Joshua, Yehoshua ben Nun in Hebrew, was Moses' second in command throughout the days that the Jews spent in the Sinai. He led the Jews in their first fight against the Amalekites. When Moses sent a dozen men to spy on the Canaanites, the pagan occupiers of the Promised Land, only Joshua and Caleb truthfully reported the beauty of the land and that the Canaanites could be defeated. For this, they were allowed to be the only participants in the Exodus from Egypt to survive all forty years in the desert. When Moses died at the banks of the Jordan, just before the Jews went to war against the Canaanites, the Lord chose Joshua to lead the Jews. The book of Joshua, which tells of his generalship, is perhaps best remembered for the story of how the walls of Jericho were toppled, and for the story of when Joshua caused the Sun and the Moon to stop, so that the Jews could continue pursuing the enemy army for a full day. The book of Joshua was part of the Bible long before the rise of Christianity.

Mediaeval and Renaissance heralds numbered Joshua among the Nine Worthies of Chivalry, making him the equal in knighthood with Arthur, Charlemagne, Godfrey de Bouillon, Julius Caesar, Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, King David, and Judah the Maccabee. Like most legendary heroes, he was attributed a coat of arms by late mediaeval and Renaissance heralds. In the Livro do Armeiro-Mor, a Portuguese Renaissance heraldic tract, Joshua's coat of arms is Or a wyvern passant sable.

Enconmia of the Nine Worthies, typically in brief biographical format, were popular items in aristocratic libraries from the High Middle Ages until the end of the SCA's period. They were used as handbooks to the aristocratic life, with each of the Nine Worthies expressing the various chivalric virtues through his deeds.

This poem's form is an epyllion in Spenserian stanzas. Epyllion is Greek for "mini-epic". Epyllia were first written in the Hellenistic era, but the form also appeared in the Renaissance. Epyllia followed the epic format, but were not as long-typically, they were only a couple of hundred lines long. Spenser developed the stanza named after him in the 1580's and 1590's to write The Faerie Queene, his epic poem, which was not completed when he died in 1599.

Like many epic poems written in the Renaissance, such as Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered or Camoens' Lusiads, the first line of this poem is inspired by the opening line of Virgil's Aeneid, "I sing of arms and the man". It also includes the traditional plea for inspiration, with, like Camoens' Lusiads, a new direction for such pleas, which are usually directed towards one of the Nine Muses. Much like Camoens asked for inspiration from the naiads of the Tagus River, which runs through Lisbon, when composing his epic about Vasco da Gama, one of Portugal's great explorers, this plea for inspiration, since the poem is about a great Jew, is directed toward the matriarchs, the mothers of Israel-Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel. While the poem does cut pieces here and there out of the story as found in the Bible, Renaissance epic poets were often cavalier with their treatment of history.

The treatment of the Canaanites is not unlike the treatment of the Persians and other Near Eastern people in mediaeval chivalric biographies of Alexander the Great. They are referred to as Infidels, even though neither Jew nor Greek considered their enemies as such. By and large, both of these ancient peoples were henotheistic, that is, adhering to their own particular religions, but also not denying the existence of other gods, unlike mediaeval Christianity. However, this is similar to the way that the Biblical and Apocryphal accounts of the Jews' battles against their neighbors were used as the basis for Crusading and for the Crusaders' treatment of the Jewish and Muslim communities of the Holy Land.

Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Translated by Guido Waldman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Boiardo, Matthew (sic.) Maria. Orlando Inamorato: The three first Books of that famous Noble Gentleman and learned Poet Matthew Maria Boiardo, Earl of Scandiano in Lombardy. Translated by R[obert] T[ofte] Gentleman. London: Valentine Sims, 1598. Reprint, edited by Alexander Kay. Dorchester: Emerald Press, 1996.

Camoens, Luis Vaz de. The Lusiads. Translated by Landeg White. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Carter, Lin. Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings. New York: Ballantine Books, 1969.

Drum, Walter. "Josue (Joshua)." In The Catholic Encyclopedia., vol. VIII, New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910.

Du Cros, Joao, and Faria, Antonio Machado de. Livro do Armeiro-Mor. Lisbon, 1956.

Jewish Publication Society. Tanakh: a new translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the traditional Hebrew text. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985.

Jones, H.S.V.. A Spenser Handbook. New York: F.S. Crofts and Co., 1930.

Keen, Maurice. Chivalry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Lewis, Clive Staples. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Spenser, Edmund. The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. Edited by R.E. Neil Dodge. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1908.

Tasso, Torquato. Jerusalem Delivered. Edited and translated by Anthony M. Esolen. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.