Homilies on Joshua

Contents

Reading pages: 0.1–2.4 · 3.1–4.4 · 5.1–6.4 · 7.1–7.7 · 8.1–8.7 · 9.1–9.10 · 10.1–12.3 · 13.1–14.2 · 15.1–15.7 · 16.1–18.3 · 19.1–20.6 · 21.1–22.6 · 23.1–24.3 · 25.1–26.3

1. 0.1Rufinus dedicates his Latin translation of Origen’s twenty-six homilies on Joshua to Chromatius, comparing his work to modest offerings for the tabernacle.
2. 1.1Origen observes that no one in Genesis bore the name Jesus (Joshua), which first appears when Moses gives Joshua command against Amalek, a figure of Christ leading his army.
3. 1.2Moses’ raised hands give Jesus (Joshua) victory over Amalek, and Joshua’s names and his place beside Moses on the mountain show his greatness.
4. 1.3The book of Joshua depicts the mysteries of Christ: the death of Moses signifies the end of the law, as Paul’s image of a widow freed from her husband shows.
5. 1.4Unlike the disorderly exodus under Moses, Jesus leads the people across the Jordan in priestly order, and Rahab, who receives his spies, figures the soul that receives Christ’s messengers.
6. 1.5Rahab’s flax signifies the priesthood of the Gentile church; the spies keep to the mountains where the devil cannot follow, and Jesus, who stopped the sun, now stays with us in our spiritual warfare.
7. 1.6The land promised to Joshua’s soldiers figures the places of the fallen angels, which Christians win in heaven by conquering the devil.
8. 1.7The nations of Canaan are the vices within us, which only Jesus can drive out; the hearers are urged to meditate on Scripture, attend church, repent, and receive the second circumcision that removes the reproach of Egypt.
9. 2.1Moses’ death signifies the end of the temple cult and the reign of Jesus in the church, as a non-canonical book’s image of two Moseses, one dead and one living, also shows.
10. 2.2Christ became “the minister of Moses” by being born under the law, and through him God gives the land promised to the meek.
11. 2.3The “places” we tread are reached by rising from the letter of the law to its spiritual sense, up to Christ at God’s right hand.
12. 2.4The desert and the Antilebanon given to Joshua signify the church gathered from the Gentiles in place of Israel according to the flesh.
13. 3.1The two and a half tribes settled by Moses, all first-born, figure the people of the law, whose righteous men, the prophets, still come to fight beside Christians, while the women and infants who stay behind figure those who leave no teaching.
14. 3.2The two and a half and nine and a half tribes show that the faithful under the law knew the Trinity only in part, and that perfection comes only with the gift of the Holy Spirit.
15. 3.3Joshua’s spies sent to Jericho figure God’s messengers, above all John the Baptist, sent before the face of Jesus.
16. 3.4Rahab, “breadth,” is the church gathered from sinners and the Gentiles, made a prophetess; Canaan’s servitude to his brothers shows God’s hidden kindness to sinners.
17. 3.5Rahab’s scarlet cord is the blood of Christ, and her house is the church, outside of which no one is saved.
18. 4.1Creation serves the righteous, and the exodus and the crossing of the Jordan are fulfilled in the convert, who crosses the Red Sea as a catechumen and the Jordan in baptism.
19. 4.2Jesus is exalted first at the Jordan, as he is for each believer at baptism; the waters that turned salt and those that stayed sweet signify the baptized who fall and those who persevere, and the priests must give light to the people.
20. 4.3The priests carry the ark close at hand while the people keep their distance; nearness to God is blessed but is a fire that tests what each has built.
21. 4.4The people enter the promised land on the tenth day of the first month, the day the Passover lamb was chosen, a sign that each virtue has its own perfection and all tend to one perfection.
22. 5.1The people’s haste to cross the Jordan teaches the baptized to hasten through all the Beatitudes and then to guard carefully the virtues they have gained.
23. 5.2The forty thousand girded men are those girded with truth in God’s sight, and the battle they cross over to fight is waged within, against the evils that come from the heart.
24. 5.3Christ, always exalted with the Father, is exalted in the believer’s sight when his divinity is revealed at baptism.
25. 5.4The fear owed to Moses under the law is changed when one passes to the Gospel and lives with Christ.
26. 5.5The second circumcision with stone knives is the circumcision by Christ the rock, received when one passes from the law to the Gospel.
