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.

It was a period of anarchy and perpetual war. Without a head, and without cohesion, it seems strange that they did not perish utterly or become absorbed by the older population of the land. That the nation should have survived admits of only one explanation. It possessed a common faith, a common sanctuary, and a common code of sacred laws. As in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire the Church preserved the fabric of society, and eventually brought order out of chaos, so, too, in ancient Israel, the nation owed its continued existence to the law which had been given by Moses. Only the iron fetters of a written law, with its organised priesthood and sanctions, and, above all, the knowledge that it existed, could have prevented the process of political and social disintegration from rapidly running its course. Had the religion of Israel been merely that result of evolution which is dreamed of by some modern writers, and the law of Moses the invention of a later age, there would have been no Israel in which a religion could have developed, or a code of laws have been compiled. The outward unity of the tribes in Egypt and the desert was shattered by the settlement in Canaan, and all that remained was the inward and religious unity that had been forced upon them by the genius of an individual legislator. The place of the political head and leader was supplied by the organised cult and elaborate code of laws which he had bequeathed to the nation. To all external appearance, indeed, Israel had ceased to be a nation, and had been reduced to a scattered and anarchical collection of marauding tribes; but the elements which could again bind them together still existed—the belief in the same national God, the rites with which He was worshipped, and the priesthood and sanctuary where the tradition of the law was preserved.

That this is no imaginary picture is proved by the Song of Deborah. The Song is admitted by the most sceptical of critics to belong to the age to which it is assigned, and consequently to reflect the ideas of the Israelite shortly after the settlement in Canaan. No composition of the Exilic period could be more uncompromising in its monotheism, and its assertion that Yahveh alone is the God of Israel. And the Song further assumes that the tribes of Israel, disunited though they otherwise may be, are nevertheless bound together by a common faith in the one national God. Nor is this all. Israel still possesses, even among its northern tribes, ‘legislators’ like Moses, and scribes who handle the pen (Judg. v. 14). Writing, therefore, is still known and practised even among a people so oppressed by their enemies that ‘the highways were unoccupied,’ and the fellahin of the villages had ceased to exist. Laws, too, were still promulgated in continuation of the laws of Moses, and the people of Israel are ‘the people of the Lord.’

And yet there was another side to the picture. While Zebulon and Naphtali were hazarding ‘their lives unto the death’ ‘on behalf of Yahveh,’ there were tribes and cities which forgot their duty to their God and their brethren, and ‘came not to the help of the Lord.’ Such was the case with the inhabitants of Meroz; such, too, was the conduct of Reuben and Gilead, of Dan and Asher. The description given by the compiler of the Book of Judges of the condition of the tribes after the death of Joshua cannot be far from the truth. They were planted in the midst of enemies whom they had found too strong to be destroyed or driven out. On all sides of them were ‘the Philistines, and all the Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hittites that dwelt in Mount Lebanon from Mount Baal-Hermon unto the entering in of Hamath.’[279] ‘And the children of Israel,’ we are told, dwelt among them, and ‘took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served their gods. And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Ashêrahs.’[280] Even more expressive are the words with which the Book of Judges ends: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.’ It was an age of individual lawlessness; the bands of society were unloosed, and none was strong enough to lead and control. Outside the influence of the representatives of the Mosaic law there was neither curb nor order.

Two incidents have been recorded which throw a lurid light on the manners and character of the age which immediately followed the settlement in Canaan. In one of them we hear of a Levite of Mount Ephraim ‘who took to him a concubine out of Beth-lehem in Judah.’ Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, had succeeded his father Eleazar as high-priest at Shiloh (Judg. xx. 28), where ‘the ark of the covenant’ had been placed. The concubine proved unfaithful to the Levite, and eventually fled to her father’s house in Beth-lehem. Thither the Levite followed her, and persuaded her to return with him to his home. The woman’s father, however, highly pleased at the reconciliation, continued to press his hospitality upon his guest, and it was not until the afternoon of the fifth day that the Levite succeeded in getting away. The evening soon fell upon him, and, rejecting the advice of his slave that he should spend the night in Jerusalem, on the ground that it was ‘the city of a stranger,’ he pressed on with his concubine to Gibeah, which belonged to Benjamin. It had been better for him, however, to have sought hospitality from ‘the stranger’ rather than from his own people; for, in spite of the fact that he had with him food in plenty both for himself and for his asses, he was left to spend the night in the street. But at the last moment an old man, who was not a native of Gibeah, came in from his work in the fields, and seeing the Levite in the street, asked him and his companions into the house. While they were eating and drinking, the rabble gathered about the house and demanded that the man should be brought out to them that they might ‘know him.’ It was a repetition of the scene enacted in Sodom when the angels visited the house of Lot, with the difference that the actors were Israelites instead of Canaanites, whom the Hebrews had been called upon to destroy for their sins. In vain ‘the master of the house’ intreated his fellow-townsmen not to act ‘so wickedly,’ offering them his own daughter as well as his guest’s concubine in place of the guest himself. Finally, however, they were satisfied with the unfortunate concubine, whom they ‘abused’ all night, and then left dead on the doorstep of the house. The first thing ‘her lord’ saw when he opened the door in the morning was the woman’s corpse. This he placed on his ass and carried to his home, where he divided it into twelve pieces, which he sent ‘into all the coasts of Israel.’[281] The horror of the deed, or perhaps of the visible proofs with which it was announced, aroused the Israelites, and they demanded the punishment of the guilty. The crime had been committed against a Levite, whose brethren were to be found wherever the Israelites were settled, and who had on his side the priesthood of the central sanctuary at Shiloh. He was, too, a Levite of Mount Ephraim, and the sympathy of the powerful tribe of Ephraim was accordingly assured to him. The Benjamites, however, refused to hand over their fellow-tribesman to justice, and the result was an inter-fraternal war. Before the tribes had conquered half the country which had been promised them, they were already fighting among themselves.

The Benjamites at first were successful, and their opponents were defeated with considerable slaughter in two successive battles. Then they fell into an ambuscade: the main body of their troops being drawn away after the retreating enemy towards the north, while an ambush rose up from ‘the meadows of Gibeah’ in their rear, and set fire to the city. The retreating foe now turned back; and the Benjamites, enclosed as it were between two fires, were cut to pieces almost to a man. Six hundred only escaped ‘towards the wilderness unto the rock of Rimmon,’ where they maintained themselves for four months. Meanwhile ‘the men of Israel’ treated their Benjamite brethren like Canaanitish outcasts, smiting ‘them with the edge of the sword, from the men of each city even unto the beasts and all that was found; and all the cities they came to did they set on fire.’

Benjamin was almost exterminated. A few men alone survived. But at the outset of the war they had been placed under the same ban as the Canaanites, and a solemn vow had been made that no Israelitish woman should be married to them. When peace was restored with the practical annihilation of the guilty tribe, the prohibition was evaded by a stratagem, which, however inconsequent it may appear to the European of to-day, was fully in keeping with the ideas of the ancient East. Jabesh-Gilead had refused to take part in the war against Benjamin, and the victors accordingly resolved to take summary vengeance upon it. The city was taken by surprise, and every male in it massacred in cold blood, as well as ‘every woman that had lain by man.’ About four hundred unmarried maidens were carried off to Shiloh, and there forcibly married to the surviving Benjamites. But even these did not suffice, and the Benjamite youths were consequently encouraged to hide in the vineyards near Shiloh, and there capture and make wives of the maidens of the place who came out to dance at the yearly ‘feast of the Lord.’ The place, we are told, was northward of Beth-el, ‘on the east side of the highway that goeth up from Beth-el to Shechem, and on the south of Lebonah.’

Recent critics have seen in this story merely a popular legend intended to account for the fact that marriage by capture was practised among the Benjamites. We might just as well assert that the story of Gunpowder Plot is a legend which has grown out of the customs of the 5th of November. The critics have not even the justification that marriage by capture was common among the Israelites. In fact, this is the only instance of it which we meet with in the Old Testament history of Israel—an instance so exceptional as to be inexplicable unless it had originated under special circumstances. It was certainly not the survival of an earlier custom common to the rest of the tribes, nor is there any trace of its having been general in the tribe of Benjamin itself. In fact, we look in vain for any other example of it alike among Israelites and Canaanites, or even among the Benjamites in any other period of their history.

It is true, however, that the account of the war between Benjamin and its brother tribes has passed through the magnifying lenses of later history. The exaggerated numbers of the combatants and the slain, like the use of the universal ‘all’ and ‘every’ where the partial ‘some’ is intended, are in thorough accordance with Oriental habits of expression. The modern resident in the East is only too familiar with such exaggerations of language, and in studying Oriental history due allowance must always be made for them. In the account of the war, moreover, its real character has been somewhat obscured. Benjamin has been regarded too much as a separate entity, distinct and cut off from the rest of Israel, rather than as the tribe which had once gathered round the sanctuary of Beth-On, and which continued to form the ‘southern’ frontier of the house of Joseph. The war against Benjamin, in fact, was like the war against Jabesh-Gilead—a quarrel not with a tribe, but with certain Israelitish cities. It is even possible that in this quarrel Jabesh-Gilead was from the beginning associated with Gibeah and the other cities of Benjamin. At all events, we find it so allied in the age of Saul. Saul’s first act as king was to rescue Jabesh-Gilead from the Ammonites, and it was the men of Jabesh-Gilead who took down the bodies of Saul and Jonathan from the walls of Beth-Shan and gave them honourable burial.[282]

The second incident, which tells us something of the manners of Israel in the years that immediately followed the invasion of Palestine, is recorded in language which has been little, if at all, altered by the compiler of the Book of Judges. The gruesome horror of the story of the Levite’s concubine is absent from it, but it equally shows how far from the truth is the idyllic picture sometimes painted of the first Israelitish conquerors of Canaan. It is again a Levite who is the central personage of the story. An Ephraimite named Micah, we are told, stole eleven hundred shekels of silver from his mother, but, terrified by her imprecations upon the thief, confessed the deed and restored the money. His mother thereupon informed him that the treasure had been dedicated to Yahveh by her on his behalf, in order that a graven and a molten image might be made out of it for him. Two hundred of the shekels were accordingly taken, and the silver employed to make the images. These were set up in the house of Micah, along with ‘an ephod and teraphim,’ and one of his sons was consecrated as priest. This, however, was recognised as contrary to the law, and when therefore a wandering Levite from Beth-lehem, ‘of the family of Judah,’ came seeking employment, he was welcomed by Micah, who asked him if he would be his priest. His wages for undertaking the office were to be ten shekels of silver each year, as well as ‘a suit of apparel’ and food. The terms were accepted, and ‘Micah consecrated’ him his priest. The provisions of the Mosaic law had been satisfied, and the Ephraimite complacently remarked, ‘Now know I that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest.’

His complacency, however, was of no long duration. The Danites, unable to establish themselves in the south of Canaan, sent out five spies from their camp near Kirjath-jearim[283] who on their way northward were hospitably received in Micah’s house. Here they found the Levite, with whom, it would appear, they had been previously acquainted, and asked him to inquire ‘of God’ whether their journey would be prosperous or not. The priest’s reply was favourable: ‘before Yahveh is your way wherein you go.’

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]

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.

