Commentary on Joshua, Volume II — Paris, 1610, by Nicolaus Serarius, S.J. — is now on the site, complete, in English for the first time. The former volume has stood here since September; this is the rest of it, and with it the whole of Serarius on Joshua is in English.
The first volume carried Joshua from the womb to the eve of the wars. This one carries him from the walls of Jericho to his grave, in three hundred and thirty-two questions.
The wars come first. Serarius asks four questions of them as a whole — how many they were, whether the Israelites justly moved arms against the Canaanites, whether the Canaanites too justly bore arms against them, and what the wars signify — and then takes the five Canaanite wars one by one. Jericho alone fills a hundred questions: the Jubilee trumpets and the order of the circuits, what brought the walls down, and the anathema laid upon the city — why so dire a thing was inflicted upon a city so beautiful, whether the mothers and the infants were rightly included in it, why the metals were excepted, and from that, at length, whether the houses of God may lawfully hold treasuries at all.
Then Ai, and the ceremony on Ebal and Gerizim; and Achan, whose theft is tried by lot, which sets Serarius off on nine questions on lots themselves — how manifold they are, whether they are fortuitous, whether they are evil by their own nature, which are forbidden and which permitted, and on what conditions. Then the Gibeonites, who got their peace by a fraud, and the question whether Israel was bound by an oath so obtained, and, not being bound, whether it did rightly to keep it.
The war of the five kings halts everything for twenty questions on the sun and moon standing still over Gabaon. Whether they stood still at all; whether they can stand still naturally; whether evil angels could stay them, or any of the good; what the efficient causes were, and whether Joshua did rightly to command it; where they stood, in what month and hour, and how long; whether the other orbs rested too, and whether all things below rested with them; whether it is the greater miracle for the sun to stand still or to go back; whether Joshua is therefore greater than Moses; and whether the ancient writers remembered so great a thing. Four questions follow on the Book of the Just, which the text cites — what it was, whether it still exists, and how it perished.
What came after the wars fills the rest: the land yet to be divided, the lot of Juda and of the Josephine tribes and of the seven that remained; the cities of refuge, and whom they protected and for how long; the cities of the Levites, their suburbs and their pasture; the altar that Reuben and Gad raised beyond the Jordan, and the war it nearly caused; and at the last Joshua’s two exhortations, the covenant at Shechem, and his death.
With the volume Serarius printed an alphabetical Index of Subjects, which he made not for this tome but for both together. Every one of its six hundred and fifty-six references is live here — half of them reaching into this volume, half back into the first — so that a reader who wants what Serarius says of Abraham, or of adoration, or of abstinence, is carried to the column itself in whichever tome it stands. The volume’s own Index of Questions is linked throughout as well.
The whole work is here to read, with Serarius’s columns marked as he cites them, and to download as a PDF or an EPUB.