New Community, New Leader
The end of a chapter. The journey over. Home at last. A new world waiting, and a new community calls for a new leader. Choosing one’s successor is never ideal and rarely works, but there are exceptions, and anyway theirs is a different world from our’s, but reflect on the leadership qualities which Moses thinks are required of his successor and the checks and balances that go with it. Moses identifies four:
One, the charisma of leadership which Joshua has demonstrated in battle. He leads from the front. He ‘led them out and led them in’ (v 17). First up, first back, but not not until the job was done. Whether he was ahead in thought as well as action is not spelt out but maybe inferred.
Two, close enough to Moses to continue the tradition, but with a recognition that he is not Moses and therefore cannot have the same authority.
Three, someone to maintain order and discipline — to ensure that the people ‘may not be like sheep without a shepherd’ (v 17). That phrase may contain an element not immediately apparent to our western ears. We think of sheep as docile and a flock without a shepherd as a congregation without a pastor, but in the Septuagint (a translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek dating from the 3rd century BCE) ‘sheep without a shepherd’ often means ‘a leaderless mob’, and that calls for ‘a toughie’.
Four, he must be God’s man, which requires recognition by Eliezer and (independently) by the people (v 19), with a public investiture; they have to know him and recognise his authority and he has to know to whom he is responsible, the divine stamp being provided by (to us) the unusual method of Urim and Thummin, thought to be two single objects (despite being Hebrew plurals) which functioned much as sacred lots, not unlike dice, possibly sticks or pebbles, maybe one white and the other black. Priests appear to have used them for divination, and may have been more sophisticated and less simple than they seem. As a way of discerning the will of God they may seem casual and unreliable to us, though whether they are any more so than many of our current methods is worth considering.