Complete Joshua 5 Summary and Study Guide: The Reproach Rolled Away at Gilgal

Two miles from a walled city, with every enemy king in the land already too frightened to fight, Joshua took a knife to his own army and left every fighting man in it unable to lift a sword. This Joshua 5 summary and study guide follows the week God spent getting Israel ready before He gave them Jericho.

Setting the Stage

God promised the land of Canaan to Abraham’s descendants, and hundreds of years later that family came out of slavery in Egypt and reached its border. Israel sent twelve men ahead to look at it. Ten came back saying it could not be taken, the people believed them and refused to go in, and God sent that generation back into the desert to die there. He told them their children would carry the weight of that refusal for forty years (Numbers 14:33-34).

Those forty years are over now. The children have crossed the Jordan under Joshua, and they are camped at Gilgal within sight of Jericho. Joshua 5 is the week the sentence runs out.

Comprehensive Joshua 5 Summary

The kings of the Amorites in the hill country and the Canaanites along the coast hear what has happened at the Jordan. What reaches them is news about a river: God dried up the Jordan at flood stage so that Israel could walk across, and their courage goes out of them.

Under that fear, God gives Joshua an order no general would give himself. Make flint knives, and circumcise Israel. Every man old enough to fight at the exodus had already worn the mark that showed he belonged to God, and all of them except Joshua and Caleb had died in the desert.

Nobody born on the way had ever received that mark. So Joshua circumcises the whole camp at a rise that came to be called the hill of the foreskins, and Israel sits still until the men are healed, defenceless, a short walk from Jericho with its gates shut.

Then God speaks over them: today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off you. The place takes its name from that sentence. Gilgal is built on the Hebrew word for rolling.

Four days after the crossing, on the fourteenth day of the first month, Israel keeps the Passover in the plains of Jericho, at exactly the time the law had set. The next day they eat food grown in Canaan, unleavened cakes and roasted grain. The day after that, the manna does not come. It had fallen for forty years, and it stops the morning after the land feeds them.

Joshua then goes out toward Jericho on his own and finds a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword. He asks whose side the man is on. The man tells him he is the captain of the LORD’s host, and Joshua falls on his face and asks for orders.

One Word Summary

• Consecration: God deals with the covenant first.
• Rolled: the meaning of the name God gave the place.
• Transition: desert rations out, harvest in.

In One Sentence

Joshua circumcises the generation born in the desert, Israel keeps its first Passover in the promised land, the manna stops, and a man with a drawn sword meets Joshua outside Jericho, so that the people entering the land go in as God’s covenant people under God’s command.

Theme of Joshua 5

Joshua 5 is about God preparing His people before He gives them anything to conquer. It opens with Canaan’s kings losing their nerve, and God uses the days that fear buys on Israel rather than on Jericho: a covenant mark restored, a feast kept, a disgrace declared gone, and a forty-year punishment brought to an end.

Running alongside it is a second idea, that God’s care does not stop when the miracle does. Underneath both sits the question handed back to Joshua outside Jericho, which is not whose side God is on but whose side Israel is.

Joshua 5 Outline

• Joshua 5:1: The Amorite and Canaanite kings hear that God dried up the Jordan, and their courage fails.
• Joshua 5:2-3: God tells Joshua to make flint knives, and Joshua circumcises Israel at the hill of the foreskins.
• Joshua 5:4-7: The reason is given, that the fighting men who left Egypt died in the desert and their sons had never been circumcised.
• Joshua 5:8: Israel stays where it is in camp until the circumcised men are healed.
• Joshua 5:9: God says He has rolled away the reproach of Egypt, and the place is called Gilgal.
• Joshua 5:10: Israel keeps the Passover on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho.
• Joshua 5:11-12: They eat unleavened cakes and roasted grain from the land, and the manna stops.
• Joshua 5:13-15: Joshua meets a man with a drawn sword near Jericho who calls himself captain of the LORD’s host, and Joshua worships and takes off his shoe.

The Days of Joshua 5

Joshua 5 is a chapter where the calendar carries the meaning, and the King James phrase “on the morrow after the passover” does not tell a modern reader which day that was.

The tenth and the fourteenth are given in the text. The eleventh is what Bible teachers have generally worked out from the order of events, since the crossing was on the tenth and the camp needed time to heal before the feast.

