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.