This is actually a very important question in the book of Joshua, and understanding this is vital to understanding the nature of the gift of the land. There is an important hint of the answer in what we have already observed, which is that the land was given so that Israel could live out Yahweh’s purposes, most notably that through them all peoples of the earth might find blessing.15 Israel’s right to the land depended on them living within those terms, and strange as it might seem, the same option