Did Joshua remove the twelve stones from the Jordan River?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This is a clean doublet within a single chapter, and the tension turns on whether Joshua 4 describes one set of stones or two. Joshua 4:1-8 describes twelve men, one from each tribe, lifting twelve stones out of the Jordan; v. 8 says they carried them over and laid them down at the lodging place. Verse 9 then reads: "And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests which bare the ark of the covenant stood: and they are there unto this day." Verse 20 doubles back: "And those twelve stones, which they took out of Jordan, did Joshua pitch in Gilgal." Read straight, the chapter has the stones simultaneously in the riverbed and at Gilgal.

The consensus apologetic harmonization is the two-monuments reading, defended by Gleason Archer, Richard Hess, and David Howard: Joshua erected one set at Gilgal (the stones the tribal representatives carried, vv. 1-8, 20-24) and a second set in the riverbed as a separate memorial (v. 9). This reading has genuine grammatical footing. The Hebrew of v. 9, *wĕ'et-shtêm 'esrēh 'ăvānîm hēqîm yĕhôshua' bĕtôk hayyardēn*, says simply that Joshua "set up" twelve stones without identifying them as the same stones the men carried; nothing in the consonantal text forces a single set. On this reading there is no contradiction — just two monuments and a compressed narrative. The reading is permissible, and it is why the entry is best classed as partially harmonized rather than a flat collision.

Where it strains is the texture of the passage. Verse 20 specifies "those twelve stones, *which they took out of Jordan*" (*'ăsher lāqĕchû min-hayyardēn*); the demonstrative and relative clause point back to the only set of stones the chapter has narrated lifting — those of vv. 3-8. If v. 9 introduces an entirely new second monument, it does so abruptly, with no transitional marker, mid-sequence. The Septuagint compounds the difficulty: LXX Joshua 4:9 reads that Joshua set up "other twelve stones" (*allous dōdeka lithous*), an explicit harmonizing plus that the Masoretic Text lacks. That the Greek tradition felt the need to add "other" is itself evidence that ancient readers already perceived the very ambiguity the two-monuments theory exploits — and that the smoother reading is secondary.

The critical-scholarly read goes to source and tradition history. The clause "unto this day" (*'ad hayyôm hazzeh*) in both v. 9 and the Gilgal etiology is a classic etiological formula: the narrator is explaining why visible stone monuments stood at named sites in the editor's own day. Burke Long's study of Old Testament etiological narrative treats exactly this kind of "and they are there to this day" tag as the signature of a tradition explaining an existing landmark. J. Alberto Soggin and Robert Boling argue that Joshua 4 weaves together two parallel etiologies about the crossing — one anchored to the cultic site of Gilgal, one to a stone feature at or near the ford — that a redactor combined into a single narrative without smoothing the seams. Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg likewise read the chapter as composite. On this model the doubling is not a deliberate pair of monuments but the residue of merging two stories about the same memorial event.

The verdict turns on parsimony. The two-monuments harmonization is grammatically possible and even has the LXX "other" to support it, so the contradiction is not airtight. But the demonstrative in v. 20, the abruptness of v. 9, the doubled etiological formula, and the secondary character of the Greek plus all point the same direction: the cleanest explanation of the textual oddities is the merging of two parallel traditions, not a tidy pair of intended monuments.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable, but the doublet hypothesis better explains the seams.