The rule of Othniel could not have lasted long. If he belonged to the generation which had witnessed the Exodus out of Egypt, he would have been already an old man at the time of the war with Chushan-rishathaim. Hardly was he dead before Israel was again under the yoke of an oppressor. Moab had recovered from its reverses at the hands of the Amorites and Israelites, the Reubenites had degenerated into mere Bedâwin squatters in the wadis of the Arnon,[297] and Eglon, the Moabite king, now prepared to possess himself of southern Canaan. Jericho was seized, or rather ‘the city of palm-trees’ which had succeeded to the Canaanitish Jericho, and the ford over the Jordan was therefore secure. Eglon was followed by bands of Amalekite Bedâwin, eager for spoil, like the Sutê who in the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence were hired by the rival princes of Canaan in their quarrels with one another. He was also allied with the Ammonites, from which we may infer that the Israelites north of the Arnon, between Moab and Ammon, had been either expelled or brought into subjection.

The capture of Jericho opened the road to Mount Ephraim to Eglon as it had done a few years previously to Joshua. But the Israelites were treated more mercifully than Joshua had treated the Canaanites. Perhaps they lived in unwalled villages rather than in fortified towns, and their culture was not high enough to tempt an enemy with the prospect of a rich booty. At all events we hear of no massacres or burnt cities; the Israelites are laid under tribute, that is all.

For eighteen years they served Eglon. Then Ehud, the Benjamite, who like so many of his tribe was left-handed,[298] was chosen to carry the yearly tribute to the conqueror. Eglon was encamped at Gilgal, in the very spot where the Israelitish camp had so long stood, and received the envoys in the upper story of his house, immediately under the roof. When the tribute-bearers had been dismissed, Ehud, who had gone as far as the sacred ‘circle’ of hallowed stones,[299] turned back with the excuse that he had a secret message for the king, which demanded the utmost privacy. Taking advantage of his solitude, Ehud seized his sword with his left hand and plunged it into the body of Eglon, then, locking the door of the room behind him, he escaped through the columned verandah. Before the murder was discovered he had made his way to Seirath, and gathered around him the Israelites of Mount Ephraim. The fords across the Jordan were occupied, and the flying Moabites slain at them to a man.

It would seem that the Moabite ‘oppression’ did not extend beyond Mount Ephraim. Ephraim and Benjamin were the tribes who had suffered from it, and it was over them accordingly that Ehud was judge. His authority does not appear to have been recognised further to the north or to the south.

In the south, indeed, there were other enemies to be contended against, and there was another hero who had risen up against them. The Edomite and Jewish settlers found themselves confronted by those formidable sea-robbers who had once dared the whole power of Egypt, and were now established on the southern coast of Palestine. The Philistines, called Pulista by the Egyptians, Palastâ and Pilistâ by the Assyrians, were new-comers like the Israelites. They had come from Caphtor, which modern research tends to identify with the island of Krete, and, along with their kinsfolk the Zakkal, had taken part in the invasion of Egypt by the barbarians of the north at the beginning of the reign of Ramses III.[300] It is the first time that their name is mentioned in the Egyptian annals. But the Zakkal, who afterwards settled on the Canaanitish coast to the north of them, and whom they resembled in dress and features, are mentioned among the invaders against whom Meneptah II. had to contend, and it is therefore possible that the Philistines also were included in the host whose assault upon Egypt seems to have been connected with the Hebrew Exodus. At any rate, at the very moment when the Israelites were making ready to enter Canaan, the Philistines had already possessed themselves of the five cities which guarded its southern frontier. The date of the conquest can be fixed within a few years. Ramses III. tells us that the barbarians had swept through Syria, where they had established their camp in the ‘land of the Amorites’ northward of Canaan. Then they fell upon Egypt partly by land, partly by sea. This may be the time when the five cities of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath were captured by the Philistines; if so, Gaza must have again become Egyptian after the overthrow of the invading hordes, since Ramses III. includes it among the conquests of his campaign in southern Palestine. But it could not have remained long in his hands. The key of Syria, the frontier town which had so long been garrisoned by Egyptian troops, at last ceased to be Egyptian, and became Philistine. Henceforth Egypt was cut off from Asia; ‘the way of the Philistines’ was guarded by the Philistines themselves.[301]

The actual occupation of ‘Philistia’ was doubtless preceded by piratical descents upon the coast. This, in fact, seems to be indicated by the statement in the book of Exodus that the Israelitish fugitives were not led by ‘the way of the Philistines’ lest they should ‘see war.’ From the time when the northern barbarians first attacked Egypt in the reign of Meneptah II. down to the final settlement of the Philistines on the Syrian coast after the Asiatic campaign of Ramses III., the conquest of the Canaanitish coast was slowly going on. All the while that the Israelites were in the desert, the Philistines of Caphtor were creating their new kingdom for themselves. They were one of the ‘hornets’ which Yahveh had sent before Israel into the Promised Land. When Judah and Simeon eventually took possession of southern Canaan, they found the Philistines too firmly established to be dislodged.[302]

It was not only from their walled cities in Palestine that the Philistines derived their strength. They were within easy reach of their kinsmen in Krete, and fresh supplies of emigrants were doubtless brought to them from time to time in Kretan ships. Greek tradition knew of a time when Minôs, the Kretan king, held command of the sea, and it is said that the sea between Gaza and Egypt was called ‘the Ionian.’[303] In the reign of Hezekiah we learn from the Assyrian king Sargon that when the people of Ashdod deposed their prince the usurper whom they placed on the throne was still a ‘Greek’ (_Yavani_).

The features of the Philistine are known to us from the Egyptian sculptures. They offer a marked contrast to those of his Semitic neighbours. They are, in fact, the features of the typical Greek, with straight nose, high forehead, and thin lips. Like the Zakkal he wears on his head a curious sort of pleated cap, which is fastened round the chin by a strap. Besides the cap, and sometimes a cuirass of leather, his dress consisted of a kilt, or perhaps a pair of drawers, similar to those depicted on objects of the ‘Mykenæan’ period, and he was armed with a small round shield with two handles, a spear, and a short but broad sword of bronze. The kilt and arms were the same as those of the Shardana or Sardinians.[304]

The Philistines were thus aliens on the soil of Canaan. Their Hebrew neighbours stigmatised them as the ‘uncircumcised,’ and in the Septuagint they are called the Allophyli or ‘Foreigners.’ But they mixed in time with the Avim whom they had displaced.[305] The Amoritish Anakim survived at Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod (Josh. xi. 22), and Goliath of Gath was reputed one of their descendants. The Philistines borrowed, moreover, numerous words from the Semitic vocabulary, if indeed they did not adopt ‘the language of Canaan’ altogether. Their five ‘lords’ took the Semitic title of _seren_, and the supreme god of Gaza was called by the Semitic name of Marna or ‘Lord.’ Dagon, whose temple stood at Gaza, was a Babylonian god whose name and worship had been brought to the West in early days.[306]

The Israelites soon found that the Philistines were dangerous neighbours. From their five strongholds in the south they issued forth to plunder and destroy. Judah and Simeon were the first to suffer, while such parts of the heritage assigned to Dan as had not been annexed to Ephraim or Benjamin passed into Philistine hands.[307] But the central and northern tribes did not escape. We learn from an unpublished Egyptian papyrus in the possession of M. Golénischeff that Dor, a little to the south of Mount Carmel, had been occupied by the Zakkal, the kinsmen of the Philistines, so that the whole coast from Gaza to Carmel may be said to have become Philistine. From hence their raiding parties penetrated into the interior, and depopulated the villages of Ephraim and Manasseh, of Zebulon and of Naphtali.

Such at least is the conclusion to be drawn from a comparison of the Song of Deborah with the statement that the Shamgar ben Anath, Shamgar the son of Anath, ‘delivered Israel,’ by slaying six hundred Philistines with an ox-goad. Shamgar, as we gather from the Song, lived but a short while before Deborah herself, and it was in his days, we further read, that the Israelitish peasantry were almost exterminated by their enemies. The Philistine invasion in the time of Samuel was but a repetition of earlier raids.

The name of Shamgar testifies to the survival of Babylonian influence in Canaan. It is the Babylonian Sumgir, while Anath is the Babylonian goddess Anat, the consort of Anu, the god of the sky. In one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets two Syrians are referred to, who bear the names of Ben-Ana and Anat.[308] Does this survival of Babylonian names imply a survival also of the Babylonian script and language? At all events the worship of Babylonian deities still survived, and an Israelite and a ‘judge’ was named after one of them.

Deborah couples with Shamgar the otherwise unknown Jael. The reading is possibly corrupt, another name having been assimilated to that of the wife of the Kenite. But it is also possible that it is due to a marginal gloss which has crept into the text.

However this may be, the age of Shamgar overlapped that of the prophetess Deborah. ‘In the days of Shamgar,’ she says, ‘the highways were unoccupied ... until that I, Deborah, arose—that I arose a mother in Israel.’ It was not only from the incursions of the Philistines that the Israelites suffered. In the north the tribes were called upon to face a confederacy of the Canaanitish states. It was the last effort of Canaan to stem the gradual advance of Israel, and the struggle was decided in the plain of Megiddo, as it had been in the older days of Egyptian invasion and conquest.

Megiddo and Taanach were still Canaanitish fortresses; so, too, was Beth-shean, in the valley of the Jordan,[309] and the Israelites of Mount Ephraim were thus cut off from their brethren in the north. Here Jabin, the king of Hazor, was the dominant Canaanite prince, whose standard was followed by the other ‘kings of Canaan.’ Twenty years long, we are told, ‘he mightily oppressed the children of Israel,’ ‘for he had nine hundred chariots of iron.’[310] Two accounts of the ‘oppression’ and the war that put an end to it have been handed down, one a prose version, which the compiler of the book of Judges has made part of his narrative, while the other is contained in the song of victory composed by Deborah after the overthrow of the foe.

Critics have found discrepancies between the two accounts, and have maintained that where they differ the prose version is unhistorical. In the latter the Canaanitish leader is the king of Hazor, Sisera being his general, who ‘dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles,’ whereas in the song there is no mention of Hazor, and Sisera appears as a Canaanitish king. Moreover, it is alleged that, according to the Song (v. 12), Barak seems to have belonged to the tribe of Issachar, while in the prose narrative he is said to have come from Kadesh of Naphtali, and it is further asserted that Hazor had already been taken and destroyed in the time of Joshua.

The author of the book of Judges, however, failed to see the discrepancies which have been discovered by the modern European critic, and he has accordingly set the prose narrative by the side of the Song without note or comment. As the king of Hazor did not personally take part in the battle on the banks of the Kishon, there was no occasion for any reference to him in the Song, and that the commander of his army should have been one of his royal allies is surely nothing extraordinary. In the Song, Barak is expressly distinguished from ‘the princes of Issachar,’[311] and the question of the destruction of Hazor by Joshua has already been dealt with. It is a gratuitous supposition that the introduction of Jabin into the narrative, and the reference to Harosheth, are the inventions of popular legend or interested historians.

The prophetess Deborah, the wife of Lapidoth, ‘judged Israel’ at the time of the war. Her name means ‘Bee,’ and a connection has been sought between it and the fact that the priestesses of Apollo at Delphi, of Dêmêter, of Artemis, and of Kybelê, were called ‘bees,’ while the high priest of Artemis at Ephesus bore the title of the ‘king-bee.’[312] We might as well look for a connection between the name of her husband and the ‘lamps’ of the sanctuary. Deborah ‘judged Israel’ because she was a prophetess, because she was the interpretress of the will of Yahveh, whose spirit breathed within her. The ‘judgments’ she delivered were accordingly the judgments of Yahveh Himself, and the indwelling of His spirit was the sign of her claim to the office of ‘judge.’ We hear of other prophetesses in Israel besides Deborah; Huldah, for example, who was consulted by the king and the priests in the reign of Josiah. The position held by the prophetess prevented the Israelitish women from sinking into the abject condition of the women among some of the Arab and other Semitic tribes. In fact, women have played a leading part in Hebrew history. It has long ago been noticed that the mother had much to do with the character of the successive kings of Judah, and Athaliah of Samaria filled a prominent place in the history of the northern kingdom. Prophecy was no respecter of persons; it came to rich and poor, to learned and simple, to men and women alike, and upon whomsoever the spirit of prophecy fell, it made him fit to be the leader and the counsellor of his people. Deborah had been marked out by Yahveh Himself to be the judge of Israel.

