xxi. It has been maintained by some critics that there is a

double rôle assigned to one and the same person, only that some maintain that the Jabin of Josh. xi. has been transferred to the time of the Judges, while others make out that the Jabin of Deborah was carried back to the time of the conquest.

** Renan thinks that the principal crossing must have taken place opposite Jericho, as is apparent from the account in Josh, ii., iii.

*** Carl Niebuhr believes that he has discovered the exact spot at the ford of Admah, near Succoth.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph in Lortet.

The latter at once came into contact with a population having a higher civilization than themselves, and well equipped for a vigorous resistance; the walled towns which had defied the veterans of the Pharaohs had not much to fear from the bands of undisciplined Israelites wandering in their neighbourhood. Properly speaking, there were no pitched battles between them, but rather a succession of raids or skirmishes, in which several citadels would successively fall into the hands of the invaders. Many of these strongholds, harassed by repeated attacks, would prefer to come to terms with the enemy, and would cede or sell them some portion of their territory; others would open their gates freely to the strangers, and their inhabitants would ally themselves by intermarriage with the Hebrews. Judah and the remaining descendants of Simeon and Levi established themselves in the south; Levi comprised but a small number of families, and made no important settlements; whereas Judah took possession of nearly the whole of the mountain district separating the Shephelah from the western shores of the Dead Sea, while Simeon made its abode close by on the borders of the desert around the wells of Beersheba.*

* Wellhausen has remarked that the lot of Levi must not be separated from that of Simeon, and, as the remnant of Simeon allied themselves with Judah, that of Levi also must have shared the patrimony of Judah.

The descendants of Rachel and her handmaid received as their inheritance the regions situated more to the centre of the country, the house of Joseph taking the best domains for its branches of Ephraim and Manasseh. Ephraim received some of the old Canaanite sanctuaries, such as Ramah, Bethel, and Shiloh, and it was at the latter spot that they deposited the ark of the covenant. Manasseh settled to the north of Ephraim, in the hills and valleys of the Carmel group, and to Benjamin were assigned the heights which overlook the plain of Jericho. Four of the less important tribes, Issachar, Asher, Naphtali, and Zebulon, ventured as far north as the borders of Tyre and Sidon, behind the Phoenician littoral, but were prevented by the Canaanites and Amorites from spreading over the plain, and had to confine themselves to the mountains. All the fortresses commanding the passes of Tabor and Carmel, Megiddo, Taanach, Ibleam, Jezreel, Endor, and Bethshan remained inviolate, and formed as it were an impassable barrier-line between the Hebrews of Galilee and their brethren of Ephraim. The Danites were long before they found a resting-place; they attempted to insert themselves to the north of Judah, between Ajalon and Joppa, but were so harassed by the Amorites, that they had to content themselves with the precarious tenure of a few towns such as Zora, Shaalbîn, and Eshdol. The foreign peoples of the Shephelah and the Canaanite cities almost all preserved their autonomy; the Israelites had no chance against them wherever they had sufficient space to put into the field large bodies of infantry or to use their iron-bound chariots. Finding it therefore impossible to overcome them, the tribes were forced to remain cut off from each other in three isolated groups of unequal extent which they were powerless to connect: in the centre were Joseph, Benjamin, and Dan; in the south, Judah, Levi, and Simeon; while Issachar, Asher, Naphtali, and Zebulon lay to the north.

