The early history of the Hebrews

by A. H. Sayce

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.