Somewhere in Israel’s future a child was going to stop at a pile of stones and ask what they were for. God built the memorial in Joshua 4 to answer that child. This Joshua 4 summary and study guide follows the stones, the priests standing in the riverbed, and the answer Israel was told to keep giving.
Table of Contents
Setting the Stage
Israel came out of Egypt by walking through a sea God dried up in front of them (Exodus 14:21-22). The generation that saw it refused to enter Canaan when they reached the border, and God sent them back into the desert until they died there (Numbers 14:29-30). God brought their children into the land instead (Numbers 14:31).
Forty years later those children stood at the Jordan while it was over its banks. Joshua 3 tells how God stopped the river. Israel’s priests carried a gold chest called the ark down into the channel.
It held the terms God gave Israel at Sinai, and God had said He would meet with His people there (Exodus 25:16, 25:22). The priests held their place in the channel while the whole nation walked across on dry ground. Joshua 4 begins with the last Israelite coming up the far bank.
Comprehensive Joshua 4 Summary
The crossing is finished before God says anything more. With every Israelite up the western bank, God tells Joshua to send twelve men, one from each tribe, back down into the dry riverbed to lift out twelve stones from the exact place where the priests had stood with the ark, and to carry them to the camp.
God gives the reason before the work starts. One day an Israelite child will ask what the stones are for, and his father is to answer that the Jordan was cut off in front of the ark of the covenant. The stones are a memorial, and they are meant to last.
The twelve men do it. Joshua then sets up a second twelve in the river itself, on the spot where the priests’ feet had been. The priests hold their place with the ark until everything God commanded is finished, and the people hurry over. Then the ark comes across in full view of the nation.
The fighting men of Reuben, Gad and half of Manasseh cross armed ahead of their brothers, keeping the promise they had made to Moses. About forty thousand of them march to the plains of Jericho. That same day God makes Joshua great in the sight of all Israel, exactly as He had said He would.
At God’s word Joshua calls the priests up out of the river. The moment their feet reach dry land the Jordan comes back and floods its banks again.
Israel comes up out of the riverbed and camps at Gilgal, within sight of Jericho, and Joshua sets the twelve stones up there. He tells the whole nation what to say when their children ask. God emptied the Jordan the way He emptied the Red Sea, so that every people on earth would know His hand is mighty and Israel would fear Him for ever.
One Word Summary
- Memorial: the chapter’s whole business is building one.
- Handover: aimed at the generation that was not there.
- Completion: the exodus that began in parted water ends in it.
In One Sentence
Twelve men carry twelve stones out of the dry Jordan riverbed and Joshua sets up a second twelve where the priests stood, so that when Israel’s children ask what the stones mean their fathers can tell them God held the river back for Israel the way He once held back the sea in Egypt.
Theme of Joshua 4
Joshua 4 is about a rescue being handed on. God meant the crossing for more people than the ones who watched it. He wants children who are not born yet to own it as their own, so He orders an object that will make them ask about it.
Two things run alongside that. God is making His power known to nations who saw none of it (Joshua 4:24), and He is settling who leads Israel now that Moses is gone (Joshua 4:14).
Joshua 4 Outline
- Joshua 4:1-3 God waits until the crossing is complete, then commands twelve stones out of the riverbed.
- Joshua 4:4-7 Joshua sends the twelve men and tells them what the stones are for.
- Joshua 4:8-9 The stones are carried to the camp, and Joshua sets up a second twelve in the river.
- Joshua 4:10-11 The priests hold their place until everything is done, the people hurry over, and the ark comes across last.
- Joshua 4:12-13 The eastern tribes cross armed, about forty thousand of them, and march to the plains of Jericho.
- Joshua 4:14 God makes Joshua great in the sight of all Israel.
- Joshua 4:15-18 The priests come up and the Jordan returns to flood.
- Joshua 4:19-20 Israel camps at Gilgal and the stones are set up there.
- Joshua 4:21-24 Joshua tells the nation what to say, and why it matters.
Observations from Joshua 4
God Waited Until the Last Israelite Was Across Before He Spoke Again
Joshua 4:1 fixes the moment before it gives the command: “when all the people were clean passed over Jordan, that the LORD spake unto Joshua.” Clean passed over means completely across, every last one. The command did not come until nobody was left standing in the riverbed. The same God who stopped the river timed the next word out of His mouth.
The Priests Were First Into the River and Last Out of It
The priests carrying the ark stepped into the water first (Joshua 3:15), stood in the riverbed while the nation walked past them, and came up only when Joshua told them to (Joshua 4:17-18). They stood longer than anyone and moved only when the word came. The people could hurry across at their own pace (Joshua 4:10), and the priests could not move at all until Joshua released them.
