Two songs, attributed to Moses, are also incorporated in the book. They seem to be a reflection of the curses and blessings pronounced respectively on Ebal and Gerizim. The one paints the sufferings which forgetfulness of Yahveh was to bring upon Israel; the other describes the future happiness and glory of the several tribes. Chiefest among them are Levi and the house of Joseph; ‘the precious things’ of the Promised Land are reserved for Ephraim and Manasseh, whose warriors shall drive the enemies of Yahveh to the ends of the earth. Levi shall be the lawgiver and instructor of Israel, while Benjamin shall be the ‘beloved of the Lord,’ who shall ‘dwell between his shoulders’ at Shiloh. Judah, on the other hand, stands in the background; little is said of him except a prayer that he should be delivered from his enemies. And Simeon is passed over altogether. It is plain that this second song or ‘blessing’ must be of early date. It cannot be later than the early days of the conquest of Canaan, when Ephraim and Manasseh were still the most powerful of the tribes, and when the tabernacle of Yahveh was erected at Shiloh. The tribes were still united among themselves; they still recognised a common God and a common worship, and had not as yet fallen upon the evil days depicted in the book of Judges. The tone of the song throughout is that of triumph and success; the Israelites must have still been in their first flush of victory, and the house of Joseph have still been their leader in war. But history knows of only two periods when such was the case; the one period that which followed the conquest of the Amorite kingdoms east of the Jordan, the other period that which saw Joshua the Ephraimite at the head of the armies of Israel. Hebrew antiquity decided that it was to the first period that the song belonged.[[253]]

The death of Moses was placed on the summit of one of the mountains of Abarim—the mountains of the ‘Hebrews’—in the land of Moab over against the temple of Baal-Peor. On the one side he looked down upon the scene of his last victory over the opponents of his law, on the place where the Midianites and their Israelitish sympathisers had been slain; on the other side lay the Land of Promise, to the borders of which he had led his people. The peak of Pisgah on which he stood had been dedicated in old days to the worship of Nebo, the Babylonian god of prophecy and literature, the interpreter of the will of Merodach, the supreme divinity of Babylon. It was no accident that the prophet and legislator of Israel, the interpreter of the will of Yahveh, should die on the same mountain-peak.

The high-places which the kindred Semitic nations dedicated to the gods become in the history of Israel the scenes of the death of its great men. Aaron dies on the summit of Mount Hor, and even to-day the tomb of the prophet Samuel is pointed out on the lofty top of Mizpah. But no tomb marked the spot where Moses died; alone among the heroes of Hebrew history he was buried in a foreign land, and the place where he was buried was unknown. The legislator of Israel, he who had made Israel a nation, and with whom Israelitish history began, vanished utterly out of sight. The fact is a strange one, whatever be the explanation we attempt to give of it. Can it be that Moab had been more completely conquered by Israel than the narrative in the Pentateuch would lead us to suppose, but that with the death of Moses the dominion of Israel passed away?[[254]] In that case Moab would have had little interest in preserving a memory of the last resting-place of its conqueror, and the time would soon have come when its site was forgotten.

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.