We can continue are leadership learning from Joshua in chapter 9. The Gibeonites fool the Israelites into believing they are someone they aren’t. This is why you need to do background checks. It’s right there in the Bible. Everyone isn’t who they say they are.
Chapters 10 and 11 tells the story of the Israelites clearing the land to the north and south. He wins a complete victory by wiping the 5 southern kings out and conquering all the people. God makes the sun stand still and Joshua does the rest. They left no survivors in the north. We even see him finally getting a crack at the giants that he and Caleb wanted to kill back in the day. Like my dad used to say, if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.
When then see the land being divided up among the tribes. Caleb picks another fight with some giants (chapter 15).
In chapters 23 AND 24 we see Joshua saying his goodbyes. I see one major difference here than that of the goodbye of Moses. Joshua has no successors. We can see right away in Judges what this leads to. There is no one leading the people. You might say “Well pastor Jason that’s good because know they can be led by God only.”
It just not what happens. The book of Judges starts what I call the “crazy cycle”. Everyone does what they want, things go bad, God bails them out by raising a leader, the leader sets them free, the leader dies, they go back to doing whatever they want, and then the cycle repeats. I don’t think this was God’s best for His people. There never is a line of succession and the cycle continued until they had a king. I’ve heard Jim Wideman say many times “There is no success without a successor.”