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.