Joshua 1:3-4

"Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, to you have I given it, as I spake unto Moses. From the wilderness and this Lebanon, even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your border."

A number of scholars make something big out of the fact that the Septuagint (LXX) omits here in Joshua 1:4 the words "all the land of the Hittites," affirming on that basis that, the words "are possibly a later interpolation."[9] However, the MAJORITY of the ancient manuscripts have the words, and there is no logical reason for rejecting them on the basis of their omission in the Septuagint (LXX) and the Vulgate. A check of the Septuagint (LXX) shows that of the eighteen verses in this chapter, only seven of them, namely, Joshua 1:3,9,10,12,13,14, and 16, escaped mutilation in the LXX.[10] In some verses the person was changed; in others the number was changed from singular to plural, or the other way around, and in other changes, words, clauses, or phrases were omitted as in the instance here. In fact, on this basis, we may conclude that the Septuagint (LXX) is, on this chapter, little more than a poor paraphrase of the text, affording no basis whatever for challenging the accepted text.

No doubt a part of the objection to the acceptance of "all the land of the Hittites" is due to failure to discern that "the land of the Hittites" was a general name for "all of Palestine" during the time when Joshua wrote.[11] We have checked a half dozen scholars including, Cook, Keil, and Plummer, and all of them concur in this general usage: "the land of the Hittites" is a designation of Canaan, or Palestine, generally. It is hard to understand why the critics appear to remain ignorant of this!