She dwelt, we are told, under the palm-tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Beth-el in Mount Ephraim. She was, therefore, presumably of Ephraimitish descent, though the conclusion does not necessarily follow, and the palm-tree which was called after her continued to be a landmark on the high-road down to the time when the narrative in the book of Judges was written. There was another tree, a terebinth, and not a palm, which stood within the sacred precincts of Beth-el itself, and also bore the name of Deborah, but this Deborah was said to have been Rebekah’s nurse, whose tomb was pointed out under the branches of the tree.[313] The writers of the Old Testament have carefully distinguished between the two trees; it has been reserved for modern criticism to confound them.

With a woman’s insight and enthusiasm, Deborah perceived that the time had come when the highways should no longer be deserted, and when the northern tribes of Israel should be freed from their bondage to the Canaanite, and she also perceived who it was that was destined to lead the Israelitish troops to victory. This was Barak of Kadesh in Naphtali, the near neighbour of Jabin and Sisera. Like the Carthaginian Barcas, he bore a name—‘the Lightning’—which fitly symbolised the vengeance he was born to take on the enemies of Israel.[314] But Barak shrank from the undertaking at first, and it was not until the prophetess had consented to go with him to Kadesh that he summoned his countrymen together, and occupied the summit of Mount Tabor. Here, protected by the forests which clothed its slopes, he trained and multiplied his forces until he felt strong enough to attack the foe. Then he descended into the plain of Megiddo, where the Canaanitish host was marching from Harosheth to meet him. It was the old battlefield of Canaan; it was there that in the days of the Egyptian conquerors the fate of the country had been decided and the Canaanitish princes under Hittite commanders from Kadesh on the Orontes had been utterly overthrown.

In the camp on the lofty summit of Tabor, Barak had done more than train his men. Time had been given them in which to provide themselves with arms. Deborah declares that in the days of the oppression a shield or spear had not been seen ‘among forty thousand in Israel.’[315] The statement receives explanation from what we are told of the policy of the Philistines at a later date. When they had laid the Israelites under tribute in the time of Samuel, they banished all the smiths from the land of Israel, to prevent ‘the Hebrews’ from making themselves ‘swords and spears’ (1 Sam. xiii. 19). Agricultural implements alone were allowed (ver. 20). It would seem that a similar policy had been pursued by the Philistines and Canaanites in the earlier age of Deborah, though probably with less success. At all events Heber the Kenite, or itinerant ‘smith,’ still pitched his tent in Israelitish territory, and his wife Jael sympathised with the Israelites rather than with their Canaanitish lords.

When Thothmes III. of Egypt met the confederated kings of Canaan in the plain of Megiddo, they were led by the Hittite sovereign of Kadesh on the Orontes. It is possible that Barak was called upon to meet a similar combination of forces. Sisera is not a Semitic name, while, as Mr. Tomkins has pointed out, it finds striking analogies in such Hittite names as Khata-sar, Khilip-sar, and Pi-siri[s]. The Hittite power at Kadesh on the Orontes had not yet passed away. It still existed in the time of David, when it formed one of the frontiers of the Israelitish kingdom.[316] In the age of the Tel el-Amarna letters we find the Hittites intriguing in Palestine along with Mitanni or Naharaim, and it is not likely that they would have been less disposed to resume their old influence in that country when Egypt was no longer to be feared. Sisera may not only have been the commander of the Canaanitish forces, but also a Hittite prince, nominally the ally of Jabin, but in reality his suzerain lord. He dwelt, we are told, in ‘Harosheth of the Gentiles,’ an otherwise unknown place. It may have been in ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ (Is. ix. 1), but it may also have been further north among the Gentile Hittites of Kadesh.[317]

The battle took place on the banks of the Kishon, and ended in a complete victory for the Israelites. The nine hundred iron chariots of Sisera availed him nothing; ‘the stars in their courses’ had fought against him. He escaped on foot to the tent of Heber the Kenite, whose wife Jael received him as a guest, and then murdered him by driving a peg of the tent through his temples while he lay asleep. When Barak arrived in pursuit, Jael showed him the corpse of his enemy.

The pæan of triumph, ‘sung by Deborah and Barak’ on the day of the victory, is one of the oldest fragments of Hebrew poetry. To its antiquity and the archaic character of its language are due the many corruptions of the text. Some of the passages in it are quite unintelligible as they stand, and the conjectural emendations that have been proposed for them are seldom acceptable except to their authors.[318] But, as a whole, the pæan is not only a magnificent relic of ancient Hebrew song, full of fire and vivid imagery, it is also a document of the highest value for the historian. It gives us a picture of Israelitish life and thought in the age of the Judges, untouched by the hands of compilers and historians, and few have been hardy enough to question its genuineness. It is a solid proof that the traditional view of Israelitish history is more correct than that which modern criticism would substitute for it, and that the ‘development’ of Israelitish religion, of which we have heard so much, is a mere product of the imagination. The belief in Yahveh displayed in the Song is as uncompromising as that of later Judaism; Yahveh is the God of Israel, who has fought for His people, and beside Him there is no other god. The monotheism of Deborah is the monotheism of the Pentateuch. Nor is the song less of a witness to the truth of the history which we have in the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua. It tells us that Yahveh revealed Himself to Israel on Mount Sinai, and it distinguishes the tribes one from the other, and assigns to them the territories which bore their names.

The Song began with words which, as we see from Deut. xxxiii. 2, Ps. lxviii. 7, were a common property of Hebrew poetry.

‘For the avenging of Israel, When the people gave themselves as a freewill offering, Praise ye Yahveh! Hear, O ye kings, give ear, O ye princes, I will sing unto Yahveh, even I, I will make music to Yahveh the God of Israel. O Yahveh, when thou wentest forth from Seir, When thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, The earth trembled, the heavens also dropped water.[319] The mountains melted from the face of Yahveh, Even Sinai itself from before Yahveh the God of Israel. In the days of Shamgar ben-Anath, [In the days of Jael][320] the roads were deserted, And the travellers walked along by-paths. The peasantry failed, in Israel did they fail, Until I, Deborah, arose, I arose a mother in Israel.

Then was war (in) the gates (?):[321] A shield was not seen, or a spear, Among forty thousand in Israel. My heart (saith) to the lawgivers of Israel, Who gave themselves as a freewill offering among the people: Praise ye Yahveh! Ye that ride on white asses, Ye that sit on cloths, And ye that walk on the road, shout ye! Above the voice of the [noisy ones] at the places of drawing water, There[322] shall they rehearse the righteous acts of Yahveh, Even righteous acts towards his peasants in Israel, (Saying), “Then to the gates descended the people of Yahveh.” Awake, awake, Deborah, Awake, awake, utter a song![323] Arise, Barak, And capture thy capturers,[324] O son of Abinoam! Then to the nobles descended the people of Yahveh (?),[325] They descended unto me among the heroes. Out of Ephraim (came they) whose roots[326] (are) in Amalek, Behind thee, O Benjamin, among thy clans. Out of Machir descended lawgivers, And out of Zebulon they that handle the staff of the scribe. And the princes of Issachar were with Deborah, For Issachar was as Barak; In the valley (of the Kishon) were they sped on the feet, Among the wadis of Reuben great were the searchings of heart. Why didst thou stray among the sheep-folds To hear the bleatings of the flocks? For the wadis of Reuben great were the searchings of heart. Gilead abode beyond the Jordan; And Dan, why does he sojourn in ships? Asher stayed on the sea-shore, And abides in his havens. Zebulon is a people that has jeopardied its life unto the death, And Issachar also on the heights of the plain. Kings came and fought, Then fought the kings of Canaan At Taanach on the waters of Megiddo; They took no spoil of silver. From heaven fought the stars, In their courses they fought against Sisera.[327] The torrent of Kishon swept them away; A torrent of slaughters is the torrent Kishon. Thou hast trodden down the strong ones, O my soul![328] Then did the horse-hoofs strike (the ground) Through the prancings of his steeds. Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of Yahveh, Curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof Because they came not to the help of Yahveh, To the help of Yahveh among the heroes. Blessed above women be Jael, The wife of Heber the Kenite, Above women in the tent may she be blessed! Water he asked, milk she gave, In a lordly dish she brought forth butter: Her hand she put to the tent-pin And her right-hand to the workman’s hammer, And with the hammer she smote Sisera, she shattered his head, And struck and pierced his temples. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down, At her feet he bowed, he fell; Where he bowed, there lay he dead. Behind the window looked and cried The mother of Sisera behind the lattice: “Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the wheels of his cars?” The wisest of her waiting-women answered her, Yea, she returned answer to herself: “Have they not found and divided the spoil, A damsel or two to each man, A spoil of many-coloured garments to Sisera, A spoil of garments of many-coloured needlework, Two garments of many-coloured needlework for the neck of the spoiler.”[329] So may all thine enemies perish, O Yahveh; But may those who love him be as the rising of the sun in his might!’

Of Barak and Deborah we hear no more. The next judge and deliverer who appears upon the canvas is an Abi-ezrite of Manasseh, who came from the northern borders of Ephraim between Ophrah and Shechem. His father was Joash, the head, it would seem, of the clan. But he himself bears a double name. It is as Gideon, the ‘cutter-down’ of his father’s idol, that he is first introduced to us. In later history his name is Jerubbaal. The latter name is said to have been given him because he had thrown down the altar of Baal, and is interpreted to mean ‘Let Baal plead against him.’[330] But the other Old Testament examples we have met with of the interpretation of proper names may well make us hesitate about accepting this. They are all mere plays upon words, mere ‘popular etymologies,’ which have no claim to be regarded as history. Whether the philology is that of an ancient Hebrew writer or of a modern critic, its conclusions do not belong to the domain of the historian.

Jerubbaal signifies ‘Baal will contend,’ not ‘Baal will plead against him,’ and therefore really has a meaning exactly the reverse of that ascribed to it in the narrative. The name seems substantially identical with that of Rib-Hadad, the governor of Phœnicia in the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Joash, the father of Jerubbaal, was a worshipper of Baal, and consequently there was nothing strange in his calling his son after his god. It is only as Jerubbaal that the future judge was known to the generation that followed him,[331] and his successor in the kingdom of Manasseh was called even in his own day ‘Abimelech the son of Jerubbaal.’[332] It has been suggested that Jerubbaal and Gideon were two different personages, whom tradition has amalgamated together,[333] but double names of the kind were not unknown in Oriental antiquity. Solomon himself also bore the name of Jedidiah (2 Sam. xii. 25), and Gideon, ‘the cutter-down,’ was not an inappropriate epithet for the conqueror of the Midianites. There was a good reason why the pious Israelite of a later generation should shrink from admitting that one of his national heroes had borne a name compounded with that of Baal.[334]

The tribes of the desert, Amalekites, Midianites, and those Benê-Qedem or ‘Children of the East,’ whom an Egyptian papyrus of the twelfth dynasty places in the neighbourhood of Edom,[335] had fallen upon the lands of the settled fellahin, as their Bedâwin descendants still do whenever the Turkish soldiery are insufficient to keep them away. Year by year bands of raiders swarmed over the cultivated fields, murdering the peasants and carrying off their crops. At first it was Gilead that suffered, but the Hebrews were weak and divided, and the robbers of the desert were soon emboldened to cross the Jordan, and extend their raids as far as the western frontiers of Israel. ‘They destroyed the increase of the earth, till thou come unto Gaza, and left no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass.’

