Joshua's Witness Stone

Joshua's Witness Stone is the large stone that Joshua set up at Shechem under the oak near the sanctuary of the LORD, as a witness to the covenant Israel made there (Joshua 24:25-27). At Tell Balata, the site of Shechem, excavators found a large standing stone in the forecourt of a temple, and it stands there again today. Whether it is the stone Joshua set up remains uncertain.

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The Stone in Joshua 24

Late in Joshua's life, "a long time after the LORD had given Israel rest" (Joshua 23:1), Joshua assembled all the tribes of Israel at Shechem (Joshua 24:1). He called them to "choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve" and declared, "As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD" (Joshua 24:15). When they chose the LORD he told them they were witnesses against themselves, and they answered, "We are witnesses!" (Joshua 24:22). On that day, at the gathering known as Joshua's Farewell at Shechem, Joshua made a covenant for the people and established a statute and ordinance for them (Joshua 24:25). Some scholars read this covenant as following the literary form of the second-millennium BC treaties between overlords and their vassals, especially those of the Hittites, and like those treaties it calls witnesses. Joshua recorded these things in the Book of the Law of God, then "took a large stone and set it up there under the oak that was near the sanctuary of the LORD" (Joshua 24:26). The word rendered oak is also translated terebinth (see Sacred Tree). Joshua said of the stone, "It will be a witness against us, for it has heard all the words the LORD has spoken to us, and it will be a witness against you if you ever deny your God" (Joshua 24:27). Some time later Joshua died at the age of 110 (Joshua 24:29).

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Oaks, Pillars and Witness Stones

An oak at Shechem appears earlier in Scripture. Abram traveled as far as the site of the Oak of Moreh at Shechem, where the LORD promised the land to his offspring and Abram built an altar (Genesis 12:6-7). Jacob buried his household's foreign gods and earrings under the oak near Shechem (Genesis 35:4). Later the leaders of Shechem gathered "beside the oak at the pillar in Shechem" to make Abimelech their king (Judges 9:6). Whether the oak near Shechem in Genesis 35:4 and the oak of Judges 9:6 are the Oak of Moreh of Genesis 12:6 is uncertain, and Scripture does not say whether the oak of Joshua 24:26 is any of these.

Other stones in the Old Testament served as witnesses or memorials. When Jacob and Laban made a covenant, Jacob set up a stone as a pillar, his relatives heaped up a mound, and Laban called both a witness between them (Genesis 31:44-52). Moses wrote down all the words of the LORD and set up twelve pillars for the twelve tribes of Israel at the base of the mountain (Exodus 24:4). After the crossing of the Jordan, Joshua set up at Gilgal the twelve stones taken from the river, for the children who would ask what they meant (Joshua 4:20-24). Jacob's pillar at Bethel (Genesis 28:18-22), the stone Samuel named Ebenezer (1 Samuel 7:12) and the replica altar built "as a witness between us and you" (Joshua 22:26-28) belong beside them. At Mount Ebal, as Moses had commanded, Joshua wrote a copy of the law of Moses on stones and read it to Israel standing in front of Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal (Deuteronomy 27:2-8; Joshua 8:30-35). The law also told Israel, "do not set up for yourselves a sacred pillar, which the LORD your God hates" (Deuteronomy 16:22), using massebah, the Hebrew word for a pillar or memorial stone.

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The Standing Stone at Tell Balata

Shechem is identified with Tell Balata, east of Nablus in the West Bank, in the valley between Mount Ebal to the north and Mount Gerizim to the south. The German archaeologist Ernst Sellin led excavations there in seasons between 1913 and 1934. A large fortress temple stood on the city's acropolis, with an altar in the courtyard in front of it. Just southeast of the altar, Sellin's excavation uncovered a large hollowed stone base and a broken slab of hard white limestone. Robert J. Bull, in a 1960 article in the Biblical Archaeologist, reports that since the slab would fit the base, Sellin concluded he had found the "main standing-stone". Between 1956 and 1964, American expeditions directed by G. Ernest Wright took up the work again. Bull writes that the Drew-McCormick Expedition, in 1956, came upon the base and the slab, thrown down from the altar fill into the area about 20 feet (6 m) below. He describes how a team of workers hauled the heavy stones back up onto the temple forecourt and cemented the standing stone back into its original base. The stone, which in Bull's words "dominates the area from a point where it probably stood originally", stands in the temple's rebuilt courtyard today. The broken slab survives to about 4 feet 9 inches (1.45 m) on its taller side, is about as wide, and is about 16 to 17 inches (40 to 42 cm) thick.

On the site of the great temple a later temple with much lighter walls was built, and a large memorial stone was placed at its entrance. Eugene D. Stockton, writing in the Australian Journal of Biblical Archaeology in 1968 and taking Wright's dating of the temple and its successor, dated the destruction of the first temple to about 1550 BC and its smaller rebuilding to about a hundred years later. Stockton held that the great slab stayed in use until the temple's final destruction about 1100 BC. Judges records that Abimelech was given silver from the temple of Baal-berith, "Lord of the Covenant" (Judges 9:4), and that he burned the inner chamber of the temple of El-berith over the leaders of the tower of Shechem (Judges 9:46-49). As Stockton notes, Wright pointed out that the temple of Baal-berith fits the archaeological evidence at Shechem.

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Is It Joshua's Stone?

Bryant G. Wood, writing in Bible and Spade in 2005 for the Associates for Biblical Research, calls the slab "an enormous limestone stela, or massebah". Wood reasons that because the temple already stood in Joshua's day, "it is possible" this was Joshua's "large stone", and he judges the stela "undoubtedly" the pillar where Abimelech was made king (Judges 9:6). Of Joshua's stone, Stockton wrote that it is "tempting to see in this the great slab found in the forecourt of Shechem's temple". Stockton added that the sanctuary of Joshua 24:26 "need not have been that excavated at Shechem", though he judged it "hardly likely" that one place had two covenant shrines at the same time.