The conquest of Canaan is related in the Book of Joshua, which appears to have been written at the time of the Babylonian captivity. The thesis of political unity guaranteed by religious unity is supported, as in the Pentateuch, by a series of miracles. The miracle of the passage of the Red Sea is repeated at the passage of the Jordan. Joshua then besieges Jericho. “And it came to pass on the seventh day that they rose early at the dawning of the day, and compassed the city after the same manner seven times. And it came to pass at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout: for Jehovah hath given you the city. So the people shouted, and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they devoted all that was in the city, both man and woman, both young and old, and ox and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” Only Rahab, the harlot, who had betrayed her country by hiding the spies sent out by Joshua, was spared with her family and all her house. “And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein.” And Joshua pronounced a curse upon the man that should build it again.
The Israelites then besieged the city of Ai, near Bethel, and, having taken it by a stratagem, treated it as they had treated Jericho. “And all that fell that day, both of men and women, were twelve thousand.… So Joshua burnt Ai, and made it an heap for ever, even a desolation, unto this day. And the king of Ai he hanged on a tree until the eventide: and at the going down of the sun Joshua commanded, and they took his carcase from the tree, and cast it at the entering of the gate of the city, and raised thereon a great heap of stones, unto this day.” At the news of the destruction of Ai and Jericho, Adoni-zedek, king of Jerusalem, forms a coalition with the kings of Hebron, of Jarmuth, of Lachish, and of Eglon, and, hearing that Gibeon has treated with the enemy, they lay siege to the city which has betrayed their common cause. The Gibeonites call Joshua to their aid, and he departs from Gilgal with his army and comes up with the allied kings. “And Jehovah discomfited them before Israel, and he slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them by the way of the ascent of Beth-horon, and smote them unto Azekah and unto Makkedah. And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, while they were in the going down of Beth-horon, that Jehovah cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with the hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword. Then Joshua spake to Jehovah in the day when Jehovah delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel, ‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.’ And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies. Is not this written in the book of the Upright? And the sun stayed in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that Jehovah hearkened to the voice of a man, for Jehovah fought for Israel.”
The five kings, having taken refuge in a cave at Makkedah, are discovered, and when the people return to the camp after the extermination of the defeated army, they are brought before Joshua. All the chiefs of the men of war that had marched with him put their feet upon the necks of the kings, then Joshua causes them to be hanged on five trees, and in the evening their corpses are cast into the cave and great stones are rolled to the mouth of it. “And Joshua took Makkedah on that day and smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof he devoted and all the souls that were therein, he left none remaining.” The same formula is repeated in the Bible with melancholy monotony, in the case of the cities of Libnah and Lachish; the king of Gezer having attempted to help Lachish, “Joshua smote him and his people, until he had left none remaining.” And the Bible resumes the tale of massacres, Eglon, Hebron, and Debir are devoted with all their inhabitants, not one of whom is spared. “So Joshua smote all the land, the hill country, and the south, and the lowland, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but he devoted all that breathed, as Jehovah, the God of Israel, commanded.” Then it is the turn of the kings of the north; the king of Hazor and the other Canaanite kings take the field with a large army, “even as the sand that is upon the sea shore in multitude, with horses and chariots very many.” Joshua attacks them near the waters of Merom, pursues them to Zidon, and destroys them, “until he left none remaining”; he houghs their horses and burns their chariots with fire. Then he returns upon his footsteps and seizes Hazor, the chief city of all these kingdoms, and slays its king with the sword. “And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, having devoted them; there was none left that breathed: and he burnt Hazor with fire. And the cities of those kings and all the kings of them did Joshua take, and he smote them with the edge of the sword and devoted them, as Moses the servant of Jehovah commanded.… So Joshua took all that land, the hill country, and all the south, and all the land of Goshen, and the lowland, and the plain of Israel, from the bare mountain that goeth up unto Seir, even unto Baal-gad in the valley of Lebanon under Mount Hermon: and all their kings he took, and smote them and put them to death.… For it was of Jehovah to harden their hearts, to come against Israel in battle, that he might devote them, that they might have no favour, but that he might destroy them, as Jehovah commanded Moses.”
Such is the summary of the legend of the conquest as related in the Book of Joshua. The usual way of extracting from it such historical fact as it may contain is to suppress the miraculous circumstances, or to explain them, as well as may be, by natural causes. Serious criticism cannot rest satisfied with this method. Unfortunately, in the case of Jewish history, we have no such invaluable aid as the study of inscriptions supplies to the history of Egypt and Assyria. We have no other source of information than a book compiled several centuries after the event, from popular traditions more or less wrested for political ends. Nevertheless Biblical exegesis, by collecting a certain amount of scattered testimony, has succeeded in discovering the facts of the case. This is not the place to recapitulate this work of analysis, a summary of it may be found in the introduction to the Bible written by Professor Reuss, of the University of Strassburg. A comparison of all these materials for research leads scholars to the conclusion that the surest means of gaining a totally false impression of the conquest of Canaan is to abide by the view of it conveyed in the Book of Joshua.