At last the Lord sent a prophet to the people and an angel to Gideon the Abi-ezrite. Gideon was threshing wheat by the winepress near the sacred terebinth of Ophrah. Here, under the shadow of the tree, was an altar of Baal, and by the side of it the cone of stone which symbolised the goddess Asherah. The angel summoned Gideon to rise and deliver Israel, and as a sign that he was indeed the angel of Yahveh he touched with his staff the offerings of flesh and unleavened cakes that Gideon had made to him, so that fire rose out of the rock and consumed them all. On the threshing-floor Gideon built an altar to Yahveh, like that more stately sanctuary which David raised in later days on the threshing-floor of rock which had belonged to Araunah the Jebusite.

Recent criticism has discovered in the history of Jerubbaal two different and mutually inconsistent narratives, which are again subdivided among a variety of writers. To these some critics would add a third version of the story, which is supposed to be referred to in Is. x. 26, though others maintain that the reference in the book of Isaiah is to the first of the two narratives. It cannot be denied that the history of the war against the Midianites in its present form is confused, and that it is difficult to construct from it a clear and intelligible picture of the course of events. That the compiler of the book of Judges should have made use of more than one narrative, if such existed, is indeed only natural, and what a conscientious historian would be bound to do. But to distinguish minutely the narratives one from the other, much more to analyse them into still smaller fragments, is the work of Sisyphus. It is even more impossible than to distinguish between Rice and Besant in _The Golden Butterfly_ or _Celia’s Arbour_. The historian must leave all such literary trifling to the collectors of lists of words, and content himself with comparing and analysing the facts recorded in the story.[336]

The altar raised by Gideon was dedicated to Yahveh-shalom, ‘the Yahveh of Peace,’ and it was still standing at Ophrah when the narrative relating to it was written.[337] Its name shows that it could hardly have been built before Gideon had returned in peace from the Midianitish war. There was much that had first to be done.

Gideon’s first task was to destroy the symbol of Asherah and the altar of Baal. The revelation made to him had been made in the name of Yahveh, and it was in the name of Yahveh alone that he was about to lead his countrymen to victory. It is true that between Yahveh and Baal the Israelite villager of the day saw but little difference. Yahveh was addressed as Baal or ‘Lord,’[338] and the local altars that were dedicated to Him in most instances did but take the place of the older altars of a Canaanitish Baal. Mixture between Israelites and Canaanites, moreover, had brought with it a mixture in religion. Along with the title, Yahveh had assumed the attributes of a Baal, at all events among the mass of the people. Joash and the villagers, who demanded that Gideon should be put to death for destroying the altar of Baal, doubtless thought that they were zealous for the God of Israel. It was the symbol of Asherah only which was the token of a foreign cult.

Perhaps the answer made by Joash to the charge against his son has been coloured by the theology of the later historian. It breathes rather the spirit of an age when the antagonism between Yahveh and Baal had become acute than that of one who was himself a worshipper of Baal and Asherah, and whose son in the hour of victory made an idol out of the enemy’s spoil. The Baal worshipped by the villagers of Abi-ezer was regarded as Yahveh himself, and hence it was that the offence committed by Gideon against him was an offence committed against the national God, and therefore punishable with death. To set him up as another god in opposition to the God of Israel carries us down to the age of Elijah, when the subjects of Ahab were called upon to choose between the Yahveh who had led them out of Egypt and the Phœnician Baal. It belongs to the same period as the etymological play on the name of Jerubbaal.

There was a special reason why Jerubbaal should thus have come forward to deliver his countrymen from the Midianites. The Bedâwin raiders had slain his brothers in a previous struggle at Mount Tabor (viii. 18-21). Jerubbaal thus had a blood-feud to avenge. He was the last and presumably the youngest of his family, and upon him therefore devolved the duty of revenging his brothers’ death. Moreover, it would appear from the words of the Midianite chiefs that Joash and his sons were not only the heads of their clan, but that they also exercised a sort of kingly authority in Ophrah and its neighbourhood. The history of Abimelech seems to imply that the family of Abi-ezer had succeeded to the power and even the name of the Canaanitish ‘kings’ of Shechem, and that the subsequent ingratitude of the inhabitants of Shechem to the house of Jerubbaal was due to jealousy of the preference displayed by it for Ophrah. Shechem contained a large Canaanitish element which was wanting at Ophrah, where the population was more purely Israelitish. If Joash were thus king of a mixed population, recognised by Canaanites and Israelites alike, we can understand why by the side of the altar of Baal there stood also the symbol of the Canaanitish goddess. The very fact that the sanctuary of Ophrah belonged to him (vi. 25) indicates that he possessed royal prerogatives. Even at Jerusalem the temple of Solomon was as it were the chapel of the kings.[339]

It has been suggested that the Baal whose altar stood on the land of Joash at Ophrah was the Baal-berith or ‘Baal of the Covenant,’ worshipped at Shechem,[340] and that the ‘covenant’ over which the god presided was that made between the Canaanites of Shechem and their Hebrew master. Doubtless the two elements in the population would have interpreted the name in a different way. For the Hebrews the ‘Baal of the Covenant’ would have been Yahveh; for the Canaanites he would have been the local sun-god. But there is nothing to prove that the attributes of the Baals of Ophrah and Shechem were the same, or that they were adored under the same form. Indeed, the fact that the altar erected by Jerubbaal at Ophrah was dedicated to the ‘Yahveh of Peace’ tells rather in a contrary direction. Shechem had its Baal-berith, while Ophrah may have had its Baal-shalom. While the one commemorated the covenant that had been entered into between the two parts of the population, the other would have commemorated its ‘peaceful’ settlement. For the Canaanite it was a covenant, for the Hebrew it was peace.

The struggle at Mount Tabor, in which the brothers of Jerubbaal had fallen, laid the fruitful valley of Jezreel at the feet of the Bedâwin plunderers. The plain of Megiddo was now in the hands of the Israelites. The battle on the banks of the Kishon had broken for ever the power of the Canaanites and their ‘chariots of iron,’ and they were now tributary to Manasseh.[341] The Canaanite townsman and the Israelitish peasant were now living in peaceful intermixture, and the torrent of raiders from the desert fell upon both alike. We hear no more of any attempts made by the older population to shake off the Hebrew yoke; it suffers from the Midianite invasion equally with its Hebrew masters, and the family of Joash govern it as much as they govern the Israelites themselves. Jerubbaal is the deliverer of the Canaanite as well as of the Israelite.

From Ophrah he sends messengers throughout Manasseh, as well as to the tribes of Asher, Zebulon, and Naphtali, and their fighting-men gather together at his summons. He thus acts like a king, and is obeyed like a king. Though he may not have actually borne the royal title, he was more than a mere ‘judge.’ Barak may have assumed the name and prerogatives of the Canaanitish kings he had conquered, and have passed them on to the family of Ebi-ezer. At any rate the power of Joash must have extended beyond Shechem and Ophrah; all Manasseh obeys the call of his son, and even the more distant northern tribes come at his bidding. The subjugation of the Canaanites had demanded a head to the state, and their union with their conquerors implied an organised community under a common king.

It was, however, with three hundred chosen followers that Jerubbaal made his first attack upon the foe. Encouraged by a dream, he fell upon their camp by night, and his followers, breaking the pitchers they carried with them, and waving torches in their left hands, caused such a panic among the undisciplined hordes of the desert that they fled in all directions.[342] The rout of the enemy was completed by the rest of the Israelitish army, which pursued the Midianites eastward towards the Jordan. Part of them under the shêkhs Oreb and Zeeb made for the ford at Beth-barah, where, however, they were intercepted by the Ephraimites, and their chiefs slain at ‘the rock of Oreb’ and the ‘winepress of Zeeb.’[343]

Meanwhile Jerubbaal was already on the eastern side of the Jordan, following in hot haste a detachment of the Midianites under two other of their shêkhs, Zebah and Zalmunna. His road led past Succoth and Penuel, but their Israelitish inhabitants refused all help, and even bread, to their brethren of Manasseh. It is clear that between Gilead and the western tribes there was now a diversity of interests and feelings, and that the half-nomad Israelites on the eastern side of the Jordan had more sympathy with the heathen of the desert than with the ruler of the organised state on the other side of the river. Perhaps they feared that his arms would next be turned against themselves, and that they too would be forced to become part of a kingdom of Manasseh.

But if they had hoped that the Midianites would have freed them from all fears upon this score they were doomed to disappointment. Once more ‘the sword of Yahveh and of Gideon’ prevailed, and Zebah and Zalmunna were slain. The claims of the blood-feud were satisfied, and Jerubbaal now returned to his old home. Condign vengeance was taken on ‘the elders’ of Succoth and ‘the men’ of Penuel. The first were scourged with the thorns of the wilderness, the others were put to death, and their tower, which guarded the approach from the desert, was razed to the ground.

Now, however, Jerubbaal had to meet with more formidable adversaries. The house of Joseph was divided against itself, and the Ephraimites resented his conduct in acting independently of the elder tribe.[344] In the earlier days of the occupation of Palestine it had been Ephraim which took the leading part; Joshua, who first opened the path into Canaan, had been an Ephraimite, and Mount Ephraim had been the first stronghold of Israel on the western side of the Jordan. In the time of Barak Ephraim had still been the dominant tribe, at least such is the impression we gather from the Song of Deborah; but it had begun to live on its past glories rather than on its present achievements. The Benjamites had definitely separated from it, and become a separate tribe, and Issachar, Zebulon, and Naphtali had carried on the war against Jabin and Sisera. Manasseh, however, had not yet appeared on the political scene; its place was taken by Machir, whose territory lay in Gilead, not to the west of the Jordan. But between the age of Barak and that of Jerubbaal a change had occurred. The Canaanitish towns, which the victory on the banks of the Kishon had laid at the feet of the northern tribes, passed into the possession of the younger branch of the house of Joseph, and Issachar had to be content that Shechem also should become a part of its territory.[345] Manasseh grew at the expense of its neighbours. It is possible that the clan of the Abi-ezrites at Ophrah had, by their conquest of Shechem, paved the way for the rise of Manasseh; if so, the dominant position they occupied in the tribe would become intelligible. Ophrah would have been the first home and gathering-place of the tribe. The treaty with Shechem, which united that city with Ophrah, may have been the beginning of Manasseh’s rise to power.

But Ephraim could ill brook the growing ascendency of the younger tribe. Manasseh had become wealthy from the tribute levied on its Canaanitish subjects; it had united itself with the older inhabitants of the land, and had borrowed their habits and their culture, and therewith their idolatries as well. The mountaineers of Ephraim, on the other hand, had retained much of the roughness and the virtues of the first invaders of Palestine. They were still warlike and hardy; they held the fortress of the Israelitish possessions in Canaan; and Shiloh, with its Aaronic priesthood, its traditions of the Mosaic law, and its purer worship of Yahveh was in their midst. Jerubbaal was forced to temporise with them. He pointed out that the destruction of the main body of the Midianites at the fords of the Jordan was a greater achievement than his own successful pursuit of the remaining bands. He had slain Zebah and Zalmunna in revenge for the death of his brothers; the slaughter of Oreb and Zeeb had been for the sake of all Israel. ‘Is not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abi-ezer?’

