Joshua opens the Nevi'im, the Prophets, in the Jewish canon's threefold division of Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim, grouped specifically among the Former Prophets alongside Judges, Samuel and Kings, a category that signals these are read as prophetic history rather than simple chronicle. Critical scholarship treats Joshua as the opening installment of a single continuous historical work, the Deuteronomistic History, sharing vocabulary, theology and a recurring pattern of covenant obedience rewarded and disobedience punished with Judges, Samuel and Kings, all shaped by the theological outlook of Deuteronomy and most likely compiled by a school of editors working across the late monarchy and the Babylonian exile from older sources, oral and written, that no longer survive independently.
Within Jewish tradition, the Talmud's ascription of the book to Joshua himself sits alongside the observation that the book records events after Joshua's own death, which later rabbinic tradition resolved by holding that Eleazar the priest, and after him Eleazar's son Phinehas, completed the final verses, a solution structurally similar to how tradition handles the death accounts closing several other biblical books. The book's closing covenant ceremony at Shechem, and its refrain "choose this day whom you will serve," has made it a recurring reference point in later Jewish and Christian reflection on communal recommitment to faith.