No detailed account was preserved of them, since they were connected with no striking and important event, like the capture and destruction of a Canaanitish city. The four military deeds with which history associated the name of Joshua centered each of them round the overthrow of a Canaanitish stronghold and gave the Israelites the command of the surrounding country. They were campaigns which led to the permanent possession of territory, not mere raids or barren victories. The capture of Jericho secured the passage across the Jordan, that of Ai planted Ephraim and Benjamin in the mountains of central Palestine, the destruction of Lachish opened up communication with that desert of the south in which the Israelites had received the legislation of Kadesh-barnea, while the overthrow of the king of Hazor gave them a foothold in the north. The alliance with the Gibeonites was of equal importance, for it secured friends and allies in the very heart of the enemy’s country, and its firstfruits were the victory at Makkedah and the destruction of Lachish. Jericho, Ai, Lachish, Hazor, and Gibeon,—these were the names which guaranteed to Joshua his claim to have been the conqueror of Canaan.
The victory at Hazor seems to have been his last. Hazor stood near Kadesh of Galilee, now represented by the ruins of Qedes, to the north of Safed, and on the western side of the marshes of Hûleh, the Lake Merom of the Old Testament.[[265]] In the age of the Tel el-Amarna letters it was still governed by its native kings, and in one of them an Egyptian officer complains that the king had joined with Sidon in intriguing with the Bedâwin.[[266]] When the Israelites entered Palestine it was the leading city of the northern part of the country. While Megiddo was the capital of the centre of the country, Hazor was the capital of the north. Its king, Jabin, now put himself at the head of a great confederacy which extended from Sidon to Dor on the sea-coast, and from the slopes of Hermon to the Sea of Galilee in the inland region. Among the confederates history remembered the names of Jobab, the king of Madon, and the kings of Shimron and Achshaph. Achshaph is the Phœnician Ekdippa, now Zîb, on the sea-coast, which is called Aksap by Thothmes III. But Madon is written Marôn in the Septuagint, though the reading of the Hebrew text seems to be confirmed by the modern name of Khurbet Madîn, ‘the ruins of Madîn.’ Shimron, moreover, is Symoôn in the Septuagint, and this form of the name finds support in the Simônias of Josephus, Simonia in the Talmud, now Semûnieh, sixteen miles from Khurbet Madîn. Mr. Tomkins would identify it with the Shmânau of Thothmes III.[[267]]
But, again, the reading of the Hebrew text is probably the more correct. In what may be termed the official list of Joshua’s victories (Josh. xii. 20), the name appears as Shimronmeron, and this reminds us of 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.