Jerubbaal was fitted to rule, for he possessed statecraft as well as military ability. His statecraft was shown not only in his answer to the Ephraimites, but also in his refusal to accept the title of king. It was pressed upon him, we are told, by ‘the men of Israel’—that is to say, by the northern tribes. Whether his father had actually borne the title we cannot say, though it would seem from the subsequent history of Abimelech, as well as from the words of Zebah and Zalmunna (viii. 18), that he must have done so. But at any rate he had exercised the authority of a king, like his son Jerubbaal, at the outset of the Midianite war, and it may be that among the Canaanites of Shechem he had also the name of king. Jerubbaal, however, if we are to regard the passage as historical, rejected the crown offered him by the Israelites, declaring that their king was Yahveh alone.

That the passage is historical seems to admit of little doubt. Jerubbaal’s words were in harmony with the feelings of the time among the stricter adherents of Yahveh, as we learn from the language of Samuel when the people demanded of him a king. How different were the feelings of the compiler of the book of Judges may be gathered from the words with which it ends. Moreover, Jerubbaal’s refusal of the royal title was politic. He had already realised that he had powerful enemies in Ephraim, who viewed his success and claims to power with suspicion and hostility, and he also knew that it was in Ephraim and among the priesthood of Shiloh that the belief in the theocratic government of Israel was strongest. As in Assyria, in Midian, and in Sheba, so too in Israel, the high priest preceded the king; it was not until the need for a single head and a leader in war became too urgent to be resisted that the national God made way for a national king.[346]

Phœnician tradition remembered that Jerubbaal was a priest of Yahveh, not that he was a king.[347] It was as a priest that he exacted from the people the golden earrings they had won from the Midianites in order that he might make with them an image of his God. The Hebrew text has substituted for the image the ephod which accompanied it.[348] But the ephod was the linen garment of the priest, which he wore when ministering, and with the help of which the future was divined.[349] It was not the vestment but the image, in whose service the vestment was used, that Jerubbaal set up in Ophrah, and after which ‘all Israel went a whoring.’ Like his father, Jerubbaal saw no idolatry where it was Yahveh of Israel who was represented by the idol. The religious beliefs and practices of Canaan had entered deeply into the soul of Israel; at Shiloh alone was no image of its God.

High priest among the Israelites, king among his Canaanitish subjects, Jerubbaal lived long in his father’s home at Ophrah. He acted like a king, even if he did not take the royal title. Like Solomon, he had ‘many wives,’ and like Solomon also, he built a sanctuary attached to his own house.[350] The Bedâwin spoilers came no more: there was now a strong hand ruling over the northern tribes of Israel, checking all tendency to disunion, and building up an organised community.

But the kingdom of Jerubbaal contained within it those seeds of dissolution which have brought about the fall of so many Oriental monarchies. They spring up, not among the people, but in the family of the ruler. Polygamy brings with it a curse, and the king is hardly dead before the children of his numerous wives are murdering and fighting with one another. Even during his lifetime the palace is honeycombed with the intrigues of the harîm, which break out into open war as soon as he has passed away. The family of Jerubbaal was no exception to the rule. Abimelech, the son of his concubine, a Canaanitess of Shechem,[351] conspired with his mother’s kinsmen in Shechem, and taking seventy shekels of silver from the temple of Baal-berith, hired with them a band of mercenaries, who fell upon the other sons of Jerubbaal at Ophrah and murdered them all save one. Alone of the ‘seventy’ brethren of Abimelech, Jotham, the youngest, hid himself and escaped. The rest were slaughtered like oxen on a block of stone. Abimelech then returned to Shechem, and there under the sacred terebinth, which stood by the consecrated ‘pillar’ or Beth-el of the city, he was anointed king. The garrison of the Millo, or fortress, of Shechem took part in the ceremony.

The report of Abimelech’s usurpation was brought to Jotham. He left his place of concealment, and, standing on the top of Mount Gerizim, upbraided the men of Shechem with ingratitude towards Jerubbaal. He clothed his words in one of those parables of which the East is the home. ‘The trees went forth,’ he told them, once on a time, ‘to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive-tree, Reign thou over us. But the olive-tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honour God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? And the trees said unto the fig-tree, Come thou and reign over us. But the fig-tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou and reign over us. And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow; and if not, let fire come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon.’

The moral of the parable was so obvious that it did not need Jotham’s explanation to make it clear. He had been bold in venturing near his enemies, and as soon as he had finished speaking, he fled to a place of safety. Beer, ‘the well,’ where he found a refuge, may have been the place of that name in the extreme north of Naphtali.[352] Here at least he would have been secure from pursuit.

The usurpation of Abimelech was the revolt of the older Canaanitish population against their Israelitish masters. It marked the successful rising of the native element. Ophrah has to make way for Shechem, and ‘the men of Hamor the father of Shechem’ take the place of the children of Jacob. Yet the deliverance from the Midianites wrought by Jerubbaal had been achieved as much for the benefit of the Canaanitish part of the population as for the Israelites themselves. The murder of his sons and the destruction of his family was a poor requital for all that he had done for them. Jotham was justified in prophesying that their own god Baal-berith would avenge the broken ‘covenant,’ and that Abimelech and his Shechemite conspirators would fall by one another’s hand.

Before three years were ended the prophecy was fulfilled. The ‘god’ of Shechem ‘sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the Shechemites,’ who began a plot against his rule. Abimelech had withdrawn from the city and was living at the otherwise unknown Arumah, the garrison and government of Shechem being placed under the command of a certain Zebul.[353] Perhaps the king had already begun to be suspicious of his subjects; perhaps his retirement to another town had aroused their jealousy. However it may have been, the Shechemites openly set at naught his authority. Bands of brigands left the city and infested the neighbouring mountains, where they robbed all who passed that way. They were soon joined by another band of bandits, under the leadership of Gaal the son of Jobaal.[354] Under him the disaffection towards Abimelech came to a head, and Gaal proposed that the citizens should revolt against Abimelech and Zebul. Zebul, however, while professing to be upon their side, sent messengers to Abimelech and urged him to march against Shechem before it was too late. Abimelech gave heed to the message, and Gaal’s forces were defeated outside the city, and driven back within its gates. Abimelech then pretended to retire to Arumah, and the citizens accordingly once more went out to their work in the fields. But the royal troops were really lying in ambush, divided into three companies, two of which fell upon the fellahin in the fields and massacred them; while the third, with Abimelech himself at their head, rushed into the city through the open gate. All day long the battle raged in the streets; then the survivors fled to the ‘crypt’ of the temple of Baal-berith which adjoined the Millo or fort.[355] By the orders of Abimelech brushwood was brought from the neighbouring Mount Zalmon, piled up over the entrance to the crypt and set on fire. All who were inside, men and women, to the number of about a thousand, perished in the flames. Shechem itself was razed to the ground, and its site sown with salt. For a time the old Canaanitish city disappeared from the soil of Palestine.

The destined punishment had now fallen upon Shechem; it was not long before it fell also upon its destroyer. The town of Thebez had shared in the revolt of Shechem, and Abimelech’s next action was to besiege it. The town itself offered little resistance, but there was a ‘strong tower’ within it, to which its defenders fled for refuge. Abimelech again had recourse to fire. But while the wood was being laid against the gate of the tower, a woman on the parapet above threw a broken millstone upon his head and shattered his skull. The king felt himself dying, and besought his armour-bearer to thrust a sword through his body, lest it might be said that he had been slain by the hand of a woman. But the request was made in vain, and future generations remembered that the last king of Shechem, the murderer of his brethren, had perished ignominiously by a woman’s hands.[356] With Abimelech the sovereignty of the house of Joash seems to have come to an end. We hear no more of Jotham, or of any other attempt to found a monarchy among the northern tribes. The first endeavour to organise Israel into a state had but little success. Once more the old elements of disorder and disunion reigned supreme. The tribes stood further and further apart from each other, and mutual jealousies led to intestine wars. The influence of Ephraim and of the sanctuary of Shiloh grew daily less, and the power of the northern tribes waned at the same time. The Israelites on the eastern side of Jordan began to forget that they had brethren on its western bank; Reuben is lost among the Bedâwin of Moab, and Gilead and Ephraim engage in interfraternal war. Meanwhile a new tribe is rising in the south. Judah has absorbed Simeon and the Kenizzites of Hebron; the few relics of Dan which have been left in the neighbourhood of Zorah have become Jews in all but name, and the Kenites and the Jerahmeelites, and the other foreign settlers in the Negeb have followed the example of the Kenizzites. A common enemy and a common danger has thus forced them together.

The enemy were the Philistines. In the early days of the Hebrew settlement in Canaan the Philistines had already made the raids inland which had been checked, if not suppressed, by Shamgar ben-Anath. For a time they had remained quiet in their five cities of the coast. But fresh immigrants from Krete or other Ægean lands introduced new blood and warlike energy. Once more their armed bands marched forth to plunder and destroy. This time they are no longer contented with mere raids; they now aim at conquest. Hardly have the Canaanites been subjugated after long generations of struggle, when the Israelites are called upon to meet a new foe. It is a foe, moreover, which is not enervated by centuries of luxury and culture, not accustomed to foreign rule or divided within itself, but a hardy nation of pirates whose whole life has been passed in fighting, and in seizing the possessions of others.

The first brunt of the Philistine attack was borne by Judah. But it was not long before the armies of the Philistines made their way northwards, and even penetrated into the fastnesses of Mount Ephraim.[357] Of all this, however, the record has been lost. The compiler of the book of Judges failed to find it in the fragmentary annals of the past, and has been compelled to fill up the interval between the fall of the kingdom of Manasseh and the supremacy of the Philistines in Palestine with notices of judges and events whose exact place in Hebrew history was uncertain.

It is here, accordingly, that we have the names of the so-called lesser Judges, of whom little more was known than the names. Two of them, Tola the son of Puah, and Elon, belonged to Issachar and Zebulon; and it is somewhat singular that while the book of Numbers makes Tola and Puah the heads of families in Issachar, it makes Elon the head of a family in Zebulon.[358] Of Tola we are told that he lived and died at Shamir in Mount Ephraim, which at that time therefore must have been in the hands of Issachar, and that he judged Israel twenty-three years. The account of Elon is equally laconic; he judged Israel ten years, and was buried at Aijalon in Zebulon. Another judge in Zebulon was Ibzan of Beth-lehem,[359] who was judge for seven years only, but of whom it was recorded that he had thirty sons and thirty. daughters. A similar record has been handed down of another of these minor judges, Abdon the son of Hillel. He, it is said, had forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rode on seventy colts. Abdon was judge for eight years, and ‘was buried at Pirathon in the land of Ephraim, in the mount of the Amalekites.’ This statement seems to push back the date of Abdon to an early period when Benjamin had not yet separated from the ‘House of Joseph,’ and ‘the land of Ephraim’ accordingly extended southwards into the Amalekite region. It would be of the same age as that of the Song of Deborah.

Gilead also had its judges, though the names of only two of them have been preserved. One was Jair, who ruled as judge for twenty-two years, and who ‘had thirty sons that rode on thirty ass-colts, and they had thirty cities which are called the villages of Jair.’ We hear something more of this Jair in the Pentateuch. He had taken the villages which were called after his name, and must have lived not long after the Israelitish conquest of Bashan.[360] He belongs, therefore, to the earliest period of Israelitish history in Canaan, and may have been a contemporary of Joshua himself.

