Joshua 14

Living Bible

14 ^1-2 The conquered lands of Canaan were allotted to the remaining nine and a half tribes of Israel. The decision as to which tribe would receive which area was decided by throwing dice^[a] before the Lord, and he caused them to turn up in the ways he wanted. Eleazar the priest, Joshua, and the tribal leaders supervised the lottery.

^3-4 (Moses had already given land to the two and a half tribes on the east side of the Jordan River. The tribe of Joseph had become two separate tribes, Manasseh and Ephraim, and the Levites were given no land at all, except cities in which to live and the surrounding pasturelands for their cattle. ⁵ So the distribution of the land was in strict accordance with the Lord’s directions to Moses.)

⁶ The Land Given to Caleb: A delegation from the tribe of Judah, led by Caleb, came to Joshua in Gilgal.

“Remember what the Lord said to Moses about you and me when we were at Kadesh-barnea?” Caleb asked Joshua. ⁷ “I was forty years old at the time, and Moses had sent us from Kadesh-barnea to spy out the land of Canaan. I reported what I felt was the truth, ⁸ but our brothers who went with us frightened the people and discouraged them from entering the Promised Land. But since I had followed the Lord my God, ⁹ Moses told me, ‘The section of Canaan you were just in shall belong to you and your descendants forever.’

¹⁰ “Now, as you see, from that time until now the Lord has kept me alive and well for all these forty-five years since crisscrossing the wilderness, and today I am eighty-five years old. ¹¹ I am as strong now as I was when Moses sent us on that journey, and I can still travel and fight as well as I could then! ¹² So I’m asking that you give me the hill country that the Lord promised me. You will remember that as spies we found the Anakim living there in great, walled cities, but if the Lord is with me, I shall drive them out of the land.”

^13-14 So Joshua blessed him and gave him Hebron as a permanent inheritance because he had followed the Lord God of Israel. ¹⁵ (Before that time Hebron had been called Kiriath-arba, after a great hero of the Anakim.)

And there was no resistance from the local populations as the Israelis resettled the land.