Joshua 8:29 → Deuteronomy 21:22-23

Deuteronomy 21:22-23 legislates that a body hung on a tree (תָּלוּי, tālûy) "must not be left on the tree overnight, but you must be sure to bury him that day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God's curse," lest the body defile the land Yahweh gives as inheritance. Joshua 8:29 is the canon's first enactment of that statute: the king of Ai is hung on a tree "until evening, and at sunset Joshua commanded that they take down the body from the tree" and bury it — the precise sundown-burial protocol Moses commanded. The connection is legal-narrative compliance, not citation: Joshua does not quote the law but performs it, demonstrating the regulation operative within Israel's historical memory (hence Allusion, not Direct Quotation). The warranted method is Redemptive-Historical Progression — the conquest narrative shows the Mosaic ban-and-burial code being executed as Israel takes the land; this is not typology, because the cursed Canaanite king is no Christ-figure but a defeated enemy, and the curse-formula's theology lies dormant here, released only when Paul (Galatians 3:13) reads the statute itself as Christ "becoming a curse for us" by hanging on the tree. Yet that very dormancy is the point: Joshua's obedient compliance keeps the statute alive and visible across the centuries, so that when Christ is "hung on a tree" the divinely-established category is waiting for him. The road to Christ runs not through the Ai king but through the law Joshua honored — the same word "cursed... on a tree" that condemned an enemy becomes the word that, borne by the Son, redeems his enemies. And here the curse turns sweet: the One we would have hung on the gibbet hangs there in our place, taken down before sundown not to spare the land defilement but to be laid in a borrowed tomb and rise — so that the curse we dreaded becomes the very ground of our welcome, and Christ the curse-bearer is seen as more desirable than the innocence we lost.