The second judge left a more famous record behind him. This was Jephthah, who delivered Gilead from its bondage to the Ammonites. His father’s name was doubtful, his mother was a harlot, and ‘the elders’ of Gilead accordingly expelled him from what he claimed to be his father’s house.[361] He fled to the desert land of Tob,[362] and there gathering a band of bandits around him, lived on the spoils of brigandage. He soon became known, like David in later days, for his skill and courage in deeds of arms. For eighteen years the Ammonite domination had lasted, and the Gileadites sighed for independence. But it was long before a champion could be found. At last the fame of the bandit captain in Tob reached the ears of the Israelitish elders, and they begged him to come to their help. Jephthah taunted them with their conduct towards him, but feelings of patriotism finally prevailed, and he agreed to lead his followers against the national enemy if the Gileadites would promise to make him their ‘head.’ The representatives of the people had no choice but to agree to his terms, and the struggle for independence began. It ended in the deliverance of the Israelites; the Ammonites were again driven from the land which had once been theirs, and Gilead was free.[363]

The rejoicings over the victory, however, were clouded by the rash vow of the Israelitish chieftain. Before marching forth to attack the Ammonites, Jephthah had vowed to sacrifice as a burnt-offering to Yahveh whatever first came out of his house at Mizpeh to meet him should he return ‘in peace.’ It was his own daughter, his only child, who thus came forth to meet him, and to celebrate his victory with timbrels and dances. The spirit of the Gileadites was very far removed from that which had taught Abraham a newer and better way; the Canaanite belief was strong in them that their firstborn could be claimed by their God; and none questioned that Yahveh Himself had selected the victim and led her forth from the house to welcome the conqueror. The vow had to be fulfilled; Yahveh had claimed that which was nearest and dearest to the Gileadite chief in return for the victory He had given him. All Jephthah could do was to grant his daughter’s request that she might wander for two months in the mountains with her comrades, bewailing ‘her virginity,’ before the day of sacrifice arrived.

The memory of the sacrifice was never forgotten. It became a custom in Israel, we are told, for the Israelitish maidens year by year to ‘lament’ for four whole days the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite. It has been maintained that this custom was the origin of the story, and that the lamentation was not for the daughter of a Hebrew judge, but for some mountain goddess who corresponded with the Phœnician god Adonis. As the maidens of Phœnicia once each year mourned the death of Adonis, so the maidens of Gilead bewailed the untimely death of a virgin goddess. But the theory is part of that reconstruction of ancient Israelitish history, one of the postulates of which is that a custom has never arisen out of a historical incident. The historian, on the other hand, finds in the story evidences of its truth. There is no trace elsewhere of such a goddess as the story demands, or of an anniversary of lamentation in her honour, while the account of the vow and its fulfilment is in thorough harmony with the beliefs and customs of the time. It is wholly contrary to the spirit of later Israel as well as to the feelings of those who adhered faithfully to the Mosaic Law. If the story were an invention, it must have originated either in the days when human sacrifice was still practised, or else in the later period when it was regarded with abhorrence. In either case, its invention would be inconceivable. In the earlier period there would have been no reason to invent what actually took place; in the later period, the character of a judge and deliverer of Israel would never have been needlessly blackened. Moreover, the belief that the first thing met with on leaving or entering a house is unlucky and devoted to the gods, is a belief which is probably as old as humanity. It still survives in our own folklore, and testifies to a time when he who first left the protection of the hearth and threshold could be claimed by the powers of the other world.

Jephthah’s term of office as ruler of Gilead was only six years. He seems to have been already advanced in years when he was called upon to oppose the Ammonites. But his rule was signalised by a war with Ephraim. The ever-increasing dissensions between the tribes on the eastern and western sides of the Jordan came openly to a head, and the elder and younger branches of the house of Joseph engaged in a struggle to the death. Ephraim, it seems, still claimed predominance, and asserted its right to interfere in the concerns of its eastern brethren. ‘Ye Gileadites,’ it was said, ‘are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites and among the Manassites.’ But the ‘fugitives’ soon proved that they were the stronger of the two. The Ephraimites invaded Gilead, but were compelled to retreat. Before they could reach the Jordan Jephthah had seized the fords across it, and the retreat of the Ephraimites was cut off. A terrible massacre took place; whoever said _sibboleth_ for _shibboleth_, ‘river-channel,’ was thereby known to belong to the western bank, and was at once put to death. Altogether 42,000 men of Ephraim perished, and the power of the tribe was broken. Jephthah, however, did not follow up his success; that would have brought upon him the hostility of the other western tribes, and he seems to have returned to Gilead. There he died and was buried in one of its cities, the name of which was not stated in the sources used by the compiler of the book of Judges.[364]

The date of Jephthah it is impossible to fix. That the author of the book of Judges was ignorant of it would appear from his making Jephthah follow immediately after Jair. But it is clear that he believed it to have been towards the close of the period of the Judges. This, too, would agree with the fact that it corresponded with the fall of the power of Ephraim. In the time of Jerubbaal, the Ephraimites were still strong enough to command the respect of the conqueror of the Midianites; when the light once more breaks upon the history of central Israel we find the Philistines in possession of the passes that led into Mount Ephraim, and threatening Shiloh itself. The destruction of the Ephraimite forces at the fords of the Jordan can best explain the Philistine success.

With the period of the Philistine supremacy the history of the Judges comes to an end. That supremacy forced Israel to the conviction that they must either submit to the organised authority of a king or cease to be a nation at all. The kingdom of Israel was born amid the struggle with the Philistines; and though the first king perished in the conflict, his successor succeeded in founding an empire.

The Philistine wars lasted for many years. They began with raids on the Israelitish territory immediately adjoining that of the Philistines. Perhaps the conquest of the plain at the foot of the mountains of Judah first roused their hostility against Judah; at all events, it brought them into contact with the conquering tribe. A desultory warfare was carried on for some years; then the plans of the Philistines became more definite, and they aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the whole of Canaan. The sea-robbers had been gradually changed into a nation of soldiers.

Samson, the hero of popular tradition, belongs to the earlier part of the Philistine wars. The last relics of the tribe of Dan in the neighbourhood of Zorah and Eshtaol have not as yet been absorbed by Judah; the Philistines, on the other hand, have gained possession of the whole plain. Between them and the Israelites there is constant intercourse, partly friendly, partly hostile; at one time the two peoples intermarry, visit, and trade with one another; at another time they carry on a guerilla warfare.

Of late years it has been the fashion to transform Samson into the hero of a myth.[365] It is true that his name is derived from _Shemesh_, ‘the sun,’ and it cannot be denied that the stories relating to him have come rather from popular tradition than from written records. His hair, in which his strength lay, reminds us of the face of the sun-god engraved on the platform of the Phœnician temple of Rakleh on Mount Hermon, where the flaming rays of the sun take the place of human hair. But it must be remembered that Samson is represented as a Nazarite—a purely Israelitish institution between which and a solar myth there is no connection—and that his strength was dependent on the keeping of the vow which consecrated him to Yahveh as a Nazarite from the day of his birth. With the loss of the hair the vow was broken, the consecration at an end; the strength had been given by Yahveh, and Yahveh took it away. Between this and the fiery locks of the sun-god there is but little connection.

The character of Samson, however, is that of a hero of popular tradition. His utter ignoring of moral principles, his hankering after foreign women, his riddle, his devices for deceiving and slaying his enemies, belong to the tales told by the Easterns at the door of a _café_, or around the camp-fire, rather than to sober history. When we hear that Ramath-lehi was so called from the ‘jawbone’ of an ass which Samson had ‘flung away’ after slaying a thousand men with it, or that Ên-hakkorê received its name from the water which flowed from the bone to quench the hero’s thirst, we find ourselves in the presence of those etymological puns with which the historian has nothing to do.[366]

The compiler of the book of Judges has turned this hero of popular story, this lover of Philistine women, into a Judge of Israel. He was, however, merely a Danite champion, the one hero of Danite tradition, of whom indeed the tribe had little reason to be proud. Even in Judah his achievements gained him no honour. When the Philistines sought to seize him after he had burnt their corn, ‘three thousand men of Judah’ ascended to his place of refuge ‘on the top of the rock Etam’ and handed him over to his enemies. The wiles of a Philistine harlot deprived him of his strength and his eyes, and he ended his days as a fettered slave at Gaza, grinding wheat for his Philistine lords. The glory of his death, however, in the eyes of his fellow-tribesmen redeemed the rest of his life. Called to make sport for his masters in the temple of Dagon, while they feasted in honour of their god, he laid hold of the two central columns on which the building was supported, and brought it down on the assembled crowd. Samson and the Philistines alike were buried under its ruins. And ‘so,’ the chronicler adds, ‘the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.’

In the story of Samson we hear for the first and the last time in the book of Judges of ‘the men of Judah.’ It is the first time that they appear in history. Judah produced no Judges, for Othniel was a Kenizzite, and throughout the epoch of the Judges its history is a blank. Nothing can show more clearly how modern a tribe it was as compared with the other tribes of Israel, and how insignificant was the power which it possessed. The original Judah had its home at Beth-lehem, shut in between the Jebusite Jerusalem and the Edomite Hebron, and it was not until it had absorbed and coalesced with the other occupants of its future territory that the Judah of history was born. It is possible that the union was brought about, or at all events completed, by the Philistine wars; at any rate we find no traces of it at an earlier date. Even Lachish had been an Ephraimitic conquest, and in the time of Deborah it must still have been reckoned among the cities of Ephraim.[367]

Ephraim was yet to have a judge, the last of the race. Though the title must be denied to Samson, it must be given to Samuel the seer. In Samuel the judges and the prophets of Israel met together, and the spirit of Yahveh which had marked out the judge now passed over into the prophet.

But the history of Samuel is not contained in the book of Judges. We have to look for it in a new book which records the foundation of the Israelitish kingdom. The books of Samuel take their name from that of the prophet which appears on their first page. They begin, however, with the conjunction ‘And,’ and thus presuppose an earlier volume. They are, in fact, merely the continuation of the book of Judges. Whether or not the same compiler has worked at the two books we cannot tell; that is a question which must be left to the philological critics who have long since settled his character and date, and determined exactly the limits of his work.

There is one fact, however, connected with the compilation of the book of Judges which the historian cannot but notice. The narratives embodied in it differ from one another in tone and character. The religious point of view of the stories of Jephthah or Micah is wholly different from that of the stories of Barak or Jerubbaal. Between the account of the overthrow of the Canaanites on the Kishon and the stories narrated of Samson, there is the contrast between written history and folklore. Each narrative preserves its own individuality, its own point of view, its own reflection of the age and locality to which it belongs.

Here and there, indeed, the pen of the historian who has collected and combined these fragments of the past history of Israel can be clearly traced. The speeches sometimes remind us of those in Thucydides, and exhibit the colouring of a later age. The framework of the narrative, moreover, is the writer’s own; in fact, he shows himself to be more than a compiler; he is a historian as well. But with all this, the narratives he has collected differ as much in character and tone as they do in the events they record.

What more convincing proof can we have of the faithfulness with which he has reproduced his materials? In most cases they have not even passed through the assimilating medium of his own mind; instead of using his privilege as a historian he has given them to us unchanged and unmodified. And yet in many cases they must have shocked both his religious and his patriotic sense. Whatever else he may have been, the author of the book of Judges possessed a historical restraint and honesty which is rare even among the modern writers of Europe. He has given us the older records of his country just as he found them.

