When Samuel was born, the Hebrew settlement in Palestine had long been a matter of the past. Little by little Canaan had passed into the possession of the Israelitish tribes. The older population had at first been massacred, then laid under tribute and amalgamated with the newcomers. The tribes themselves had changed much. Some had disappeared, others had grown at their expense. Ephraim, which from the first days of the conquest had been the most powerful among them, was now in a state of decadence, and a new force was rising in the south in the shape of the mixed tribe of Judah. A few of the Canaanite cities in the interior still remained independent, like Gezer and Jerusalem, as well as all those on the Phœnician coast.
The tribes had suffered from want of cohesion. The attempt to found a monarchy in Manasseh had failed; it was too local and limited, and served only to arouse the jealousy of the tribes which lay outside it. It had done little more than bring to light the dissensions and differences that existed within Israel itself. The bond that connected the tribes had become continually looser, and the ‘House of Joseph’ was divided into hostile factions. Benjamin had been decimated by its brother Israelites under the leadership of Ephraim, and Ephraim had undergone the same treatment at the hands of its brethren from Gilead. The conquest of Canaan had brought with it the old Canaanitish spirit of disunion and discord; the spectacle which the Tel el-Amarna letters present to us of city arrayed against city is reproduced in the Israel of the period of the Judges. The common brotherhood, which was still felt in the age of Deborah, tended to be forgotten. The tribes no longer come to one another’s aid; they fight with one another instead. The authority of the Judges become more and more circumscribed, their jurisdiction more and more confined. The tribes on the east of the Jordan begin to lead a separate life, and hardly acknowledge that the tribes to the west are kinsmen at all. The incorporation of the Canaanite element had weakened the recollection of a common descent, and at the same time had introduced into Israel a spirit of selfish isolation. The causes which had brought about the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites were now working among its conquerors, and it seemed as if the fate of the Canaanites was to be the fate of the Israelites also.
The sanctuary at Shiloh still existed, but it had lost much of its influence. It had become little more than the local sanctuary of Ephraim,[[368]] and as the power of Ephraim waned the influence of Shiloh declined as well. Elsewhere rival sanctuaries and rival forms of worship had arisen. The high-places, whereon the Canaanites had adored Baalim and Ashtaroth, still continued sacred, and though officially the Baal of Israel was Yahveh, the mass of the people worshipped the local Baal of the place in which they lived. Yahveh was scarcely remembered, even in name: His place was taken by the Baalim and Ashtaroth of Canaan. Manasseh went ‘a whoring’ after the golden image erected by Jerubbaal in Ophrah, or after the Canaanitish Baal-berith in Shechem; a rival priesthood to that of Shiloh served before the idols of Micah at Dan; and Jephthah sacrificed his daughter in accordance with Canaanitish beliefs. The Law of Moses was forgotten; each man did that which was right in his own eyes.
Modern criticism has asked how it is possible that all this could have been the case if a written Law actually existed. But the question forgets to take account of the circumstances of the time. A knowledge of reading and writing was confined to a particular class, that of the scribes; Israel was divided; intercommunication was difficult, and a Law which presupposed a camp of nomads continually under the eye of their legislator, was not adapted to the changed conditions in which the Israelites found themselves. Moreover, it must be remembered that the Israelites were for the most part a peasantry living in scattered villages; the inhabitants of the towns were Canaanites either by race or marriage. The one were too ignorant, the others too alien, to be affected by the Mosaic Code.
Nevertheless, the Code was preserved at Shiloh. Here there was an Aaronic priesthood, and the few notices that we possess of the worship carried on there show that it was in accordance with the Mosaic Law. Outside Shiloh, among those who still remained true to the faith of their fathers, the Law was remembered and presumably observed. Of this the Song of Deborah is a witness. The God of Israel, in whose name Barak and Deborah went forth against the heathen, is the Yahveh of the Pentateuch, not the Baal of Canaan. The history of Israel in the age of the Judges is, religiously as well as politically, the history of degeneracy, not of development.
