Jair was one of the judges, so that the conquest of Havoth-Jair must
have taken place long after the death of Moses.
Footnote 237:
Now Dar’at (pronounced Azr’ât by the Bedâwin) and Tell-Ashtereh.
Footnote 238:
Zippor of Gaza was the name of the father of a certain Baal- ... whose
servant carried letters in the third year of Meneptah II. from Egypt
to Khai, the Egyptian governor of the fellahin or Perizzites of
Palestine, and the king of Tyre (Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_,
Eng. tr., second edit., ii., p. 126).
Footnote 239:
Ammiya is said to have been seized by Ebed-Asherah the Amorite (_The
Tel el-Amarna Tablets in the British Museum_, 12. 25., 15. 27). It is
also called Amma (_ib._ 17. 7., 37. 58, where it is associated with
Ubi, the Aup of the Egyptian inscriptions) and Ammi (W. and A. 89.
13).
Footnote 240:
If the two Balaams, ‘son of Beor,’ are really the same person, Edomite
and Israelitish history will have handed down two different
conceptions of him. The Israelitish chronology, moreover, would make
it impossible for him to have been the _first_ Edomite king (see Numb.
xx. 14).
Footnote 241:
Sheth are the Sutu of the Assyrian inscriptions, the Sittiu or
‘Archers’ of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Bedâwin of modern
geography. The Beni-Sheth will be the Midianite Bedâwin who are
associated with the Moabites in the Pentateuch (Numb. xxii. 4, 7; xxv.
1-18; xxxi. 8).
Footnote 242:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., iii. pp. 61-65.
Footnote 243:
Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100) boasts of having sailed upon the
Mediterranean in a ship of Arvad, and of there killing a dolphin,
while his son, Assur-bil-kala, erected statues in the cities of ‘the
land of the Amorites’ (W. A. I. i. 6, No. vi.). A little later
Assur-irbi carved an image of himself on Mount Amanus, near the Gulf
of Antioch, but the capture by the king of Aram of Mutkina, which
guarded the ford over the Euphrates, subsequently cut him off from the
west. Palestine is already called Ebir-nâri, ‘the land beyond the
river,’ in an Assyrian inscription which Professor Hommel would refer
to the age of Assur-bil-kala, the son of Tiglath-pileser I. (_The
Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, p. 196). Professor D. H. Müller (_Die
Propheten_, p. 215) conjecturally emends the Hebrew text of Numb.
xxiii. 23, 24, and sees in it a reference to the kingdom of Samalla,
to the north-east of the Gulf of Antioch. The two verses become in his
translation, ‘[And he saw Samalla], and began his speech, and said,
Alas, who will survive of Samalla? And ships [shall come] from the
coast of Chittim, and Asshur shall oppress him, and Eber shall oppress
him, and he himself is destined to destruction.’ Samalla, however, was
only the Assyrian name of a district called by natives of Northern
Syria Ya’di and Gurgum; nor is it easy to understand how Balaam could
have ‘seen’ the north of Syria from Moab. Professor Hommel is more
probably right in his view that Asshur here does not signify the
Assyrians, but the Asshurim to the south of Palestine (Gen. xxv. 3,
18).
Footnote 244:
For the Messianic prophecy of Ameni, see above, p. 175.
Footnote 245:
Similar cities of refuge, called _puhonua_, existed in Hawaii. ‘A
thief or a murderer might be pursued to the very gateway of one of
those cities; but as soon as he crossed the threshold of that gate,
even though the gate were open and no barrier hindered pursuit, he was
safe as at the city altar. When once within the sacred city, the
fugitive’s first duty was to present himself before the idol and
return thanks for his protection’ (Trumbull, _The Threshold Covenant_,
p. 151, quoting Ellis, _Through Hawaii_, pp. 155 _sq._, and Bird, _Six
Months in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 135 _sq._). For the _asyla_ of
Asia Minor see Barth, _De Asylis Græcis_ (1888); Daremberg et Saglio,
_Dictionnaire des Antiquités, Grecques et Romaines_, i. pp. 505
_sqq._; Pauly’s _Real-Encyclopädie_ (ed. Wissowa), iv. pp. 1884-5.
Footnote 246:
Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 299.
Footnote 247:
Cornelius Nepos, _Them._ ii. 10.
Footnote 248:
Mahaffy, _The Empire of the Ptolemies_, pp. 144, 156-158. For the
_hiera_ or priestly cities of Asia Minor, see Ramsay, _The Cities and
Bishoprics of Phrygia_, pp. 101 _sqq._; their constitution resembled
very closely that of the Levitical cities in Israel. Examples of such
cities in the history of Israel are Nob in the time of Saul and
Anathoth in the age of Jeremiah.
Footnote 249:
The order of events is in many places confused, which probably points
to later insertions in the text. See, for example, Deut. x. 6-9, which
interrupts the context, and has nothing to do either with what
precedes or with what follows.
Footnote 250:
_E.g._ Deut. xiv. 21, compared with Lev. xvii. 14-16.
Footnote 251:
In this respect it resembles the ‘Negative Confession’ of the Egyptian
Book of the Dead, which the soul of the dead man was required to make
before the judges of the other world (Wiedemann, _Religion der alten
Aegypter_, pp. 132, 133).
Footnote 252:
Levi is included among the six tribes which stood on Mount Gerizim to
bless. This is an inadvertency, as the Levites were placed on both
mountains, it being their duty to utter the curses as well as the
blessings.
Footnote 253:
If it did so, xxxiii. 4 can hardly be original. Perhaps Yahveh rather
than Moses was described as ‘king in Jeshurun’ (cf. _v._ 26). A very
ingenious attempt has been made by Dr. Hayman to explain the
corruptions of the text in the song by the theory that it was
originally written on a clay tablet, a fracture of which has caused
some of the words at the ends of the lines to be lost.
Footnote 254:
Cf. 1 Chron. iv. 22.
CHAPTER IV
THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN
Joshua not the Conqueror of Canaan—The Conquest gradual—The Passage
of the Jordan—Jericho, Ai and the Gibeonites—Battle of
Makkedah—Lachish and Hazor—The Kenizzites at Hebron and
Kirjath-Sepher—Shechem—Death of Joshua.
Hebrew tradition ascribed the conquest of Canaan to Joshua the son of
Nun. But when we come to examine the book of Joshua or the book of
Judges, we find that the extent of his work has been greatly magnified
in the imagination of later ages. The Ephraimitish chieftain
successfully established Israel on the western side of the Jordan,
gained permanent possession of Mount Ephraim, and defeated the
Canaanitish princes to the south and north. But the conquest of Canaan
was a longer work, which was not completed till the days of David and
Solomon.
The first chapter of Judges tells us in outline what the map of
Palestine was like after the settlement of the Israelitish tribes. In
the south the mountainous country was held by the Edomite tribe of Caleb
as well as by the more strictly Israelitish tribe of Judah. But it was
only ‘the mountain’ that was thus held. Though ‘the Lord was with
Judah,’ he ‘could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because
they had chariots of iron.’ Further south, however, Judah and Simeon in
combination succeeded in making themselves masters of the Negeb or
desert plain as far as Zephath, where a mixed population, partly
Israelitish, partly Edomite, and partly Kenite, took the place of the
older inhabitants.
Jerusalem remained in the hands of the Jebusites until it was captured
by David. It is true, we read (Judg. i. 8) that ‘the children of Judah
had fought against Jerusalem, and had taken it and smitten it with the
edge of the sword.’ But if so, it must soon have been again fortified by
its former possessors, since we are expressly told (Judg. i. 21) that
the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that inhabited
Jerusalem; but the Jebusites ‘dwell with the children of Judah in
Jerusalem unto this day.’[255] Modern critics have been in the habit of
dismissing the alleged capture of the city as unhistorical, but it is
quite possible that Jerusalem really suffered momentarily from a sudden
raid. The capture of the city is not ascribed to Joshua—indeed, though
he defeated its king and his allies, he seems to have made no effort to
reduce the city itself—and it is said to have been effected by Judah
after Joshua’s death. This may have been at any time during the period
of the Judges. The Tel el-Amarna tablets show us how easily the cities
of Canaan could be taken and retaken in the course of local quarrels,
and the fact that Jerusalem was for a while in Jewish hands seems to
form an integral part of the story of the conquest of Bezek.
Even the great sanctuary of Beth-el, destined to be the possession of
Benjamin as well as of Ephraim,[256] had not fallen into the hands of
‘the house of Joseph’ when Joshua died, though the ‘ruined heap’ of Ai
which lay near it was one of the first of the Israelitish conquests. All
the chief towns in the territory of Manasseh—Megiddo and Taanach, Dor
and Beth-Shean—remained Canaanite, the utmost that Israel could do in
the days of its strength being to exact tribute from them. Gezer defied
the power of Ephraim down to the time when it was given to Solomon by
the Egyptian Pharaoh; while the great cities of Zebulon and Naphtali,
like those of Manasseh, never became Israelitish, but paid tribute to
the Hebrews whenever the latter were ‘strong.’ Asher failed to secure
the territory that had been assigned to him, where Moses in his song had
promised that his foot should be dipped in oil and his sandals should be
of iron and bronze. The Phœnicians continued to hold the coast long
after the Israelitish tribes had been carried into Assyrian captivity,
and even in the mountains that overlooked the shore the Asherites were
forced to live and be lost among the older Canaanites (Judg. i. 32).
‘The children of Dan’ were in even worse case; the Amorites drove them
into the mountains and ‘would not suffer them to come down to the
valley.’ When at last their enemies were made tributary by ‘the house of
Joseph,’ it was too late; the tribe of Dan was merged into that of
Judah, or had found a refuge in the city of Laish in the extreme north.
Joshua, therefore, was not the conqueror of Canaan in any exact sense of
the term. The districts east of the Jordan had been occupied by the
Israelites before the death of Moses, and north of Moab the occupation
had been fairly complete. In Canaan itself the amount of territory won
by Joshua was practically confined to the passage over the Jordan and
the mountainous region of the centre. Few of the Canaanitish cities were
captured by him; and with the exception of Jericho and Lachish, and
perhaps Hazor, none of them was of primary importance. But he succeeded
in doing what had been attempted in vain in earlier days; he led his
people into Palestine, and planted them there so firmly that the future
conquest of the whole country became merely a matter of time.
It was at Jericho, ‘the city of palms,’ that the passage into Canaan was
forced. The army of Israel crossed the Jordan dry-shod, for ‘the waters
which came down from above stood and rose up upon an heap very far from
the city Adam, that is beside Zaretan; and those which came down towards
the sea of the plain, even the Salt Sea, failed, and were cut off.’ A
similar phenomenon is recorded as having occurred in the Middle Ages. M.
Clermont-Ganneau has pointed out a passage in the Arabic historian
Nowairi, in which an account is given of the construction in A.D. 1266
of a bridge across the Jordan by the Sultan Beybars I. of Egypt, when in
consequence of a landslip the bed of the river was for a time left dry.
The bridge was built on five arches between the stream of the Qurawa and
Tel Damieh, perhaps the Adam of the Old Testament. But no sooner was it
completed than ‘part of the piers gave way. The Sultan was greatly
vexed, and blamed the builders, and sent them back to repair the damage.
They found the task very difficult, owing to the rise of the waters and
the strength of the current. But in the night preceding the dawn of the
17th of the month Rabi the First of the year of the Hijra 666 (_i.e._
the 8th of December, A.D. 1267) the water of the river ceased to flow so
that none remained in its bed. The people hurried and kindled numerous
fires and cressets, and seized the opportunity offered by the
occurrence. They remedied the defects in the piers, and strengthened
them, and effected repairs which would otherwise have been impossible.
They then despatched mounted men to ascertain the nature of the event
that had occurred. The riders urged their horses, and found that a lofty
mound (_Kabâr_) which overlooked the river on the west had fallen into
it and dammed it up. A _Kabâr_ resembles a hill, but is not actually a
hill, for water will quickly disintegrate it into mud. The water was
held up, and had spread itself over the valley above the dam. The
messengers returned with this explanation, and the water was arrested
from midnight until the 4th hour of the day. Then the water prevailed
upon the dam and broke it up. The water flowed down in a body equal in
depth to the length of a lance, but made no impression upon the building
owing to the strength given to it.’[257]
The megalithic ‘circle’ of Gilgal commemorated the passage of the
Jordan. The camp was fixed there, and a popular etymology explained the
name by the circumcision that had ‘rolled away the reproach of
Egypt.’[258] Jericho, the city of the ‘Moon-god’ Yârêakh, was next
invested and captured in spite of its strong walls. All its inhabitants
were put to the sword, Rahab only being spared to become the founder of
a family in Israel because she had sheltered the Israelitish spies. The
city was razed to the ground, and was not again rebuilt till the reign
of Ahab.
We can still trace the site of Jericho in the hollow of the deep valley
through which the Jordan flows into the Dead Sea. Its ruins lie round
about the ’Ain es-Sultân, a spring of warm water which gushes into an
ancient basin, overgrown with reeds and brushwood, among which the birds
flutter and watch the fish in the water below. Above towers the huge
mass of Mount Qarantel, while the black soil which forms the floor of
the hollow is covered with small artificial mounds of earth, and is
thick with the decayed relics of a tropical vegetation. In the coldest
weather it is still warm at Jericho; in summer the damp heat is
stifling, and the mosquitoes are innumerable. Now it is given over to
idle Bedâwin, but in the old days when the country was filled with an
industrious population, it was as ‘the garden of the Lord.’ No place in
Palestine was more fertile, and it commanded the ford that led across
the Jordan from the east.
The destruction of Jericho opened to Joshua the way into Canaan. Laden
with its spoil, the Israelites matched westward, up into the mountains
and through the pass of Michmash towards Beth-el. Beth-el itself was too
strong to be attacked. But a neighbouring town, whose later name of Ai,
‘the ruined heap,’ was a lasting record of its fate, was not so
fortunate. The Israelites took it by means of an ambuscade, and the same
merciless treatment was dealt out to it that had been dealt to Jericho.
The inhabitants were all massacred, ‘only the cattle and the spoil
Israel took for a prey unto themselves.’
The conquest of Ai, however, had not been easy. The Canaanites had made
a brave defence, and the invaders had at first suffered a check. The
cause was discovered in the Israelitish camp. A Jew, Achan or Achar, had
hidden under his tent some of the booty of Jericho which ought to have
been either destroyed or dedicated to Yahveh. ‘A goodly Babylonish
garment,’ two hundred shekels of silver, and a tongue-like wedge of gold
fifty shekels in weight, were the objects which he had coveted and
concealed. But the order had been issued that all objects of metal
should be given to the tabernacle, and that all things else should be
burned with fire. Achan accordingly was condemned to be stoned to death,
and along with him the rest of his family as well as his oxen, his
asses, and his sheep. Then the bodies were burnt, and a heap of stones
piled over them in memory of the event.
The mention of the ‘goodly Babylonish garment’ takes us back to the time
when Assyria had not as yet supplanted Babylonia in the west. For
centuries Babylonia had been the home of weavers and embroiderers whose
fabrics were famous all over the east. The cuneiform tablets contain
long lists of articles of clothing, each of which had its own name; and,
as we learn from the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, the merchants of
Babylonia found a ready market for their goods in the cities of Canaan.
The age of the Exodus marks the period when the old peaceful intercourse
with Babylonia was coming to an end; alien peoples had barred the road
across the Euphrates, and Babylon itself was about to fall into the
hands of an Assyrian conqueror. Henceforth it was Assyria, and not
Babylonia, whose name was known or feared in Palestine, and the writer
of a later day would have spoken of the wares of Assyria rather than
those of the Babylonians.[259]
The destruction of Ai gave Joshua a foothold in the mountain of Ephraim.
Then came the league with the Gibeonites, secured, so we are told, by
craft. Modern criticism, with needless scepticism, has seen in the
narrative merely a popular legend to account for the fact that the four
cities which formed the western half of the future territory of Benjamin
were laid under tribute, and not destroyed. But the extermination of the
Canaanites was relative, not absolute; their utter destruction, like
that of the Britons by the Saxon invaders, was the dream of a later day.
As we have seen, the Hebrew occupation of Canaan was a slow and gradual
process, and in the more important cities the older population remained
to the end. Even the temple of Solomon was built on the threshing-floor
of a Jebusite, and the heads of the prisoners which surmount the names
of the places captured by Shishak in the south of Palestine are Amorite
rather than Jewish. The Amorite population was still predominant there;
and the fellahin of to-day, as has been pointed out by M.
Clermont-Ganneau, are the lineal descendants of the old races.[260]
Gibeon, Chephirah, Beeroth, and Kirjath-jearim are not the only cities
of which we hear as having been made tributary. This was also the case
with Megiddo and Taanach, Beth-shean, Dor, and Ibleam (Judg. i. 27), as
well as with the chief cities in the territories of Zebulon and Naphtali
(Judg. i. 30, 33); while, on the other hand, the tribe of Issachar
became tributary to its Canaanitish neighbours (Gen. xlix. 15).[261] It
is more profitable to exact tribute from a wealthy and industrious
population than to exterminate it, as Mohammed found; and the near
neighbourhood of the central sanctuaries of Israel, first at Shiloh,
then at Jerusalem and Beth-el, afforded a special reason why the
Gibeonites should be made ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water for the
house of God.’
The greater part of the future territory of Benjamin was now in
Israelitish hands. The destruction of Jericho had secured the ford
across the Jordan and communication with the Israelitish settlers on the
east side of the river. But it must be remembered that the tribe of
Benjamin as distinct from that of Ephraim did not as yet exist. Its
territory formed the southern part of Mount Ephraim, and for military
and political purposes the two tribes constituted a single whole. This
was still the case as late as the age of Deborah and Barak, when the
power of Ephraim, ‘behind’ Benjamin, is said to extend as far as the
desert of the Amalekites to the south of Judah (Judg. v. 14). The name
of Benjamin, in fact, means ‘the southerner’; the tribe lay southward of
Ephraim; and the second name by which it was known—that of Ben-Oni, ‘the
Onite’—indicated that it was settled round the great sanctuary of
Beth-On. And such indeed was the case when the tribe had vindicated its
individual existence and been definitely separated from Ephraim. Beth-On
or Beth-el was then included within its boundaries (Josh. xviii. 22).
Originally, however, Beth-el belonged to Ephraim, and had been an
Ephraimitish conquest (Judg. i. 22-26).
The conquest of Beth-el did not take place until after Joshua’s death,
and as long as it remained independent it must have been a constant
menace to the Israelitish settlers in Mount Ephraim. With its capture
all danger passed away, and Mount Ephraim—the heart of Palestine—became
at last the secure possession of the ‘house of Joseph.’ From hence, as
from an impregnable fortress, they were able to make descents upon the
fertile lands to the west and attack the cities which stood there. The
powerful city of Gezer was eventually compelled to pay them tribute
(Josh. xvi. 10), and the territory which had been assigned to Dan became
tributary to ‘the house of Joseph’ (Judg. i. 35).
But all this was after Joshua had passed away. Besides crossing the
Jordan and securing a footing in Mount Ephraim, Joshua had made a
successful raid into those mountains in the ‘Negeb’ of Judah which had
been so fatal to the first Israelitish invaders of Canaan. The
destruction of Ai had excited the fears of Adoni-zedek of Jerusalem, and
in the league that had been made between Gibeon and the invaders he saw
danger to his own state. Gibeon lay only a few miles to the north of
Jerusalem, and the Tel el-Amarna tablets have shown us that the
neighbourhood of two Canaanitish cities was a quite sufficient cause of
war between them. When the tablets were written, Ebed-Tob was king of
Jerusalem, and his letters to the Pharaoh are filled with imploring
appeals for help against his enemies. These were partly the neighbouring
‘governors,’ partly the Khabiri or ‘Confederates,’ who seem to have been
of foreign origin, and who had already captured some of his cities. The
situation, therefore, was very much like what it was in the later days
of Adoni-zedek, the place of the Egyptian ‘governors’ being taken by
Gibeon, while the Khabiri were represented by the Israelites. But
Adoni-zedek had no suzerain lord in Egypt to whom he could apply for
aid. He was therefore forced to turn to the Canaanitish princes around
him and form a league with them against the invading hordes from the
desert. Hoham of Hebron, Piram of Jarmuth, Yaphia of Lachish, and Debir
of Eglon rallied to his summons, and the combined forces marched against
Gibeon and besieged the town.[262] The Gibeonites at once sent
messengers to Joshua, who accordingly left the camp at Gilgal and fell
suddenly on the besieging army. The Canaanites were utterly routed, and
fled towards Beth-horon and Makkedah, a hailstorm adding to their
discomfiture. The five kings were discovered hiding in a cave at
Makkedah, and dragged before Joshua, who pitilessly put them all to
death. The bodies were buried in the cave and great stones laid upon its
mouth, which, the compiler of the book of Joshua states, remained there
unto his day (Josh. x. 27).
The defeat of the Canaanite army was followed by the capture of Makkedah
and Libnah, which opened the road to Lachish. The site of Lachish was
rediscovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1890 at Tell el-Hesy,
sixteen miles eastward of Gaza. The great mound that covers its ruins
has been excavated partly by him, partly by Dr. Bliss, and the huge wall
that surrounded it in the days of the Amorites, and before which the
Israelites encamped, has been explored and measured.[263]
The city stood on a natural eminence some forty feet in height. Close to
it rises the only good spring of water in the district, which when
swollen by the winter rains becomes the torrent of the Hesy. The stream
ran past the eastern side of the city, and has eaten away part of the
remains of the successive cities which rose upon the site, one above the
ruins of the other. Fragments of the pottery used by the Amorite
defenders of the city in the days of Joshua can now be seen in the rooms
of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
The walls of Lachish, like those of the cities of Egypt, were built of
crude brick, and were nearly thirty feet in thickness. It had, in fact,
long been one of the principal fortresses of Southern Palestine. Among
the Tel el-Amarna tablets are letters from two of its governors Zimrida
and Yabniel, the first of whom was murdered, and who is mentioned on
another tablet found by Dr. Bliss among the ruins of Lachish itself. Its
capture, therefore, by the Israelites was a serious blow to the
Canaanites in the southern part of the country. But, though Horam king
of Gezer came to its assistance, all was no avail; the strong fortress
fell at last before the invaders, and ‘all the souls’ that were in it
were massacred.[264] For at least a century its site lay desolate and
uninhabited; and the explorers found in the soil that accumulated above
the ruins of the Amorite city nothing but the ashes of the camp-fires of
Bedâwin nomads.
Eglon, now probably Tell Ejlân, close to Tell el-Hesy, naturally shared
the fate of the neighbouring city. According to the compiler of the book
of Joshua, the fall of Hebron and Debir followed immediately after that
of Eglon. But this cannot be correct. Debir, as we afterwards learn, was
taken at a later date by Othniel (Josh. xv. 16, 17; Judg. i. 12, 13),
not by Joshua, and the error seems to have been due to the fact that
Debir was the name of the king of Eglon. It was the king and not the
town of that name who fell before the arms of Joshua.
It is, moreover, difficult to reconcile the statement that Hebron was
captured by Joshua after the defeat of the five kings with the narrative
of its capture by Caleb, which is given in detail elsewhere (Josh. xv.
13, 14; Judg. i. 9, 10). Here, as in other parts of the book of Joshua,
we find a tendency to ascribe the gradual occupation of Canaan to a
single point of time, and to assign all the successive conquests made in
it by the Israelites to the general who first led them across the
Jordan. The individual hero has absorbed all the victories gained by his
people, and the past has been foreshortened in the retrospect of the
later historian. As in the books of Kings the murder of Sennacherib is
made to follow immediately after his flight from Judah twenty years
before, so in the book of Joshua, the conquest of Canaan is all placed
in one age, the lifetime of the hero himself. As Moses was the lawgiver
of Israel and its deliverer from the house of bondage, posterity saw in
his successor the conqueror of Canaan.
It is noticeable, however, that neither Jerusalem nor Gezer is said to
have been taken after the battle of Makkedah. Both cities were doubtless
too strong to be attacked; and though Gezer was subsequently forced to
become the vassal of Ephraim, Jerusalem was destined to fall before a
Jewish and not an Ephraimitish leader.
The battle of Makkedah became the subject of a national song. It was
embodied, like David’s dirge over Saul and Jonathan, in the book of
Jashar, a fragment of which is quoted by the compiler of the book of
Joshua. ‘Sun, be thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, moon, in the valley
of Ajalon!’ cried Joshua, ‘in the sight of Israel,’ ‘when the Lord
delivered up the Amorites’ before them: ‘and the sun was still, and the
moon stayed until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.’
So ran the words of the poem, and the prose historian seems to have
taken them literally.
The alliance with Gibeon and the destruction of Lachish opened the way
to the south. Westward, the sea-coast was in the hands of the
Philistines, whom the Israelites would have found more formidable
enemies than the disunited and effeminate Canaanites. The five
Philistine cities, accordingly, which had been but recently wrested from
Egyptian hands, were left untouched, and the Israelitish raiders made
their way into the Negeb towards the south-east, where they succeeded in
penetrating as far as Arad and Zephath. They had thus reached the very
spot where the first attempt to invade Canaan had failed, and from which
the disappointed tribes had been driven back again into the wilderness.
Zephath was not far distant from Kadesh-barnea, so that it is with a
pardonable exaggeration that the Jewish historian describes Joshua as
smiting his enemies ‘from Kadesh-barnea even unto Gaza’ (Josh. x. 41).
It is true that his victories in this part of Canaan have been
questioned. No detailed account is given of them, and it is only in the
list of the ‘kings’ who were overthrown by ‘Joshua and the children of
Israel’ on the western side of the Jordan that the names of Arad and
Zephath, or Hormah, appear (Josh. xii. 14). Moreover, we are told in the
book of Judges (i. 17) that Zephath was destroyed by Judah and Simeon
after the death of the Ephraimitish leader (_v._ 1), a memorial of the
destruction being preserved in the change of name to Hormah. But it must
be noted that it is only the ‘kings’ of Arad and Zephath who are said to
have been ‘smitten’ by Joshua, not the cities over which they ruled. The
expedition to the Negeb was merely a raid, such as the possession of
Lachish and the mountainous country to the north-west of it enabled the
Israelitish chieftain to make with impunity. Indeed, such raids into the
fertile land to the south would have been natural, if not inevitable.
No detailed account was preserved of them, since they were connected
with no striking and important event, like the capture and destruction
of a Canaanitish city. The four military deeds with which history
associated the name of Joshua centered each of them round the overthrow
of a Canaanitish stronghold and gave the Israelites the command of the
surrounding country. They were campaigns which led to the permanent
possession of territory, not mere raids or barren victories. The capture
of Jericho secured the passage across the Jordan, that of Ai planted
Ephraim and Benjamin in the mountains of central Palestine, the
destruction of Lachish opened up communication with that desert of the
south in which the Israelites had received the legislation of
Kadesh-barnea, while the overthrow of the king of Hazor gave them a
foothold in the north. The alliance with the Gibeonites was of equal
importance, for it secured friends and allies in the very heart of the
enemy’s country, and its firstfruits were the victory at Makkedah and
the destruction of Lachish. Jericho, Ai, Lachish, Hazor, and
Gibeon,—these were the names which guaranteed to Joshua his claim to
have been the conqueror of Canaan.
The victory at Hazor seems to have been his last. Hazor stood near
Kadesh of Galilee, now represented by the ruins of Qedes, to the north
of Safed, and on the western side of the marshes of Hûleh, the Lake
Merom of the Old Testament.[265] In the age of the Tel el-Amarna letters
it was still governed by its native kings, and in one of them an
Egyptian officer complains that the king had joined with Sidon in
intriguing with the Bedâwin.[266] When the Israelites entered Palestine
it was the leading city of the northern part of the country. While
Megiddo was the capital of the centre of the country, Hazor was the
capital of the north. Its king, Jabin, now put himself at the head of a
great confederacy which extended from Sidon to Dor on the sea-coast, and
from the slopes of Hermon to the Sea of Galilee in the inland region.
Among the confederates history remembered the names of Jobab, the king
of Madon, and the kings of Shimron and Achshaph. Achshaph is the
Phœnician Ekdippa, now Zîb, on the sea-coast, which is called Aksap by
Thothmes III. But Madon is written Marôn in the Septuagint, though the
reading of the Hebrew text seems to be confirmed by the modern name of
Khurbet Madîn, ‘the ruins of Madîn.’ Shimron, moreover, is Symoôn in the
Septuagint, and this form of the name finds support in the Simônias of
Josephus, Simonia in the Talmud, now Semûnieh, sixteen miles from
Khurbet Madîn. Mr. Tomkins would identify it with the Shmânau of
Thothmes III.[267]
But, again, the reading of the Hebrew text is probably the more correct.