Moses Is Named Three Times in Five Verses
Joshua acts “according to all that Moses commanded” (Joshua 4:10), the eastern tribes cross “as Moses spake unto them” (Joshua 4:12), and Israel fears Joshua “as they feared Moses” (Joshua 4:14). The chapter keeps measuring the day against Moses, and at verse 14 the measuring stops. God had promised in Joshua 3:7 to begin making Joshua great in Israel’s sight, and this is the day He did it.
The Chapter Says Twelve Six Times
The word twelve falls in Joshua 4:2, 4:3, 4:4, 4:8, 4:9 and 4:20, twice of men and four times of stones. Israel had twelve tribes, and two and a half of them were settling east of the river rather than in Canaan, yet the count keeps every one of them inside the memorial. No tribe carried more of it than another, and none was left out of it.
The Chapter Asks Its Question Twice
Joshua puts the same question in the mouth of a future child in Joshua 4:6 and again in Joshua 4:21. The first time he is speaking to twelve men in a riverbed, and the second time to the whole nation at Gilgal. God is handing Israel a script as much as a monument, and both times He supplies the answer before the question is ever asked.
Difficult Verses Explained
Why Are There Two Piles of Stones in Joshua 4?
Because verses 8 and 9 report two different actions by two different people. In verse 8 the children of Israel take twelve stones out of the riverbed and lay them down at the camp, which becomes Gilgal in verse 20. In verse 9 Joshua sets up twelve stones “in the midst of Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests which bare the ark of the covenant stood”, meaning he built a second marker on the spot the priests had held.
Most commentators have read it this way, and the ancient Greek and Latin versions make it explicit by adding the word other. What the text does not settle is how visible the river pile was. Some hold that it stood high enough to break the surface, some that it sat at the flooded edge where the priests stood rather than mid-channel, and the verse itself does not say.
What Does “They Are There Unto This Day” Mean?
It means the stones were still standing when the book of Joshua was written, and that is all it means. The same phrase runs through the book at Joshua 5:9, 6:25, 7:26 and elsewhere, and each time it dates something to the writer’s own time rather than to ours.
So Joshua 4:9 is not a promise that the pile survives now. No site has been identified with either memorial, and even the location of Gilgal is not settled. The verse is a witness that the markers outlived the people who built them, which is exactly what they were for.
Whose Life Does Joshua 4:14 Mean?
The verse says Israel feared Joshua “as they feared Moses, all the days of his life”, and the his can be read of either man. Many commentators take it of Moses, reading the Hebrew accents that way, so that Israel gave Joshua the reverence they had given Moses throughout Moses’ lifetime. Read the other way it means they gave it to Joshua for the rest of Joshua’s life. Either reading leaves the point of the verse standing: Joshua now holds the place Moses held.
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Common Misunderstandings
- Crossing the Jordan in Joshua 4 leads into a war, not into heaven. Hymns and sermons have used the river as a picture of death for centuries, and this chapter will not carry that. The men who came up the far bank were “prepared for war” and marched “unto battle” (Joshua 4:13), so what waited across the river was a campaign. The hope of a rest still to come is real and Scripture teaches it (Hebrews 4:9), but Joshua 4 is not where it is taught.
- Joshua 4:10-11 recaps the crossing on purpose. Those verses go back over it in order to place two things inside it: the eastern tribes going over armed, and God making Joshua great that day. Joshua 4:15-18 then supplies what had not been told yet, the priests coming up and the water returning.
- The forty thousand of Joshua 4:13 is one part of the army, not the nation. The verse counts the fighting men of Reuben, Gad and half of Manasseh who crossed ahead of their brothers. The rest of Israel had already gone over.
- The Bible gives no weight for the stones. It says each man took “a stone upon his shoulder” (Joshua 4:5), which tells us a single man could carry one, and no more. Weights offered elsewhere are guesses.
Christ Connection
The chapter runs on a pattern that turns up again in the New Testament. God attaches a physical object to a rescue and supplies the words that explain it, so that people who were not present will hold the rescue as theirs. On the night He was betrayed Jesus took bread and a cup, told His disciples what each one meant, and said, “this do in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19).
Paul hands the same words on to the church (1 Corinthians 11:24-25). Bread and cup do for the cross what twelve stones did for the Jordan. Both keep a finished rescue in front of people who were not there when it happened, and neither one is the rescue itself.
Joshua then does something the church is asked to do. He is speaking to a generation who were children at the Red Sea or were not yet born (Numbers 14:29-31). He tells them God dried it up “from before us, until we were gone over” (Joshua 4:23), which puts them inside a deliverance they never saw. Paul does the same thing with the exodus, calling that generation “our fathers” and saying they all passed through the sea, writing to a church that had no part in it (1 Corinthians 10:1-2).
