Verse 17 completes the narrative: the priests, carrying the Covenant Box, stood on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan. The Hebrew text has a second verb form going with the main verb “they stood.” It may be understood as an infinitive of the verb “be firm,” thus they “stood firm” (King James Version, New English Bible); or it may be taken as a composite form of the adverb “there”: “they stood right there” (see An American Translation “right in the middle of the Jordan”). Most translations take it in the first sense; so New International Version “stood firm”; Good News Translation and Revised Standard Version have simply “stood,” which is quite adequate.

There is a slight discrepancy here, since in verse 8 the priests were told to stand near the bank (that is, on the east side), but here they are standing in the middle of the Jordan. It may be, however, that the phrase in the middle of does not necessarily refer to the geographical center of the Jordan River, but may mean rather that they were “completely in the riverbed.”

It is not the role of the translator to attempt a harmonization of the text at points where it is obviously at variance. However, the directions in verse 8 are themselves somewhat ambiguous. The priests are commanded to stand “in the Jordan River” when they have come to the “edge of the Jordan River” (see Revised Standard Version, verse 8). This command is not necessarily contradictory to what the priests are described as having done here in verse 17, especially if in the middle of the Jordan may be taken in a broader sense of “in the Jordan.”

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Newman, Barclay M. A Handbook on Joshua. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1983. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .