Observations in Joshua

    While reading in Joshua this morning several little things caught my attention. In 6:25 we read, "But Rahab the prostitute and her father's household and all who belonged to her, Joshua saved alive. And she has lived in Israel to this day, because she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho."(ESV) This means that the book of Joshua was written down in her lifetime, and presumably she was an adult woman at the time of the conquest. As the historians would say, this is a primary source.
     On the same theme of writing  we read in 8:32 "And there, in the presence of the people of Israel, he (Joshua) wrote on the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he had written." (ESV) Moses had died only a short time before this yet Joshua felt compelled to write the Law for the people. Stones last a long time. In verse 35 of the same chapter we read, "There was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the sojourners who lived among them." (ESV) Joshua again was compelled to read the Word of God as it then existed to everyone.
     In 11:20 we read, "For it was the Lord's doing to harden their hearts (the people of Canaan) that they should  be devoted to destruction and should receive no mercy but be destroyed, just as the Lord commanded Moses." The Lord hardened their hearts for his sovereign purpose yet He spared Rahab, a pagan, because of her courage in protecting the messengers.
     When I consider that Joshua read the Law even to the little ones, I am reminded of my current effort to learn French. The first time i encountered the language was in elementary school where we learned the colors. My dad was taking a night course in French, and he insisted that we ask for things at the dinner table in French. Then i took French in ninth and tenth grades, or as my mother used to say about Latin, French took me as my grades were poor. There was a hiatus of almost twenty years when i did not use it at all except for a strange conversation as a hippie in Greece that combined my tiny French, a few words of Greek and sign language.
     When I returned to college i had to have a foreign language so i stumbled through two semesters of French and barely passed. In grad school I had to read another language. Stronger motivation produced an ability to read almost twenty books in French. However, once again I didn't need it afterwards. Now as i work with a computer program daily I find that French was somewhere in my memory as it floats back to the surface. The problem now is that I mix it up with Portuguese.