In what may be termed the official list of Joshua’s victories (Josh.
xii. 20), the name appears as Shimronmeron, and this reminds us of
Samsi-muruna (‘the Sun-god is lord’), which is given by the Assyrian
inscriptions as the name of a town in this very neighbourhood. It was
from ‘Menahem, king of Samsi-muruna,’ that Sennacherib received tribute
during his campaign against Hezekiah, and it is possible that Shimron
may be a contracted form of Shem[esh-me]ron or Sam[si-mu]runa.
Once more criticism has raised doubts as to the truth of the narrative.
We hear of another Jabin of Hazor, at a later date, in the time of
Deborah and Barak, and we hear also of another great victory gained by
Israel over Jabin’s troops. It is urged that if Hazor had been burnt to
the ground by Joshua, and all its inhabitants put to the sword, it could
hardly have risen so soon again from its ashes and have assumed a
leading position in the north. Had Joshua’s conquest been as complete as
it is represented to have been, the country would have been Israelitish,
and not Canaanite.
But it does not follow that because there was one king of Hazor called
Jabin, there should not have been another of the same name. Such
repetitions of name have been common in other countries of the world,
and it is difficult to see why the rulers of Hazor should not be allowed
a similar privilege. That a city should rise from its ruins and recover
its former power is again no unique event. Much depends upon its
position and the character of its inhabitants. We gather from the
Egyptian annals that the towns of Canaan were accustomed to capture and
temporary destruction. But they soon recovered themselves, the old
population flocked back, and their ruined walls were again repaired.
It is true that the conquest of the country by Joshua could not have
been as thorough as the narrative describes. But that we already knew
from the first chapter of Judges (vv. 30-33). Oriental expressions and
modes of thought are not to be measured by the precise terminology of
the modern West, and an Eastern writer speaks absolutely where we should
speak relatively. When it is said that ‘all the earth sought to Solomon,
to hear his wisdom’ (1 Kings x. 24), the universality of the statement
must be very considerably limited, and so too when it is said that
‘Joshua took all that land’ (Josh. xi. 16), the expression admits of a
similarly liberal discount. In fact, the narrative itself contains its
own corrective. The words, ‘All the cities of those kings ... did Joshua
take, and smote them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed
them’ (ver. 12), are followed immediately by the conditioning clause,
‘Only the cities which were built upon _tels_, Israel burned none of
them: Hazor alone did Joshua burn.’
Between the story of Joshua’s campaign and that of the rising under
Barak there is no resemblance whatever. In the time of the Hebrew judge
the army of Jabin was commanded by Sisera, not by Jabin himself. The
decisive battle took place on the banks of the Kishon, not on the shores
of Lake Hûleh, miles away to the north, and the city of Hazor was
neither captured nor destroyed. Kadesh of Galilee and other districts
were already in the hands of the Israelites, and must therefore have
been occupied by them at some earlier period. The account in the book of
Joshua, brief as it is, tells us when the occupation took place.
Jabin had summoned his allies and vassals to oppose the northward march
of the Israelites. The Canaanites stood upon the defensive, and the
Israelites therefore must have been the attacking party. That they did
not cross the Jordan from the plains of Bashan we may gather from the
list of the kings vanquished by Joshua.[268] Among them we find the
kings of Taanach and Megiddo, Kadesh of Naphtali and Jokneam, Dor,
Gilgal, and Tirzah.[269] Tirzah would have been the first stage
northward of Shechem; the fortress of Megiddo commanded the plain of
Jezreel. A common danger would thus have forced the kings of the centre
and the north of Canaan to fight together, and the confederacy would
have covered much the same extent of territory as that which confronted
Barak on the banks of the Kishon. But instead of advancing upon the
enemy from the north, as was the case with Barak, Joshua would have
moved up from the south.
It was on the shore of Lake Merom that the Israelites fell suddenly upon
the Canaanitish encampment. The Canaanites were taken by surprise and
fled in all directions. Some made their way across the narrow gorge of
the Jordan towards Mizpeh of Gilead;[270] the larger body was pursued as
far as Sidon, where they at last found a shelter behind the strong walls
of the city. The chariots of their cavalry, useless to mountaineers,
were burned, and their horses were maimed. The flight of the army had
left Hazor undefended; the Israelites accordingly turned back from the
pursuit, and took the city by assault. Its houses were burned, its spoil
carried away, and ‘every man’ was smitten with the edge of the sword,
‘neither left they any to breathe.’ The merciless ferocity of Joshua
finds a close parallel in that of the Assyrian kings.
The life of Joshua was drawing to an end. He was an old man; it was said
he was 110 years of age at his death, the length of time the Egyptian
wished his friends to live. He had brought his people into the Promised
Land, had shown them how to take cities and defeat their adversaries,
and had planted Israel firmly in the mountainous part of Canaan. Before
his death the tribes were provisionally established in the territories
subsequently called after their names. We are not bound to believe that
the division of the land was made with the mathematical precision which
had become possible in the days of the compiler of the book of Joshua,
but to deny that it was made at all is merely an abuse of criticism. In
the period of the Judges we find most of the tribes actually settled in
the very districts which we are told were given to them, and the fact
that in one or two instances—Dan and Simeon, for example—the tribe never
gained possession of the larger part of the territory said to have been
assigned to it, shows that the story of the division could not have been
based on the later geographical position of the tribes. The doctrine of
development may have no limitations in the domain of organic nature, but
history has to take account of individual action and the arbitrary
enactments of great men. To suppose that the tribal division of
Palestine was the result of a process of development has little in
support of it, and fails to explain the geographical position
traditionally assigned to a tribe like Dan.
There was one tribe, however, to whose history the theory of development
is to some extent applicable. This was the tribe of Judah. The tribe was
only partly of Israelitish descent. Its most important family, that of
Caleb and Othniel, belonged to the Edomite tribe of Kenaz; while another
Edomite tribe, that of Jerahmeel, occupied the southern part of the
Jewish territory (1 Chron. ii. 25-33, 42). Even ‘the families of the
scribes which dwelt at Jabez’ were Kenites from Midian (1 Chron. ii.
55).[271] Down to the time of the kings the Israelitish members of the
tribe of Judah mixed freely with their neighbours; David himself was
descended from Ruth the Moabitess, and Bath-sheba, the mother of his
successor, had been the wife of a Hittite. As has been already noticed,
the prisoners whose figures surmount the names of Shishak’s conquests in
Judah have the features of the Amorite and not of the Jew. In the Song
of Deborah the tribe of Judah, like those of Dan and Simeon, is unknown.
It is Ephraim and Benjamin who form the Israelitish vanguard against the
Amalekites of the southern desert. And the deliverers of southern Israel
from its two first oppressors were Othniel the Kenizzite and Ehud the
Benjamite.
The tribe of Judah as a compact and definite whole first makes its
appearance at a later period, and, unlike the other tribes of Israel,
represents a geographical rather than an ethnographical unity.[272] Jews
were commingled in it with Edomites, as well as with other tribes—Dan,
Simeon, and Levi. Its cities were only partly Israelitish; even the
future capital, Jerusalem, retained its Jebusite population, and the
temple was built on land that had been bought from a Gentile owner.
Nevertheless, the fact that both tribe and territory bore to the last
the name of Judah indicates that in this mixture of nationalities the
Hebrew element remained the stronger and more predominant. It is true
that Hebron, the first centre and capital of Judah, had been conquered,
not by a Jew, but by the Kenizzite Caleb, and that his brother Othniel
was the first ‘Judge’; but it is also true that the settlement of the
country was in the main due to an amalgamation of Hebrew and Edomite
elements. Gedor, Socho, Zanoah, Keilah, and Eshtemoa traced their second
foundation to a Kenizzite father and a Jewish mother (1 Chron. iii. 18,
19), and Hebron itself soon ceased to be distinctively Kenizzite and
became Jewish.
Caleb the Kenizzite had been one of the spies sent out from
Kadesh-barnea when the Israelites made their first, and unsuccessful,
attempt to invade Canaan. He consequently belonged to the generation
which had escaped from the bondage of Egypt, of which he and Joshua were
said to have been the only survivors at the time of the passage of the
Jordan. Hebron had been the chief point and goal of exploration on the
part of the spies, and it was from its neighbourhood that the grapes
were brought which testified to the fertility of the land. It was
natural, therefore, that Hebron should again be the object of Caleb’s
aim, and that while the Ephraimitish general was establishing himself in
the north Caleb should lead his followers to its assault. The
destruction of Lachish had opened the way; and the steep path which led
up the limestone hills from Lachish to Hebron was left undefended.
Modern writers have seen in the name of Caleb a mere tribal designation
denoting the ‘Calebites’ or ‘Dog-men.’ But the cuneiform inscriptions
show us that Caleb or ‘Dog’ was the name of an individual, and they also
explain how it came to be so. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets, as well as
in later Assyrian letters, the word _Kalbu_ or ‘Dog’ is used in the
sense of ‘officer’ or ‘messenger’; the king’s officer was his ‘faithful
dog,’ and the term was an honourable one.[273] It conveyed none of those
ideas of contempt or abuse with which it was afterwards associated in
the Semitic mind, and which may have had their origin in Arabia. It is
possible that Caleb had been an ‘officer’ of the Pharaoh before he
became a Hebrew spy.
The capture of Hebron is said to have taken place five years after the
passage of the Jordan (Josh. xiv. 10). At any rate, it was before the
death of Joshua (notwithstanding Judg. i. 1, 10). It was after that
event, however, that the further conquests of the Kenizzites were made.
Somewhere near Hebron, but higher in ‘the mountains,’ was the
Canaanitish city of Debir. Debir signified the ‘Sanctuary’; and it was
here, as in Babylonia and Assyria, that a great library of books was
stored in one of the chambers of the temple. Like the Babylonian cities,
moreover, Debir had more than one name. It was also called
Kirjath-Sannah, ‘the city of Instruction,’ from the schools which
gathered round its library,[274] and in the Old Testament it is further
known as Kirjath-Sepher or ‘Booktown.’ In _The Travels of the Mohar_,
however, a satirical account of a tourist’s adventures in Palestine,
which was written by an Egyptian in the reign of Ramses II., it is
termed Beth-Sopher, ‘the house of the scribe,’ and is coupled with
Kirjath-Anab. It is plain, therefore, that the Massoretic punctuation
Sepher ‘book’ is erroneous, and must be corrected to Sopher or ‘scribe.’
Whether Kirjath, ‘city,’ should also be corrected into Beth, ‘house’ or
‘temple,’ is more doubtful. _Beth_ would be the more appropriate term in
the case of a town which possessed a sanctuary, and it may be that the
word Kirjath has been derived from the neighbouring town of [Kirjath-]
Anab, which is called simply Anab in Josh. xv. 50. But it is also
possible that the Egyptian writer has made a mistake, and has
interchanged the words ‘city’ and ‘house,’ the true names of the two
cities having been Kirjath-Sopher and Beth-Anab.[275]
However this may be, Caleb promised his daughter Achsah as a reward to
the conqueror of Debir. The prize was won by his ‘younger brother’
Othniel, and the Canaanitish city was so completely destroyed that its
very site is still unknown. Its library perished in the ruins, though
the clay tablets with which it was doubtless filled must still be lying
beneath the soil, awaiting the discoverer who shall with their aid
reconstruct the ancient history of southern Canaan. Hebron was more
fortunate. The city was spared after its capture, and became the chief
seat of the Kenizzites, and subsequently, when the Kenizzites were
merged in Judah, the capital of Judah itself.
The Hebrew tribe of Judah was slow in following the example of its
Edomite comrades. The ‘children of Judah,’ it is said, had at first been
content to live with the Midianitish Kenites in the neighbourhood of
Jericho, and when the Kenites returned to the desert of Kadesh-barnea to
settle there along with them (Judg. i. 16). But there were other Jews
who remained behind in Canaan, and there carved out a patrimony for
themselves. Judah and Simeon, we are told, ‘went up’ together into the
country which had been allotted to them, and eventually succeeded in
occupying the greater part of it. The expression is a curious one, and
seems to imply that the invaders started from the desert of
Kadesh-barnea, though Lachish and its neighbourhood may be meant. At all
events, Adoni-bezek, ‘the lord of Bezek,’ was defeated and captured, and
his thumbs and great toes cut off, like those of the seventy vassal
princes who had ‘picked up their meat’ under his own table. It is added
that he was brought to Jerusalem, where he died.
That he was brought there by the Hebrews is not certain. However, the
compiler of the book of Judges seems to have thought so, as he goes on
to say, ‘And the children of Judah fought[276] against Jerusalem, and
took it, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and set the city on
fire.’ It is difficult to reconcile this with the very definite
statement in the book of Joshua (xv. 63), ‘As for the Jebusites, the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children of Judah could not drive them
out: but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah at Jerusalem
unto this day’; or with the equally explicit statement in the first
chapter of Judges itself (verse 21), ‘The children of Benjamin did not
drive out the Jebusites that inhabited Jerusalem; but the Jebusites
dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem unto this day.’[277]
The latter passage belongs to the period when Judah had not yet become a
corporate whole, and when, therefore, as in the Song of Deborah,
Benjamin was still regarded as forming the southern boundary of the
tribes of Israel; but the first passage takes us down to the time when
Benjamin had been supplanted by Judah, and Israel was being prepared to
receive a king. It was during the earlier period that the Levite of
Mount Ephraim, when returning from Beth-lehem, would not lodge in
‘Jebus’ because it was a ‘city of the Jebusites’ (Judg. xix. 10, 11);
the later period extended to the time when Jerusalem was taken by David,
and when the Jewish king, so far from massacring its inhabitants and
setting it on fire, allowed the Jebusites in it to retain their property
(2 Sam. xxiv. 18-24), and made it the capital of his empire. Doubtless
Jerusalem might have been captured by the ‘children of Judah,’ and
nevertheless have continued to exist. We may gather from the Tel
el-Amarna tablets that such an occurrence actually took place at the
close of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and one of the cities of
southern Canaan taken by Ramses II. was Shalama or Salem. But if so,
there could have been no massacre of the population and burning of the
town; the passages of the Old Testament which describe the Jebusites as
living uninterruptedly in their city are too clear and definite to admit
of such a supposition. On the contrary, the Jebusites lived in peace and
harmony along with both Jews and Benjamites; and were it not for the
words of the Levite (Judg. xix. 11), that Jerusalem was still ‘the city
of a stranger,’ we could well believe that the fate which overtook it in
the time of David had been anticipated in an earlier century. But
neither Benjamin nor Judah could ‘drive out the Jebusites that
inhabited’ the great fortress-city of Southern Palestine.