The period following the occupation of Canaan constituted the heroic age of the Hebrews. The sacred writings agree in showing that the ties which bound the twelve tribes together were speedily dissolved, while their fidelity and obedience to God were relaxed with the growth of the young generations to whom Moses or Joshua were merely names. The conquerors “dwelt among the Canaanites: the Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite: and they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods. And the children of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord their God, and served the Baalim and the Asheroth.” *

When they had once abandoned their ancient faith, political unity was not long preserved. War broke out between one tribe and another; the stronger allowed the weaker to be oppressed by the heathen, and were themselves often powerless to retain their independence. In spite of the thousands of men among them, all able to bear arms, they fell an easy prey to the first comer; the Amorites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, and the Philistines, all oppressed them in turn, and repaid with usury the ills which Joshua had inflicted on the Canaanites. “Whithersoever they went out, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil, as the Lord had spoken, and as the Lord had sworn unto them: and they were sore distressed. And the Lord raised up judges, which saved them out of the hand of those that spoiled them. And yet they hearkened not unto their judges, for they went a-whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves down unto them: they turned aside quickly out of the way wherein their fathers walked obeying the commandments of the Lord; but they did not so. And when the Lord raised them up judges, then the Lord was with the judge, and saved them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge: for it repented the Lord because of their groaning by reason of them that oppressed them and vexed them. But it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they turned back, and dealt more corruptly than their fathers, in following other gods to serve them, and to bow down unto them; they ceased not from their doings, nor from their stubborn way.” * The history of this period lacks the unity and precision with which we are at first tempted to credit it.

* Judges ii. 15-19.

The Israelites, when transplanted into the promised land, did not immediately lose the nomadic habits they had acquired in the desert. They retained the customs and prejudices they had inherited from their fathers, and for many years treated the peasantry, whose fields they had devastated, with the same disdain that the Bedawin of our own day, living in the saddle, lance in hand, shows towards the fellahîn who till the soil and bend patiently over the plough. The clans, as of old, were impatient of all regular authority; each tribe tended towards an isolated autonomy, a state of affairs which merited reprisals from the natives and encouraged hatred of the intruders, and it was only when the Canaanite oppression became unendurable that those who suffered most from it united themselves to make a common effort, and rallied for a moment round the chief who was ready to lead them. Many of these liberators must have acquired an ephemeral popularity, and then have sunk into oblivion together with the two or three generations who had known them; those whose memory remained green among their kinsmen were known by posterity as the judges of Israel.*

* The word “judges,” which has been adopted to designate these rulers, is somewhat misleading, as it suggests the idea of an organized civil magistracy. The word “shophet,” the same that we meet with in classical times under the form _suffetes_, had indeed that sense, but its primary meaning denotes a man invested with an absolute authority, regular or otherwise; it would be better translated _chief, prince, captain_.

These judges were not magistrates invested with official powers and approved by the whole nation, or rulers of a highly organised republic, chosen directly by God or by those inspired by Him. They were merely local chiefs, heroes to their own immediate tribe, well known in their particular surroundings, but often despised by those only at a short distance from them. Some of them have left only a name behind them, such as Shamgar, Ibzan, Tola, Elon, and Abdon; indeed, some scholars have thrown doubts on the personality of a few of them, as, for instance, Jair, whom they affirm to have personified a Gileadite clan, and Othnîel, who is said to represent one of the Kenite families associated with the children of Israel.* Others, again, have come down to us through an atmosphere of popular tradition, the elements of which modern criticism has tried in vain to analyse. Of such unsettled and turbulent times we cannot expect an uninterrupted history:** some salient episodes alone remain, spread over a period of nearly two centuries, and from these we can gather some idea of the progress made by the Israelites, and observe their stages of transition from a cluster of semi-barbarous hordes to a settled nation ripe for monarchy.

* The name Tola occurs as that of one of the clans of Issachar (Gen. xlvi. 13; Numb. xxvi. 23); Elon was one of the clans of Zebulon (Gen. xlvi. 14; Numb. xxvi. 26)

** Renan, however, believes that the judges “formed an almost continuous line, and that there merely lacks a descent from father to son to make of them an actual dynasty.” The chronology of the _Book of Judges_ appears to cover more than four centuries, from Othnîel to Samson, but this computation cannot be relied on, as “forty years” represents an indefinite space of time. We must probably limit this early period of Hebrew history to about a century and a half, from cir. 1200 to 1050 B.C.