Paul’s purpose there is a warning, that the privilege saved nobody who despised it, and the move itself is still the one the gospel asks of every believer. Paul says of a death he did not witness, “I am crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20).
Christ died once, long before the reader was born, and faith says us about it. Many teachers also see the two stone piles as pictures of burial and resurrection with Christ (Romans 6:3-4). No verse in Joshua 4 says so, so hold it as a picture some teachers draw rather than as the chapter’s own meaning.
When, Where, and Why
- When: Spring, at the barley harvest, when the Jordan was over its banks (Joshua 3:15). Joshua 4:19 dates it exactly, to the tenth of Israel’s first month. That is the day God had set for every household to choose its Passover lamb (Exodus 12:3), and Israel kept the Passover four days later, camped at Gilgal (Joshua 5:10). Israel had left Egypt on the fifteenth day of that same month (Numbers 33:3), and Joshua 5:6 puts the wilderness years at forty, so they walked into the land five days short of the anniversary. The century is debated, and the usual proposals sit approximately in the fifteenth or the thirteenth century before Christ.
- Where: The Jordan at flood stage opposite Jericho, the riverbed where the priests stood, and Gilgal, on the eastern edge of Jericho (Joshua 4:19). Gilgal became Israel’s base for the whole conquest, and the stones are the first thing the book records being set up there. Its exact site has not been settled.
- Why: The writer is showing that the God who was with Moses is with Joshua, and that the land is a gift rather than a conquest Israel managed on its own. The account also stops the invasion before it starts. Israel is camped on Jericho’s border (Joshua 4:19) and spends the day stacking stones, so the account of the conquest opens with a memorial rather than a siege.
Key Verses
“That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD.”
Joshua 4:6-7
A sign here is a marker that raises a question, and in time to come means years from now. God is arranging for children not yet born to ask about the stones, and He gives their parents the answer in advance. Israel already knew this form of words, because God had used it for the Passover (Exodus 12:26) and for the redemption of the firstborn (Exodus 13:14), so Joshua is attaching the Jordan to a way of teaching children Israel already had.
“And the people came up out of Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and encamped in Gilgal, in the east border of Jericho.”
Joshua 4:19
Israel climbed out of the riverbed on the tenth day of the first month of their year and pitched camp at Gilgal, just east of Jericho. This is the only date given anywhere in the crossing account, and the writer stops the story to give it. He is placing Israel’s first day in the land on the calendar of the exodus.
“For the LORD your God dried up the waters of Jordan from before you, until ye were passed over, as the LORD your God did to the Red sea, which he dried up from before us, until we were gone over.”
Joshua 4:23
Joshua tells them God emptied the Jordan ahead of them until every one of them was across, just as He had emptied the Red Sea ahead of us until we were over. The pronoun shifts from you to us inside one sentence, and almost nobody in front of him had seen the sea open. Israel kept singing about this day long afterwards: “The sea saw it, and fled: Jordan was driven back” (Psalm 114:3), which puts the two rescues side by side the way Joshua does here.
“That all the people of the earth might know the hand of the LORD, that it is mighty: that ye might fear the LORD your God for ever.”
Joshua 4:24
God did it so that every nation on earth would learn that His hand is strong, and so that Israel would live in awe of Him from then on. The chapter closes by naming two audiences, and only one of them is Israel.
Key Lessons from Joshua 4
- God waited for the last Israelite before speaking again, so nobody was hurried out of His care to get to the next thing (Joshua 4:1).
- Every tribe sent a man for a stone, so no part of Israel was left out of the memory (Joshua 4:2-5).
- The memorial was designed to answer a child’s question rather than to impress an adult (Joshua 4:6-7).
- The priests kept their place in the riverbed until God released them through Joshua (Joshua 4:10, 4:16-17).
- Keeping their word to Moses cost the eastern tribes a war for land they would never live on (Joshua 4:12-13).
- God had Israel build a witness to Him before He had them fight for Him (Joshua 4:19-20).
To go deeper into the lessons from this chapter, read our full study: Lessons from Joshua 4.
Bible Study Questions
- According to Joshua 4:6-7, what were the stones for, and who was supposed to explain them?
- Joshua 4:1 says God spoke only after everyone was across. What does the timing show about how God was treating the nation?
- Why does Joshua 4:14 matter so much for a nation that had followed Moses for forty years?
- Israel camped on Jericho’s border and spent the day building a memorial. Why do you think God ordered that before a single battle?