Observations from Joshua 5

The kings heard, and that was enough (Joshua 5:1)

Joshua 4:24 had said the crossing happened so “that all the people of the earth might know the hand of the LORD, that it is mighty.” In other words, so that everyone everywhere would learn how strong God’s hand is. The very next verse shows the first people who learned it, and they are the kings Israel has not met yet. God went ahead of Israel and did the work of an army before a single sword was drawn.

Rahab heard the same report and did something else with it (Joshua 5:1 with Joshua 2:9-11)

Rahab told the two spies, “as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man.” When Jericho heard what God had done, the courage drained out of everyone there. Joshua 5:1 uses almost the same words of the kings: “their heart melted, neither was there spirit in them any more.”

The same news reached both, and it did not end in the same place. Rahab took her melted heart to the God she had heard about and said He was God in heaven and on earth. The kings kept theirs and stayed where they were. Fear is not faith, and a report about God can leave a person exactly where it found them.

The thing that terrified Israel is now terrified of Israel (Joshua 5:1 with Deuteronomy 1:28)

When the previous generation refused to enter, this is what they said: “the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and moreover we have seen the sons of the Anakims there.”

They meant the cities were fortified beyond anything they could take, and giants lived in them. Now the kings of those same walled cities lose their nerve. The obstacle had not changed at all. The generation had.

God asked for this at the moment it cost the most (Joshua 5:2, 8)

Israel had been camped for months on the far side of the Jordan, where a flooded river stood between them and every Canaanite army. The command to circumcise did not come then.

It came after the crossing, when there was no river left to hide behind and no way back. Israel obeyed and sat still while their fighting men healed. God settled who these people belonged to before He said one word about Jericho.

Moses asked for a day like this one and never saw it (Joshua 5:10)

For the first time in nearly forty years, Israel eats a Passover meal, and it happens on promised ground at the exact hour the law had set. Psalm 90 carries the heading “A Prayer of Moses the man of God,” and in it Moses asks God, “Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil” (Psalm 90:15).

Give us as much gladness as You gave us hardship. Moses died on Mount Nebo without crossing, and many read this feast at Gilgal as the beginning of the answer to that prayer. The people eating it were the ones he had led all the way to this border.

Difficult Verses Explained

Why Did Joshua Circumcise Israel “Again, the Second Time”?

Nobody was circumcised twice. The Hebrew phrase means to go back and do again something that had lapsed, and what had lapsed was the practice itself: Joshua restored it for a generation that had never received it.

The strongest reason the practice stopped is in the sentence God passed at Kadesh. He told the rebelling generation, “your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness” (Numbers 14:33). Your children will live out in the desert for forty years and carry the cost of your unfaithfulness until the last of you has died there.

The sons were under the sentence too, so the sign of the covenant was withheld while it ran. Others have suggested simpler reasons, that constant travelling made it unsafe for infants, or that Israel simply let it slide. The chapter itself only says it did not happen “by the way” (Joshua 5:7), which means it never happened while they were travelling.

What Was “The Reproach of Egypt” That God Rolled Away?

The phrase most likely means the reproach coming from Egypt, the taunt that God had brought Israel out only to kill them in the desert. Moses had quoted that taunt back to God twice, once after the golden calf and once after Kadesh: “Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains?” (Exodus 32:12).

Why let Egypt say God took them out to destroy them in the hills? As long as Israel wandered, Egypt looked right. Standing in Canaan, they no longer did.

Two other readings have been held for a long time. Some take the phrase as the shame of having been slaves, now finished with. Some take it as the state of being uncircumcised, which the nations around Israel treated as a disgrace.

Scripture does not settle which one God meant. It does settle who declared the reproach gone and on what day, and that God named the ground after the declaring.

Who Was the Captain of the Host of the LORD?

The chapter never gives his name, and the strongest evidence for who he is sits two verses later. The exchange that begins in Joshua 5:13 does not stop at the chapter break; Joshua 6:1 is a note about Jericho’s shut gates, and then the same speaker carries straight on in Joshua 6:2, where he is called the LORD.

Three things in these three verses point the same way. He accepted worship, where an angel in Scripture refuses it outright (Revelation 22:8-9). His presence made the ground holy. And his first order to Joshua matches what God had said to Moses at the burning bush: “Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy” (Joshua 5:15).