The first of these episodes deals merely with a part, and that the least important, of the tribes settled in Central Canaan.* The destruction of the Amorite kingdoms of Heshbon and Bashan had been as profitable to the kinsmen of the Israelites, Ammon and Moab, as it had been to the Israelites themselves.

* The episode of Othnîel and Cushan-rishathaim, placed at the beginning of the history of this period (Judges iii. 8- 11), is, by general consent, regarded as resting on a worthless tradition.

The Moabites had followed in the wake of the Hebrews through all the surrounding regions of the Dead Sea; they had pushed on from the banks of the Arnon to those of the Jabbok, and at the time of the Judges were no longer content with harassing merely Reuben and Gad.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the original in the Louvre.

They were a fine race of warlike, well-armed Beda-wins. Jericho had fallen into their hands, and their King Eglon had successfully scoured the entire hill-country of Ephraim,* so that those who wished to escape being pillaged had to safeguard themselves by the payment of an annual tribute.

* The text seems to infer (Judges iii. 13-15) that, after having taken the Oily of Palm Trees, i.e. Jericho (Deut. xxxiv. 3; 2 Ghron. xxviii. 15), Eglon had made it his residence, which makes the story incomprehensible from a geographical point of view. But all difficulties would disappear if we agreed to admit that in ver. 15 the name of the capital of Eglon has dropped out.

Ehud the Left-handed concealed under his garments a keen dagger, and joined himself to the Benjamite deputies who were to carry their dues to the Moabite sovereign. The money having been paid, the deputies turned homewards, but when they reached the cromlech of Gilgal,* and were safe beyond the reach of the enemy, Ehud retraced his steps, and presenting himself before the palace of Eglon in the attitude of a prophet, announced that he had a secret errand to the king, who thereupon commanded silence, and ordered his servants to leave him with the divine messenger in his summer parlour.

* The cromlech at Gilgal was composed of twelve stones, which, we are told, were erected by Joshua as a remembrance of the crossing of the Jordan (Josh. iv. 19-24).

“And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat. And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the sword from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly: and the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, for he drew not the sword out of his belly; and it came out behind.” Then Ehud locked the doors and escaped. “Now when he was gone out, his servants came; and they saw, and, behold, the doors of the parlour were locked; and they said, Surely he covereth his feet in his summer chamber.” But by the time they had forced an entrance, Ehud had reached Gilgal and was in safety. He at once assembled the clans of Benjamin, occupied the fords of the Jordan, massacred the bands of Moabites scattered over the plain of Jericho, and blocked the routes by which the invaders attempted to reach the hill-country of Ephraim. Almost at the same time the tribes in Galilee had a narrow escape from a still more formidable enemy.* They had for some time been under the Amorite yoke, and the sacred writings represent them at this juncture as oppressed either by Sisera of Harosheth-ha-Goyîm or by a second Jabin, who was able to bring nine hundred chariots of iron into the field.** At length the prophetess Deborah of Issachar sent to Barak of Kadesh a command to assemble his people, together with those of Zebulon, in the name of the Lord;*** she herself led the contingents of Issachar, Ephraim, and Machir to meet him at the foot of Tabor, where the united host is stated to have comprised forty thousand men. Sisera,**** who commanded the Canaanite force, attacked the Israelite army between Taanach and Megiddo in that plain of Kishon which had often served as a battle-field during the Egyptian campaigns.

* The text tells us that, after the time of Ehud, the land had rest eighty years (Judges iii. 30). This, again, is one of those numbers which represent an indefinite space of time.

** It has been maintained that two versions are here blended together in the text, one in which the principal part is played by Sisera, the other in which it is attributed to Jabin. The episode of Deborah and Barak (Judges iv., v.) comprises a narrative in prose (chap, iv.), and the song (chap, v.) attributed to Deborah. The prose account probably is derived from the song. The differences in the two accounts may be explained as having arisen partly from an imperfect understanding of the poetic text, and partly from one having come down from some other source.

*** Some critics suppose that the prose narrative (Judges