How to read this page

An Intertextuality Pair — one connection between two passages, shown as linked verse cards: the Later text and the Earlier text it quotes, alludes to or echoes. The Significance essay explains why the link matters and where it points in Christ.

Reference Type— how explicit the link is: Quotation, Allusion, or Echo
Connection Method(s)— how it carries meaning: e.g. Typology, Promise-Fulfillment, Analogy, Longitudinal Theme
Found via— where the connection was identified, e.g. the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge or an Anchor-Text Network

Graph View — tap the constellation icon in the top bar to see this page's connections as a web of light: gold points are passages, and the coloured threads are the connection types. Click any type in the graph's own legend to filter it in or out, and use the expand control for the full-screen night sky.

New to a term? The Glossary explains every abbreviation and term on the site in plain words.

Intertextuality Pair

Joshua 11:20 → Deuteronomy 7:2

Allusion

Later text

Joshua 11:20BSB

For it was of the LORD to harden their hearts to engage Israel in battle, so that they would be set apart for destruction and would receive no mercy, being annihilated as the LORD had commanded Moses.

Earlier text

Deuteronomy 7:2BSB

and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you to defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.

Significance

Joshua 11:20 reveals that it was the LORD who hardened (חִזֵּק, chizzeq, "strengthened/hardened") the Canaanites' hearts to engage Israel in battle, providing the theological rationale for the חֵרֶם (cherem, "total destruction") command of Deuteronomy 7:2. Moses had commanded Israel to devote the nations to destruction and show no mercy; Joshua 11:20 explains that God himself ensured the conditions for this command's fulfillment by removing the possibility of peace treaties. The narrator thus presents the conquest not as Israel's initiative but as God's sovereign orchestration, closing off diplomatic alternatives so that the Deuteronomic command would be carried out completely. The link runs through the cognate root חרם and covenantal continuity rather than through a rare verbal parallel. TT 033 nevertheless marks it CRITICAL, because that mark records christological load on the trajectory's spine — the ban Christ absorbs at the cross — and load is gradable independently of verbal dependence.

Found via: Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Redemptive-Historical Progression — the חֵרֶם command of Deuteronomy 7:2 is carried to completion in the conquest: the narrator explains that the LORD Himself hardened the Canaanites' hearts so that they would "receive no mercy, being annihilated as the LORD had commanded Moses" — divine orchestration ensuring the Mosaic mandate's full execution.

Linked Mentions 1

Trajectory Tables 1

Conquest of Canaan Trajectory Table