Joshua rose up early in the morning; and they removed from Shittim, and came to the Jordan, he and all the children of Israel; and they lodged there before they passed over.
The peculiarities of the narrative of these two chapters are marked by the piecemeal manner of its relation.  There is a free use of provisional endings, which do not signal the final conclusion of a given factor at all, but the interruption of the record in order for the historian to insert a parenthesis, a prolepsis, or to take up another phase of the overall history.  This episodic treatment of the grand event related here is nothing new to the histories of the times of Joshua and earlier.  We shall meet with it again in  Joshua 10.  It is an undeniable earmark of the near mid-second millennium writings that have come down through history.  Keil has favored us with a step-by-step analysis of these two chapters as follows: