Canaan and the first conquered, triggered the invocation of all these peoples, in a kind of synecdoche.

12. the hornet. This is the traditional understanding of tsirʿah, leading some scholars to claim that noxious insects were actually used as weapons. But, on etymological grounds, as I proposed in comments on Exodus 23:28 and Deuteronomy 7:20, the term could mean “the Smasher,” a mythological rather than a zoological entity.

13. you are eating the fruit. “Fruit” is implied by ellipsis. Pointedly, the verb for enjoying the fruit of vineyard and olive grove switches from past to a present participle, emphasizing to the audience that they themselves are benefiting from the conquest.

14. in wholeness and truth. Many construe these two Hebrew nouns as a hendiadys, having the sense of “in absolute truth.”

15. whether the gods that your forefathers served . . . or . . . the gods of the Amorites. There is surely a note of sarcasm here: if you really want to serve foreign gods, just take your pick between Mesopotamian and Canaanite deities.

18. all the peoples, the Amorites. “Amorites” is sometimes a particular people and sometimes a general rubric for the sundry peoples of Canaan.

19. You will not be able to serve the LORD, for He is a holy God. In the face of the people’s solemn declaration to remain faithful to the God of Israel, Joshua expresses grave doubt: YHWH is a holy God, making severe demands of exclusive loyalty, and I don’t believe you will be able to meet these demands. This view sets the stage for the series of idolatrous backslidings in Judges.

25. set it for them as statute and law. The same phrase is used in Exodus 15:25.

26. the book of God’s teaching. This is a new designation, on the model of “the book of Moses’s teaching” and so can refer either to Deuteronomy or to the Five Books of Moses, unless what Joshua writes is an appendix to them.

27. this stone shall be witness. Commemorative stone markers confirming treaties appear a number of times in the Hebrew Bible and were common in much of the ancient Near East.

29. servant of the LORD. Here at the end Joshua is given the same epithet as Moses.

a hundred ten years old. The narrative pointedly allots Joshua ten years fewer than Moses, using instead the Egyptian number for a very full life span.

33. The received text of Joshua ends on a relatively harmonious note of renewal of the covenant and the death in ripe old age of the military leader Joshua and the priestly leader Eleazar. But the ancient Greek translator used a Hebrew text that concludes more discordantly with the following verse, which confirms Joshua’s doubts and looks forward to Judges: “And the Israelites went each man to his place and to the town, and the Israelites served Ashtoreth and the Ashtaroth and the gods of the peoples round about them, and the LORD gave them into the hand of Eglon king of Moab, and he ruled over them eighteen years.” Though a variant manuscript might have added this report in order to create a bridge with the beginning of Judges, it seems more likely that a scribe or an editor deleted it out of motives of national piety, so as not to conclude the book with an image of Israel’s shame.