Catholic Commentary
Cities of the Merarites: Zebulun, Reuben, and Gad (Part 2)
42Each of these cities included their pasture lands around them. It was this way with all these cities.
Joshua 21:42 concludes the allocation of forty-eight Levitical cities by affirming that each received designated pasture lands (migrash in Hebrew) extending around its walls for communal grazing and livestock sustenance. The closing formula emphasizes the completeness and consistency of this provision across all the cities, ensuring the landless Levites possessed the essential economic means to support their families and fulfill their priestly duties.
God does not call without provision — the Levites received not just cities but the pasture lands that would sustain them for generations.
Furthermore, the totality expressed — "it was this way with all these cities" — echoes the eschatological completeness of God's redemptive work. Nothing is left over, nothing is forgotten. In the New Covenant, this finds its fulfillment in Christ, who provides not merely land but himself as the bread of life — an inexhaustible migrash — to every soul incorporated into his Body.
Catholic tradition sees in the meticulous provision of pasture lands for the Levites a revelation of God's providentia — his all-encompassing, particular, and ordered care for those who serve him. The Catechism teaches that "God cares for all, from the least things to the great events of the world and its history" (CCC 303). This verse incarnates that teaching in concrete, agrarian terms: God does not call the Levites to priestly service and then abandon them to improvise their material existence. The call comes with the provision.
St. Augustine, in De Civitate Dei, reflects on how the earthly Jerusalem and its structures of worship were ordered images of the heavenly city, where every citizen participates in the divine life without deficiency. The pasture lands point toward the fullness of the heavenly inheritance — what the Catechism describes as "the beatific vision, the goal and fulfillment of the deepest human longings" (CCC 1024).
The Church Fathers, particularly Origen in his Homilies on Joshua, read these Levitical cities allegorically as the souls of the faithful who, though scattered in the world, carry the presence of the sacred within them and are sustained by the Word of God as their migrash. Origen writes that the soul dedicated to God must have its surrounding "pasture" — the Scriptures, prayer, and sacramental life — lest it grow spiritually thin.
From a sacramental-ecclesiological perspective, the Levitical migrash prefigures the Church's teaching on the just support of clergy and ministers (cf. CCC 2122; 1 Cor 9:13–14), grounded explicitly in the Levitical precedent. Paul quotes this very system when defending the right of those who preach the Gospel to live by it.
For a contemporary Catholic, this understated verse offers two concrete spiritual challenges. First, it calls the laity to take seriously their responsibility to support the material needs of those in sacred ministry — priests, deacons, consecrated religious, and lay ecclesial ministers. The migrash was not optional; it was legally embedded in the structure of the covenant. Supporting one's parish is not charity in the discretionary sense; it is covenant fidelity.
Second, the verse challenges every Catholic to reflect on whether the "pasture lands" of their own spiritual life — daily Scripture reading, regular prayer, the sacraments, works of mercy — are genuinely surrounding and sustaining the sacred center of their faith. Many Catholics maintain the form of religious identity (the city walls) while allowing the migrash to go fallow. This verse quietly insists: the interior life cannot thrive without the sustaining practices that surround and feed it. Ask honestly: What are the pasture lands of my spiritual life, and are they in good order?
Commentary
Literal Sense: The Pasture Lands (migrash)
The phrase "pasture lands around them" translates the Hebrew migrash (מִגְרָשׁ), a word meaning an open area or common land surrounding a walled town, typically extending some 1,000 cubits from the city wall (cf. Numbers 35:4–5). These were not private estates but communal grazing grounds, legally secured to the Levitical clans for the sustenance of their livestock. Since the Levites received no tribal allotment of arable farmland, these migrashim were essential: they provided the means to graze the animals used in sacrificial worship, to feed priestly families, and to sustain the economic life of those dedicated wholly to the service of God.
The closing formula — "It was this way with all these cities" — is deliberately totalizing. The Hebrew construction signals completeness and universality across the entire list of forty-eight Levitical cities distributed throughout Canaan (cf. Josh 21:41). The author of Joshua is not merely being repetitive; he is making a theological declaration: the pattern of grace is consistent and exhaustive. Not one city was given without its surrounding provision.
Narrative and Structural Significance
This verse functions as the closing bracket of the entire Levitical city distribution begun in Joshua 21:1. The chapter opened with the heads of the Levitical families approaching Eleazar the priest and Joshua before the whole assembly at Shiloh, appealing to Moses' command from the Lord (cf. Numbers 35:1–8). Now, the account ends in precise, bureaucratic completeness — which is itself a literary form of worship. The sacred geography of Israel is fully ordered. The Levites are scattered throughout all the tribes, not as a marginalized people, but as a holy leaven, spatially embedding the presence of God's ministers into the whole of the promised land.
Typological Sense
The migrash surrounding each Levitical city prefigures the "common lands" of grace that surround every sacred place and every consecrated person in the Church. Just as the Levitical city had its walls (the sacred center) and its migrash (the zone of sustenance extending outward), so every Catholic parish, monastery, or diocese has both an interior sacred life and an outward-facing mission of sustenance to the surrounding community. The Levites could not minister inside without the provisions outside; the Church cannot sustain her liturgical life without the material and spiritual "pasture lands" of active lay charity, catechesis, and care for the poor that surround her.