same may be said of all other peoples and of the whole race is not represented by a period of piety, and consequent prosperity followed by a fall, and then a series of unsuccessful efforts to recover from it. The truth is, that the Israelites of Joshua's time were half-civilized barbarians, amongst whom the activity of Moses had scattered some seeds of nobility which would in time bring forth fruit. But at present they gave but little sign of this better future, and were still fierce and rude to the last degree. Their prosperity was that of a horde of nomads who had been tolerably successful in gaining a home by conquest. Some of them were lucky enough to get possession of rich pastures and fertile corn-lands, while others had to be content with more barren districts; some became masters, and others were reduced to slavery; and this not because some were more virtuous than others, but because capricious fortune throws abundance into the lap of one, and withholds it from another. It is true that, in the end, great things came of these wild invaders; but this was the result of long and painful toil, and its price was paid in tears and blood. CHAPTER XIV. CALEB THE KENIZZITE. JUDGES I. 1-21; NUм. XIII. AND XIV. AFTER the death of Joshua we are told in the book of Judges it was time for the Israelite tribes to take possession of their territory. So they asked Yahweh which of them should begin. The oracle chose Judah, and he made common cause with Simeon. First they fell upon Bezek, the position of which is unknown, and took her king alive, upon which they cut off his thumbs and great toes, so as to disable him for war. He recognized the punishment of God in this mutilation; for in his cruel pride he had himself treated seventy princes in the same manner, and made them crawl under his table to pick up the crumbs that fell from it. He died in Jerusalem, which now fell into the hands of Judah. Then they turned their arms successfully against the inhabitants of various parts of the future territory of Judah. 1 Compare Joshua xv. 13-19. They conquered Kirjath-arba (afterwards Hebron), where the Enakites, Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai dwelt. Then they rushed upon Kirjath-sepher, that is the city of the scribe," afterwards known as Debir. "Whoever takes it shall have my daughter Achsah to wife," cried Caleb; and when his own brother, Othniel the Kenizzite, took the place he kept his word. But Achsah was not content with her future home, and when Caleb brought her to her husband's house, she urged the latter to request a more fertile allotment from her father; and when she found she could not persuade him to do so she undertook the task herself. She allowed herself to slip from her ass in token of distress, and when Caleb asked her what was the matter, she answered: "Grant me a boon! You have given me a dry land, give me some wells with it!" Caleb granted her request, and that is how the Kenizzites came to possess the higher and the lower wells. The sons of Keni, the father-in-law of Moses, came with the men of Judah from the "city of palms" (Jericho) to the desert of Judah; and when they had taken possession of this desert, the men of Judah and Simeon marched upon Zephath, which they conquered and laid under the ban. They called it Hormah, or "the banned." Judah also took Gaza, Askelon, and Ekron, together with the land in which these cities lay. Thus Yahweh helped Judah to conquer the mountain land; but the inhabitants of the valleys could not be conquered because they had iron chariots. The conquerors gave Hebron to Caleb, as Moses had commanded, and he expelled the three Enakites from it. Of his brother Othniel, we are further told, that when the king of Mesopotamia, Chushan Rishathaim, oppressed Israel, he arose and delivered the people from his tyranny. 1 We have seen that the book of Joshua represents all the Israelite tribes as united in a single camp, under Joshua, fighting against the Canaanites in concert, and dividing the conquered districts amongst themselves by friendly agreement. The same conception, thoroughly unhistorical as we have shown 2 it to be, underlies the story we have just given; for it represents the men of Judah and Simeon, together with the sons of Keni or the Kenites, as starting on their campaign from Jericho, if not from the common camp. The real course of events was very different; and though we have no direct accounts of it, we can make it out with tolerable 1 Judges iii. 8-11. 2 See pp. 347, 348. certainty from various traces it has left in the history of these southern tribes and the relation in which they stood to the inhabitants of the north country. We must begin, then, by reversing the order in which the book of Judges mentions the conquests of the men of Judah, and must make them begin from the south; for it is highly probable that while the house of Joseph, under the command of Joshua, worked its way into Canaan from the other side of the Jordan, and settled in the central district, Judah and his allies entered from the Arabian desert, along the coast of the Dead Sea. Let us turn our attention for a moment to these allies of Judah. In the first place there was the tribe of Simeon, with which that of Levi was always so closely allied that we shall be safe in supposing that a number of Levite families, if not the whole tribe, were to be found in the camp of Judah. But in addition to these sons of Israel, troops of shepherds of quite another origin ranged themselves under the same flag. We have already1 pointed out more than once that an Israelite tribe by no means consisted, as some would have us think, of the descendants of a single man, and that Judah, Simeon, and the other sons of Israel were not persons at all, but mere personifications. We have also observed that the Israelites were anything but an unmixed race, and that the sons of Israel did but form the nucleus of the tribes, while all manner of other elements were taken up into them. We are quite unable to discover the real