- Joshua 4:23 has Joshua say the LORD dried up the Red Sea “from before us”, speaking to people who were not there. What is he asking them to believe about themselves?
- Joshua 4:24 gives two reasons for the miracle. Which of the two is harder for you to keep in view, and why?
Frequently Asked Questions
How do Joshua 3 and Joshua 4 fit together?
They are one account split across two chapters. Joshua 3 carries the crossing itself and leaves the priests still standing in the riverbed with the water held back. Joshua 4 completes it, adding the memorial stones, the priests coming up, and the river returning to flood.
What does the name Gilgal mean?
Gilgal comes from a Hebrew root meaning to roll, and the name is usually explained as a rolling or a circle of stones. Joshua 4:19 uses the name before it has been given, and Joshua 5:9 supplies the reason for it, where God says He has rolled away the reproach of Egypt from Israel, meaning the shame Egypt had put on them.
Who were the twelve men Joshua chose?
They were one man from each tribe, appointed earlier in Joshua 3:12, and Scripture never gives their names. Joshua 3:12 appoints them without saying why, and the reason reaches them only in Joshua 4:5-7.
Why did Reuben, Gad and half of Manasseh cross the Jordan armed?
Because they had promised Moses they would. Those tribes had asked for their inheritance on the eastern side of the Jordan, and Moses granted it on condition that their fighting men crossed over and fought until the rest of Israel had rest (Numbers 32:20-22). Joshua 4:12 records them keeping that word on the first day it cost them anything.
Does the Bible say what happened to the twelve stones later?
Joshua 4:9 is the last time Scripture clearly refers to either pile. Judges 3:19 mentions “the quarries that were by Gilgal” and some readers connect that with the memorial, though the verse does not say so. What Scripture does record is the thing the stones were built to prevent: Judges 2:10 describes a generation that “knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel”.
Joshua 4, The Full Text (KJV)
Read the full chapter below for reference. You can also read Joshua 4 in the KJV at Bible Gateway.
1 And it came to pass, when all the people were clean passed over Jordan, that the LORD spake unto Joshua, saying,
2 Take you twelve men out of the people, out of every tribe a man,
3 And command ye them, saying, Take you hence out of the midst of Jordan, out of the place where the priests’ feet stood firm, twelve stones, and ye shall carry them over with you, and leave them in the lodging place, where ye shall lodge this night.
4 Then Joshua called the twelve men, whom he had prepared of the children of Israel, out of every tribe a man:
5 And Joshua said unto them, Pass over before the ark of the LORD your God into the midst of Jordan, and take ye up every man of you a stone upon his shoulder, according unto the number of the tribes of the children of Israel:
6 That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones?
7 Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD; when it passed over Jordan, the waters of Jordan were cut off: and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever.
8 And the children of Israel did so as Joshua commanded, and took up twelve stones out of the midst of Jordan, as the LORD spake unto Joshua, according to the number of the tribes of the children of Israel, and carried them over with them unto the place where they lodged, and laid them down there.
9 And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests which bare the ark of the covenant stood: and they are there unto this day.
10 For the priests which bare the ark stood in the midst of Jordan, until every thing was finished that the LORD commanded Joshua to speak unto the people, according to all that Moses commanded Joshua: and the people hasted and passed over.
11 And it came to pass, when all the people were clean passed over, that the ark of the LORD passed over, and the priests, in the presence of the people.
12 And the children of Reuben, and the children of Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh, passed over armed before the children of Israel, as Moses spake unto them:
13 About forty thousand prepared for war passed over before the LORD unto battle, to the plains of Jericho.
14 On that day the LORD magnified Joshua in the sight of all Israel; and they feared him, as they feared Moses, all the days of his life.
15 And the LORD spake unto Joshua, saying,
16 Command the priests that bear the ark of the testimony, that they come up out of Jordan.
17 Joshua therefore commanded the priests, saying, Come ye up out of Jordan.
18 And it came to pass, when the priests that bare the ark of the covenant of the LORD were come up out of the midst of Jordan, and the soles of the priests’ feet were lifted up unto the dry land, that the waters of Jordan returned unto their place, and flowed over all his banks, as they did before.
19 And the people came up out of Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and encamped in Gilgal, in the east border of Jericho.
20 And those twelve stones, which they took out of Jordan, did Joshua pitch in Gilgal.
21 And he spake unto the children of Israel, saying, When your children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean these stones?
22 Then ye shall let your children know, saying, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land.
23 For the LORD your God dried up the waters of Jordan from before you, until ye were passed over, as the LORD your God did to the Red sea, which he dried up from before us, until we were gone over:
24 That all the people of the earth might know the hand of the LORD, that it is mighty: that ye might fear the LORD your God for ever.
