Question I. (marg.) Did Joshua hear when the Lord told Moses the people had sinned?

On the same peak of the mountain Joshua was living together with Moses, as [was] said above. He could therefore have heard whatever was said by the Lord to Moses. But it is not so. For Joshua seems to have been ignorant of the people’s sin, when he said, “The noise of battle is heard in the camp.” Although this one utterance of his does not altogether prove ignorance. For he could have suspected [that], because they had sinned, enemies had come and were inflicting some grave defeat on them; or [that] they themselves were at variance among themselves in spirit, and, a sedition now arisen, were joining hands and fighting it out. For the propensity of the people to murmurings and factions had been observed by his mind, and the recent incursion of the Amalekites still almost clung before his eyes. From this, however, it is nevertheless gathered [that] he was ignorant — if not of the kind of sin, certainly of its species. But that the whole kind of sin was already known to that same Joshua, I do not indeed think can be gathered from the passage itself. For although both were in the midst of the cloud, [they were] nevertheless not in so small a little space that one was ever apart from the other. For to those necessities which nature’s modesty is wont to attend to more discreetly, it was sometimes needful [to give privacy]. And then, as [was] said above (ch. 4, q. 15), God’s speech to Moses could be hidden, and wholly enclosed within the inner recesses of his mind, so that there was no outward voice — just as also Moses’s prayers, conceived to God for the people, could be [so hidden]. Yet that one may reckon he was ignorant of that kind of sin, [the reason] is that the speech of Joshua to Moses is so narrated as if he were altogether unaware of this matter; but when he happened to have heard the shouts, at once he indicated what came into his mind — [that] they seemed battle-cries. If otherwise he had already heard of the sin beforehand, he would seem [likely] to have conjectured a little more shrewdly about those shouts. He therefore neither heard nor thought of the people’s sin, until at last he himself, sorrowing, drank in that most doleful sight of things with his own eyes.