The turn of Midian came next. The Midianite tribes were overthrown, and their five shêkhs slain, one of whom, Rekem, gave his name to the city which is better known as Petra. ‘Balaam also, the son of Beor, they slew with the sword.’ The Midianite villages and forts were burned to the ground, and the captives and spoil were brought to the Israelitish camp. Here they were divided among the people, Yahveh and His priests receiving their share. Out of a total of 16,000 captives, thirty-two slaves were given to the Lord. Henceforth it became the rule that the spoil taken in war should be divided into two equal parts, one-half for the fighting men, the rest for the people as a whole; and that while the fighting men had to deliver up only one share in five hundred to the Levites, the priestly tribute levied on the rest of the ‘congregation’ was as much as one in fifty. The regulation was reinforced by David after his defeat of the Amalekites when his companions clamoured for the whole of the spoil (1 Sam. xxx. 24, 25), at all events in so far as the equal division of it was concerned between the combatants and those who remained at home.
The Midianites were driven from Moab and its frontiers. Their overthrow meant the triumph of the priestly tribe in Israel. The war had been waged not against Midian only, but against the allies and kinsmen of Midian in Israel itself. The old relationship between Israel and Midian had been severed on the confines of the Promised Land; the supremacy of Yahveh in Israel had been once more asserted, and Israel had become more than ever His peculiar people. Before they entered Canaan, it was needful that the last links that bound them to the wild tribes of the desert should be cut in two.
The work of Moses was completed. He had led Israel from the house of bondage, had given it laws and made it a nation in the wilderness, and had fitted it for the conquest of Canaan. The land flowing with milk and honey, which the Semitic settlers in Egypt seem always to have regarded as a home of refuge to which they should ultimately return, was now within their grasp. Egyptian troops no longer garrisoned it, and its population was weakened by intestine troubles, by the long war between Egypt and the Hittites, and, above all, by the invasion of the Philistines and other pirates from the Greek seas. A large portion of the cultivated territory on the east side of the Jordan was already in Israelite hands; all that was needed was to cross the river and take possession of ‘the land of promise.’ Israel never forgot that it was from hence that its ancestors had come, and tradition recorded that the bodies of the patriarchs still lay in the rock-tomb of Machpelah. Even now the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh carried with them the mummy of Joseph, from whom they claimed their origin, ready to deposit it wherever they could gain a permanent foothold and build for themselves a central sanctuary.
The scene of the last legislation of Moses is laid in the plains of Moab, in the newly-won territory of Israel, and almost within sight of the mountains of Canaan. The additional laws and regulations which needed to be made were not many. Reuben and Gad were settled in the districts which subsequently bore their names, the Reubenites pasturing their flocks like nomad Bedâwin among the northern wadis of Moab, while Gad occupied the greater portion of the Amorite kingdom of Sihon. Part of the tribe of Manasseh also made its home in the districts of Gilead and Bashan, which it had won by the sword.
The institution of the six cities of refuge, moreover, as well as of the forty-eight cities of the Levites, is assigned to the same period. Modern criticism, however, has shown itself unwilling to accept its Mosaic authorship. But sacred cities, to which the homicide could flee for refuge, were an ancient institution in both Syria and Asia Minor. We find them also in the region of the Hittites. Such asyla, as the Greeks called them, lasted down to the classical period, and played a considerable part in the local history of Asia Minor. Wherever we find a Kadesh or a Hierapolis, there we may expect to find also an asylum in which the gods and their ministers would protect the unintentional shedder of blood from the vengeance of man. It was a means of checking the vendetta or blood feud, which was in full harmony with primitive law.[[245]]
In establishing the cities of refuge, therefore, the Israelites did but carry on the traditions of the past. And two at least of the cities, which were subsequently set apart for the purpose, were sanctuaries, and consequently ‘asyla,’ long before the children of Jacob entered Palestine. These were Kadesh in Galilee and Hebron (Josh. xx. 7). The name of Kadesh declares its sacred character, and the sanctuary of Hebron had been famous for centuries.
The institution of the Levitical cities, again, was a result of the new position assigned to the tribe of Levi as the priests and representatives of the national God. The overthrow of the Midianites and their Israelitish allies had definitely settled the place of the tribe in Israel. Yahveh had prevailed over all other gods, and those who worshipped another god had been put to the sword. It had been the work of Levi, of those who had been chosen to be the ministers of Yahveh or had voluntarily devoted themselves to the service of the sanctuary. On the day that the spoil of Midian was divided it was recognised that Levi was not a tribe in the sense that the other tribes were so; it represented the priests and ministers of Yahveh, whoever and wheresoever they might be. And as, in the division of the spoil, due care was taken of Yahveh and His priests, so, too, in the division of the land, it was needful that similar care should be taken for them. The priests of Egypt had their lands, out of the revenues of which the temples were supported, and Egypt was not the only country of the Oriental world in which the same practice prevailed. Indeed, while Canaan was an Egyptian province temples had been built in it by the Pharaohs, and doubtless endowed in the same way as the temples of Egypt itself. The revenues of Syrian towns, moreover, had been given to Egyptian temples; Thothmes III., for example, immediately after the conquest of Syria, settled three of its towns (Anaugas, Innuam, and Harankal) upon Amon of Thebes.[[246]] The custom lingered on into late times; the Persian king assigned the three cities of Magnesia, Myos, and Lampsacus for the maintenance of Themistoklês,[[247]] and the taxes of the Fayyûm in Egypt formed the ‘pin-money’ of Queen Arsinoê Philadelphos.[[248]]
Later ages misunderstood the regulations that related to the Levitical cities, and, misled by the belief that the tribe of Levi was constituted like the other tribes of Israel, imagined that they were intended to be places where the Levites should dwell and none else. This misconception has coloured the existing text of Numb. xxxv. 2-8, but we have only to turn to the list of the cities given in Josh. xxi. to see how unfounded it is. In fact, the Levites, as ministers of the national God, lived wherever there was a sanctuary of Yahveh to be served; in the days of the Judges we find a Levite even in the private house of Micah, on Mount Ephraim, from whence he is taken by the Danite raiders along with the image of his God (Judg. xviii.). There was no intention of shutting up the Levites in certain cities apart from the rest of the people; on the contrary, they were to be ‘scattered’ throughout Israel, the priests and representatives everywhere of the national God.
The book of Deuteronomy is the testament of Moses. Even the most sceptical criticism admits that such was already the belief in the age of Josiah, so far, at any rate, as regards the main portion of the book. At the same time, the stoutest advocates of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch also admit that it cannot all have come from his hand. The account of his death, which forms the close of the book, cannot have been written by the great legislator himself. Here, as elsewhere, it is for the historian to decide where the narrative may belong to the Mosaic age, and where it transports us to the atmosphere of a later period.
The original Deuteronomy of philological criticism begins with the twelfth chapter, without introduction or even explanation. The Deuteronomy of Hebrew tradition is the fitting conclusion of the Pentateuch. Moses, worn out with years and labour, addresses his people for the last time. They are about to cross the Jordan and enter Canaan; here on the threshold of the Promised Land his task is done, and he must leave the work of conquest to other and younger hands. He has been the legislator of Israel, Joshua must be its general.