They were for the most part written records. The scribes of Zebulon are alluded to in the Song of Deborah, and the notices of the ‘lesser’ Judges have the same annalistic character as the notices of the early kings of Egypt in the fragments of Marretho. The Canaanites of Shechem, from whom Abimelech was sprung, had been acquainted with the art of writing from untold centuries, and the Canaanitish cities which were laid under tribute by Manasseh and the neighbouring tribes contained archive-chambers and libraries where the older literature of the country was stored. It is only in the future territory of Judah that we hear of a Kirjath-Sepher, ‘a town of books,’ being destroyed, and it is just this part of the country whose history in the age of the Judges is a blank. Between Othniel the destroyer of Kirjath-Sepher and David the conqueror and embellisher of Jerusalem, the name of no single Judge or hero has been preserved. Samson belonged to the feeble relics of the tribe of Dan, and the story of his deeds is the one narrative in the book of Judges which betrays an origin in folklore instead of written history.

Footnote 279:

Judg. iii. 3. The ‘Hivites’ of the Hebrew text should probably be corrected into ‘Hittites.’ The Sidonians are mentioned to the exclusion of the Tyrians, as in Gen. x. 15-18. This takes us back to the period before that of David, when Tyre was still a place of small importance, and Sidon was the leading city on the Phœnician coast. Cp., however, 1 Kings xvi. 31.

Footnote 280:

Judg. iii. 6, 7.

Footnote 281:

As Israel was theoretically considered to be divided into twelve tribes, there is no reason for doubting the cypher, even though there were not actually twelve tribes at the time in Canaan, and one of tribes, Benjamin, can hardly have had a piece sent to it. The text carefully avoids saying that the pieces were sent to each of the tribes. In chap. xx. 2, the word ‘all’ is used in that restricted sense to which western students of Oriental history have to accustom themselves, since one at least of the tribes, Benjamin, was absent.

Footnote 282:

The value of modern philological criticism of the Old Testament may be judged from the fact that Stade pronounces the narrative of the war against Benjamin to be unhistorical, because the first king of Israel was a Benjamite! (_Geschichte des Volkes Israel_, p. 161).

Footnote 283:

Judg. xviii. 12, 13, where it is said to be ‘behind’ or west of Kirjath-jearim. In xiii. 25 the Camp of Dan is placed between Zorah and Eshtaol, which were west of Kirjath-jearim. See G. A. Smith, _Historical Geography of the Holy Land_, pp. 220, 221.

Footnote 284:

We hear on other occasions of a regiment of six hundred men among the Israelites (Judg. xx. 47; 1 Sam. xiii. 15, xxiii. 13), and it would seem, therefore, that in the division of the troops a memory of the culture of Babylonia was preserved. Six hundred men represented the Babylonian _ner_.

Footnote 285:

Judg. xviii. 30. ‘The captivity of the land’ is of course that described in 2 Kings xv. 29, and shows that the compilation of the Book of Judges must be subsequent to the conquest of Northern and Eastern Israel by Tiglath-pileser.

Footnote 286:

Kennicott, _Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum_, i. p. 509. ‘Moses’ is also the reading of the Vulgate and a few Greek MSS.

Footnote 287:

See 1 Kings viii. 9. The addition of the pot of manna and Aaron’s rod in the Epistle to the Hebrews (ix. 4) is due to a misunderstanding of Ex. xvi. 33, 34, and Numb. xvii. 10.

Footnote 288:

The identity of Mitanni and Nahrina is stated in one of the Tel el-Amarna letters (W. and A. 23) from Mitanni, a hieratic docket attached to it stating that it came from Nahrina. In one place, however (W. and A. 79. 13, 14), the Phœnician governor Rib-Hadad seems to distinguish between ‘the king of Mittani and the king of Nahrina,’ though the passage may also be translated, ‘the king of Mittani, that is, the king of Nahrina.’ Ilu-rabi-Khur of Gebal (W. and A. 91. 32) writes the name Narima, and says that the king of Narima in alliance with the king of the Hittites was destroying the Egyptian cities of Northern Syria.

Footnote 289:

W. and A. 104. 32-35. Comp. Numb. xxiv. 24, where Assyria and Eber take the place of Babylonia and Nahrima. The translation given above is from a corrected copy of the cuneiform text.

Footnote 290:

See _Records of the Past_, new ser., vi. pp. 28, 29, 34, 45.

Footnote 291:

Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), ii. p. 151; _Records of the Past_, new ser., vi. pp. 31-45.

Footnote 292:

_Records of the Past_, new ser., vi. pp. 38-41. As only the _qau_ or ‘district’ of Shalam is mentioned, it is possible that the city itself was not captured by the Egyptian troops. Hebron is written _Khibur_, _i.e._ the city of the ‘Khabiri.’

Footnote 293:

Was the campaign of Ramses III. the mysterious ‘hornet’ sent before the children of Israel to destroy the populations of Canaan (Exod. xxiii. 28, Deut. vii. 20, Josh. xxiv. 12)? At any rate, this is more probable than the suggestion that _tsir’âh_, rendered ‘hornet,’ is a variant of _tsâra’ath_, ‘plague.’

Footnote 294:

The name has been Hebraised, and perhaps corrupted, so that it is difficult to suggest what could have been its Mitannian original. The Khusarsathaim of the Septuagint, however, reminds us of the name of Dusratta or Tuisratta, the Mitannian king who corresponded with the Pharaoh Amenophis IV.

Footnote 295:

Livy, xxviii. 37, xxx. 7.

Footnote 296:

The Welsh laws allowed a stranger to acquire proprietary rights in the fourth generation, and to become a tribesman in the ninth (Seebohm, in the _Transactions_ of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1895-96, pp. 12 _sqq._).

Footnote 297:

This is expressly stated in the Song of Deborah: the Reubenites could not come to the help of their brethren, for they had become a body of scattered and nomad shepherds (Judg. v. 15, 16).

Footnote 298:

See Judg. xx. 16.

Footnote 299:

_P’sîlîm_, mistranslated ‘quarries’ in the Authorised Version. They were the sacred stones, believed to be inspired with divinity, which formed the Gilgal or ‘Circle.’ Modern critics have raised unnecessary difficulties about the geography of the narrative, and conjectured that the name of the capital of Eglon has dropped out of the text in Judg. iii. 15 (see Budde: _Die Bücher Richter und Samuelis_, p. 99). The Biblical writer makes it plain that Eglon was at Gilgal, not at Jericho as his would-be critics assert.

Footnote 300:

Caphtor is written Kptar in hieroglyphics at Kom-Ombo (on the wall of the southern corridor of the temple), where it heads a list of geographical names, and is followed by those of Persia and Susa (Sayce: _The Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, 3rd edition, p. 173). The name of the Zakkal, formerly read Zakkar or Zakkur, and identified with the Teukrians, has been pointed out by Professor Hommel in a Babylonian inscription of the fifteenth century B.C. (W. A. I. iv. 34, No. 2, ll. 2, 6). Here it is called the city of Zaqqalu, and we may gather from a papyrus in the possession of M. Golénischeff that it was situated on the coast of Canaan not far from Dor.

Footnote 301:

A reminiscence of the event is probably preserved in Justin, xviii. 3, where we read that in the year before the fall of Troy, ‘the king of the Ascalonians’ destroyed Sidon, whose inhabitants fled in their ships and founded Tyre. The date would harmonise with that of the reign of Ramses III. Lydian history related that Askalos, the son of Hymenæos, and brother of Tantalos, had been sent by the Lydian king Akiamos in command of an army to the south of Palestine, and had there founded Askalon (Steph. Byz. _s.v._ Ἀσκάλων), and according to Xanthos the Lydian historian, the goddess Derketô was drowned in the lake of Askalon by the Lydian Mopsos (Athen. _Deipn._ viii. 37, p. 346). In these legends we have a tradition of the fact that the Philistines and their allies came from the coast of Asia Minor and the Greek Seas.

Footnote 302:

Josh. xiii. 2, 3; Judg. iii. 1-3. The statement in Judg. i. 18 was true only theoretically; it was not true in fact until the reign of David.

Footnote 303:

Stephanus Byzantinus _s.v._ Ἰόνιον, where it is also said that Gaza was termed Ionê. According to Kastôr the thalassocratia or ‘sea-rule’ of Minôs lasted until B.C. 1180, when it passed into the hands of the Lydians. By the latter may be meant the expedition sent to the south of Palestine by the Lydian king Akiamos.

Footnote 304:

Sayce, _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 126, 127, and pl. i.

Footnote 305:

Deut. ii. 23. Avim is merely a descriptive title signifying ‘the people of the ruins.’

Footnote 306:

See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 325-327. It is possible that some of the Semitic deities had been adopted by the Philistines before they left Krete, if indeed they came from that island. At all events it has been supposed that certain Canaanitish divinities were adored there, more especially Ashtoreth, under the title of Diktynna. The presence of Semites in the island seems indicated by the name of the river Iardanos or Jordan.

Footnote 307:

In the age of Deborah, however, it would seem that the seaport of Joppa was still in the possession of the Danites (Judg. v. 17). But cp. Josh. xix. 46.

Footnote 308:

Winckler and Abel, _Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen_, iii. 143. 37, 43. Anatum or Anat, the son of Sin-abu-su, is also a witness to the sale of some property in a deed dated in the reign of the Babylonian king Samsu-iluna, the son of Khammurabi or Amraphel, and published by Mr. Pinches, _Inscribed Babylonian Tablets in the Collection of Sir H. Peek_, iii. p. 61.

Footnote 309:

See Judg. i. 27. Beth-shean, the Scythopolis of classical geography, is the modern Beisân.

Footnote 310:

Twenty is half the indeterminate number forty, and merely denotes that the exact number of years, though unknown, was less than a generation.

Footnote 311:

Judg. v. 15. Literally the words are: ‘Issachar [is] like Barak.’ The Heb. _kên_ is the Assyrian _kêmi_, ‘like,’ and is used in the same way as _kida_ in modern Egyptian Arabic. It is criticism run wild to assert with Budde, Wellhausen, and others, that Deborah also is described as belonging to Issachar.

Footnote 312:

Pindar, _Pyth._ iv. 106; _Lactant._ i. 22; _Etym. Mag._ s.v. ἐσσην.

Footnote 313:

Gen. xxxv. 8, where the name of the terebinth, Allon-Bachuth, ‘the terebinth of weeping,’ is derived from the lamentations over the death of the nurse. A different origin of the name, however, seems to be indicated in Hos. xii. 4.

Footnote 314:

Rimmon, one of the chief Assyrian gods, was also entitled Barqu, ‘the lightning,’ and it is possible that the name had migrated westward along with that of Rimmon. Noam, whose name enters into that of Abinoam, the father of Barak, seems to have been a Phœnician god, whose consort was Naamah.

Footnote 315:

‘Forty thousand’ represents the highest unit, one thousand, in the division of the army, multiplied by the indeterminate number forty.

Footnote 316:

‘The Hittites of Kadesh,’ according to the reading of Lucian’s recension of the Septuagint, 2 Sam. xxiv. 6, in place of the corrupt and unmeaning Tahtim-hodshi of the Massoretic text. See Hitzig, _Z. D. M. G._, ix. pp. 763 _sqq._; Wellhausen, _T. B. S._, p. 221.

Footnote 317:

It has been generally assumed to have been near the Kishon, on account of Judges iv. 16. But the inference is not certain, partly because we do not know how far the pursuit may have extended, partly because Oriental expressions cannot be interpreted with the mathematical exactitude of western language. The name of Harosheth means probably ‘[the town of] metal-working,’ or ‘the smithy.’

