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Every King at Once.

Joshua 11 — Every remaining power united against Israel, and it still wasn't enough

10 min read

Key Takeaways

Against the largest army Joshua ever faced — countless as sand on the seashore — God's entire battle plan was a promise and a deadline: tomorrow.
God told Joshua to burn the chariots and cripple the horses rather than keep them — Israel's security was meant to rest on trust, not stockpiled firepower.
Joshua's conquest traces a chain of obedience from God to Moses to Joshua, carried out to the letter over decades.
God extended real opportunities for centuries — Rahab took one, the Gibeonites took one — but when those were exhausted, the door closed.

Here is the complete chapter body with all eight footnotes re-inserted at their original locations, each with a contextual bridge:

📢 Chapter 11 — Every King at Once ⚔️

had just finished sweeping through the south. City after city. King after king. The entire lower half of the land was in hands, and the news was traveling fast. But the north hadn't been touched yet — and the northern kings had no intention of going quietly.

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What follows is the largest military showdown in the entire book of Joshua. A coalition of every remaining power in the region, an army compared to sand on the seashore, chariots and horses beyond counting — all aimed at one target. And on the other side? A promise. Just a promise. But it turned out to be enough.

When the Whole North United 🗡️

When Jabin, king of , got word of what had done in the south, he didn't sit around waiting. was the dominant city in the northern region — the capital everyone else looked to — and Jabin knew his turn was coming. So he started building an alliance:

He sent messengers to Jobab king of Madon, to the kings of Shimron and Achshaph, and to every king across the northern hill country, the Arabah south of Chinneroth, the western lowlands, and Naphoth-dor on the coast. He rallied the Canaanites from east to west — the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites in the hills, and the Hivites below Mount Hermon in the land of Mizpah.

They all came out with everything they had — a massive army, countless as sand on the seashore, with horses and chariots in numbers Israel had never seen. Every one of these kings joined forces and set up camp together at the waters of Merom, united for one purpose: destroy Israel.

Think about the scale here. This wasn't one defending its borders. This was every remaining power in the land combining into a single force — the ancient equivalent of an entire region pooling their militaries into one coalition army. Horses and chariots were the decisive technology of the era. had neither. From where Joshua was standing, this was the worst thing he'd seen since crossing the .

The Night Before the Ambush 🛡️

With that massive coalition camped at the waters of Merom, God spoke to . And what he said was almost startlingly simple. The Lord told him:

"Do not be afraid of them. By this time tomorrow, I will hand every one of them over to Israel, slain. You will hamstring their horses and burn their chariots with fire."

That was the entire briefing. Not a tactical formation. Not a detailed battle plan. Just a promise and a timeline — tomorrow.

Joshua and his entire force moved fast. They struck suddenly at the waters of Merom and fell on the coalition before they could organize. The Lord gave them into Israel's hands. They chased the retreating armies as far as Great Sidon and Misrephoth-maim to the northwest and the Valley of Mizpeh to the east. They didn't stop until no one was left.

Then Joshua did exactly what the Lord told him — he hamstrung their horses and burned their chariots with fire.

Here's a detail worth pausing on. Chariots were the ultimate military technology of the ancient world — the tanks, the fighter jets, the decisive advantage on any battlefield. God didn't tell Joshua to capture them and add them to arsenal. He told him to destroy them. Burn the chariots. Cripple the horses. Because security was never supposed to depend on having superior firepower. It was supposed to rest on trusting the one who gave the victory. The moment you start stockpiling what God told you to surrender, you've started trusting the wrong thing.

Straight to the Capital 🏰

After the battle at Merom, turned his attention to the city that had organized the whole coalition — itself:

Joshua turned back and captured Hazor. He struck its king with the sword. Hazor had been the head of all those northern kingdoms — the command center, the city that pulled the strings. They put everyone in it to the sword, devoting them to destruction. No one was left breathing. Then Joshua burned Hazor to the ground.

He captured all the other kings' cities too, struck them down, and devoted them to destruction — exactly as Moses, the servant of the Lord, had commanded. But Israel didn't burn the cities built on their mounds — they left those standing. Hazor alone was burned. The Israelites kept the plunder and livestock from these cities for themselves, but every person was struck down. No one who breathed was left alive.

Just as the Lord had commanded Moses his servant, so Moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did. He left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses.

Let's be honest — this is one of the hardest parts of the Old Testament to sit with. The systematic destruction. The totality of it. These verses aren't easy, and they aren't meant to be.

But notice what the text keeps emphasizing. Three times in this section alone, the narrator connects Joshua's actions back to commands, and Moses' commands back to God's. This wasn't Joshua freelancing. This was a chain of that stretched back decades — from God to Moses to Joshua, carried out to the letter. Whatever we make of these events, the text wants us to understand they weren't random violence or unchecked conquest. They were the execution of something God had set in motion long before Joshua crossed the .

The Full Map 🗺️

Now the camera pulls way back. The narrator stops zooming in on individual battles and summarizes the entire conquest:

Joshua took all that land — the hill country, the entire Negev, all the land of Goshen, the lowlands, the Arabah, the hill country of Israel and its foothills. From Mount Halak rising toward Seir in the south, all the way north to Baal-gad in the Valley of Lebanon below Mount Hermon. He captured their kings, struck them down, and put them to death.

This war wasn't quick. Joshua fought these kings for a long time. Not a single city made peace with Israel — except the Hivites living in Gibeon. Every other city was taken in battle.

And then comes a verse that stops you cold:

For it was the Lord's doing to harden their hearts so that they would come against Israel in battle — in order that they would be devoted to destruction and would receive no mercy, but be destroyed, just as the Lord had commanded Moses.

This is heavy theology, and the text doesn't soften it. God hardened their hearts. The same language used about in . These nations had centuries of warning — generations of opportunity to turn. did. The Gibeonites did. But the rest chose opposition at every turn, and at a certain point, God confirmed them in the direction they'd already been heading.

That's an uncomfortable truth, and it's supposed to be. The text doesn't offer a tidy resolution. It presents a God who is both endlessly patient and ultimately decisive — who extends real opportunity and who, when it's been exhausted, closes the door. We don't get to domesticate that. We just have to sit with it.

The Giants Fell Too 💪

There's one more piece of unfinished business — and it reaches all the way back to a moment forty years earlier.

At that time, Joshua went and cut off the Anakim from the hill country — from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, from all the hill country of Judah and all the hill country of Israel. He devoted them to destruction along with their cities. No Anakim were left anywhere in the land of Israel. Only in Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod did some remain.

(Quick context: The were the giants — the people who terrified the Israelite spies so badly that an entire generation refused to enter the land. "We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes," they reported back in Numbers 13. That fear cost forty years of wandering in the wilderness. A whole generation died without ever setting foot in the — all because the giants seemed too big to face.)

And now? just wiped them out. The very people who had paralyzed with fear a generation ago were gone. The obstacle that seemed insurmountable — the thing an entire nation couldn't get past — fell like everything else when the time came.

Then the chapter closes with a single sentence that carries the weight of everything before it:

So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses. He gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments. And the land had rest from war.

Six words: And the land had rest from war. After decades of wilderness wandering. After crossing the on dry ground. After , , the southern campaign, and the northern coalition. After every king and every giant and every battle — rest. Not a ceasefire. Not a temporary pause between conflicts. . The kind of deep exhale that only comes when a very long journey finally reaches its destination.

Sometimes the most powerful sentence in a story is the quietest one.