Joshua 10:19
And stay ye not, but pursue after your enemies, and smite the hindmost of them; suffer them not to enter into their cities: for the LORD your God hath delivered them into your hand. And stay ye not, but pursue after your enemies, and smite the hindmost of them; suffer them not to enter into their cities: for the LORD your God hath delivered them into your hand.
Joshua 10:19 belongs to the history in Joshua 1 to 22, largely written by Israel's leader whose name means saviour, the same as Jesus in Greek. That leader was one of the two of his generation who wholly followed the Lord during the forty years of temptation and the time of the wilderness, and he entered upon his greatest work when about eighty years of age. The verse shows his work of leading the children of Israel through the Jordan, dividing the land for them, and setting them in a fair way to conquer all their foes and find the promised rest. In all his work of victory the Captain of Jehovah's hosts was with him, and when Jericho, the first-fruit of that evil land, fell it was the invisible army of God that leveled its walls, but when Israel failed to trust they were defeated, as at Ai. Israel might have possessed the land soon had they been faithful, yet from the triumph of Jericho there was general backsliding, captivity came again and again, and Israel lived in adversity the years she might have lived in prosperity.
The Hebrew conquest under Joshua was made easier by the disturbed condition of Palestine. The verse belongs to the account of Israel's battles and conquest of several small kingdoms in Canaan, whose people were not spared because they would have continued to spread the same evil.
In Joshua 10 the word soul is used over and over to mean persons, as when the army destroyed Eglon and killed all who were there, with the same said of other towns. Its primary meaning is the whole being, the whole creature, a living person. The chapter therefore supports the teaching that mortal people die rather than remain conscious after death.