There are two memorials in Joshua 4, and most readers only notice one of them. The first is the famous one: twelve men, one from each tribe, each pulling a stone from the riverbed of the Jordan while the priests stood holding the Ark of the Covenant and the water piled up miles upstream. Those twelve stones were carried to Gilgal, stacked into a monument, and dedicated as a sign for all future generations of Israel. That memorial is the main event of the chapter, and it deserves every bit of attention it receives. But tucked into verse nine is something quieter and more personal, a second pile of stones that most English translations have either obscured or absorbed into the first story. A close reading of the Hebrew text, and a comparison across multiple English translations, makes a compelling case that Joshua himself set up a separate set of twelve stones, not at Gilgal, but in the middle of the Jordan, at the exact spot where the priests had stood.
The NIV translates verse nine in a way that folds Joshua's action into the Gilgal memorial, using the phrase "had been" to suggest that Joshua arranged the stones the twelve men had already carried. But the ESV, the NASB, the CSB, and others read it differently, placing Joshua's stones in the river itself, at the location of the priests and the Ark. The Hebrew text begins with the number twelve and moves through a sequence of words pointing to the Jordan, to Joshua, to the place of the priests, and to the Ark. When you read the Hebrew without the interpretive layer the NIV adds, what emerges is a second act entirely. Joshua made his own memorial, in the water, at the place of God's presence, and the text says those stones are there to this day.
What makes this theologically significant is what the text does not say about it. When God commands the Gilgal memorial, the instruction is explicit and public. The Lord tells Joshua, Joshua tells the twelve men, the twelve men carry out the task, and the monument is erected at the campsite where all of Israel can see it. It is a corporate, commanded, public act. Joshua's second memorial carries none of those qualifiers. There is no record of God commanding it. There is no mention of Joshua announcing it to anyone. He simply goes to the place where the Ark stood and stacks twelve stones in the river. It reads like something Joshua needed to do for himself, at the place where God had most visibly shown up, as a personal marker for a personal encounter.
Every one of us who has walked with God for any length of time has a version of that spot. There is a place in the story of our lives where we can point and say, that is where God met me. That is where the impossible became ordinary, where the water stood up and the ground went dry and we walked through something we could not have navigated on our own. Those places are not always visible to anyone else. They do not always make it into the public testimony or the Sunday morning worship service. But they are real, and they matter, and the instinct to mark them is not self-indulgence. It is wisdom.
Joshua had seen God work before. He had walked through the Red Sea as a young man, standing close to Moses as the waters parted. He had spent forty years in the wilderness watching God sustain a nation on manna and miraculous water. He had been inside the tent of meeting and heard the voice of God. By the time he stood on the bank of the Jordan and watched the river stop, he was not a novice. And yet something in that moment moved him to go to the very place where the Ark had rested in the dry riverbed and stack a dozen stones in the water before the current returned. He had a national memorial to oversee. He had a people to lead into a land full of enemies. And he paused to build something for himself, at the spot where God's presence had stood.
There is a pastoral honesty in this that we should not rush past. The demands of serving others, of leading a family, of carrying responsibility for people who depend on us, can crowd out the personal work of remembering what God has done in us, not just through us. It is easier to build the Gilgal memorial than Joshua's second pile. The Gilgal memorial has a clear purpose, a clear audience, and a clear social function. It serves the nation. Joshua's second pile served Joshua. And the text treats both as legitimate, both as worth recording, both as part of what happened at the Jordan crossing.
We need both kinds of memorials. We need the communal ones, the stories we tell in community, the testimonies we share with those who come after us, the faith markers we build together so that the people of God do not forget what God has done for the people of God. But we also need the personal ones, the private markers we return to in the dark seasons, the places in our memory we go back to when faith feels thin and the enemy is loud and we need to remind ourselves that we were there. We stood on the dry ground. We saw the water stand up. We walked through and came out the other side. If God did it then, He can do it now.
Joshua's stones may well be underwater today. When the Jordan returned to flood stage, the river would have covered whatever he built there. The stones are present but invisible, submerged under the normal flow of an ordinary day. That too feels true to experience. The deepest memorials of God's faithfulness in our lives are often the ones no one else can see, the ones that are covered over by the ordinary current of life but are still there beneath the surface, still solid, still marking the place where He showed up.
Go back to that place. Stack those stones. You may be the only one who ever knows they are there, and that is enough.
Dr. William C.K. Yomes is the founding apologist of Faith Makes Sense and the Senior Pastor of Catalyst Community Church in Wilmington, Delaware. This article is part of his ongoing teaching ministry at Catalyst Community Church.