JOSHUA (Heb. Yeltoshua, "Jehovah helps"), the name of the celebrated Hebrew warrior under whose leadership the land of Canaan was conquered. He was the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, and was born in Egypt. Before the Israelites had reached Sinai he was chosen by Moses to command the troops that fought against Amalek; and shortly before the death of the great lawgiver, he was publicly invested by the latter with the whole civil and military government of the Israelites. The vigorous and, on, the whole, successful manner in which he pursued the conquest of Canaan, and distrib uted the land among the tribes, is minutely described in the book which bears his name. He died at the age of 110, and was buried at Timnath-Serah, in Ephraim. The so-called book of Joshua, in its present form, containing an account of the conquest and division of the "Land of Promise," was neither written by hire nor by any of Ills contempo raries; but the compiler has certainly made copious use, especially in the earlier chap ters, of documents drawn up during the period of the conquest. Such passages as that relative to the harlot, Rahab—" and she dwelled' in Israel unto this day" (vi. 25)—dem
onstrate their own antiquity; but on the other hand, such passages as the narrative of the capture of Hebron (of which there are several), which did not take place till after the death of Joshua; the frequency of the expression "unto this day," in connections that forbid us to suppose the interval a brief one; the allusion to Judah and Israel as •distinct (xi. 21); the lateness of many of the grammatical forms, etc., clearly indicate the gradual growth of the book under successive editors, the last of whom is placed by Masius, Spinoza, Hasse, etc., after the exile, and by Ewald in the time of Manasseh; while Keil and others place the book in the time of Saul. A Samaritan book of Joshua .(Chronicon Samaritanum), containing a chronological_ narrative of events from the death of Moses down to the time of the Roman emperor Hadrian, compiled from Arabic and Hebrew sources, about 1300 A.n.,is extant in Arabic, and was first edited at Leyden in 1848, by Juyuboll, along with a Latin version. It differs very considerably from the canonical book of Joshua.