Take your sandal off your foot, because the ground you are standing on is holy. God had told Moses almost exactly that at the bush (Exodus 3:5).

Many Bible teachers understand this man as the Son of God appearing in human form before His birth in Bethlehem, and the evidence points that way strongly. Some have read him instead as a created angel sent to speak for God. The man gives Joshua a title and an order, and never a name.

Why Did He Answer “Nay” When Joshua Asked Whose Side He Was On?

He was refusing the question rather than declaring himself neutral. Joshua asked, “Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?” and the answer came back, “Nay; but as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come” (Joshua 5:13-14). Neither, and here is who I am: the commander of God’s armies, and I have arrived.

What he does next settles the point. In the very next breath he hands Joshua the plan for taking Jericho and tells him the city is already given (Joshua 6:2-5). He came to take command of Israel’s war, and Joshua handed it over on the spot.

The drawn sword in his hand is a sword of judgement, and God had explained centuries earlier why that judgement had waited so long. He told Abraham that four hundred years would pass before his descendants came back for this land, “for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Genesis 15:16), meaning the people living there had still to run their wickedness to its end. Moses later told Israel plainly that the land was coming to them as a gift and never as a wage (Deuteronomy 9:4-5).

Common Misunderstandings

• That the men who came out of Egypt were circumcised in the desert. Joshua 5:5 says the opposite. Those who came out of Egypt had already been circumcised; it was those born afterwards, on the way, who had not.
• That the manna was only ever meant to last a short time. Exodus 16:35 says Israel ate manna forty years, until they came to the border of Canaan. It ran the full course God said it would.
• That Israel was still enslaved when God rolled away the reproach. They had been out of Egypt for forty years by then. Whatever the reproach was, it was not their legal status.
• That the desert stands for one class of Christian and Canaan for another. This is a framework some teachers bring to the chapter rather than one Joshua 5 states. The chapter is about a nation coming out from under a sentence, and it can be read that way without sorting believers into ranks.

Christ Connection

Everything in this chapter that made Israel God’s people was a sign of something God does inwardly. Circumcision marked a man out as belonging to God, and Paul says believers now carry a version of it that no blade makes: “In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11).

Christ performs a cutting away that no blade reaches. That is not a new idea Paul invented, either. Moses had already told Israel that “the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart” (Deuteronomy 30:6), and Jeremiah told Judah to have it done (Jeremiah 4:4).

Three more parts of the chapter point the same way.

• The Passover. Israel kept this feast at Gilgal because a lamb had died in Egypt so that they could go free. Paul writes, “For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). The lamb the feast remembered was pointing at Him the whole time.
• The manna. It stopped that week because the land had begun to feed them. Jesus took that up directly. He told a crowd that His Father “giveth you the true bread from heaven” (John 6:32), meaning God was offering bread of an altogether different order, and then said plainly, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35). The desert bread ran out one morning in Canaan. The bread He is speaking of does not run out.
• The commander with the drawn sword. Hebrews 2:10 calls Jesus “the captain of their salvation,” the one who leads His people to glory, and Isaiah 55:4 calls the coming Messiah “a leader and commander to the people.” Neither passage is quoting Joshua 5, but the title Joshua heard outside Jericho is the title the New Testament gives to Christ.

When, Where, and Why

• When: Approximately 1400 BC, in the first month of the year, across the days between the tenth and the sixteenth. The dating of the conquest is debated, so treat the year as approximate; the days within the month are given in the chapter itself.
• Where: Gilgal, on the plain between the Jordan River and Jericho, and the open ground just outside Jericho where Joshua met the man with the sword. Josephus put the camp between one and two miles east of the city, though the site has never been identified with certainty. Gilgal kept its place in Israel’s story long after this week: Saul was made king there (1 Samuel 11:15) and told there that his kingdom would not last (1 Samuel 13:13-14), and centuries later Hosea and Amos named it as a place where Israel had learned to sin in God’s name (Hosea 4:15; Amos 4:4).
• Why: Joshua 4:24 says the crossing happened so that the whole earth would know God’s hand is mighty, and Joshua 5:1 is that beginning to happen. The writer records this week because the fighting is about to start, and he wants the last thing on the page before the first battle to be what God did with His own people.