In fact, religion and politics cannot be separated one from the other in the history of the ancient East, least of all in the history of the Hebrews. The one presupposes the other, and the political decay of the nation is a sure sign of its religious retrogression. The same causes which broke up its political unity broke up its religious unity as well. The knowledge and worship of Yahveh lingered in Ephraim, because in Ephraim alone the old ideal and spirit of Israel continued to survive. Ephraim was, as it were, the heart and core of Israel; it had led the attack upon Palestine, and its blood was purer than that of the other tribes. It remained more genuinely Israelite, with less admixture of foreign blood.
After Joshua and Othniel the history of most of the Judges is connected with that of Ephraim. Ehud is a Benjamite—the Ephraimitic ‘Southerner’; Shamgar is referred to in the Song of Deborah;[[369]] Deborah herself dwelt near ‘Beth-el in Mount Ephraim’; between Ephraim and Jerubbaal, who reigned on the Ephraimitic frontier, there was smothered hostility, which burst into open war in the case of Jephthah; Tola was buried in ‘Shamir in Mount Ephraim’; Abdon was an Ephraimite; while Ibzan and Elon came from adjoining tribes. Jair the Manassite, and Samson from ‘the camp of Dan,’ are the sole exceptions to the rule. What else can this mean except that such annals as survived the stormy age of the Judges were preserved amid the fastnesses of Mount Ephraim? The scribes of early Israel were not confined to Zebulon, and as in Babylonia or Egypt, so also in Palestine, the temple was the seat of the library. In the sanctuary at Shiloh the written records of the country would have found a safe harbourage along with the tables of the Law and the other monuments of the Mosaic age.[[370]]
The lifetime of Samuel separated the age of the Judges from that of the Kings. It marked the transition from a period of anarchy and disunion to one of order and organised unity under a single head. But never had the fortunes of Israel seemed so desperate. Disunited, with its former leader, Ephraim, disabled and half-exterminated through civil war, it had become the prey of a foreign enemy. The Philistines were no longer content with raiding expeditions. They now occupied the districts they overran, and built forts to secure the passes that led into the very heart of the Israelitish territory.[[371]] Their supremacy extended from one end of Palestine to another, and so gave a name to the country which it never afterwards lost. The tribes were reduced to a condition of serfdom; they ceased to be free men who could go forth with arms in their hands to fight their foes; and were compelled, as in the subsequent days of Chaldæan domination, to confine themselves to tilling the soil. The wandering smiths, the Kenite gypsies, were driven from the land; the Israelite was deprived of all warlike weapons, and was forced to go to the nearest Philistine post if he wished merely to sharpen his implements of agriculture. The sons of Jacob had almost ceased to be a nation.
It was while Samuel was still young that the chief Philistine victories were gained, and as he grew older the Philistine yoke became heavier and more severe. In the general wreck, his was the one prominent figure in Israel. To him the people looked for counsel and help, and saw in him a prophet of Yahveh. But Samuel was a man of peace, not of war. He could not lead his people to battle, or check the rising tide of Philistine success. Other men were wanted for the work, and these were not forthcoming. Perhaps a time came when Samuel himself was unwilling they should be found, and that the authority he had possessed should pass to another. Such, at least, is the impression we derive from his opposition to the demand of the people that they should have a king.
Samuel possessed, moreover, something more than personal influence. He was the last representative of the ancient sanctuary at Shiloh. He had been dedicated to it even before he was born; he had grown up in it among the last descendants of the earlier high-priests; he had seen the ark taken from it to fall into the hands of the Philistines; he had also witnessed, probably, the destruction of the temple itself. All the older traditions of Mosaic worship gathered about him; he was the living link in the chain which bound the religious past of Israel with its present. In his person the doctrines and practices which had been preserved at Shiloh were handed on to the newer age of the kings.