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).