Footnote 318:

Being a poem, it was probably handed down orally at first. This would account for variant readings like ‘also the clouds dropped,’ by the side of ‘also the heavens dropped,’ in _v._ 4; or ‘in the days of Jael,’ by the side of ‘in the days of Shamgar ben-Anath,’ in _v._ 6. The name of Jael, however, may have been a marginal gloss like _sârîd_, ‘a remnant,’ possibly, in _v._ 13. The song was almost certainly written from the outset in the letters of the so-called Phœnician alphabet, and not in cuneiform characters. Had it been written in cuneiform there would have been a confusion between _aleph_, _hê_ and _’ayin_, which cannot be detected in it. At the same time, the use of the preposition _bě_ in _vv._ 2 and 15 (_b’ Isrâel_, _b’ Issachar_) could be explained from the cuneiform syllabary, in which the character _pi_ (used for _bi_ in the Tel el-Amarna tablets) also has the value of _yi_. The omission of the article, which is a characteristic of the Song, reminds us that in Canaanite or Phœnician the definite article of Hebrew did not exist.

Footnote 319:

A variant reading gave ‘clouds’ instead of ‘heavens.’

Footnote 320:

Probably a marginal gloss.

Footnote 321:

This line also is corrupt, but there is a reference to it again in verse 11, ‘The people of Yahveh went down to the gates.’

Footnote 322:

_I.e._ on the road.

Footnote 323:

_Dabbĕrî shîr_, with a play on the name of Deborah.

Footnote 324:

The Massoretic text has ‘captives.’

Footnote 325:

The text is here again corrupt. The Septuagint renders it: ‘Then went down the remnant to the strong.’ But _sârîd_, ‘remnant,’ is possibly a marginal gloss derived from the name of the place Sarid in Zebulon (Josh. xix. 10), the meaning being ‘Then the people of Yahveh descended to Sarid to the nobles.’ The second member of the verse shows that the ‘nobles’ are Israelites.

Footnote 326:

The text cannot be right here, though the general meaning of it is clear.

Footnote 327:

The idea is the same as that of the sun and the moon standing still while Joshua defeated the kings at Makkedah (Josh. x. 12-14). Babylonian astrology taught that events in this world were dependent on the motions of the heavenly bodies.

Footnote 328:

Septuagint: ‘My mighty soul has trodden him down.’ The verse seems to be corrupt. Cheyne translates: ‘Step on, my soul, with strength!’

Footnote 329:

The Massoretic punctuation makes it ‘spoil.’ Ewald conjecturally reads _sârâh_, ‘princess,’ for _shâlâl_, ‘spoiling.’ The Septuagint has, equally conjecturally, ‘spoils for his neck.’ The garment referred to is the white towel worn round the neck as a protection from the sun or wind, and called _shaqqa_ in Upper Egypt, or the parti-coloured _milâya_ used for the same purpose in Lower Egypt. Cheyne translates: ‘A coloured stuff, two pieces of embroidery, for my neck, has he taken for a prey.’

Footnote 330:

Judg. vi. 32.

Footnote 331:

1 Sam. xii. 11, 2 Sam. xi. 21 (where ‘Baal’ has been changed into ‘bosheth,’ ‘shame’).

Footnote 332:

Judg. ix. 1.

Footnote 333:

See Kittel, _Geschichte der Hebräer_, ii. p. 73.

Footnote 334:

If a distinction is to be drawn between the names of Gideon and Jerubbaal, it might be conjectured that the first was the name under which the bearer of it was known to the Israelites at Ophrah, the second that whereby he was known to the Canaanites of Shechem. According to Porphyry, Phœnician annals spoke of a priest of Ieuô named Hierombalos, which is clearly Jerubbaal. The Canaanitish kings could also be priests, as we learn from the history of Melchizedek. Baethgen makes Jerubbaal practically identical with Meribbaal (_Beiträge zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte_, p. 143).

Footnote 335:

The Kadmonites of Gen. xv. 19, where they are coupled with the Kenites and Kenizzites of Southern Palestine: see above, p. 162.

Footnote 336:

Many of the accounts of battles given by Livy are similarly confused, and are doubtless drawn from more than one source, but no one would think of distinguishing the sources, much less of splitting the narrative of the Roman historian into separate documents.

Footnote 337:

Judg. vi. 24.

Footnote 338:

The usage lingered even as late as the time of Hosea (Hos. ii. 16).

Footnote 339:

The name of Abimelech, ‘my father is king,’ cannot be used as an argument, since the ‘king’ referred to in it is the divine king or Moloch, not an earthly ruler.

Footnote 340:

Judg. ix. 4, 46. Cf. viii. 33.

Footnote 341:

See Judg. i. 28.

Footnote 342:

The story of the pitchers and torches is pronounced by modern criticism to be a myth, and has been compared with old Egyptian romances like that which described the capture of Joppa in the reign of Thothmes III. by a stratagem similar to that which we read of in the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. But from the point of view of history alone there is no reason for discrediting the narrative. Bedâwin superstition would fully account for the panic and flight if the camp believed that the spirits of the night had attacked them. Indeed similar panics have been known to arise not only among the Bedâwin of the wilderness, but even among disciplined English soldiers.

Footnote 343:

The names of the chiefs have been said to have been derived from the two places which local tradition associated with their deaths. But though ‘the rock of the Raven’ is a very possible geographical name in the East—there is indeed more than one ‘Raven’s Rock’ in modern Egypt—‘the winepress of the Wolf’ is quite the reverse. Animal names like raven and wolf, on the other hand, were frequently applied in ancient Arabia to individuals and tribes (see W. Robertson Smith in the _Journal of Philology_, ix. 17, 1880, pp. 79-88).

Footnote 344:

In the narrative the quarrel with Ephraim comes before the defeat of Zebah and Zalmunna, but Judg. vii. 25 shows that it is misplaced. Certain critics have maintained that two different versions of the same story lie before us, and that the Oreb and Zeeb of the one version are the Zebah and Zalmunna of the other. This, however, is to exhibit a curious ignorance of Bedâwin organisation and modes of warfare: there would have been more than one raiding band, and the different bands would have been under different shêkhs.

Footnote 345:

See above, p. 270. Of the cities mentioned in Judg. i. 27, Dor, as we learn from the Golénischeff papyrus, had been occupied by the Zakkal, the kinsfolk of the Philistines, and would not have become Israelitish until after the conquest of the latter people. (Cf. 1 Kings iv. 11.) Dor, however, properly belonged to Asher, and Josh. xvii. 11 expressly states that the Canaanitish cities afterwards possessed by Manasseh were originally included in the territories of Issachar and Asher. Issachar could not have lost them until after the time of Barak.

Footnote 346:

Even at Tyre, the title of the supreme Baal, Melek-qiryath (Melkarth), ‘the king of the city,’ shows that at the outset the state had been a theocracy.

Footnote 347:

See above, p. 306. The priestly character of Jerubbaal has been suppressed in the narrative in accordance with the feelings of a later time, when the priesthood was strictly confined to the tribe of Levi. But at an earlier date the anointed king was regarded as invested by Yahveh with priestly functions. Saul and Solomon offered sacrifice, and David’s sons acted as priests (2 Sam. viii. 18).

Footnote 348:

See Judg. xvii. 5; Hos. iii. 4.

Footnote 349:

1 Sam. ii. 18, xxii. 18, xxiii. 9, xxx. 7, 8.

Footnote 350:

Judg. vi. 24, viii. 27.

Footnote 351:

See Judg. ix. 1, 28.

Footnote 352:

2 Sam. xx. 14. The reading of the latter passage, however, is not certain.

Footnote 353:

See Judg. ix. 41. Verse 31 should be translated, Zebul ‘sent messengers unto Abimelech to Arumah.’

Footnote 354:

The name of Jobaal, ‘Yahveh is Baal,’ has been preserved in the Septuagint. Its signification has caused it to be omitted in the Massoretic text where we have only _ben-’ebed_, ‘the son of a slave,’ corresponding to the expression ‘son of a nobody,’ which we meet with in the Assyrian inscriptions.

Footnote 355:

It is here called the _Migdal Shechem_ or ‘Tower of Shechem,’ but seems to have been the same as the _Millo_ of _v._ 6. The fort would have stood in the same relation to Shechem that the ‘stronghold of Zion’ taken by David stood to Jerusalem. It was probably built just outside the walls of the town. We may compare also the ‘Millo’ constructed by Solomon to defend his palace and the temple (1 Kings ix. 15).

Footnote 356:

See 2 Sam. xi. 21.

Footnote 357:

See Judg. x. 11, 12. All records of the wars with the Zidonians and the Maonites have perished. Perhaps Professor Hommel is right in identifying the Maonites with the people of Ma’ân in Southern Arabia, whose power waned before the rise of that of Sheba, and extended to the frontiers of Palestine (_Aufsätze und Abhandlungen sur Kunde der Sprachen, Literaturen und der Geschichte des vorderen Orients_, pp. 2, 47).

Footnote 358:

Numb. xxvi. 23, 26.

Footnote 359:

Had the southern Beth-lehem been meant, it would have been called, as elsewhere in the book of Judges, Beth-lehem-Judah.

Footnote 360:

Numb. xxxii. 41; Deut. iii. 4, 14. In Deut. iii. 4, the ‘cities’ of Argob are described as sixty in number, which in Josh. xiii. 30 are identified with ‘the towns of Jair which are in Bashan.’ This, however, is incorrect, as it was thirty villages and not sixty cities that were conquered by Jair.

Footnote 361:

This must mean that he had claimed a portion of his father’s inheritance from the legitimate sons, and that ‘the elders’ who tried the case decided it against him. In the narrative he is called merely ‘the son of Gilead.’

Footnote 362:

Tubi (No. 22) is one of the places mentioned by Thothmes III. among his conquests in Palestine. It is probably the modern Taiyibeh, the Tôbion of 2 Macc. x. 11, 17.

Footnote 363:

The argument put into the mouth of the Ammonites (Judg. xi. 13), like the answer made by Jephthah, doubtless expressed the feelings on both sides, but the language is that of the historian, as in the case of the speeches in Thucydides. When it is said (_v._ 26) that the Israelites had occupied the district north of the Arnon for three hundred years, the chronology is that of the compiler. Three hundred years are equivalent to ten generations, and the ten generations are made up by counting the names of the judges given in the book of Judges, down to Jephthah, as representing so many successive generations (1. Moses; 2. Joshua; 3. Othniel; 4. Ehud; 5. Shamgar; 6. Barak; 7. Gideon; 8. Abimelech; 9. Tola; 10. Jair. If Moses and Joshua are reckoned as one generation, the numeration would be carried on to Jephthah).

Footnote 364:

The name of Jephthah is a shortened form of Jephthah-el, which we find as the name of a valley on the borders of Asher (Josh. xix. 27).

Footnote 365:

See Steinthal, _The Legend of Samson_, Eng. tr. by Russell Martineau in Goldziher’s _Mythology among the Hebrews_, pp. 392-446.

Footnote 366:

Ramath-lehi is ‘the height of Lehi,’ and has nothing to do with _râmâh_, ‘to throw’; ’Ên-haqqorê is ‘the Spring of the Partridge,’ not ‘of the caller.’

Footnote 367:

It may be gathered from Judg. i. 16, 17, that Simeon preceded Judah in the occupation of the future Judah. When the expedition against Arad and Zephath was formed, the Jews and Kenites were still encamped together at Jericho. The Kenites seem to have remained behind in the newly-won territory of the Negeb, while the Jews established themselves at Beth-lehem.