Were the twelve stones from the Jordan set up at Gilgal or in the river?

Joshua 4 describes two memorials of twelve stones each. The first was commanded by the Lord. Twelve men, one from each tribe, were to take stones from the place where the priests’ feet stood and carry them to the camp (4:3, 8), and Joshua set them up at Gilgal (4:20). Verse 9 then adds something else that Joshua did: he set up twelve stones in the river bed itself, on the spot where the priests stood with the ark. The Gilgal stones marked the place where Israel first camped in the land. The stones in the river marked the very place of the crossing, near the eastern bank, before the water came back over it.

The Hebrew points to two sets. Verse 20 speaks of “those twelve stones, which they took out of Jordan”, with the definite article and a reference back. Verse 9 says simply ‘twelve stones’, without the article, and tells where Joshua set them up, not where he took them from. The Greek Septuagint reads ‘other twelve stones’ in verse 9, and the Latin Vulgate has the same sense, so the earliest translators already understood two memorials. Barnes’ Notes, Clarke, Gill and Keil and Delitzsch all read the chapter in this way.

One set, described twice

Some translations, such as the NIV, render verse 9 as ‘Joshua set up the twelve stones that had been in the middle of the Jordan’, so that it speaks of the Gilgal stones. Kennicott proposed reading ‘from the midst’ for ‘in the midst’. Either way there is only one set and no clash, though the Hebrew wording and the oldest translations favour two memorials.

How long the stones in the river bed stayed in place is not known. Keil and Delitzsch thought they were meant mainly for the generation that crossed and their children; ‘unto this day’ shows only that they were still there when the book was written.