27. 5.6Baptism, the second circumcision, removes the reproach of Egypt, but sin after baptism, especially sexual immorality and the superstitions of astrology and omens, brings back a heavier reproach.
28. 6.1Christ performs the true circumcision, whose wound heals when new virtues become habit; the three foods of the exodus are secular learning, the divine law, and the fruits of the promised life to come.
29. 6.2The prince of the Lord’s army who appears to Joshua at Jericho, and whom Joshua worships, is Christ, the commander of all the heavenly powers.
30. 6.3Jericho, though held by enemies, is holy ground because the Lord is present there; so the soul must loose its bonds of mortality for God to stand by it.
31. 6.4Jericho, taken by trumpets, is the world that will fall at the trumpet of Christ’s coming, from which only the church, once a harlot and now a chaste bride, will be saved by his blood.
32. 7.1The priestly trumpets that brought down Jericho are the writings of the apostles, which overthrew idolatry, divination, and the doctrines of the philosophers.
33. 7.2The people’s shout at Jericho signifies the concord of a church of one mind, and each believer, a priest, must sound the trumpets of Scripture and bring his own thoughts into harmony.
34. 7.3Christ conquered the world on the cross by stripping the hostile powers, and the heavenly army raised the shout of victory at his triumph.
35. 7.4The accursed things of Jericho are worldly habits, pagan festivals, astrology, and augury, which Christians must not bring into the church.
36. 7.5Rahab’s being added to Israel “until this day” signifies the Gentiles grafted into the faith of the patriarchs, now made the head while those who rejected Christ became the tail.
37. 7.6Achan’s sin, which brought wrath on all Israel, warns church leaders that sparing an unrepentant sinner endangers the whole church; after repeated warnings he must be cut off, even if he is a presbyter.
38. 7.7Achan’s “tongue of gold” is the eloquence of pagan philosophy and poetry, which heretics such as Valentinus, Basilides, and Marcion brought into the church; the “pure” bracelets are works without God, as a merely human Christ would be.
39. 8.1Origen asks his hearers not to find the story of Ai tedious and retells how Joshua took Ai by a feigned flight and an ambush and hanged its king on a double tree.
40. 8.2The taking of Ai, “chaos,” the dwelling of the devil, figures the victory of the two peoples, Jewish believers who “flee” the burdens of the law with Jesus and the Gentiles who come unexpectedly from behind.
41. 8.3The double tree on which the king of Ai was hanged is the twofold cross: Christ was crucified visibly in the flesh, and the devil and his powers invisibly.
42. 8.4The devil, though conquered on the cross, still attacks, because what Christ’s first coming foreshadowed will be completed at his second coming, when death, the last enemy, is destroyed.
43. 8.5The burning of Ai, left uninhabited forever, figures the final judgment, when the place of the demons is emptied and God provides for every soul until all Israel is saved.
44. 8.6Joshua’s feigned flight teaches the virtue of fleeing sin, especially sexual immorality, anger, and avarice, and the double tree signifies the twofold power of the cross, a tree of the knowledge of good and evil on which Christ and the devil both hung.
45. 8.7The command to leave none of Ai alive is read as the war against sin and the demons, which the righteous must wage without sparing any vice; the Old Testament’s wars of slaughter are to be understood in this way.
46. 9.1After the victory over Ai, Joshua builds an altar of whole stones; believers are living stones built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets and on Christ, and those devoted to prayer form the altar.
47. 9.2The whole stones untouched by iron are those free of the darts of desire and of strife, perhaps the apostles praying with one accord, and believers too become stones of the altar by concord in prayer.
48. 9.3The Deuteronomy, or “second law,” that Jesus writes on living stones is the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, written on the hearts of believing Gentiles.
49. 9.4Joshua could not literally have written all Deuteronomy on the altar stones; Christ writes the law of the Gospel in a believer’s heart at baptism, before the angels, the true “Israel” who see God.
50. 9.5The true priests and Levites who carry the ark of the law are not merely those who hold priestly rank but those who live as priests and fulfill the law in deed.
51. 9.6Half the people stood by Mount Gerizim, the mountain of blessing, and half by Mount Ebal, the mountain of curses, as Deuteronomy assigns the tribes.
52. 9.7Those by Gerizim are believers drawn to salvation by desire for God’s promises, those by Ebal believers moved by fear of punishment; only Jesus can tell them apart.
