Flood Season

This week-end's news told of swollen rivers over-flowing their banks in the Assinoboine and Mississippi flood-plains and disastrous floods in Colombia. Today's post focuses on the challenge of a river in flood-stage.

In the spring of the year, the Jordan River runs at its highest level, swollen by melting snow and late winter rains. This was the season when God chose to lead Israel into the Promised Land, perhaps for two reasons. Pragmatically, it brought Israel into their new homeland in time for the abundance of the spring barley and wheat harvest. But more significantly, it provided a dramatic sign of God’s amazing power for both Israel and the nations.

Seeing Israel’s God stop the flow of the Jordan in full flood, all the inhabitants of the land saw that Yahweh not Baal, was supreme Lord of the Waters and of the land. This sign would also assure Israel that Yahweh was able to complete his redemptive work for them. If God could arrest the flood-waters of the Jordan, God could also drive out the current inhabitants who had ‘defiled’ the land by their abhorrent practices, such as child sacrifice. Twice in the story of the crossing, the narrator calls Yahweh “the God of all the earth”.

The crossing itself was dramatic – even ceremonial. The priests went half-way across carrying the Ark of the Covenant – twice called the Ark of God of all the earth, underscoring his claim over the river, the land and all its inhabitants – then the people followed, with delegates from each tribe picking up a large stone from mid-river for a monument on the West Bank to commemorate their dramatic entry into the land.

The narrator gives us no hint as to what caused the river to suspend its flow just when the priests ventured into the river or why it resumed its flow when everyone had crossed over. An Arab historian tells of a landslide 2500 years later in AD 1266 which stopped the flow of the Jordan for 10 hours, and in 1927 an earthquake caused a blockage in the same place stopping the river’s flow for 21 hours. But the Bible focuses more on the result than the cause.

The Jordan was a boundary that Israel finally crossed – opening the way into a new way of life. After 400 years as refugees and then slaves in Egypt, and the past 40 years as nomads in the desert, now at last they had the opportunity to sink down their roots in their own newly acquired homeland. Crossing the Jordan marked a decisive transition point and a memorable milestone in their national history.

They understood that Yahweh had done this for them. As the narrator of Joshua says,
"The LORD your God did to the Jordan just what he had done to the Red Sea when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over. He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the LORD is powerful and so that you might always fear the LORD your God." Joshua 4:23-24