Daily Verse | Joshua 2:9
“I know that the Lord has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you.”

Friday’s Reading: Joshua 6-8
Saturday’s Reading: Joshua 9-12

Happy Friday and welcome to the weekend. If you’re following the Bible reading plan, we’re now in the book of Joshua—which is an amazing name.

Why? Glad you asked.

Joshua was the successor of Moses, the man brought up in Pharaoh’s household and the leader who brought the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt. Joshua is described as Moses’ “young aide” (Exodus 33:11) and one “who had been Moses’ aide since youth” (Numbers 11:28).

Joshua was commissioned by God Himself to lead the Israelites just before the LORD took them into the land of Canaan (Deut. 31:23):

The Lord gave this command to Joshua son of Nun: “Be strong and courageous, for you will bring the Israelites into the land I promised them on oath, and I myself will be with you.”

Here are some facts about the name “Joshua” that give us a more robust (and inspiring!) understanding of how the Old Testament (the Jewish Tanakh) points to Jesus.

In Hebrew, Joshua is spelled יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yehoshu’a) (and always reading right to left in Hebrew). It means, “Yahweh is salvation,” from the roots יְהוֹ (yeho) referring to the Hebrew God and יָשַׁע (yasha’) meaning “to save.”

Included in the name Joshua is a shortened form of the Tetragrammaton, i.e. the name of the Lord: YHWH (יהו). YHWH is unpronounceable,

“… and wherever the text called for YHWH, a reader would pronounce the Hebrew word for lord, namely Adonai. In the Middle Ages, the Masoretes began to fear that the traditional pronunciation of the written text might become lost and inserted symbols to help preserve it. That caused the pronunciation of the word Adonai to be linked to the spelling of YHWH, which in turn resulted in the impossible hybrid “name” Jehovah.

Other Jewish traditions handled the vocalization of YHWH by inserting the word Hashem, which is the word for “name” … plus the definite article: The Name.

The name Joshua, then, is associated with God and with salvation.

Second, Joshua is the original Hebrew form of the Greek name Jesus, which comes from a Greek translation of the Aramaic short form יֵשׁוּעַ (Yeshu’a). As The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (ed. Colin Brown) puts it,

Iēsous is the Gk. form of the OT Jewish name Yēšua‘, arrived at by transcribing the Heb. and adding an -s to the nom. to facilitate declension. Yēšua‘ (Joshua) seems to have come into general use about the time of the Babylonian exile in place of the older Yᵉhôšûa‘. The LXX rendered both the ancient and more recent forms of the name uniformly as Iēsous … It is the oldest name containing the divine name Yahweh, and means “Yahweh is help” or “Yahweh is salvation” (cf. the vb. yiisa’, help, save).

The name Joshua, then, is also associated with Jesus.

Finally, the name Joshua is the exact reverse of the name Isaiah (ישעיה).

The name Isaiah(u) consists of two parts: The final part is יה or יהו, both abbreviated forms of יהוה; YHWH or Yahweh. The first part of the name Isaiah comes from the verb ישע (yasha’), meaning to be saved or delivered … The verb ישע (yasha’) means to be unrestricted and thus to be free and thus to be saved (from restriction, from oppression and thus from ultimate demise). A doer of this verb is a savior.

Where have we heard that before?

The name Joshua, then, is also associated with Isaiah and thereby reinforced in its meaning of “Yahweh is salvation.”

One more interesting and related fact. The name Moses is the Latin version of the Greek name Μωσης (Moses), which in turn is a transliteration of the Hebrew name משה (Moshe). If you spell the name of Moses backward in Hebrew (השם), it spells the word Hashem, which is Jewish for The Name.

Remember that from above?

Mind, blown.

Let’s put it all together. Moses, whose name is associated with “The Name” leads the Israelites out of Egyptian bondage into the Promised Land with the help of his young aide, Joshua, whose name means “Yahweh is salvation” and is associated with Jesus.

What you’re reading in the account of the exodus from Egypt and the conquest of the land “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8) is a type which, in scripture, is a person or thing in the Old Testament that foreshadows a person or thing in the New Testament.

An Old Testament type’s details don’t all necessarily have a one-to-one correlation in the New Testament, but the broad parallels in the account of Moses, Joshua and the Israelites with Jesus Christ and his work are pretty hard to miss.

Exciting!

Have a good weekend.