Sunrise, Sunset

Before Israel crosses the Jordan, the Lord reminds the three trans-Jordanian tribes of the deal struck with them. Yahweh has already begun to give them the land He promised to Abraham, and Reuben, Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh will settle there. Before they settle down, though, they need to cross the Jordan to fight with their brothers. After the conquest is done, they can “return to your own land, and possess that which Moses the servant of the Lord gave you beyond the Jordan toward the sunrise” (Joshua 1:15). 

They can possess the sunrise land – to the east of the Jordan – after they have helped the rest of Israel acquire the land of the west, the sunset land.

That division of the land into sunrise and sunset land, divided by the river, links up with a number of patterns elsewhere in the Bible. For starters, the designation of land by the movements of the sun is a way of designating space by reference to time. To the east is the land of sunrise, the protological land, the first land; to the west is the land of sunset, the eschatological land of evening, the last land. The old hymns that see Canaan as a picture of eschatological life are exactly right.

It replicates too the original creation arrangement. Adam was placed in the garden, which was east in the land of Eden, toward the sunrise. Had he fought off the serpent, he would have ascended to the sunset land, from the first to the last land. When he failed, he was cast out of the land entirely, out into the wilderness. Though Canaan is not geographically identical with Eden, it overlaps theologically. Israel’s conquest of the transJordan is a recovery of the garden; then they cross the river to the land of Eden, to become the kings that Adam never became.

It is also linked to the arrangement of the tabernacle. Offerings move from sunrise to sunset. The altar is in the east of the courtyard, and conceptually the smoke of the offerings ascends from the east to the west, toward the throne of Yahweh in the Most Holy Place. Israel ascends from the wilderness like a bull on the altar, passes from the altar of the wilderness and Sinai, through the water-veil of the Jordan, toward the throne of God in the land.