Joshua 22:24-25 - "No! We did it for fear that some day your descendants might say to ours, 'What do you have to do with the LORD, the God of Israel? The LORD has made the Jordan a boundary between us and you -- you Reubenites and Gadites! You have no share in the LORD.' So your descendants might cause ours to stop fearing the LORD."
The Israelites on the west side of the Jordan were literally up in arms over a replica altar the Israelites on the east side of the Jordan had just built. The text above is their explanation for building it. While this may have been true, it still sounds like a weak argument. I wonder if that's what all of them were really thinking or if that's the best they could come up with on the spur of the moment when the West Israeli Army showed up.
The Jordan (and other rivers) seemed like rather major hindrances during this era. I wonder if no one ever thought of the concept of a bridge. The technology certainly would have been there, wouldn't it? They could build some pretty nifty things in their cities. Why not down by the riverside too?
Perhaps they purposely didn't build bridges in some cases as protection from enemies, but the Jordan was entirely within their own territory. I wonder what stopped them from building a bridge across it.
[In memory of Joan who crossed her own Jordan this week.]
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