The rise of Judah dated from the overthrow of Adoni-bezek, ‘Afterwards,’
we read, ‘the children of Judah went down to fight against the
Canaanites that dwelt in the mountain, and in the Negeb of the south,
and in the plain.’ It was all long subsequent to the death both of
Joshua and of Caleb. The last survivors of the first attempt to
penetrate into that part of Canaan had passed away before it at last
fell—if only partially—into Israelitish hands. The first dreams of
conquest had long since made way for a sober and disappointing reality.
Canaan had proved for Israel a more difficult prize to secure than
Britain proved for the Saxons. It was only in the mountains and a few
isolated cities that the invaders succeeded in holding their own.
Elsewhere the walls and chariots of the Canaanites kept them at bay,
while the strongholds of the Philistines and Phœnicians barred them from
the coast. The children of Israel were compelled to dwell ‘among the
Canaanites, Hittites, and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and
Jebusites,’ and there was little cause for wonder that ‘they took their
daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and
served their gods’ (Judg. iii. 5, 6).
Before Joshua died the tabernacle was set up at Shiloh, on the slopes of
Mount Ephraim, in the heart of the newly-conquered land. That the
central sanctuary should thus be under the protection of Ephraim was a
token that ‘the house of Joseph’ was paramount among the tribes of
Israel. A further token was the burial of the mummy of Joseph at
Shechem. Here, too, at Shechem were the two mountains Ebal and Gerizim,
on which the curses and the blessings of the Law had been ordered to be
pronounced. History has left no record of the conquest of the place, and
the name of the king of Shechem is not even found in the list of the
kings vanquished by Joshua. But the city must have fallen during the
early period of the invasion, and the narrative in Josh. viii. 33 would
imply that its capture followed closely upon the destruction of Ai.
We may gather from the silence of history that there was neither siege
nor massacre to make an impression on the memory of posterity. And the
inference is confirmed by what we know of the subsequent history of
Shechem. In the time of Gideon and Abimelech its population was still
half-Amorite (Judg. ix. 28). As at Jerusalem, the older inhabitants
cannot have been destroyed or driven out. Like the Gibeonites, they must
have made terms with the invaders, or mixed peaceably with them in the
course of years.
At the outset, however, Shechem would have been the capital of Ephraim.
Here was the sepulchre of the founder of ‘the house of Joseph,’ here
were the two sacred mountains of the Law, and here, too, it was that
Joshua gathered the people together to hear his last words. Like Moses
at Sinai and Kadesh-barnea, ‘Joshua made a covenant with the people ...
and set them a statute and an ordinance in Shechem. And Joshua wrote
these words in the book of the Law of God, and took a great stone, and
set it up there under the terebinth that was in the sanctuary of the
Lord.’ Here, therefore, was the local sanctuary of Ephraim, separate
from the central one at Shiloh, and a sacred terebinth stood within its
precincts. Criticism finds no reason to doubt that ‘the great stone’
spoken of in the text was actually set up, like a ‘Beth-el,’ under the
shadow of the tree, and it is hard to see why it should be more
sceptical towards the further statement that the covenant which the
stone commemorated was written by Joshua ‘in the book of the Law of
God.’
While Shechem was thus the local sanctuary of Ephraim, the tribes east
of the Jordan had consecrated a ‘great altar’ of their own on the banks
of the river. The altar was the occasion of a dispute between the two
branches of the house of Israel, which nearly resulted in war. But the
danger was averted through the mediation of the priests; and although
the tribes east and west of the Jordan necessarily had different
interests, it was long ere this led to open hostility, or even to
forgetfulness of their common ancestry and common God. Deborah
reproaches Reuben and Gilead for having stood aloof while Zebulon and
Naphtali were hazarding their lives in the field, and the son of Gideon
had his kingdom on the eastern side of the Jordan.
Joshua was buried at Timnath-serah or Timnath-heres[278] in Mount
Ephraim, in a piece of ground which had become the property of himself
and his family. The Israelites of a later day looked back upon his
memory with gratitude and veneration; he had been the hero who had
succeeded in doing what Moses had failed to accomplish, and had led his
people into the Promised Land. But history judges somewhat differently.
He was not a lawgiver or a leader of men like Moses, and even from a
military point of view the conquest of the Amorite kingdoms of Sihon and
Og was a greater achievement than securing a foothold in the mountains
of central Palestine. Joshua was not the conqueror of Canaan, as the
pious imagination of a later age supposed him to be: he merely opened
the way to it. He taught the Israelites how to defeat the Canaanites,
and he succeeded in destroying a few of their cities. But that was all;
and the wholesale massacres which marked his progress, the wanton
destruction of everything which could not be carried away as spoil, and
the barbaric extermination of the elements of culture, find their match
only in the sanguinary campaigns of some of the Assyrian kings and the
Saxon invasion of Britain.
Footnote 255:
This passage must have been written at a time when Judah had not yet
come to occupy a definite place among the tribes in Canaan, and when,
as in the Song of Deborah, the territory of Benjamin was regarded as a
sort of appendage of that of Ephraim, and as extending as far south as
the desert of the Amalekites. (See also Josh. xv. 63.)
Footnote 256:
Josh. xviii. 22.
Footnote 257:
Colonel Watson in the _Quarterly Statement_ of the Palestine
Exploration Fund, July 1895, pp. 253-261; see also Quatremère,
_Histoire des Sultans Mamluks_, ii. p. 26; and Mr. Stevenson in the
_Quarterly Statement_ October 1895, pp. 334-338.
Footnote 258:
The play is on the verb _gâlal_, ‘to roll.’ Gilgal, however, means the
‘circle’ of stones, or ‘cairn.’ Moreover, the Egyptians were
circumcised, so that uncircumcision could not correctly be called ‘the
reproach of Egypt.’ Some of the Israelites may have been circumcised
at Gilgal, but it is incredible that none of the males born in the
desert had been so. This would have been a flagrant violation of the
Mosaic law (see Lev. xii. 3; Gen. xvii. 14).
Footnote 259:
The tongue-like wedge of gold finds its parallel in six tongue-like
wedges of silver discovered by Dr. Schliemann in the ‘Third
prehistoric City’ of Hissarlik or Troy, and figured by him in _Ilios_,
pp. 470-472. Mr. Barclay V. Head has shown that they each represent
the third of a Babylonian maneh.
Footnote 260:
See my _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 75-77; _Quarterly Statement_
of the Palestine Exploration Fund, July 1876 and July 1877.
Footnote 261:
Gezer was similarly laid under tribute by Ephraim (Josh. xvi. 10).
Footnote 262:
The Septuagint has Elam instead of Hoham, from which we may perhaps
infer that the older reading of the Hebrew text was Yeho-ham. If so,
we should have an example of the use of the name of the national God
of Israel among the Hebronites. The substitution of El for Yeho would
be parallel to the fact that in the inscriptions of the Assyrian king
Sargon the contemporary king of Hamath is called both Yahu-bihdi and
Ilu-bihdi. Cf. also Joram and Hado-ram (2 Sam. viii. 10; 1 Chron.
xviii. 10). Piram resembles the Egyptian Pi-Romi; the name was also
Karian (Sayce, _The Karian Language and Inscriptions_ in the
_Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, ix. 1, No. ii.
3). The Jarmuth of which Piram was king cannot be the same as the
Yarimuta of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, as that seems to have been in
the north, though Karl Niebuhr makes it the Delta. For Piram the
Septuagint has Phidôn; and it changes Yaphia into Jephthah and Eglon
into Adullam.
Footnote 263:
See Flinders Petrie, _Tell el-Hesy (Lachish)_ (1891) and Bliss, _A
Mound of Many Cities_.
Footnote 264:
For Horam the Septuagint again has Elam. Perhaps the original reading
was Yehoram. There is no ground for supposing that Hoham of Hebron and
Horam of Gezer are one and the same.
Footnote 265:
It is called Huzar in the list of the conquests of Thothmes III. at
Karnak, where it follows Liusa or Laish, and precedes Pahil,
identified with Pella by Mr. Tomkins, and Kinnertu or Chinnereth.
Footnote 266:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 89.
Footnote 267:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 44, No. 18.
Footnote 268:
See also Josh. xi. 2.
Footnote 269:
Josh. xii. 21-24. Probably the kings of Tappuah, Hepher, Aphek, and
Sharon are to be included in the confederacy (verses 17, 18). We do
not know where Tappuah was (though it is usually placed in the Wadi
el-Afranj; G. A. Smith, _Hist. Geog. of the Holy Land_, p. 202).
Hepher can hardly be the southern Hepher referred to in 1 Kings iv.
10, but is probably Gath-Hepher west of the Sea of Galilee. Aphek (1
Sam. xxix. 1) was a few miles to the south of it, and the plain of
Sharon began at Dor. Cf., however, Beth-Tappuah (in the Wadi
el-Afranj) and Aphekah near Hebron, in Judah (Josh. xv. 53).
Footnote 270:
In Josh. xi. 3, ‘the land of Mizpeh’ is said to include ‘the
Hittite’—so we should probably read instead of ‘Hivite’—‘under
Hermon.’
Footnote 271:
The main body of the Kenites, however, who, like ‘the children of
Judah,’ had settled in the neighbourhood of Jericho after its capture,
moved afterwards into the desert south of Arad (Judg. i. 16; 1 Sam.
xv. 6), and lived here along with a portion of the tribe of Judah.
Footnote 272:
Beth-lehem has been supposed to have been the original headquarters of
the tribe, as it is called Beth-lehem-Judah (xix. 1). But this was
merely to distinguish it from another Beth-lehem in Zebulon.
Footnote 273:
Thus, in a despatch sent to one of the later Assyrian kings, the
writer says, ‘I am a dog, a dog of the king his lord’ (Harper,
_Assyrian and Babylonian Letters_, iv. p. 460).
Footnote 274:
Josh. xv. 49. In one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets Ebed-Tob of
Jerusalem, when referring to the Khabiri or ‘Hebronites,’ speaks of
Bit-Sâni, which may be the Kirjath-Sannah of the Old Testament.
Winckler (_Tell el-Amarna Letters_, 185) has given a wrong translation
of the passage, which is partly based on an incorrect copy of the
text. The translation should be, ‘Behold Gath-Carmel has fallen to
Tagi and the men of Gath. He is in Bit-Sâni, and we will bring it
about that they give Labai and the land of the Sutê (Bedâwin) to the
district of the Khabiri.’
Footnote 275:
The determinative of ‘writing’ is attached to the word Sopher, showing
that the Egyptian scribe was acquainted with its meaning. The name of
Beth-Sopher (_Baitha-Thupar_) was first deciphered on the papyrus by
Dr. W. Max Müller, and published in his _Asien und Europa_.
Footnote 276:
Not the pluperfect, as in the Authorised Version.
Footnote 277:
See above, p. 247.
Footnote 278:
The latter reading (Judg. ii. 9) is probably the more correct. The
name of Timnath-heres, ‘the portion of the Sun-god,’ may have been
changed to Timnath-serah, ‘the portion of abundance,’ on account of
its idolatrous associations. Perhaps it is the modern Kafr Hâris, nine
miles south of Shechem.
CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF THE JUDGES
The Condition of Israel—The Destruction of the Benjamites—Story of
Micah and the Conquest of Dan—Chushan-rishathaim- and Ramses
III.—Office of Judge—Eglon of Moab—The Philistines—Deborah and
Barak—Sisera and the Hittites—The Song of Deborah—Gideon—Kingdom of
Abimelech—Jephthah—Sacrifice of his Daughter—Defeat and Slaughter of
the Ephraimites—Samson—Historical Character of the Book of Judges.
Israel has at last forced its way into the Promised Land. Mount Ephraim
is in its hands, and it has already planted itself in other parts of
Palestine. Joshua, the leader who taught it how to cross the Jordan and
defeat the princes of Canaan, is dead. The age of wandering is over; the
age of settlement has begun.
But the age of settlement was a stormy one. The Canaanites were but
partially subdued; the Israelites themselves were little better than a
collection of raiding bands. They had brought with them, moreover, the
nomadic habits of the desert, and were but little inclined to rebuild
the cities which they had so ruthlessly destroyed. And in almost every
direction they were encircled by enemies, better organised, better
armed, or more numerous than themselves, who from time to time succeeded
in overrunning their fields and reducing them to subjection. The tribes
who had dreamed of conquering Canaan found themselves, instead, the prey
of others.
It was a period of anarchy and perpetual war. Without a head, and
without cohesion, it seems strange that they did not perish utterly or
become absorbed by the older population of the land. That the nation
should have survived admits of only one explanation. It possessed a
common faith, a common sanctuary, and a common code of sacred laws. As
in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire the Church preserved the
fabric of society, and eventually brought order out of chaos, so, too,
in ancient Israel, the nation owed its continued existence to the law
which had been given by Moses. Only the iron fetters of a written law,
with its organised priesthood and sanctions, and, above all, the
knowledge that it existed, could have prevented the process of political
and social disintegration from rapidly running its course. Had the
religion of Israel been merely that result of evolution which is dreamed
of by some modern writers, and the law of Moses the invention of a later
age, there would have been no Israel in which a religion could have
developed, or a code of laws have been compiled. The outward unity of
the tribes in Egypt and the desert was shattered by the settlement in
Canaan, and all that remained was the inward and religious unity that
had been forced upon them by the genius of an individual legislator. The
place of the political head and leader was supplied by the organised
cult and elaborate code of laws which he had bequeathed to the nation.
To all external appearance, indeed, Israel had ceased to be a nation,
and had been reduced to a scattered and anarchical collection of
marauding tribes; but the elements which could again bind them together
still existed—the belief in the same national God, the rites with which
He was worshipped, and the priesthood and sanctuary where the tradition
of the law was preserved.
