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[Reconnoiter]

Hello Jim,

My wife and I were reading Joshua and we both were astounded by this passage. It is so short and easy to overlook, but Joshua comes face to face with the commander of the Lord's army. This is just wild. Who (or what) is this "man"? It is passages like this that make the OT so incredibly interesting to me. Do you have any comments about this passage or is it just one of those elusive verses in the OT?

[jimwalton]

Good to hear from you. The passage is neither just a toss-off or elusive, but is actually an important event. This is, so to speak, Joshua's "burning bush" experience. The Lord appears to give him a plan for the immediate future and to assure His presence will go with them. Just as at the burning bush, so also for Joshua. In both cases, God appeared in a form suitable to the situation (for Moses a wilderness phenomenon, for Joshua a military one). In both, they hid their faces before the presence of the Lord. Both were to remove their sandals because of holy ground. Both were given a plan to execute (Moses approaching Pharaoh with requests and miracles, Joshua to approach Jericho with a military strategy and miracles.

Those factors make this event for Joshua just a seminal a moment as the burning bush had been for Moses. It gave both divine initiative, divine guidance, and divine promises that God would fight for them.

Who was it? No one knows. Some speculate that it was Michael, the angel who went before the camp in Ex. 33.2. Some speculate that it is Jesus in a pre-incarnation manifestation. There's no way to know since we're are not told and few clues are given.