A Name Given by Moses
The clearest textual foundation for the name is a renaming. Numbers 13:16 records that Moses called Hoshea son of Nun by a new name, Yehoshua — the man remembered as Joshua, who would lead Israel into the land after Moses' death. The original name, Hoshea (הוֹשֵׁעַ), already carried the root yasha, “to save”; Moses' change adds the divine-name element, turning “salvation” into “Yahweh saves.”
The text does not explain Moses' reasoning in detail, so any account of his intent beyond the plain fact of the renaming is inference. What is directly attested is the name change itself, at a specific narrative moment, on the man who would carry Israel across the Jordan.
Joshua the Successor
Through the book of Joshua, Yehoshua son of Nun succeeds Moses as leader of Israel, commissioned in Deuteronomy 31 and Joshua 1, and leads the conquest and settlement of the land. He is a military and administrative leader in the text's own terms — a successor, not an atoning figure. The book does not present him as a savior from sin; his “saving” role in the narrative is deliverance into the promised land.
Typological reading
Later Jewish and Christian interpreters have read Joshua's leadership — bringing a wandering people into rest in the land — as a foreshadowing (a “type”) of a greater deliverer to come. This reading appears explicitly in later Christian exegesis, including reflection on Hebrews 4, where the author contrasts the rest Joshua gave with a further rest still open to God's people. It is a legitimate and long-standing interpretive tradition, but it is a reading applied to the Joshua narrative from outside it — the book of Joshua itself makes no such claim about its protagonist.
Joshua the High Priest
A second, distinct bearer of the name appears generations later: Joshua the high priest in Zechariah 3 and 6, a contemporary of the governor Zerubbabel during the return from Babylonian exile. Zechariah's vision shows Joshua standing before the LORD in filthy garments, accused by “the satan,” then re-clothed in clean vestments — a scene of priestly cleansing and restoration. Zechariah 6 goes further, describing a symbolic crowning of Joshua and naming a coming figure called “the Branch.”
This second Joshua is textually distinct from Joshua son of Nun by several centuries, but the coincidence of the name — a priest named “Yahweh saves,” cleansed and crowned in a prophetic vision — has drawn sustained devotional and typological attention, discussed further under Theological Themes.