That this is no imaginary picture is proved by the Song of Deborah. The
Song is admitted by the most sceptical of critics to belong to the age
to which it is assigned, and consequently to reflect the ideas of the
Israelite shortly after the settlement in Canaan. No composition of the
Exilic period could be more uncompromising in its monotheism, and its
assertion that Yahveh alone is the God of Israel. And the Song further
assumes that the tribes of Israel, disunited though they otherwise may
be, are nevertheless bound together by a common faith in the one
national God. Nor is this all. Israel still possesses, even among its
northern tribes, ‘legislators’ like Moses, and scribes who handle the
pen (Judg. v. 14). Writing, therefore, is still known and practised even
among a people so oppressed by their enemies that ‘the highways were
unoccupied,’ and the fellahin of the villages had ceased to exist. Laws,
too, were still promulgated in continuation of the laws of Moses, and
the people of Israel are ‘the people of the Lord.’
And yet there was another side to the picture. While Zebulon and
Naphtali were hazarding ‘their lives unto the death’ ‘on behalf of
Yahveh,’ there were tribes and cities which forgot their duty to their
God and their brethren, and ‘came not to the help of the Lord.’ Such was
the case with the inhabitants of Meroz; such, too, was the conduct of
Reuben and Gilead, of Dan and Asher. The description given by the
compiler of the Book of Judges of the condition of the tribes after the
death of Joshua cannot be far from the truth. They were planted in the
midst of enemies whom they had found too strong to be destroyed or
driven out. On all sides of them were ‘the Philistines, and all the
Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hittites that dwelt in Mount
Lebanon from Mount Baal-Hermon unto the entering in of Hamath.’[279]
‘And the children of Israel,’ we are told, dwelt among them, and ‘took
their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their
sons, and served their gods. And the children of Israel did evil in the
sight of the Lord, and forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals
and the Ashêrahs.’[280] Even more expressive are the words with which
the Book of Judges ends: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel;
every man did that which was right in his own eyes.’ It was an age of
individual lawlessness; the bands of society were unloosed, and none was
strong enough to lead and control. Outside the influence of the
representatives of the Mosaic law there was neither curb nor order.
Two incidents have been recorded which throw a lurid light on the
manners and character of the age which immediately followed the
settlement in Canaan. In one of them we hear of a Levite of Mount
Ephraim ‘who took to him a concubine out of Beth-lehem in Judah.’
Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, had succeeded his father Eleazar as
high-priest at Shiloh (Judg. xx. 28), where ‘the ark of the covenant’
had been placed. The concubine proved unfaithful to the Levite, and
eventually fled to her father’s house in Beth-lehem. Thither the Levite
followed her, and persuaded her to return with him to his home. The
woman’s father, however, highly pleased at the reconciliation, continued
to press his hospitality upon his guest, and it was not until the
afternoon of the fifth day that the Levite succeeded in getting away.
The evening soon fell upon him, and, rejecting the advice of his slave
that he should spend the night in Jerusalem, on the ground that it was
‘the city of a stranger,’ he pressed on with his concubine to Gibeah,
which belonged to Benjamin. It had been better for him, however, to have
sought hospitality from ‘the stranger’ rather than from his own people;
for, in spite of the fact that he had with him food in plenty both for
himself and for his asses, he was left to spend the night in the street.
But at the last moment an old man, who was not a native of Gibeah, came
in from his work in the fields, and seeing the Levite in the street,
asked him and his companions into the house. While they were eating and
drinking, the rabble gathered about the house and demanded that the man
should be brought out to them that they might ‘know him.’ It was a
repetition of the scene enacted in Sodom when the angels visited the
house of Lot, with the difference that the actors were Israelites
instead of Canaanites, whom the Hebrews had been called upon to destroy
for their sins. In vain ‘the master of the house’ intreated his
fellow-townsmen not to act ‘so wickedly,’ offering them his own daughter
as well as his guest’s concubine in place of the guest himself. Finally,
however, they were satisfied with the unfortunate concubine, whom they
‘abused’ all night, and then left dead on the doorstep of the house. The
first thing ‘her lord’ saw when he opened the door in the morning was
the woman’s corpse. This he placed on his ass and carried to his home,
where he divided it into twelve pieces, which he sent ‘into all the
coasts of Israel.’[281] The horror of the deed, or perhaps of the
visible proofs with which it was announced, aroused the Israelites, and
they demanded the punishment of the guilty. The crime had been committed
against a Levite, whose brethren were to be found wherever the
Israelites were settled, and who had on his side the priesthood of the
central sanctuary at Shiloh. He was, too, a Levite of Mount Ephraim, and
the sympathy of the powerful tribe of Ephraim was accordingly assured to
him. The Benjamites, however, refused to hand over their
fellow-tribesman to justice, and the result was an inter-fraternal war.
Before the tribes had conquered half the country which had been promised
them, they were already fighting among themselves.
The Benjamites at first were successful, and their opponents were
defeated with considerable slaughter in two successive battles. Then
they fell into an ambuscade: the main body of their troops being drawn
away after the retreating enemy towards the north, while an ambush rose
up from ‘the meadows of Gibeah’ in their rear, and set fire to the city.
The retreating foe now turned back; and the Benjamites, enclosed as it
were between two fires, were cut to pieces almost to a man. Six hundred
only escaped ‘towards the wilderness unto the rock of Rimmon,’ where
they maintained themselves for four months. Meanwhile ‘the men of
Israel’ treated their Benjamite brethren like Canaanitish outcasts,
smiting ‘them with the edge of the sword, from the men of each city even
unto the beasts and all that was found; and all the cities they came to
did they set on fire.’
Benjamin was almost exterminated. A few men alone survived. But at the
outset of the war they had been placed under the same ban as the
Canaanites, and a solemn vow had been made that no Israelitish woman
should be married to them. When peace was restored with the practical
annihilation of the guilty tribe, the prohibition was evaded by a
stratagem, which, however inconsequent it may appear to the European of
to-day, was fully in keeping with the ideas of the ancient East.
Jabesh-Gilead had refused to take part in the war against Benjamin, and
the victors accordingly resolved to take summary vengeance upon it. The
city was taken by surprise, and every male in it massacred in cold
blood, as well as ‘every woman that had lain by man.’ About four hundred
unmarried maidens were carried off to Shiloh, and there forcibly married
to the surviving Benjamites. But even these did not suffice, and the
Benjamite youths were consequently encouraged to hide in the vineyards
near Shiloh, and there capture and make wives of the maidens of the
place who came out to dance at the yearly ‘feast of the Lord.’ The
place, we are told, was northward of Beth-el, ‘on the east side of the
highway that goeth up from Beth-el to Shechem, and on the south of
Lebonah.’
Recent critics have seen in this story merely a popular legend intended
to account for the fact that marriage by capture was practised among the
Benjamites. We might just as well assert that the story of Gunpowder
Plot is a legend which has grown out of the customs of the 5th of
November. The critics have not even the justification that marriage by
capture was common among the Israelites. In fact, this is the only
instance of it which we meet with in the Old Testament history of
Israel—an instance so exceptional as to be inexplicable unless it had
originated under special circumstances. It was certainly not the
survival of an earlier custom common to the rest of the tribes, nor is
there any trace of its having been general in the tribe of Benjamin
itself. In fact, we look in vain for any other example of it alike among
Israelites and Canaanites, or even among the Benjamites in any other
period of their history.
It is true, however, that the account of the war between Benjamin and
its brother tribes has passed through the magnifying lenses of later
history. The exaggerated numbers of the combatants and the slain, like
the use of the universal ‘all’ and ‘every’ where the partial ‘some’ is
intended, are in thorough accordance with Oriental habits of expression.
The modern resident in the East is only too familiar with such
exaggerations of language, and in studying Oriental history due
allowance must always be made for them. In the account of the war,
moreover, its real character has been somewhat obscured. Benjamin has
been regarded too much as a separate entity, distinct and cut off from
the rest of Israel, rather than as the tribe which had once gathered
round the sanctuary of Beth-On, and which continued to form the
‘southern’ frontier of the house of Joseph. The war against Benjamin, in
fact, was like the war against Jabesh-Gilead—a quarrel not with a tribe,
but with certain Israelitish cities. It is even possible that in this
quarrel Jabesh-Gilead was from the beginning associated with Gibeah and
the other cities of Benjamin. At all events, we find it so allied in the
age of Saul. Saul’s first act as king was to rescue Jabesh-Gilead from
the Ammonites, and it was the men of Jabesh-Gilead who took down the
bodies of Saul and Jonathan from the walls of Beth-Shan and gave them
honourable burial.[282]
The second incident, which tells us something of the manners of Israel
in the years that immediately followed the invasion of Palestine, is
recorded in language which has been little, if at all, altered by the
compiler of the Book of Judges. The gruesome horror of the story of the
Levite’s concubine is absent from it, but it equally shows how far from
the truth is the idyllic picture sometimes painted of the first
Israelitish conquerors of Canaan. It is again a Levite who is the
central personage of the story. An Ephraimite named Micah, we are told,
stole eleven hundred shekels of silver from his mother, but, terrified
by her imprecations upon the thief, confessed the deed and restored the
money. His mother thereupon informed him that the treasure had been
dedicated to Yahveh by her on his behalf, in order that a graven and a
molten image might be made out of it for him. Two hundred of the shekels
were accordingly taken, and the silver employed to make the images.
These were set up in the house of Micah, along with ‘an ephod and
teraphim,’ and one of his sons was consecrated as priest. This, however,
was recognised as contrary to the law, and when therefore a wandering
Levite from Beth-lehem, ‘of the family of Judah,’ came seeking
employment, he was welcomed by Micah, who asked him if he would be his
priest. His wages for undertaking the office were to be ten shekels of
silver each year, as well as ‘a suit of apparel’ and food. The terms
were accepted, and ‘Micah consecrated’ him his priest. The provisions of
the Mosaic law had been satisfied, and the Ephraimite complacently
remarked, ‘Now know I that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a
Levite to my priest.’
His complacency, however, was of no long duration. The Danites, unable
to establish themselves in the south of Canaan, sent out five spies from
their camp near Kirjath-jearim[283] who on their way northward were
hospitably received in Micah’s house. Here they found the Levite, with
whom, it would appear, they had been previously acquainted, and asked
him to inquire ‘of God’ whether their journey would be prosperous or
not. The priest’s reply was favourable: ‘before Yahveh is your way
wherein you go.’
Far away, to the north of the other Hebrew settlements, the spies found
the Phœnician city of Laish, already mentioned in the geographical lists
of the Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. Its inhabitants were living in
peaceful security, ‘after the manner of the Zidonians,’ with no one to
interfere with them, and no enemy of whom they could be afraid. The
spies saw at once that the city was unprepared for a sudden attack by
armed men; that, in short, ‘God had given it into’ their hands. They
returned therefore to Mahaneh-Dan, the Camp of Dan, and reported what
they had seen. Thereupon the Danites determined to seize an inheritance
for themselves in the north, and six hundred men ‘girded with weapons of
war,’ along with their families and cattle, started for Laish.[284] On
the road the spies led them to the house of Micah, whom they robbed of
his images, ephod and teraphim, as well as of his priest. The latter at
first protested; but on being told that he would be the priest of ‘a
tribe,’ his ‘heart was glad,’ and ‘he took the ephod and the teraphim
and the graven image and went into the midst of the people.’ Micah and
his friends on discovering the robbery pursued after the Danites, but
finding they were too strong for him he judged it prudent to return
home.
The Danites continued their march, and had little difficulty in
capturing the unguarded Laish, in massacring its inhabitants, and
burning the houses with fire. On the ruins they built a new city, the
Dan of future Israelitish history. Here the graven image of Micah was
erected, and worship carried on ‘all the time that the house of God was
in Shiloh.’ The Levite who presided over the sanctuary became the
ancestor of a long line of priests who continued to be ‘priests to the
tribe of Dan until the day of the captivity of the land.’[285] The
compiler of the Book of Judges adds that his name was Jonathan, the
grandson of Moses, whose name has been changed to Manasseh in the
majority of Hebrew manuscripts.[286] The statement fixes the date of the
conquest of Laish, and shows that, like the war against Benjamin, it
took place only two generations after the great legislator’s death.
The picture presented to us by the narrative stands in sharp contrast to
the ideal aimed at in the legislation of the Pentateuch. The golden calf
has been revived in an intensified form, and the ordinary Israelite,
including a Levite who was the grandson of Moses, takes it for granted
that Yahveh must be adored in the shape of a twofold idol. Nay, more; by
the side of the graven and molten images which were meant to represent
the God of Israel in defiance of the second commandment, we find also
the images of the household gods or teraphim, whose cult forms part of
that which was paid to the national deity. The cult, in fact, survived
to the latest days of the northern kingdom; it was practised in the
household of David (1 Sam. xix. 13), and is even regarded by a prophet
of Samaria as an integral portion of the established religion of the
state (Hos. iii. 4). The priestly powers of the Levite, however,
suffered in no way from the idolatrous nature of the worship over which
he presided. Like David in a later age (1 Sam. xxiii. 2, 4, 9, xxx. 8; 2
Sam. v. 19, 23) when the men of Dan inquired through him whether their
journey would be successful, he was able to answer them in the name of
the Lord.
But this is not all. Micah, the Ephraimite, consecrates his own son as
priest, while the Levite wanders through the land, seeking employment
and begging his bread. There is no endowment that is his by right; no
Levitical city where he can claim a shelter and a field; no central
sanctuary where his services are required. He is said to be ‘of the
family of Judah,’ not a descendant of Levi, though the compiler implies
that the expression must not be understood in a literal sense. And the
priesthood which he established at Dan continued to be a rival of that
of ‘the sons of Aaron’ through nearly five centuries of Israelitish
national life.
Criticism has drawn the conclusion that the Pentateuchal legislation
could not have been in existence at the time when the city of Laish was
taken by the tribe of Dan. The conclusion, however, by no means follows.
It is quite certain that it was not drawn by the compiler of the Book of
Judges, who has preserved the narrative for us; and, after all, he is
more likely to have understood the ideas and feelings of the Israelites
of an earlier generation than is a European critic of the nineteenth
century. In fact, he has given us an explanation of the contradiction
between the Mosaic law and early Israelitish practice, which not only
satisfies all the conditions of the problem, but is on the whole more
probable than the rough-and-ready solution of modern criticism. Israel
in Canaan in the first throes of the invasion was a very different
Israel from that which had lived in the desert under the immediate
control and superintendence of the legislator. It was disorganised, it
was lawless, it was broken up into fragments which were surrounded on
all sides by an alien population whose superior culture and wealth, when
it could not be seized or destroyed, necessarily exercised a profound
influence over the ruder tribes of marauders from the desert. The
Israelites inevitably fell under the spell; they intermarried with the
natives, and adopted their gods and religious ideas.
