Far away, to the north of the other Hebrew settlements, the spies found the Phœnician city of Laish, already mentioned in the geographical lists of the Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. Its inhabitants were living in peaceful security, ‘after the manner of the Zidonians,’ with no one to interfere with them, and no enemy of whom they could be afraid. The spies saw at once that the city was unprepared for a sudden attack by armed men; that, in short, ‘God had given it into’ their hands. They returned therefore to Mahaneh-Dan, the Camp of Dan, and reported what they had seen. Thereupon the Danites determined to seize an inheritance for themselves in the north, and six hundred men ‘girded with weapons of war,’ along with their families and cattle, started for Laish.[[284]] On the road the spies led them to the house of Micah, whom they robbed of his images, ephod and teraphim, as well as of his priest. The latter at first protested; but on being told that he would be the priest of ‘a tribe,’ his ‘heart was glad,’ and ‘he took the ephod and the teraphim and the graven image and went into the midst of the people.’ Micah and his friends on discovering the robbery pursued after the Danites, but finding they were too strong for him he judged it prudent to return home.
The Danites continued their march, and had little difficulty in capturing the unguarded Laish, in massacring its inhabitants, and burning the houses with fire. On the ruins they built a new city, the Dan of future Israelitish history. Here the graven image of Micah was erected, and worship carried on ‘all the time that the house of God was in Shiloh.’ The Levite who presided over the sanctuary became the ancestor of a long line of priests who continued to be ‘priests to the tribe of Dan until the day of the captivity of the land.’[[285]] The compiler of the Book of Judges adds that his name was Jonathan, the grandson of Moses, whose name has been changed to Manasseh in the majority of Hebrew manuscripts.[[286]] The statement fixes the date of the conquest of Laish, and shows that, like the war against Benjamin, it took place only two generations after the great legislator’s death.
The picture presented to us by the narrative stands in sharp contrast to the ideal aimed at in the legislation of the Pentateuch. The golden calf has been revived in an intensified form, and the ordinary Israelite, including a Levite who was the grandson of Moses, takes it for granted that Yahveh must be adored in the shape of a twofold idol. Nay, more; by the side of the graven and molten images which were meant to represent the God of Israel in defiance of the second commandment, we find also the images of the household gods or teraphim, whose cult forms part of that which was paid to the national deity. The cult, in fact, survived to the latest days of the northern kingdom; it was practised in the household of David (1 Sam. xix. 13), and is even regarded by a prophet of Samaria as an integral portion of the established religion of the state (Hos. iii. 4). The priestly powers of the Levite, however, suffered in no way from the idolatrous nature of the worship over which he presided. Like David in a later age (1 Sam. xxiii. 2, 4, 9, xxx. 8; 2 Sam. v. 19, 23) when the men of Dan inquired through him whether their journey would be successful, he was able to answer them in the name of the Lord.
But this is not all. Micah, the Ephraimite, consecrates his own son as priest, while the Levite wanders through the land, seeking employment and begging his bread. There is no endowment that is his by right; no Levitical city where he can claim a shelter and a field; no central sanctuary where his services are required. He is said to be ‘of the family of Judah,’ not a descendant of Levi, though the compiler implies that the expression must not be understood in a literal sense. And the priesthood which he established at Dan continued to be a rival of that of ‘the sons of Aaron’ through nearly five centuries of Israelitish national life.
Criticism has drawn the conclusion that the Pentateuchal legislation could not have been in existence at the time when the city of Laish was taken by the tribe of Dan. The conclusion, however, by no means follows. It is quite certain that it was not drawn by the compiler of the Book of Judges, who has preserved the narrative for us; and, after all, he is more likely to have understood the ideas and feelings of the Israelites of an earlier generation than is a European critic of the nineteenth century. In fact, he has given us an explanation of the contradiction between the Mosaic law and early Israelitish practice, which not only satisfies all the conditions of the problem, but is on the whole more probable than the rough-and-ready solution of modern criticism. Israel in Canaan in the first throes of the invasion was a very different Israel from that which had lived in the desert under the immediate control and superintendence of the legislator. It was disorganised, it was lawless, it was broken up into fragments which were surrounded on all sides by an alien population whose superior culture and wealth, when it could not be seized or destroyed, necessarily exercised a profound influence over the ruder tribes of marauders from the desert. The Israelites inevitably fell under the spell; they intermarried with the natives, and adopted their gods and religious ideas.
The proof that this is the true explanation of the disregard or forgetfulness of the Mosaic law which characterised the age of the Judges is furnished by the fact that this disregard or forgetfulness was not universal. Throughout the age of the Judges Israel possessed a central sanctuary, little though it seems to have been frequented, and in this central sanctuary the worship of Yahveh was conducted by ‘the sons of Aaron,’ who kept alive the memory of the legislation in the wilderness. At Shiloh there was no image, whether graven or molten, no figures of the teraphim, no idolatrous rites. Instead of an image there was the ark of the covenant, with nothing within it except the tables of the law.[[287]] Shiloh was the only place in Israel where the Pentateuchal enactments could be observed, and it is only at Shiloh that we find them to have been so.
But the influence of Shiloh did not extend far. It did not even become the central sanctuary of Ephraim. The history of Micah is alone sufficient to prove this. Ephraimite as he was, Shiloh and its priesthood had no existence for him; his gods and his priests were part of his own household. Equally conclusive is the history of Gideon.
The ephod after which Israel went ‘a whoring,’ was not dedicated at Shiloh but at Ophrah, a few miles to the north; and Baal-berith in the Ephraimitish city of Shechem had more worshippers than Yahveh of Shiloh. Just as the spirit of Judaism was kept alive in the age of the Maccabees among a small remnant of the people, amid the obscurity of a country town, so in the time of the Judges the spirit of the law was preserved among the mountains of Ephraim in the midst of an insignificant body of priests.
It was not only with the Canaanites and with its own internal disorganisation and dissensions that the infant nation of Israel was called upon to contend. Foreign invasion followed quickly on the settlement in Palestine. We have learnt from the tablets of Tel el-Amarna that already before the days of the Exodus the kings of Mesopotamia had cast longing eyes upon Canaan. To the Semites of the west Mesopotamia was known as Naharaim, or Aram Naharaim, ‘Aram of the Two Rivers,’ the Euphrates and Tigris, and the name was borrowed by the Egyptians under its Aramaic form of Naharain or Nahrina.[[288]] The leading state of Mesopotamia had for some centuries been Mitanni, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from Carchemish, and the rulers of Mitanni had made themselves masters not only of the district between the Euphrates and the Tigris, but also of the country westward to the Orontes. In the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty Mitanni was the most powerful of the Asiatic kingdoms, and the Pharaohs themselves did not disdain to unite their solar blood with that of its royal family.
From time to time, the Tel el-Amarna correspondence teaches us, the princes of Mitanni had interfered in the affairs of Palestine. Rib-Hadad, the governor of Phœnicia, declares that ‘from of old’ the kings of Mitanni had been hostile to the ancestors of the Pharaoh, and his letters are filled with complaints that the Amorites to the north of Palestine had revolted against Egypt with the help of Mitanni and Babylonia. Ebed-Tob of Jerusalem, who uses the name Nahrina or Naharain like the writers of the Old Testament, refers to the struggles that had taken place on the waters of the Mediterranean when Nahrina and Babylonia held possession of Canaan. ‘When the ships,’ he says, ‘were on the sea, the arm of the Mighty King (the god of Jerusalem) overcame Nahrima and Babylonia; yet now the Khabiri have overcome the cities of the king’ (of Egypt in Southern Palestine).[[289]]