That which this book tells us was accomplished in five years was as a matter of fact, very gradually accomplished in the course of two centuries and a half, for the conquest of the country and the complete subjugation of the Canaanites were not finally achieved until the reign of Solomon. It is precisely the same thing that happened in the conquest of the Peloponnesus by the Dorians, and of Roman Gaul by the Franks. From this we may infer, for the honour of the Israelites, that the frightful massacres related in the Book of Joshua have been greatly exaggerated by the compilers of the Bible, who regarded the extermination of the vanquished as among their ancestors’ titles to fame, and as a proof of their obedience to the commands of the national God of Israel. “We must not,” say the Dutch authors of The Family Bible, “imagine all the children of Israel gathered together in a single camp at Gilgal and all acting in concert. It would be much nearer the truth to imagine the Israelite tribes indulging in local and intermittent raids into the land of the Canaanites, who were perhaps enfeebled in consequence of a war with Ramses III, king of Egypt.”
The partition of the lands conquered or still to be conquered is given in the concluding chapters of the Book of Joshua, which are not by the same hand as the narrative of the conquest. The region to the east of the Dead Sea and the Jordan, afterwards known as Peræa, had been occupied ever since the time of Moses by the tribes of Reuben, Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh. Judah took the southern part of the land of Canaan, west of the Dead Sea. The small tribes of Simeon, Dan, and Benjamin grouped themselves about Judah, the first-named on the west, the other two on the north. These four tribes afterwards constituted the kingdom of Judah. Many portions of the territory assigned to them in this partition long remained in the occupation of alien peoples. Thus the Jebusites were first subjugated by David, who seized upon their city, thereafter called Jerusalem; the Philistines, whom Joshua had not ventured to attack, kept the five cities which they occupied on the Mediterranean coast, and these served as a refuge for the Anakim. At the period when the monarchy was instituted in Israel the sway of the Philistines extended over almost all the territory of Judah.
The powerful tribe of Ephraim, to which Joshua belonged, established itself in the middle of the land of Canaan, between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The Ark of the Covenant, first set up at Gilgal, was afterwards carried to Shiloh, which became the common sanctuary of all the Israelite tribes. The tribe of Issachar settled to the north of the territory of Ephraim, along the Jordan, and the half-tribe of Manasseh farther to the west. Lastly, the tribes of Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali settled in the northern region, afterwards called Galilee; Asher spread abroad on the seacoast north of Carmel, but was not able to gain possession of the Phœnician cities within the border assigned to it; Zebulun encamped in the plain of Jezreel, northwest of Issachar, and Naphtali along the Upper Jordan, between the waters of Merom and the lake of Gennesareth. The tribe of Levi had no territory of its own, for, as the Bible frequently repeats, Jehovah was its inheritance. The Levites received forty-eight cities, scattered over the territory of the other tribes. Some of these cities were intended to serve as places of shelter for involuntary homicides; these were called cities of refuge.
The genealogies which take up so much space in the Bible show clearly the importance which the tribes of Israel attached to the descent from Abraham and Jacob. Nevertheless they were far from being a race of pure blood. Before their sojourn in Egypt they had allied themselves with the women of the country, as their own legends testify; of the sons of Jacob four are the issue of female slaves of whose descent we know nothing. Joseph weds the daughter of an Egyptian priest, Moses a Midianitess and an Ethiopian woman, and when his sister Miriam upbraids him for this mésalliance, Jehovah smites her with leprosy. On their departure from Egypt the Children of Israel are accompanied by “a mixed multitude,” who must have been incorporated into the tribes, for there is no subsequent mention of them. During the half-century which lies between the going forth out of Egypt and the conquest of Canaan there must have been unions with Edomites, Ammonites, and Moabites. At the time of the invasion, wandering hordes of Arabs, too weak to make their way into Palestine by themselves, may have taken advantage of this opportunity to join the Israelite tribes; such were the children of Keni, the father-in-law of Moses, who accompanied the Children of Judah as far as the city of palm trees (Jericho). These Kenites or Kenizzites settled among the men of Judah and were ultimately merged in them; it was impossible to hold aloof from allies who had contributed their share towards victory.
After the conquest, unions with the indigenous peoples became very numerous. “The Children of Israel,” says the Book of Judges, “dwelt among the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites: and they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods. And the Children of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of Jehovah, and forgot Jehovah their God, and served the Baalim and the Ashtaroth.” It was not the first time that they had been unfaithful to Jehovah; in the wilderness, for forty years, according to the prophet Amos, they had borne before them the image of Moloch and the star of their idols.
The position of the Israelites settled in the midst of the Canaanites was not everywhere the same; in some districts the earlier inhabitants had been exterminated or reduced to slavery, but in others they had remained in possession of the land, and the new-comers had only been able to take up their abode there on payment of tribute. Oftenest of all, the old inhabitants and the new lived side by side on a footing of armed neutrality, frequently disturbed by feuds, each on the watch for an opportunity of subjugating or expelling the other. After the Israelites had settled in various parts of the country, the Canaanites, the Amorites, and the Philistines took their revenge, and made them pay by instalments for the outrages of the invasion. The stronger tribes did not succour the weaker, for the tie that bound them together was religious, not political, and was growing weaker and weaker; hence the Bible invariably attributes the defeats of the Israelites to their neglect of the national religion.