The proof that this is the true explanation of the disregard or
forgetfulness of the Mosaic law which characterised the age of the
Judges is furnished by the fact that this disregard or forgetfulness was
not universal. Throughout the age of the Judges Israel possessed a
central sanctuary, little though it seems to have been frequented, and
in this central sanctuary the worship of Yahveh was conducted by ‘the
sons of Aaron,’ who kept alive the memory of the legislation in the
wilderness. At Shiloh there was no image, whether graven or molten, no
figures of the teraphim, no idolatrous rites. Instead of an image there
was the ark of the covenant, with nothing within it except the tables of
the law.[287] Shiloh was the only place in Israel where the Pentateuchal
enactments could be observed, and it is only at Shiloh that we find them
to have been so.
But the influence of Shiloh did not extend far. It did not even become
the central sanctuary of Ephraim. The history of Micah is alone
sufficient to prove this. Ephraimite as he was, Shiloh and its
priesthood had no existence for him; his gods and his priests were part
of his own household. Equally conclusive is the history of Gideon.
The ephod after which Israel went ‘a whoring,’ was not dedicated at
Shiloh but at Ophrah, a few miles to the north; and Baal-berith in the
Ephraimitish city of Shechem had more worshippers than Yahveh of Shiloh.
Just as the spirit of Judaism was kept alive in the age of the Maccabees
among a small remnant of the people, amid the obscurity of a country
town, so in the time of the Judges the spirit of the law was preserved
among the mountains of Ephraim in the midst of an insignificant body of
priests.
It was not only with the Canaanites and with its own internal
disorganisation and dissensions that the infant nation of Israel was
called upon to contend. Foreign invasion followed quickly on the
settlement in Palestine. We have learnt from the tablets of Tel
el-Amarna that already before the days of the Exodus the kings of
Mesopotamia had cast longing eyes upon Canaan. To the Semites of the
west Mesopotamia was known as Naharaim, or Aram Naharaim, ‘Aram of the
Two Rivers,’ the Euphrates and Tigris, and the name was borrowed by the
Egyptians under its Aramaic form of Naharain or Nahrina.[288] The
leading state of Mesopotamia had for some centuries been Mitanni, on the
eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from Carchemish, and the rulers
of Mitanni had made themselves masters not only of the district between
the Euphrates and the Tigris, but also of the country westward to the
Orontes. In the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty Mitanni was the
most powerful of the Asiatic kingdoms, and the Pharaohs themselves did
not disdain to unite their solar blood with that of its royal family.
From time to time, the Tel el-Amarna correspondence teaches us, the
princes of Mitanni had interfered in the affairs of Palestine.
Rib-Hadad, the governor of Phœnicia, declares that ‘from of old’ the
kings of Mitanni had been hostile to the ancestors of the Pharaoh, and
his letters are filled with complaints that the Amorites to the north of
Palestine had revolted against Egypt with the help of Mitanni and
Babylonia. Ebed-Tob of Jerusalem, who uses the name Nahrina or Naharain
like the writers of the Old Testament, refers to the struggles that had
taken place on the waters of the Mediterranean when Nahrina and
Babylonia held possession of Canaan. ‘When the ships,’ he says, ‘were on
the sea, the arm of the Mighty King (the god of Jerusalem) overcame
Nahrima and Babylonia; yet now the Khabiri have overcome the cities of
the king’ (of Egypt in Southern Palestine).[289]
It was not the last time that Mitanni and Egypt were ranged on opposite
sides. Ramses II. claims to have defeated the forces of Mitanni, and the
name of the same country appears among the conquests of Ramses III. of
the twentieth dynasty.[290] It is coupled with Carchemish the Hittite
capital among the kingdoms over which the last of the conquering
Pharaohs had gained a victory. In the great struggle which Egypt had to
face against the Philistines and other piratic hordes from the Greek
seas, the northern invaders had carried with them in their train
contingents from the various peoples of Northern Syria through whose
lands they had passed. The Hittites and Amorites, the inhabitants of
Carchemish and Arvad, even the people of Elishah or Cyprus, joined the
invaders of Egypt, and among the captured leaders of the enemy recorded
on the walls of Medinet Habu are the kings of the Hittites and Amorites.
The king of Mitanni, however, is wanting; enemy though he was of the
Pharaoh, he never ventured into Egypt, and his name therefore does not
appear among the conquered chiefs. All that the Pharaoh could do was to
include the name of his kingdom among those whose forces he had
overthrown.[291]
The reign of Ramses III. brings us to the moment when the Israelites
under Joshua were about to enter Canaan. Egypt had annihilated the
enemies who had invaded it, and had carried a war of vengeance into
Palestine and Syria. The Israelite had not as yet crossed the Jordan.
Among the places in Southern Palestine subdued by Ramses are Beth-Anoth
(Josh. xv. 59), Carmel of Judah, Hebron, Ir-Shemesh, Hadashah (Josh. xv.
37), Shalam or Jerusalem, the districts of the Dead Sea and the Jordan,
even Korkha in the land of Moab.[292] There is as yet no trace of
Israel, and Hebron had not as yet become the spoil of the Kenizzite.
The chronology, however, makes it certain that though the Israelites had
not entered Palestine at the time of the Egyptian campaign in that
country, it could not have been very long before they actually did so.
The campaign of Ramses III., in fact, prepared the way for the
Israelitish invasion by weakening the forces of the Canaanites. In any
case, the victory over the northern nations and their allies,
commemorated in the temple of Medinet Habu, must have taken place only a
few years before the Israelitish conquest of southern Canaan.[293]
The king of Mitanni was numbered among the enemies of Egypt;
nevertheless he had not joined the invading hordes in their attack upon
the valley of the Nile. Can it have been that he lingered in what had
once been an Egyptian province, that land of Canaan which his
forefathers had coveted before him? The Egyptian Empire had fallen, the
very existence of Egypt itself was at stake, and the favourable
opportunity had come at last when Naharaim might make herself the
mistress of Western Asia. Babylonia was powerless like Egypt, Assyria
had not yet put forth its strength, and the Hittites barred the old road
which had led from Chaldæa to the West.
The armies of Chushan-rishathaim[294] of Naharaim, accordingly, made
their way through Syria to the southern frontiers of Palestine. They
were no longer associated with those of Babylonia, as in the days of
Ebed-Tob; for a short while Naharaim ruled supreme on the eastern coasts
of the Mediterranean. For eight years both the Canaanites and their
Israelite and Kenizzite invaders were forced to submit to its sway. The
work of conquest was checked by the stronger hand of the foreign power.
How soon after the Israelitish settlement in Canaan the invasion of
Chushan-rishathaim must have been is shown by the fact that Othniel, the
Kenizzite, the brother of Caleb, and the conqueror of Kirjath-Sepher,
was the hero who ‘delivered’ Israel from the foreign yoke. How the
deliverance was effected we do not know, whether through the death of
the king of Naharaim, or through a revolt of the Canaanites and Syrians,
or whether it was only the Israelitish tribes and not the Canaanitish
cities to which it came. What is certain is that both the ‘oppression’
and the deliverance followed closely on the occupation of Palestine by
the Israelites. Caleb belonged to the same generation as Moses and
Joshua, and though Othniel was his ‘younger brother,’ he too must be
counted in it. Joshua can hardly have been dead before Israel had passed
under the yoke of Naharaim.
The supremacy of Naharaim extended to the southernmost borders of
Palestine. It was not an Ephraimite who ‘delivered’ Israel, but the
Edomite chief at Hebron, where the tribe of Judah had not yet
established itself. The fact is noteworthy: the first of the ‘Judges’
was a Kenizzite of Edomite origin, and the yoke which he shook off was
one which pressed equally upon Israelites and Canaanites. In the very
act of conquering and exterminating the Canaanites, Israel was forced to
sympathise and join with them against a common foe.
The sign which gave Othniel the right to be a _Shophêt_ or ‘Judge’ was
twofold. ‘The spirit of Yahveh came upon him,’ and he delivered Israel
from its oppressor. The Shophêt was thus marked out by Yahveh for his
office, and his success in war was a visible token that he had been
called to be the leader of his people. The office was a peculiarly
Canaanitish institution. When Kingship was abolished at Tyre in the time
of Nebuchadrezzar, the kings were replaced by ‘Judges,’ and at Carthage
the ‘Sufetes’ or ‘Judges’ were the chief magistrates of the state.[295]
Whether the institution existed elsewhere in the Semitic world we do not
know. But it was as it were indigenous to the soil of Canaan, and in
submitting themselves to the rule of the Judges, the Israelites
submitted themselves at the same time to Canaanitish influence. It was a
step backward, a step towards absorption into the population around
them, and it is therefore not without reason that the period of the
Judges is a synonym for the period when the religion and manners of
Canaan were dominant among the Israelitish tribes. The Pentateuch
recognised the priest, the lawgiver, and the king; the judge was the
creation of an age in which the Baalim seemed to have gained the mastery
over Yahveh.
That the first of the Judges should have been of Edomite descent is a
striking commentary on what may be termed the catholicity of pre-exilic
Israel. It was not race so much as participation in the worship and
favour of Yahveh, that gave a right to be included among ‘the chosen
people.’ The ancestress of David was a Moabitess, and the Deuteronomic
law lays down that the children of an Edomite, or even of an Egyptian,
‘shall enter into the congregation of the Lord in their third
generation’ (Deut. xxiii. 7, 8).[296] A ‘mixed multitude’ accompanied
the Israelites in their flight from Egypt, and the Kenites, with whom
Moses was allied, shared like the Kenizzites in the conquest of Canaan.
Hebron, the future capital of Judah, and a Levitical city, was a
Kenizzite possession, and the Judah of later days was itself a mixture
of Israelitish and Edomite elements.
How far the authority of Othniel extended it is difficult to say. But
the fact that the enemy, whose yoke he had broken, was an invader from
the north makes it probable that his rule was acknowledged in Mount
Ephraim as well as among the northern tribes. That it was also
acknowledged on the east side of the Jordan there is no proof. Though
the Song of Deborah shows that the solidarity of Israel was recognised,
it also shows that this feeling of a common God and of a common history
had but little political effect. The eastern tribes lived apart from
those of the west, and the judges whom we hear of as rising among them
had purely local powers. Indeed, between Jephthah and the Ephraimites
there was internecine war.
The rule of Othniel could not have lasted long. If he belonged to the
generation which had witnessed the Exodus out of Egypt, he would have
been already an old man at the time of the war with Chushan-rishathaim.
Hardly was he dead before Israel was again under the yoke of an
oppressor. Moab had recovered from its reverses at the hands of the
Amorites and Israelites, the Reubenites had degenerated into mere
Bedâwin squatters in the wadis of the Arnon,[297] and Eglon, the Moabite
king, now prepared to possess himself of southern Canaan. Jericho was
seized, or rather ‘the city of palm-trees’ which had succeeded to the
Canaanitish Jericho, and the ford over the Jordan was therefore secure.
Eglon was followed by bands of Amalekite Bedâwin, eager for spoil, like
the Sutê who in the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence were hired
by the rival princes of Canaan in their quarrels with one another. He
was also allied with the Ammonites, from which we may infer that the
Israelites north of the Arnon, between Moab and Ammon, had been either
expelled or brought into subjection.
The capture of Jericho opened the road to Mount Ephraim to Eglon as it
had done a few years previously to Joshua. But the Israelites were
treated more mercifully than Joshua had treated the Canaanites. Perhaps
they lived in unwalled villages rather than in fortified towns, and
their culture was not high enough to tempt an enemy with the prospect of
a rich booty. At all events we hear of no massacres or burnt cities; the
Israelites are laid under tribute, that is all.
For eighteen years they served Eglon. Then Ehud, the Benjamite, who like
so many of his tribe was left-handed,[298] was chosen to carry the
yearly tribute to the conqueror. Eglon was encamped at Gilgal, in the
very spot where the Israelitish camp had so long stood, and received the
envoys in the upper story of his house, immediately under the roof. When
the tribute-bearers had been dismissed, Ehud, who had gone as far as the
sacred ‘circle’ of hallowed stones,[299] turned back with the excuse
that he had a secret message for the king, which demanded the utmost
privacy. Taking advantage of his solitude, Ehud seized his sword with
his left hand and plunged it into the body of Eglon, then, locking the
door of the room behind him, he escaped through the columned verandah.
Before the murder was discovered he had made his way to Seirath, and
gathered around him the Israelites of Mount Ephraim. The fords across
the Jordan were occupied, and the flying Moabites slain at them to a
man.
It would seem that the Moabite ‘oppression’ did not extend beyond Mount
Ephraim. Ephraim and Benjamin were the tribes who had suffered from it,
and it was over them accordingly that Ehud was judge. His authority does
not appear to have been recognised further to the north or to the south.