composition of some of the tribes of Israel, but we still know a good deal about that of Judah. This tribe included many families, such as the Calebites, the Kenites, the Kenizzites, and the Jerahmeelites, that were certainly not of Israelite but of Edomite and Midianite origin.3 This is only natural; for the men of Judah and the other Israelites who had made common cause with them had doubtless spent a considerable time on the southern boundaries of Canaan before they succeeded in gaining a footing in the country itself. These regions west of Mount Seir were inhabited by Edomites and Midianites, some of whom, no doubt, had settled habitations, while others wandered about with their herds in search of pasture. These shepherds, doubtless, cast longing eyes upon the fertile glades of Canaan, and from time to time, as opportunity served, made marauding expeditions against them, though they were not strong enough to expel their inhabitants. In the course of time however, they were 1 See pp. 102, 103; 226-228.- 2 See p. 316. 8 Compare Numbers x. 29-32. strengthened by the "sons of Judah," whose habitual attitude of hostility towards the Philistines made them the natural allies of these border tribes. At first, perhaps, the alliance they formed was disturbed by occasional quarrels, but eventually they all made common cause with each other, visited the sanctuary of "the Terror" at Beersheba1 together, and at last felt strong enough to venture on an attempt to conquer the land of Canaan. Of course this enterprise was surrounded with difficulties. It will be remembered that a story in the Pentateuch represents the Israelites as having been actually repulsed by the Amorites in an expedition against Zephath.2 Another account tells us that Moses took this city, while the book of Judges, as we saw just now, says that the Judæans and their allies conquered it after the death of Joshua. Zephath was evidently a border fortress and the key to the land; and it is probable that its fall gave the signal to the shepherd tribes that lived on the southern border of Canaan to seize the opportunity of making a regular invasion. As the first fruits of the spoil, Zephath itself was treated by the Judæans as Jericho was by the sons of Joseph- it was devoted to Yahweh, and the place where it had stood was called Hormah, or "banned." Pushing on from this point of vantage, the invaders came upon a formidable foe to the west; for there the Philistines, a warlike tribe that had come, like the Israelites themselves, from Egypt, held possession of the seaboard. We are informed, indeed, both in the narrative we have just given and in a passage in the book of Joshua,5 that the Israelites took the Philistine cities Ekron, Ashdod, Gaza, and Askelon; but if this is so, the triumph was but short lived, for we soon find all these places once more in the hands of their former owners. The invaders were more successful towards the north, where they took Kirjath-sepher and the mountain land round Hebron, and extended their conquests up to the district of which the house of Joseph had taken possession. Thus did Judah and his allies win themselves a home, which they divided according to the rights of war - that is to say, the right of the strongest. Most of the foreign clans ranged themselves under the flag of Judah- whether because the chief of this tribe was the bravest and most successful, or for whatever other reason and Judah, therefore, became far 1 See pp. 161-166. more powerful than Simeon and Levi, who gradually sank almost into the position of dependencies of the larger tribe. The Simeonites did indeed retain a certain amount of independence, and gained some territory of their own; but many of their families, together with all the Levite clans that had entered Canaan from this side, were scattered amongst the Judæans, while others penetrated as far as Shechem, where we shall meet with them again. Of course the Kenites, Kenizzites, and other kindred tribes acquired land of their own just as the Judæans and other sons of Israel did. What each obtained depended upon his valor or good fortune. Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, the Kenizzite,' and Othniel, "the son of Kenaz" (which means that he too was a Kenizzite), are mentioned by tradition as valiant and successful warriors, who drove the warlike Enakites from Hebron and the surrounding district, and took possession of it themselves. The Kenites settled in the desert of Judah, and still further south. From the nature of the case, the boundary between the territory of the Israelites and that of the Edomites must have been very illdefined, or rather the two must have run into each other, so that in travelling from north to south one would constantly meet fewer Israelites and more Kenites, Kenizzites, and kindred tribes. Hence the legend represented Esau and Jacob as twin brothers, and called them both sons of Isaac. At the time of the conquest of Canaan the national consciousness of Israel was not yet roused. Centuries were still to pass before the rise of a true Israelite nation. The northern tribes paid no attention to Judah: Judah knew nothing of Joseph, or at least felt no interest in him. But when the sons of Israel began to feel their connection more deeply; when the worship of Yahweh, which was common to them all, took a fresh flight, and the peculiar Israelite character began to be strongly marked, then the question as to the origin of the inhabitants of the various portions of the land emphatically demanded an answer. The idea took root that none but true Israelites ought to have an inheritance in the land of Yahweh. And yet it was still perfectly well known that the inhabitants of Hebron were not Israelites, but people of another stock. This was strange and even shocking. The legend of Caleb's faith in the might of Yahweh was intended to explain this fact, and to answer the question, "What right have these strangers to an inheritance in the midst of the sons 1 Numbers xxxii. 12. 1 Chron. iv. 13-15. |