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.