The Continued Failure of The People Summarised With respect to the Days That Were Coming - His Attempts To Woo Them By Deliverance - And Their Continual Backsliding (Judges 2:10-23).
‘ And also all that generation were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them, who did not know Yahweh, nor yet the work which he had wrought for Israel.'
Thus ‘the elders that outlived Joshua' were the elders of his generation. There were not two faithful generations. And they all died and were buried in their family tombs.
“And there arose another generation after them, who did not know Yahweh, nor yet the work which he had wrought for Israel.” They did not know Him in the sense that they had not experienced His powerful saving works and activity on behalf of His people. They did not know of Him as the One Who would be what He would be, the One ‘Who was there' (the meaning of ‘Yahweh'). They knew of Him, they believed in His covenant, they looked to Him for help, but they had not had personal experience of His miraculous, powerful, saving acts, just as Moses had said of the patriarchs that the name of Yahweh was not ‘known' to them (Exodus 6:3), for they too had not experienced His powerful, saving acts, only looking forward to them as a future expectation when He would fulfil His promises to them. ‘Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed' (John 20:29).
The message for Christians is that we cannot depend on the blessings of past days as a barometer of our situation. The only test is our living response to God today. Without that the glories of the past are irrelevant.