Joshua 16:1-4

OUTLINE OF JOSEPH’S LOT, Joshua 16:1-4.

[Chapters 16 and 17 belong together, and describe the allotment made to the house of Joseph, composed of the two powerful tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. “We are so familiar,” says Stanley, “with the supremacy of the tribe of Judah, that we are apt to forget that it was of comparatively recent date. For more than four hundred years a period equal in length to that which elapsed between the Norman Conquest and the Wars of the Roses Ephraim, with its two dependent tribes of Manasseh and Benjamin, exercised undisputed pre-eminence. Joshua, the first conqueror; Gideon, the greatest of the judges, whose brothers were ‘as the children of kings,’ and whose children all but established hereditary monarchy in their own line; Saul, the first king, belonged to one or the other of these three tribes.

“It was not till the close of the first period of Jewish history that God ‘ refused the tabernacle of Joseph, and chose not the tribe of Ephraim: but chose the tribe of Judah, even the Mount Zion which he loved.’ Psalms 78:67. That haughty spirit which could brook no equal or superior, which chafed against the rise even of the kindred tribe of Manasseh, in the persons of Gideon and Jephthah, (Judges 8:1; Judges 12:1,) and yet more against the growing dominion of Judah in David and Solomon, till it threw off the yoke altogether and established an independent kingdom, would naturally claim, and could not rightly be refused, the choicest portion of the land. ‘Blessed of the Lord be his land; for the precious things of heaven, for the dew, and for the deep that coucheth beneath, and for the precious fruits brought forth by the sun, and for the precious things put forth by the moon, and for the chief things of the ancient mountains, and for the precious things of the lasting hills, and for the precious things of the earth and the fulness thereof, and for the good will of him that dwelt in the bush, let the blessing come upon the head of Joseph.’ If Judah was the wild lion that guarded the south, and couched in the fastness of Zion, so Ephraim was to be the more peaceful but not less powerful buffalo, who was to rove the rich vales of Central Palestine, and defend the frontier of the north. ‘His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns, (buffaloes;) with them shall he push the people together to the ends of the earth, and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh.’” Deuteronomy 33:13-17.