xii. 20), the name appears as Shimronmeron, and this reminds us of

Chapter 154,914 wordsPublic domain

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: