The rise of Judah dated from the overthrow of Adoni-bezek, ‘Afterwards,’ we read, ‘the children of Judah went down to fight against the Canaanites that dwelt in the mountain, and in the Negeb of the south, and in the plain.’ It was all long subsequent to the death both of Joshua and of Caleb. The last survivors of the first attempt to penetrate into that part of Canaan had passed away before it at last fell—if only partially—into Israelitish hands. The first dreams of conquest had long since made way for a sober and disappointing reality. Canaan had proved for Israel a more difficult prize to secure than Britain proved for the Saxons. It was only in the mountains and a few isolated cities that the invaders succeeded in holding their own. Elsewhere the walls and chariots of the Canaanites kept them at bay, while the strongholds of the Philistines and Phœnicians barred them from the coast. The children of Israel were compelled to dwell ‘among the Canaanites, Hittites, and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and Jebusites,’ and there was little cause for wonder that ‘they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served their gods’ (Judg. iii. 5, 6).
Before Joshua died the tabernacle was set up at Shiloh, on the slopes of Mount Ephraim, in the heart of the newly-conquered land. That the central sanctuary should thus be under the protection of Ephraim was a token that ‘the house of Joseph’ was paramount among the tribes of Israel. A further token was the burial of the mummy of Joseph at Shechem. Here, too, at Shechem were the two mountains Ebal and Gerizim, on which the curses and the blessings of the Law had been ordered to be pronounced. History has left no record of the conquest of the place, and the name of the king of Shechem is not even found in the list of the kings vanquished by Joshua. But the city must have fallen during the early period of the invasion, and the narrative in Josh. viii. 33 would imply that its capture followed closely upon the destruction of Ai.
We may gather from the silence of history that there was neither siege nor massacre to make an impression on the memory of posterity. And the inference is confirmed by what we know of the subsequent history of Shechem. In the time of Gideon and Abimelech its population was still half-Amorite (Judg. ix. 28). As at Jerusalem, the older inhabitants cannot have been destroyed or driven out. Like the Gibeonites, they must have made terms with the invaders, or mixed peaceably with them in the course of years.
At the outset, however, Shechem would have been the capital of Ephraim. Here was the sepulchre of the founder of ‘the house of Joseph,’ here were the two sacred mountains of the Law, and here, too, it was that Joshua gathered the people together to hear his last words. Like Moses at Sinai and Kadesh-barnea, ‘Joshua made a covenant with the people ... and set them a statute and an ordinance in Shechem. And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the Law of God, and took a great stone, and set it up there under the terebinth that was in the sanctuary of the Lord.’ Here, therefore, was the local sanctuary of Ephraim, separate from the central one at Shiloh, and a sacred terebinth stood within its precincts. Criticism finds no reason to doubt that ‘the great stone’ spoken of in the text was actually set up, like a ‘Beth-el,’ under the shadow of the tree, and it is hard to see why it should be more sceptical towards the further statement that the covenant which the stone commemorated was written by Joshua ‘in the book of the Law of God.’
While Shechem was thus the local sanctuary of Ephraim, the tribes east of the Jordan had consecrated a ‘great altar’ of their own on the banks of the river. The altar was the occasion of a dispute between the two branches of the house of Israel, which nearly resulted in war. But the danger was averted through the mediation of the priests; and although the tribes east and west of the Jordan necessarily had different interests, it was long ere this led to open hostility, or even to forgetfulness of their common ancestry and common God. Deborah reproaches Reuben and Gilead for having stood aloof while Zebulon and Naphtali were hazarding their lives in the field, and the son of Gideon had his kingdom on the eastern side of the Jordan.
Joshua was buried at Timnath-serah or Timnath-heres[[278]] in Mount Ephraim, in a piece of ground which had become the property of himself and his family. The Israelites of a later day looked back upon his memory with gratitude and veneration; he had been the hero who had succeeded in doing what Moses had failed to accomplish, and had led his people into the Promised Land. But history judges somewhat differently. He was not a lawgiver or a leader of men like Moses, and even from a military point of view the conquest of the Amorite kingdoms of Sihon and Og was a greater achievement than securing a foothold in the mountains of central Palestine. Joshua was not the conqueror of Canaan, as the pious imagination of a later age supposed him to be: he merely opened the way to it. He taught the Israelites how to defeat the Canaanites, and he succeeded in destroying a few of their cities. But that was all; and the wholesale massacres which marked his progress, the wanton destruction of everything which could not be carried away as spoil, and the barbaric extermination of the elements of culture, find their match only in the sanguinary campaigns of some of the Assyrian kings and the Saxon invasion of Britain.
CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF THE JUDGES
The Condition of Israel—The Destruction of the Benjamites—Story of Micah and the Conquest of Dan—Chushan-rishathaim- and Ramses III.—Office of Judge—Eglon of Moab—The Philistines—Deborah and Barak—Sisera and the Hittites—The Song of Deborah—Gideon—Kingdom of Abimelech—Jephthah—Sacrifice of his Daughter—Defeat and Slaughter of the Ephraimites—Samson—Historical Character of the Book of Judges.
Israel has at last forced its way into the Promised Land. Mount Ephraim is in its hands, and it has already planted itself in other parts of Palestine. Joshua, the leader who taught it how to cross the Jordan and defeat the princes of Canaan, is dead. The age of wandering is over; the age of settlement has begun.
But the age of settlement was a stormy one. The Canaanites were but partially subdued; the Israelites themselves were little better than a collection of raiding bands. They had brought with them, moreover, the nomadic habits of the desert, and were but little inclined to rebuild the cities which they had so ruthlessly destroyed. And in almost every direction they were encircled by enemies, better organised, better armed, or more numerous than themselves, who from time to time succeeded in overrunning their fields and reducing them to subjection. The tribes who had dreamed of conquering Canaan found themselves, instead, the prey of others.