53. 9.8Jesus reads the whole law to his people when he reveals its spiritual sense, so that the catholic church receives the law of Moses as read by Christ.
54. 9.9Jesus reads the law to those with inner ears; the “men, women, infants, and proselytes” of the assembly are the perfect, the weaker, the newly baptized, and the catechumens, and Scripture distinguishes “man” and “woman” by the soul, not by sex.
55. 9.10The kings who gathered against Joshua figure the Roman authorities who have outlawed Christians, but as they failed then, persecution will not stop the church from spreading.
56. 10.1The Gibeonites, saved but made servants, figure believers who serve the church yet never amend their lives, saved only with a mark of disgrace, like the fruitless elm that supports the vine in the Shepherd of Hermas.
57. 10.2Against heretics who call Joshua inhumane for enslaving the Gibeonites, Origen answers that he judged by the measure of their faith: Rahab believed wholly and was received, while the Gibeonites came by fraud with a faith without works.
58. 10.3Church members whose faith never changes their conduct share the Gibeonites’ lot; the law freeing a Hebrew slave in the seventh year urges the baptized who have fallen into sin to hasten back to freedom.
59. 11.1Origen retells the attack of the five kings on Gibeon, Joshua’s rescue, the hailstones, and the sun standing still.
60. 11.2Whoever befriends Jesus gains enemies, human and demonic; even the least in the church will be attacked, but Christ and the church’s leaders come to help the weak.
61. 11.3Christ lengthens the day of salvation, delaying the end until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in and all Israel is saved; when love grows cold, the days will be shortened.
62. 11.4The perfect fight the spiritual powers, while the imperfect, like the Gibeonites, are still attacked by the five kings, the five bodily senses, which “flee into caves” when sunk in earthly things.
63. 11.5The conquered kingdoms that later become the Lord’s portion signify the senses, which, once freed from the evil powers by the cross, serve the soul in righteousness.
64. 11.6Joshua’s slaying of the kings does not teach cruelty, as heretics claim, but signifies Christ’s slaying of the powers that reign through sin within us.
65. 12.1Against heretics who reject the Old Testament, Origen argues that Joshua’s conquest of Canaan figures the Christian’s war against the spiritual powers that occupy the kingdom of heaven.
66. 12.2Christ himself commands that the kingdom of heaven be taken by force; the kings of Makkedah, Lachish, and Libnah figure spiritual enemies and vices, and the soldiers of Jesus must return unwounded and without boasting.
67. 12.3Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides, reading the wars of Joshua literally, posited a cruel creator God; Origen prays instead to trample the spirits of vice and to give the glory to Christ’s cross.
68. 13.1The outward reader sees only wars in Joshua, but the Christian, a Jew inwardly, understands them as Christ’s war against the powers that reign in souls, which he makes into temples of God.
69. 13.2The names Libnah (“whiteness”), Lachish (“way”), and Hebron (“joining”) can signify both the evil state of the soul and its good state after conquest by Christ.
70. 13.3Understood as the destruction of evils in the soul, the total destruction of the cities becomes merciful; like Jeremiah’s words, the Word of God first uproots vices and then builds and plants.
71. 13.4The Word of God first uproots sin and pulls down the devil’s buildings in the soul, then plants virtues and builds the soul into God’s temple.
72. 14.1Christ teaches peace through the reading of wars, arming Christians against the sins of the heart; the great alliance of kings at the waters of Merom figures the swarms of demons stirred up against the growing people of God.
73. 14.2From the meanings of their names, the kings allied with Jabin (“understanding”) of Hazor (“court”) are read as the devil and the powers that deceive souls by bitterness, false hearing, fleeting goods, great and small sins, ambush, and heresy; they will be wholly destroyed at the end of the age.
74. 15.1The apostles gave the church the books of Israel’s wars to read only because they figure the spiritual wars Christians wage against the powers that try to make them sin.
75. 15.2The command to hamstring the horses of enemies who had all been killed makes no sense literally, since Israel elsewhere kept the enemy’s animals for its own use.
76. 15.3The enemy horses that are hamstrung, unlike the donkeys that are spared, figure the proud fallen powers and the passions of the body, which must be curbed by fasting and slain while still small, so that no stirring of vice remains in the soul.