In the south, indeed, there were other enemies to be contended against,
and there was another hero who had risen up against them. The Edomite
and Jewish settlers found themselves confronted by those formidable
sea-robbers who had once dared the whole power of Egypt, and were now
established on the southern coast of Palestine. The Philistines, called
Pulista by the Egyptians, Palastâ and Pilistâ by the Assyrians, were
new-comers like the Israelites. They had come from Caphtor, which modern
research tends to identify with the island of Krete, and, along with
their kinsfolk the Zakkal, had taken part in the invasion of Egypt by
the barbarians of the north at the beginning of the reign of Ramses
III.[300] It is the first time that their name is mentioned in the
Egyptian annals. But the Zakkal, who afterwards settled on the
Canaanitish coast to the north of them, and whom they resembled in dress
and features, are mentioned among the invaders against whom Meneptah II.
had to contend, and it is therefore possible that the Philistines also
were included in the host whose assault upon Egypt seems to have been
connected with the Hebrew Exodus. At any rate, at the very moment when
the Israelites were making ready to enter Canaan, the Philistines had
already possessed themselves of the five cities which guarded its
southern frontier. The date of the conquest can be fixed within a few
years. Ramses III. tells us that the barbarians had swept through Syria,
where they had established their camp in the ‘land of the Amorites’
northward of Canaan. Then they fell upon Egypt partly by land, partly by
sea. This may be the time when the five cities of Gaza, Ashkelon,
Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath were captured by the Philistines; if so, Gaza
must have again become Egyptian after the overthrow of the invading
hordes, since Ramses III. includes it among the conquests of his
campaign in southern Palestine. But it could not have remained long in
his hands. The key of Syria, the frontier town which had so long been
garrisoned by Egyptian troops, at last ceased to be Egyptian, and became
Philistine. Henceforth Egypt was cut off from Asia; ‘the way of the
Philistines’ was guarded by the Philistines themselves.[301]
The actual occupation of ‘Philistia’ was doubtless preceded by piratical
descents upon the coast. This, in fact, seems to be indicated by the
statement in the book of Exodus that the Israelitish fugitives were not
led by ‘the way of the Philistines’ lest they should ‘see war.’ From the
time when the northern barbarians first attacked Egypt in the reign of
Meneptah II. down to the final settlement of the Philistines on the
Syrian coast after the Asiatic campaign of Ramses III., the conquest of
the Canaanitish coast was slowly going on. All the while that the
Israelites were in the desert, the Philistines of Caphtor were creating
their new kingdom for themselves. They were one of the ‘hornets’ which
Yahveh had sent before Israel into the Promised Land. When Judah and
Simeon eventually took possession of southern Canaan, they found the
Philistines too firmly established to be dislodged.[302]
It was not only from their walled cities in Palestine that the
Philistines derived their strength. They were within easy reach of their
kinsmen in Krete, and fresh supplies of emigrants were doubtless brought
to them from time to time in Kretan ships. Greek tradition knew of a
time when Minôs, the Kretan king, held command of the sea, and it is
said that the sea between Gaza and Egypt was called ‘the Ionian.’[303]
In the reign of Hezekiah we learn from the Assyrian king Sargon that
when the people of Ashdod deposed their prince the usurper whom they
placed on the throne was still a ‘Greek’ (_Yavani_).
The features of the Philistine are known to us from the Egyptian
sculptures. They offer a marked contrast to those of his Semitic
neighbours. They are, in fact, the features of the typical Greek, with
straight nose, high forehead, and thin lips. Like the Zakkal he wears on
his head a curious sort of pleated cap, which is fastened round the chin
by a strap. Besides the cap, and sometimes a cuirass of leather, his
dress consisted of a kilt, or perhaps a pair of drawers, similar to
those depicted on objects of the ‘Mykenæan’ period, and he was armed
with a small round shield with two handles, a spear, and a short but
broad sword of bronze. The kilt and arms were the same as those of the
Shardana or Sardinians.[304]
The Philistines were thus aliens on the soil of Canaan. Their Hebrew
neighbours stigmatised them as the ‘uncircumcised,’ and in the
Septuagint they are called the Allophyli or ‘Foreigners.’ But they mixed
in time with the Avim whom they had displaced.[305] The Amoritish Anakim
survived at Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod (Josh. xi. 22), and Goliath of Gath
was reputed one of their descendants. The Philistines borrowed,
moreover, numerous words from the Semitic vocabulary, if indeed they did
not adopt ‘the language of Canaan’ altogether. Their five ‘lords’ took
the Semitic title of _seren_, and the supreme god of Gaza was called by
the Semitic name of Marna or ‘Lord.’ Dagon, whose temple stood at Gaza,
was a Babylonian god whose name and worship had been brought to the West
in early days.[306]
The Israelites soon found that the Philistines were dangerous
neighbours. From their five strongholds in the south they issued forth
to plunder and destroy. Judah and Simeon were the first to suffer, while
such parts of the heritage assigned to Dan as had not been annexed to
Ephraim or Benjamin passed into Philistine hands.[307] But the central
and northern tribes did not escape. We learn from an unpublished
Egyptian papyrus in the possession of M. Golénischeff that Dor, a little
to the south of Mount Carmel, had been occupied by the Zakkal, the
kinsmen of the Philistines, so that the whole coast from Gaza to Carmel
may be said to have become Philistine. From hence their raiding parties
penetrated into the interior, and depopulated the villages of Ephraim
and Manasseh, of Zebulon and of Naphtali.
Such at least is the conclusion to be drawn from a comparison of the
Song of Deborah with the statement that the Shamgar ben Anath, Shamgar
the son of Anath, ‘delivered Israel,’ by slaying six hundred Philistines
with an ox-goad. Shamgar, as we gather from the Song, lived but a short
while before Deborah herself, and it was in his days, we further read,
that the Israelitish peasantry were almost exterminated by their
enemies. The Philistine invasion in the time of Samuel was but a
repetition of earlier raids.
The name of Shamgar testifies to the survival of Babylonian influence in
Canaan. It is the Babylonian Sumgir, while Anath is the Babylonian
goddess Anat, the consort of Anu, the god of the sky. In one of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets two Syrians are referred to, who bear the names of
Ben-Ana and Anat.[308] Does this survival of Babylonian names imply a
survival also of the Babylonian script and language? At all events the
worship of Babylonian deities still survived, and an Israelite and a
‘judge’ was named after one of them.
Deborah couples with Shamgar the otherwise unknown Jael. The reading is
possibly corrupt, another name having been assimilated to that of the
wife of the Kenite. But it is also possible that it is due to a marginal
gloss which has crept into the text.
However this may be, the age of Shamgar overlapped that of the
prophetess Deborah. ‘In the days of Shamgar,’ she says, ‘the highways
were unoccupied ... until that I, Deborah, arose—that I arose a mother
in Israel.’ It was not only from the incursions of the Philistines that
the Israelites suffered. In the north the tribes were called upon to
face a confederacy of the Canaanitish states. It was the last effort of
Canaan to stem the gradual advance of Israel, and the struggle was
decided in the plain of Megiddo, as it had been in the older days of
Egyptian invasion and conquest.
Megiddo and Taanach were still Canaanitish fortresses; so, too, was
Beth-shean, in the valley of the Jordan,[309] and the Israelites of
Mount Ephraim were thus cut off from their brethren in the north. Here
Jabin, the king of Hazor, was the dominant Canaanite prince, whose
standard was followed by the other ‘kings of Canaan.’ Twenty years long,
we are told, ‘he mightily oppressed the children of Israel,’ ‘for he had
nine hundred chariots of iron.’[310] Two accounts of the ‘oppression’
and the war that put an end to it have been handed down, one a prose
version, which the compiler of the book of Judges has made part of his
narrative, while the other is contained in the song of victory composed
by Deborah after the overthrow of the foe.
Critics have found discrepancies between the two accounts, and have
maintained that where they differ the prose version is unhistorical. In
the latter the Canaanitish leader is the king of Hazor, Sisera being his
general, who ‘dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles,’ whereas in the song
there is no mention of Hazor, and Sisera appears as a Canaanitish king.
Moreover, it is alleged that, according to the Song (v. 12), Barak seems
to have belonged to the tribe of Issachar, while in the prose narrative
he is said to have come from Kadesh of Naphtali, and it is further
asserted that Hazor had already been taken and destroyed in the time of
Joshua.
The author of the book of Judges, however, failed to see the
discrepancies which have been discovered by the modern European critic,
and he has accordingly set the prose narrative by the side of the Song
without note or comment. As the king of Hazor did not personally take
part in the battle on the banks of the Kishon, there was no occasion for
any reference to him in the Song, and that the commander of his army
should have been one of his royal allies is surely nothing
extraordinary. In the Song, Barak is expressly distinguished from ‘the
princes of Issachar,’[311] and the question of the destruction of Hazor
by Joshua has already been dealt with. It is a gratuitous supposition
that the introduction of Jabin into the narrative, and the reference to
Harosheth, are the inventions of popular legend or interested
historians.
The prophetess Deborah, the wife of Lapidoth, ‘judged Israel’ at the
time of the war. Her name means ‘Bee,’ and a connection has been sought
between it and the fact that the priestesses of Apollo at Delphi, of
Dêmêter, of Artemis, and of Kybelê, were called ‘bees,’ while the high
priest of Artemis at Ephesus bore the title of the ‘king-bee.’[312] We
might as well look for a connection between the name of her husband and
the ‘lamps’ of the sanctuary. Deborah ‘judged Israel’ because she was a
prophetess, because she was the interpretress of the will of Yahveh,
whose spirit breathed within her. The ‘judgments’ she delivered were
accordingly the judgments of Yahveh Himself, and the indwelling of His
spirit was the sign of her claim to the office of ‘judge.’ We hear of
other prophetesses in Israel besides Deborah; Huldah, for example, who
was consulted by the king and the priests in the reign of Josiah. The
position held by the prophetess prevented the Israelitish women from
sinking into the abject condition of the women among some of the Arab
and other Semitic tribes. In fact, women have played a leading part in
Hebrew history. It has long ago been noticed that the mother had much to
do with the character of the successive kings of Judah, and Athaliah of
Samaria filled a prominent place in the history of the northern kingdom.
Prophecy was no respecter of persons; it came to rich and poor, to
learned and simple, to men and women alike, and upon whomsoever the
spirit of prophecy fell, it made him fit to be the leader and the
counsellor of his people. Deborah had been marked out by Yahveh Himself
to be the judge of Israel.
She dwelt, we are told, under the palm-tree of Deborah, between Ramah
and Beth-el in Mount Ephraim. She was, therefore, presumably of
Ephraimitish descent, though the conclusion does not necessarily follow,
and the palm-tree which was called after her continued to be a landmark
on the high-road down to the time when the narrative in the book of
Judges was written. There was another tree, a terebinth, and not a palm,
which stood within the sacred precincts of Beth-el itself, and also bore
the name of Deborah, but this Deborah was said to have been Rebekah’s
nurse, whose tomb was pointed out under the branches of the tree.[313]
The writers of the Old Testament have carefully distinguished between
the two trees; it has been reserved for modern criticism to confound
them.
With a woman’s insight and enthusiasm, Deborah perceived that the time
had come when the highways should no longer be deserted, and when the
northern tribes of Israel should be freed from their bondage to the
Canaanite, and she also perceived who it was that was destined to lead
the Israelitish troops to victory. This was Barak of Kadesh in Naphtali,
the near neighbour of Jabin and Sisera. Like the Carthaginian Barcas, he
bore a name—‘the Lightning’—which fitly symbolised the vengeance he was
born to take on the enemies of Israel.[314] But Barak shrank from the
undertaking at first, and it was not until the prophetess had consented
to go with him to Kadesh that he summoned his countrymen together, and
occupied the summit of Mount Tabor. Here, protected by the forests which
clothed its slopes, he trained and multiplied his forces until he felt
strong enough to attack the foe. Then he descended into the plain of
Megiddo, where the Canaanitish host was marching from Harosheth to meet
him. It was the old battlefield of Canaan; it was there that in the days
of the Egyptian conquerors the fate of the country had been decided and
the Canaanitish princes under Hittite commanders from Kadesh on the
Orontes had been utterly overthrown.
In the camp on the lofty summit of Tabor, Barak had done more than train
his men. Time had been given them in which to provide themselves with
arms. Deborah declares that in the days of the oppression a shield or
spear had not been seen ‘among forty thousand in Israel.’[315] The
statement receives explanation from what we are told of the policy of
the Philistines at a later date. When they had laid the Israelites under
tribute in the time of Samuel, they banished all the smiths from the
land of Israel, to prevent ‘the Hebrews’ from making themselves ‘swords
and spears’ (1 Sam. xiii. 19). Agricultural implements alone were
allowed (ver. 20). It would seem that a similar policy had been pursued
by the Philistines and Canaanites in the earlier age of Deborah, though
probably with less success. At all events Heber the Kenite, or itinerant
‘smith,’ still pitched his tent in Israelitish territory, and his wife
Jael sympathised with the Israelites rather than with their Canaanitish
lords.
When Thothmes III. of Egypt met the confederated kings of Canaan in the
plain of Megiddo, they were led by the Hittite sovereign of Kadesh on
the Orontes. It is possible that Barak was called upon to meet a similar
combination of forces. Sisera is not a Semitic name, while, as Mr.
Tomkins has pointed out, it finds striking analogies in such Hittite
names as Khata-sar, Khilip-sar, and Pi-siri[s]. The Hittite power at
Kadesh on the Orontes had not yet passed away. It still existed in the
time of David, when it formed one of the frontiers of the Israelitish
kingdom.[316] In the age of the Tel el-Amarna letters we find the
Hittites intriguing in Palestine along with Mitanni or Naharaim, and it
is not likely that they would have been less disposed to resume their
old influence in that country when Egypt was no longer to be feared.
Sisera may not only have been the commander of the Canaanitish forces,
but also a Hittite prince, nominally the ally of Jabin, but in reality
his suzerain lord. He dwelt, we are told, in ‘Harosheth of the
Gentiles,’ an otherwise unknown place. It may have been in ‘Galilee of
the Gentiles’ (Is. ix. 1), but it may also have been further north among
the Gentile Hittites of Kadesh.[317]
The battle took place on the banks of the Kishon, and ended in a
complete victory for the Israelites. The nine hundred iron chariots of
Sisera availed him nothing; ‘the stars in their courses’ had fought
against him. He escaped on foot to the tent of Heber the Kenite, whose
wife Jael received him as a guest, and then murdered him by driving a
peg of the tent through his temples while he lay asleep. When Barak
arrived in pursuit, Jael showed him the corpse of his enemy.
The pæan of triumph, ‘sung by Deborah and Barak’ on the day of the
victory, is one of the oldest fragments of Hebrew poetry. To its
antiquity and the archaic character of its language are due the many
corruptions of the text. Some of the passages in it are quite
unintelligible as they stand, and the conjectural emendations that have
been proposed for them are seldom acceptable except to their
authors.[318] But, as a whole, the pæan is not only a magnificent relic
of ancient Hebrew song, full of fire and vivid imagery, it is also a
document of the highest value for the historian. It gives us a picture
of Israelitish life and thought in the age of the Judges, untouched by
the hands of compilers and historians, and few have been hardy enough to
question its genuineness. It is a solid proof that the traditional view
of Israelitish history is more correct than that which modern criticism
would substitute for it, and that the ‘development’ of Israelitish
religion, of which we have heard so much, is a mere product of the
imagination. The belief in Yahveh displayed in the Song is as
uncompromising as that of later Judaism; Yahveh is the God of Israel,
who has fought for His people, and beside Him there is no other god. The
monotheism of Deborah is the monotheism of the Pentateuch. Nor is the
song less of a witness to the truth of the history which we have in the
Pentateuch and the book of Joshua. It tells us that Yahveh revealed
Himself to Israel on Mount Sinai, and it distinguishes the tribes one
from the other, and assigns to them the territories which bore their
names.