Key Verses

“For the children of Israel walked forty years in the wilderness, till all the people that were men of war, which came out of Egypt, were consumed, because they obeyed not the voice of the LORD.”

Joshua 5:6

Israel spent forty years in the desert until every man who had been of fighting age at the exodus was dead, Joshua and Caleb excepted, and the reason given is that they would not listen to God. This is the one line that accounts for the previous forty years, and it stands in the middle of the chapter that ends them.

“And the manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land.”

Joshua 5:12

The day after Israel ate food grown in Canaan, the manna stopped coming. The King James “old corn” simply means the produce of the land, and forty years of desert rations end on a dated morning: Israel went out to gather as they had done every day of their lives, and there was nothing on the ground because there was food in the barns.

“And it came to pass, when they had done circumcising all the people, that they abode in their places in the camp, till they were whole.”

Joshua 5:8

When the circumcising was finished, the people stayed where they were in camp until they had recovered. For several days an army that had already destroyed two kings east of the Jordan could not have defended itself against a raiding party, and Israel spent those days sitting still because God had told them to.

Key Lessons from Joshua 5

• God put Israel right with Himself before He dealt with a single enemy (Joshua 5:2-9).
• Obedience can cost more at the moment God asks for it than it would have cost earlier, and Israel obeyed anyway (Joshua 5:8).
• God can change how He provides without changing that He provides (Joshua 5:12).
• The question worth asking is not whether God is on our side but whether we are on His (Joshua 5:13-14).

To go deeper into what this chapter teaches, read our full study: Lessons from Joshua 5.

Bible Study Questions

1. What exactly had the kings of the Amorites and Canaanites heard in Joshua 5:1, and what did it do to them?
2. According to Joshua 5:4-7, why had the men in the camp never been circumcised?
3. Israel had been camped safely east of the Jordan for months. Why do you think God waited until after the crossing to give the command in Joshua 5:2?
4. What does God say He has done in Joshua 5:9, and what does the name Gilgal record about that day?
5. Manna had fallen through every one of Israel’s years in the desert, and then one morning it did not (Joshua 5:12). What would that morning have been like, and what does it show about the way God provides?
6. Joshua asked, “Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?” and got “Nay” for an answer (Joshua 5:13-14). What was wrong with his question?

Frequently Asked Questions

Joshua 5, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference.

1 And it came to pass, when all the kings of the Amorites, which were on the side of Jordan westward, and all the kings of the Canaanites, which were by the sea, heard that the LORD had dried up the waters of Jordan from before the children of Israel, until we were passed over, that their heart melted, neither was there spirit in them any more, because of the children of Israel.

2 At that time the LORD said unto Joshua, Make thee sharp knives, and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time.

3 And Joshua made him sharp knives, and circumcised the children of Israel at the hill of the foreskins.

4 And this is the cause why Joshua did circumcise: All the people that came out of Egypt, that were males, even all the men of war, died in the wilderness by the way, after they came out of Egypt.

5 Now all the people that came out were circumcised: but all the people that were born in the wilderness by the way as they came forth out of Egypt, them they had not circumcised.

6 For the children of Israel walked forty years in the wilderness, till all the people that were men of war, which came out of Egypt, were consumed, because they obeyed not the voice of the LORD: unto whom the LORD sware that he would not shew them the land, which the LORD sware unto their fathers that he would give us, a land that floweth with milk and honey.

7 And their children, whom he raised up in their stead, them Joshua circumcised: for they were uncircumcised, because they had not circumcised them by the way.

8 And it came to pass, when they had done circumcising all the people, that they abode in their places in the camp, till they were whole.

9 And the LORD said unto Joshua, This day have I rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off you. Wherefore the name of the place is called Gilgal unto this day.

10 And the children of Israel encamped in Gilgal, and kept the passover on the fourteenth day of the month at even in the plains of Jericho.

11 And they did eat of the old corn of the land on the morrow after the passover, unleavened cakes, and parched corn in the selfsame day.

12 And the manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land; neither had the children of Israel manna any more; but they did eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.

13 And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand: and Joshua went unto him, and said unto him, Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?

14 And he said, Nay; but as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, What saith my lord unto his servant?

15 And the captain of the LORD’S host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so.