77. 15.4Each believer had a particular king of sin, such as avarice, pride, or lust, whom Jesus slays and commands us to leave no trace of; Christ also fulfilled the whole law, being born under it.
78. 15.5Jesus took all the enemy kings because Christ, the Wisdom of God, overcomes every kind of sin, which baptism washes away; God lets the hostile powers come out so that they may be destroyed, and there are countless spirits of each vice under their princes and one chief prince over all.
79. 15.6Each victory of the saints over a spirit of sin removes that demon, as the legion and the crushing of Satan show, and the “sword” that must not be withheld from blood is the word of God turned against the hostile powers.
80. 15.7Only Christ truly took the whole land, drawing believers from all nations, and only in him does the land rest from war, when the baptized soul is at peace and rests under the vine and fig tree.
81. 16.1Scripture calls someone a presbyter or elder “advanced in days” not for age but for maturity and holiness, so the words to Joshua bear witness to his progress toward the eternal days of the Sun of righteousness.
82. 16.2Christ, the firstborn of all creation, is the true presbyter, the prince of high priests, shepherds, presbyters, and bishops.
83. 16.3Joshua took all the land and yet much land remains: Christ took the world by sowing his word at his first coming, and at his second coming he will subject all the rest; blessed are those won now.
84. 16.4Of all the nations, only the Sidonians, “hunters,” are to be exterminated, because they figure the powers that set snares to catch souls in sin.
85. 16.5The fathers who received their inheritance through Moses still fight for Christians, helping them by their prayers, and the church’s weapons are prayer, Scripture, faith, and good works.
86. 17.1The division of the land was a shadow of the heavenly inheritance; when the truth came in Christ, Jerusalem, the temple, and the earthly inheritance were taken away so that the Jews might seek the heavenly Jerusalem and its high priest.
87. 17.2The Levites, whose inheritance is the Lord, figure the few who devote themselves to wisdom and teach the simpler believers; only Jesus, not Moses, gives them dwellings, as only he calls disciples to renounce everything.
88. 17.3Those whose inheritance is the Lord receive wisdom, righteousness, and all goods, and they live among the laity so that each may share with the other: the laity supporting the priests so that the priests may devote themselves to Scripture and give the people light.
89. 18.1The holy land was divided by Joshua with the princes of the tribes and the priest Eleazar, figures of the apostles and of the mystical word of God.
90. 18.2Caleb, “as a heart,” son of Jephunneh, “turning,” figures the believer who acts with understanding and is strong in the mysteries of both the law and the Gospel.
91. 18.3Caleb asks for the mountain of fortified cities, figures of the doctrines of philosophers and heretics that the wise teacher overthrows, and receives Hebron with the tombs of the patriarchs and their wives.
92. 19.1Only Joshua’s distribution of the land is preceded by rest from war, so whoever would receive an inheritance from Jesus must first end the wars within.
93. 19.2The boundaries of Judah begin after Idumea, “earthly,” and the desert of Sin, “temptations,” and only west and east are named.
94. 19.3The southern and western boundaries of Judah teach that the believer must pass through the earthly, the desert of temptations, and the ascent of scorpions to reach Kadesh, “sanctification.”
95. 19.4On Judah’s eastern side lie the salt sea, the spring and city of the sun, and the city of letters: the believer crosses the sea of this life to reach Christ, the Sun of righteousness, and the city of letters is won by study of Scripture.
96. 20.1Even when the lists of names in Joshua are not understood, hearing Scripture benefits the soul: as pagan incantations act through names, the words of Scripture strengthen the angelic powers within and around us and drive away the demons.
97. 20.2Like a medicine whose effect is felt only later, Scripture benefits the hearer even when not understood, since it has a power of its own even without explanation.
98. 20.3Caleb, who alone with Joshua survived of those who left Egypt, receives the first portion, Hebron, the mother city of Anak, expels Anak’s three sons, and goes up against Debir, once called the City of Letters.
99. 20.4Origen sets out the puzzles of Othniel’s capture of the City of Letters, his relation to Caleb, and Achsah’s request for the upper and lower springs, and asks for prayers to explain them.
100. 20.5Anak means “empty humility,” the humiliation of sin and the lowly ideas of poets and philosophers about the divine; its three sons stand for the errors of idolatry, which the law cuts off, and Debir, “speech,” shows the letter of the Old Testament turned into spiritual speech in the church.