The Song began with words which, as we see from Deut. xxxiii. 2, Ps.
lxviii. 7, were a common property of Hebrew poetry.
‘For the avenging of Israel,
When the people gave themselves as a freewill offering,
Praise ye Yahveh!
Hear, O ye kings, give ear, O ye princes,
I will sing unto Yahveh, even I,
I will make music to Yahveh the God of Israel.
O Yahveh, when thou wentest forth from Seir,
When thou marchedst out of the field of Edom,
The earth trembled, the heavens also dropped water.[319]
The mountains melted from the face of Yahveh,
Even Sinai itself from before Yahveh the God of Israel.
In the days of Shamgar ben-Anath,
[In the days of Jael][320] the roads were deserted,
And the travellers walked along by-paths.
The peasantry failed, in Israel did they fail,
Until I, Deborah, arose,
I arose a mother in Israel.
Then was war (in) the gates (?):[321]
A shield was not seen, or a spear,
Among forty thousand in Israel.
My heart (saith) to the lawgivers of Israel,
Who gave themselves as a freewill offering among the people:
Praise ye Yahveh!
Ye that ride on white asses,
Ye that sit on cloths,
And ye that walk on the road, shout ye!
Above the voice of the [noisy ones] at the places of drawing water,
There[322] shall they rehearse the righteous acts of Yahveh,
Even righteous acts towards his peasants in Israel,
(Saying), “Then to the gates descended the people of Yahveh.”
Awake, awake, Deborah,
Awake, awake, utter a song![323]
Arise, Barak,
And capture thy capturers,[324]
O son of Abinoam!
Then to the nobles descended the people of Yahveh (?),[325]
They descended unto me among the heroes.
Out of Ephraim (came they) whose roots[326] (are) in Amalek,
Behind thee, O Benjamin, among thy clans.
Out of Machir descended lawgivers,
And out of Zebulon they that handle the staff of the scribe.
And the princes of Issachar were with Deborah,
For Issachar was as Barak;
In the valley (of the Kishon) were they sped on the feet,
Among the wadis of Reuben great were the searchings of heart.
Why didst thou stray among the sheep-folds
To hear the bleatings of the flocks?
For the wadis of Reuben great were the searchings of heart.
Gilead abode beyond the Jordan;
And Dan, why does he sojourn in ships?
Asher stayed on the sea-shore,
And abides in his havens.
Zebulon is a people that has jeopardied its life unto the death,
And Issachar also on the heights of the plain.
Kings came and fought,
Then fought the kings of Canaan
At Taanach on the waters of Megiddo;
They took no spoil of silver.
From heaven fought the stars,
In their courses they fought against Sisera.[327]
The torrent of Kishon swept them away;
A torrent of slaughters is the torrent Kishon.
Thou hast trodden down the strong ones, O my soul![328]
Then did the horse-hoofs strike (the ground)
Through the prancings of his steeds.
Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of Yahveh,
Curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof
Because they came not to the help of Yahveh,
To the help of Yahveh among the heroes.
Blessed above women be Jael,
The wife of Heber the Kenite,
Above women in the tent may she be blessed!
Water he asked, milk she gave,
In a lordly dish she brought forth butter:
Her hand she put to the tent-pin
And her right-hand to the workman’s hammer,
And with the hammer she smote Sisera, she shattered his head,
And struck and pierced his temples.
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down,
At her feet he bowed, he fell;
Where he bowed, there lay he dead.
Behind the window looked and cried
The mother of Sisera behind the lattice:
“Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why tarry the wheels of his cars?”
The wisest of her waiting-women answered her,
Yea, she returned answer to herself:
“Have they not found and divided the spoil,
A damsel or two to each man,
A spoil of many-coloured garments to Sisera,
A spoil of garments of many-coloured needlework,
Two garments of many-coloured needlework for the neck of the
spoiler.”[329]
So may all thine enemies perish, O Yahveh;
But may those who love him be as the rising of the sun in his
might!’
Of Barak and Deborah we hear no more. The next judge and deliverer who
appears upon the canvas is an Abi-ezrite of Manasseh, who came from the
northern borders of Ephraim between Ophrah and Shechem. His father was
Joash, the head, it would seem, of the clan. But he himself bears a
double name. It is as Gideon, the ‘cutter-down’ of his father’s idol,
that he is first introduced to us. In later history his name is
Jerubbaal. The latter name is said to have been given him because he had
thrown down the altar of Baal, and is interpreted to mean ‘Let Baal
plead against him.’[330] But the other Old Testament examples we have
met with of the interpretation of proper names may well make us hesitate
about accepting this. They are all mere plays upon words, mere ‘popular
etymologies,’ which have no claim to be regarded as history. Whether the
philology is that of an ancient Hebrew writer or of a modern critic, its
conclusions do not belong to the domain of the historian.
Jerubbaal signifies ‘Baal will contend,’ not ‘Baal will plead against
him,’ and therefore really has a meaning exactly the reverse of that
ascribed to it in the narrative. The name seems substantially identical
with that of Rib-Hadad, the governor of Phœnicia in the age of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets. Joash, the father of Jerubbaal, was a worshipper of
Baal, and consequently there was nothing strange in his calling his son
after his god. It is only as Jerubbaal that the future judge was known
to the generation that followed him,[331] and his successor in the
kingdom of Manasseh was called even in his own day ‘Abimelech the son of
Jerubbaal.’[332] It has been suggested that Jerubbaal and Gideon were
two different personages, whom tradition has amalgamated together,[333]
but double names of the kind were not unknown in Oriental antiquity.
Solomon himself also bore the name of Jedidiah (2 Sam. xii. 25), and
Gideon, ‘the cutter-down,’ was not an inappropriate epithet for the
conqueror of the Midianites. There was a good reason why the pious
Israelite of a later generation should shrink from admitting that one of
his national heroes had borne a name compounded with that of Baal.[334]
The tribes of the desert, Amalekites, Midianites, and those Benê-Qedem
or ‘Children of the East,’ whom an Egyptian papyrus of the twelfth
dynasty places in the neighbourhood of Edom,[335] had fallen upon the
lands of the settled fellahin, as their Bedâwin descendants still do
whenever the Turkish soldiery are insufficient to keep them away. Year
by year bands of raiders swarmed over the cultivated fields, murdering
the peasants and carrying off their crops. At first it was Gilead that
suffered, but the Hebrews were weak and divided, and the robbers of the
desert were soon emboldened to cross the Jordan, and extend their raids
as far as the western frontiers of Israel. ‘They destroyed the increase
of the earth, till thou come unto Gaza, and left no sustenance for
Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass.’
At last the Lord sent a prophet to the people and an angel to Gideon the
Abi-ezrite. Gideon was threshing wheat by the winepress near the sacred
terebinth of Ophrah. Here, under the shadow of the tree, was an altar of
Baal, and by the side of it the cone of stone which symbolised the
goddess Asherah. The angel summoned Gideon to rise and deliver Israel,
and as a sign that he was indeed the angel of Yahveh he touched with his
staff the offerings of flesh and unleavened cakes that Gideon had made
to him, so that fire rose out of the rock and consumed them all. On the
threshing-floor Gideon built an altar to Yahveh, like that more stately
sanctuary which David raised in later days on the threshing-floor of
rock which had belonged to Araunah the Jebusite.
Recent criticism has discovered in the history of Jerubbaal two
different and mutually inconsistent narratives, which are again
subdivided among a variety of writers. To these some critics would add a
third version of the story, which is supposed to be referred to in Is.
x. 26, though others maintain that the reference in the book of Isaiah
is to the first of the two narratives. It cannot be denied that the
history of the war against the Midianites in its present form is
confused, and that it is difficult to construct from it a clear and
intelligible picture of the course of events. That the compiler of the
book of Judges should have made use of more than one narrative, if such
existed, is indeed only natural, and what a conscientious historian
would be bound to do. But to distinguish minutely the narratives one
from the other, much more to analyse them into still smaller fragments,
is the work of Sisyphus. It is even more impossible than to distinguish
between Rice and Besant in _The Golden Butterfly_ or _Celia’s Arbour_.
The historian must leave all such literary trifling to the collectors of
lists of words, and content himself with comparing and analysing the
facts recorded in the story.[336]
The altar raised by Gideon was dedicated to Yahveh-shalom, ‘the Yahveh
of Peace,’ and it was still standing at Ophrah when the narrative
relating to it was written.[337] Its name shows that it could hardly
have been built before Gideon had returned in peace from the Midianitish
war. There was much that had first to be done.
Gideon’s first task was to destroy the symbol of Asherah and the altar
of Baal. The revelation made to him had been made in the name of Yahveh,
and it was in the name of Yahveh alone that he was about to lead his
countrymen to victory. It is true that between Yahveh and Baal the
Israelite villager of the day saw but little difference. Yahveh was
addressed as Baal or ‘Lord,’[338] and the local altars that were
dedicated to Him in most instances did but take the place of the older
altars of a Canaanitish Baal. Mixture between Israelites and Canaanites,
moreover, had brought with it a mixture in religion. Along with the
title, Yahveh had assumed the attributes of a Baal, at all events among
the mass of the people. Joash and the villagers, who demanded that
Gideon should be put to death for destroying the altar of Baal,
doubtless thought that they were zealous for the God of Israel. It was
the symbol of Asherah only which was the token of a foreign cult.
Perhaps the answer made by Joash to the charge against his son has been
coloured by the theology of the later historian. It breathes rather the
spirit of an age when the antagonism between Yahveh and Baal had become
acute than that of one who was himself a worshipper of Baal and Asherah,
and whose son in the hour of victory made an idol out of the enemy’s
spoil. The Baal worshipped by the villagers of Abi-ezer was regarded as
Yahveh himself, and hence it was that the offence committed by Gideon
against him was an offence committed against the national God, and
therefore punishable with death. To set him up as another god in
opposition to the God of Israel carries us down to the age of Elijah,
when the subjects of Ahab were called upon to choose between the Yahveh
who had led them out of Egypt and the Phœnician Baal. It belongs to the
same period as the etymological play on the name of Jerubbaal.
There was a special reason why Jerubbaal should thus have come forward
to deliver his countrymen from the Midianites. The Bedâwin raiders had
slain his brothers in a previous struggle at Mount Tabor (viii. 18-21).
Jerubbaal thus had a blood-feud to avenge. He was the last and
presumably the youngest of his family, and upon him therefore devolved
the duty of revenging his brothers’ death. Moreover, it would appear
from the words of the Midianite chiefs that Joash and his sons were not
only the heads of their clan, but that they also exercised a sort of
kingly authority in Ophrah and its neighbourhood. The history of
Abimelech seems to imply that the family of Abi-ezer had succeeded to
the power and even the name of the Canaanitish ‘kings’ of Shechem, and
that the subsequent ingratitude of the inhabitants of Shechem to the
house of Jerubbaal was due to jealousy of the preference displayed by it
for Ophrah. Shechem contained a large Canaanitish element which was
wanting at Ophrah, where the population was more purely Israelitish. If
Joash were thus king of a mixed population, recognised by Canaanites and
Israelites alike, we can understand why by the side of the altar of Baal
there stood also the symbol of the Canaanitish goddess. The very fact
that the sanctuary of Ophrah belonged to him (vi. 25) indicates that he
possessed royal prerogatives. Even at Jerusalem the temple of Solomon
was as it were the chapel of the kings.[339]
It has been suggested that the Baal whose altar stood on the land of
Joash at Ophrah was the Baal-berith or ‘Baal of the Covenant,’
worshipped at Shechem,[340] and that the ‘covenant’ over which the god
presided was that made between the Canaanites of Shechem and their
Hebrew master. Doubtless the two elements in the population would have
interpreted the name in a different way. For the Hebrews the ‘Baal of
the Covenant’ would have been Yahveh; for the Canaanites he would have
been the local sun-god. But there is nothing to prove that the
attributes of the Baals of Ophrah and Shechem were the same, or that
they were adored under the same form. Indeed, the fact that the altar
erected by Jerubbaal at Ophrah was dedicated to the ‘Yahveh of Peace’
tells rather in a contrary direction. Shechem had its Baal-berith, while
Ophrah may have had its Baal-shalom. While the one commemorated the
covenant that had been entered into between the two parts of the
population, the other would have commemorated its ‘peaceful’ settlement.
For the Canaanite it was a covenant, for the Hebrew it was peace.
The struggle at Mount Tabor, in which the brothers of Jerubbaal had
fallen, laid the fruitful valley of Jezreel at the feet of the Bedâwin
plunderers. The plain of Megiddo was now in the hands of the Israelites.
The battle on the banks of the Kishon had broken for ever the power of
the Canaanites and their ‘chariots of iron,’ and they were now tributary
to Manasseh.[341] The Canaanite townsman and the Israelitish peasant
were now living in peaceful intermixture, and the torrent of raiders
from the desert fell upon both alike. We hear no more of any attempts
made by the older population to shake off the Hebrew yoke; it suffers
from the Midianite invasion equally with its Hebrew masters, and the
family of Joash govern it as much as they govern the Israelites
themselves. Jerubbaal is the deliverer of the Canaanite as well as of
the Israelite.
From Ophrah he sends messengers throughout Manasseh, as well as to the
tribes of Asher, Zebulon, and Naphtali, and their fighting-men gather
together at his summons. He thus acts like a king, and is obeyed like a
king. Though he may not have actually borne the royal title, he was more
than a mere ‘judge.’ Barak may have assumed the name and prerogatives of
the Canaanitish kings he had conquered, and have passed them on to the
family of Ebi-ezer. At any rate the power of Joash must have extended
beyond Shechem and Ophrah; all Manasseh obeys the call of his son, and
even the more distant northern tribes come at his bidding. The
subjugation of the Canaanites had demanded a head to the state, and
their union with their conquerors implied an organised community under a
common king.
It was, however, with three hundred chosen followers that Jerubbaal made
his first attack upon the foe. Encouraged by a dream, he fell upon their
camp by night, and his followers, breaking the pitchers they carried
with them, and waving torches in their left hands, caused such a panic
among the undisciplined hordes of the desert that they fled in all
directions.[342] The rout of the enemy was completed by the rest of the
Israelitish army, which pursued the Midianites eastward towards the
Jordan. Part of them under the shêkhs Oreb and Zeeb made for the ford at
Beth-barah, where, however, they were intercepted by the Ephraimites,
and their chiefs slain at ‘the rock of Oreb’ and the ‘winepress of
Zeeb.’[343]