It was not the last time that Mitanni and Egypt were ranged on opposite sides. Ramses II. claims to have defeated the forces of Mitanni, and the name of the same country appears among the conquests of Ramses III. of the twentieth dynasty.[[290]] It is coupled with Carchemish the Hittite capital among the kingdoms over which the last of the conquering Pharaohs had gained a victory. In the great struggle which Egypt had to face against the Philistines and other piratic hordes from the Greek seas, the northern invaders had carried with them in their train contingents from the various peoples of Northern Syria through whose lands they had passed. The Hittites and Amorites, the inhabitants of Carchemish and Arvad, even the people of Elishah or Cyprus, joined the invaders of Egypt, and among the captured leaders of the enemy recorded on the walls of Medinet Habu are the kings of the Hittites and Amorites. The king of Mitanni, however, is wanting; enemy though he was of the Pharaoh, he never ventured into Egypt, and his name therefore does not appear among the conquered chiefs. All that the Pharaoh could do was to include the name of his kingdom among those whose forces he had overthrown.[[291]]
The reign of Ramses III. brings us to the moment when the Israelites under Joshua were about to enter Canaan. Egypt had annihilated the enemies who had invaded it, and had carried a war of vengeance into Palestine and Syria. The Israelite had not as yet crossed the Jordan. Among the places in Southern Palestine subdued by Ramses are Beth-Anoth (Josh. xv. 59), Carmel of Judah, Hebron, Ir-Shemesh, Hadashah (Josh. xv. 37), Shalam or Jerusalem, the districts of the Dead Sea and the Jordan, even Korkha in the land of Moab.[[292]] There is as yet no trace of Israel, and Hebron had not as yet become the spoil of the Kenizzite.
The chronology, however, makes it certain that though the Israelites had not entered Palestine at the time of the Egyptian campaign in that country, it could not have been very long before they actually did so. The campaign of Ramses III., in fact, prepared the way for the Israelitish invasion by weakening the forces of the Canaanites. In any case, the victory over the northern nations and their allies, commemorated in the temple of Medinet Habu, must have taken place only a few years before the Israelitish conquest of southern Canaan.[[293]]
The king of Mitanni was numbered among the enemies of Egypt; nevertheless he had not joined the invading hordes in their attack upon the valley of the Nile. Can it have been that he lingered in what had once been an Egyptian province, that land of Canaan which his forefathers had coveted before him? The Egyptian Empire had fallen, the very existence of Egypt itself was at stake, and the favourable opportunity had come at last when Naharaim might make herself the mistress of Western Asia. Babylonia was powerless like Egypt, Assyria had not yet put forth its strength, and the Hittites barred the old road which had led from Chaldæa to the West.
The armies of Chushan-rishathaim[[294]] of Naharaim, accordingly, made their way through Syria to the southern frontiers of Palestine. They were no longer associated with those of Babylonia, as in the days of Ebed-Tob; for a short while Naharaim ruled supreme on the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. For eight years both the Canaanites and their Israelite and Kenizzite invaders were forced to submit to its sway. The work of conquest was checked by the stronger hand of the foreign power.
How soon after the Israelitish settlement in Canaan the invasion of Chushan-rishathaim must have been is shown by the fact that Othniel, the Kenizzite, the brother of Caleb, and the conqueror of Kirjath-Sepher, was the hero who ‘delivered’ Israel from the foreign yoke. How the deliverance was effected we do not know, whether through the death of the king of Naharaim, or through a revolt of the Canaanites and Syrians, or whether it was only the Israelitish tribes and not the Canaanitish cities to which it came. What is certain is that both the ‘oppression’ and the deliverance followed closely on the occupation of Palestine by the Israelites. Caleb belonged to the same generation as Moses and Joshua, and though Othniel was his ‘younger brother,’ he too must be counted in it. Joshua can hardly have been dead before Israel had passed under the yoke of Naharaim.
The supremacy of Naharaim extended to the southernmost borders of Palestine. It was not an Ephraimite who ‘delivered’ Israel, but the Edomite chief at Hebron, where the tribe of Judah had not yet established itself. The fact is noteworthy: the first of the ‘Judges’ was a Kenizzite of Edomite origin, and the yoke which he shook off was one which pressed equally upon Israelites and Canaanites. In the very act of conquering and exterminating the Canaanites, Israel was forced to sympathise and join with them against a common foe.
The sign which gave Othniel the right to be a Shophêt or ‘Judge’ was twofold. ‘The spirit of Yahveh came upon him,’ and he delivered Israel from its oppressor. The Shophêt was thus marked out by Yahveh for his office, and his success in war was a visible token that he had been called to be the leader of his people. The office was a peculiarly Canaanitish institution. When Kingship was abolished at Tyre in the time of Nebuchadrezzar, the kings were replaced by ‘Judges,’ and at Carthage the ‘Sufetes’ or ‘Judges’ were the chief magistrates of the state.[[295]] Whether the institution existed elsewhere in the Semitic world we do not know. But it was as it were indigenous to the soil of Canaan, and in submitting themselves to the rule of the Judges, the Israelites submitted themselves at the same time to Canaanitish influence. It was a step backward, a step towards absorption into the population around them, and it is therefore not without reason that the period of the Judges is a synonym for the period when the religion and manners of Canaan were dominant among the Israelitish tribes. The Pentateuch recognised the priest, the lawgiver, and the king; the judge was the creation of an age in which the Baalim seemed to have gained the mastery over Yahveh.
That the first of the Judges should have been of Edomite descent is a striking commentary on what may be termed the catholicity of pre-exilic Israel. It was not race so much as participation in the worship and favour of Yahveh, that gave a right to be included among ‘the chosen people.’ The ancestress of David was a Moabitess, and the Deuteronomic law lays down that the children of an Edomite, or even of an Egyptian, ‘shall enter into the congregation of the Lord in their third generation’ (Deut. xxiii. 7, 8).[[296]] A ‘mixed multitude’ accompanied the Israelites in their flight from Egypt, and the Kenites, with whom Moses was allied, shared like the Kenizzites in the conquest of Canaan. Hebron, the future capital of Judah, and a Levitical city, was a Kenizzite possession, and the Judah of later days was itself a mixture of Israelitish and Edomite elements.
How far the authority of Othniel extended it is difficult to say. But the fact that the enemy, whose yoke he had broken, was an invader from the north makes it probable that his rule was acknowledged in Mount Ephraim as well as among the northern tribes. That it was also acknowledged on the east side of the Jordan there is no proof. Though the Song of Deborah shows that the solidarity of Israel was recognised, it also shows that this feeling of a common God and of a common history had but little political effect. The eastern tribes lived apart from those of the west, and the judges whom we hear of as rising among them had purely local powers. Indeed, between Jephthah and the Ephraimites there was internecine war.