101. 20.6Othniel, “answer of God,” who takes the City of Letters and marries Caleb’s daughter, is the Gentile church, which destroys the killing letter, receives from the law the knowledge of God, and gains blessings for this life and the next.
102. 21.1The Jebusites who remained in Jerusalem are the sinners who remain in the church, which cannot be wholly purified on earth; those whose sins are manifest are to be expelled, but no one whose sin is hidden, lest the wheat be uprooted with the tares.
103. 21.2The Jebusites, “tramplers,” are those who learn the church’s mysteries and then turn against it; the Canaanites left in Ephraim are the unstable who trouble the fruitful; inwardly, both are evil and wandering thoughts that must be driven out of the heart daily.
104. 22.1The three statements about the Canaanites living among the sons of Ephraim follow an order that holds a divine meaning.
105. 22.2The Canaanite is the flesh, which first only pays tribute, then becomes obedient, and finally, in the perfect, is put to death with its vices.
106. 22.3Pharaoh’s taking of Gezer, “building,” and giving it to his daughter warns that a soul which lets the body live carnally will be led captive to the law of sin.
107. 22.4Joseph’s sons are told to clear the Perizzites, evil “fruitfulness,” and the Rephaim, the “loosened mother,” the soul’s slack power that bears feeble thoughts, which must be purified, not destroyed.
108. 22.5Joseph’s sons are told to clear the forest, which signifies cutting down fruitless trees in the soul so that it may bear fruit, as the Gospel’s axe at the root also teaches.
109. 22.6The Canaanite flesh must be subdued and finally exterminated, lest the soul fall captive to Pharaoh, the law of sin, and become a “seed of Canaan” instead of a child of Abraham.
110. 23.1In Scripture lots do not fall by chance: Origen surveys the lots for the scapegoat and for the division of the land, which followed what God had predestined.
111. 23.2From the lots cast for Jonah, Solomon’s proverb, the choice of Matthias, and Paul’s language of being called “by lot,” Origen concludes that a lot cast in faith and with prayer reveals God’s hidden will.
112. 23.3Lots are cast among the heavenly powers too: by God’s hidden judgment the angels received the nations, guardian angels their souls, and other powers the governance of nature, according to merit.
113. 23.4The division of the land by lot foreshadows the heavenly inheritance: the earthly Jerusalem given to Benjamin is a figure of the heavenly city, and the names of places, like the names of angels and patriarchs, are not chance; these mysteries were seen by Paul but are not uttered.
114. 24.1The Amorites, “bitterness,” who stayed in Elom and Salamin under the heavy hand of Ephraim, are like demons that persist in the possessed despite prayers, fasts, and exorcisms, but are weighed down by the laying on of hands and by good works.
115. 24.2Joshua, who distributed all the land, took his own portion last and received it from the people, an example of the humility commanded of leaders.
116. 24.3As Israel gave Joshua a place to dwell, the believer gives Christ a place in the soul, which he builds into a dwelling for himself and the Father.
117. 25.1The cities of the Levites were also assigned by lot, in an order of honor beginning with the priestly line of Aaron among the sons of Kohath, matching the order of the camp around the ark in Numbers.
118. 25.2The first lot gave the priests, Aaron’s sons, thirteen cities in Judah, Simeon, and Benjamin; then the other Kohathites, the Gershonites, and last the Merarites received their cities.
119. 25.3Origen relates the Levites’ lots to the four quarters of the camp, showing that each region, even the last in the north, received a share of priestly grace.
120. 25.4If the order of the Levites’ lots is hard to follow even literally, its mystery is deeper still: in the resurrection God will order the saints like the stars, each in his place in the kingdom of heaven.
121. 26.1Joshua laid up the stone knives of circumcision in his city on Mount Ephraim, “the fruitful mountain”: Christ dwells in souls that bear the fruits of the Spirit, and through them his light reaches the rest.
122. 26.2The stone knives are the word of God, which circumcises vices after baptism and is laid up in souls given wisdom and knowledge; its stone, not iron, shows it comes from Christ, not from rhetoric; the dismissal of the two and a half tribes figures the fathers’ final reward when the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.
123. 26.3The altar built beyond the Jordan as a copy of the true one shows that the righteous before Christ knew their altar was only a figure and are brothers of Christians; Aaron standing between the dead and the living figures Christ, whom part of the Jewish people received and part rejected.