According to the commandment of the LORD to Joshua, he gave to Caleb the son of Jephunneh a portion among the people of Judah, Kiriath-arba, that is, Hebron (Arba was the father of Anak).
One of the struggles to read through the Bible is when you come to passage in this section. Joshua has conquered 31 kings in the land and now needs to divide the rest of the land among the twelve tribes of Israel. When we look at all these names we have no clue who they are, or where their cities were. We would do better at dividing our state up and telling the readers which city each tribe gets. But, we don’t know the cities, so this makes these verses easy to skip over. However, the above verse is a reason to note skip the text. Right in the middle of dividing the land we read about Joshua giving a man named Caleb a significant portion of the land. Caleb and Joshua grew up together. They were the two spies who served under Moses, that came back with a positive report. Everyone else, including Moses, died in the wilderness. Joshua wants the 85 year old Caleb to have his choice of the land. He could retire and simply find a nice lake to build his retirement cottage. But, instead Caleb wants the hill country of the Anakim. The Anakim were the giants of the land. It is ironic that the spies who first saw the promised land did not want to go into the promise land because they saw the Anakim. Here is what they said back then:
And they told him, “We came to the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. And besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there.
So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”
Here is what Caleb said back then:
But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.”
So, here he is at 85 about to fulfill both his mission and demonstrate that God will, indeed, overcome. It took the 40 year old Caleb, 40 years wandering in the wilderness and another 5 years for Joshua to conquer those 31 kings. But, finally, Caleb can go in, and with God’s power, defeat the last of the Anakim. There was not retirement village for Caleb. On a fulfillment of his mission.
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