e managed to take off the wheels of Pharaoh's chariots
at the Red Sea. Why could he not do the same on this occasion? Were the
linch-pins too tight or the wheels too heavy?

Joshua died at the ripe old age of a hundred and ten. Whatever else he
may have been, he was certainly one of the gamest fighting cocks that
ever lived. Jehovah never found a better instrument for his bloody
purposes. They buried him at Timnath-serah. Joseph's old bones, which
Moses brought out of Egypt, were buried at Shechem. Had they been kept
much longer some Hebrew "old-clo' man" might have carried them off and
made an honest penny by them.

After Joshua's death, the tribe of Judah fought against Adoni-bezek.
When they caught him they cut off his thumbs and his big toes. He
acknowledged the justice of his punishment, and admitted that God had
served him just as he had himself served seventy kings, whose great toes
he had cut off, and made them eat under his table. Kings must have been
very plentiful in those days.

During Joshua's lifetime the Jews served God, and they kept pretty
straight during the lifetime of the elders who had known him. But
directly these died they went astray; "they forsook the Lord and
worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth." God punished them by letting their
enemies oppress them. "Nevertheless," says the story, "the Lord raised
up judges, which delivered them out of the hand of those that spoiled
them. And yet they would not hearken unto their judges, but they went
a whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them; and they
turned quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in, obeying the
commandments of the Lord; but they did not so..... And it came to pass,
when the judge was dead, that they returned and corrupted themselves
more than their fathers, in following other Gods to serve them, and
to bow down unto them; they ceased not from their own doings, nor from
their stubborn way."

God's selection of the Jews as his favorite people does not seem to
reflect much credit on his sagacity. All who came out of Egypt, except
two persons, turned out so badly that they were pronounced unfit to
enter the promised land, and doomed to die in the wilderness. The new
generation who entered Canaan, after being circumcised to make them
holy; after seeing the miracles of Jordan and the valley of Ajalon;
after having gained a home by God's assistance in a land flowing with
milk and honey; this very generation proved worse