Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/417

ISRAEL 401 dispersion on the contra 1 } is regarded as a curse and no blessing, an annihilation and not the means of giving permanence to its tribal individuality. The shattsred remains of Simeon, and doubtless those of Levi also, became incorporated with Judah, which thence forward was the sole representative of the three sons of Leah, who according to the genealogy had been bom immediately after Reuben the first-born. Judah itself seems at the same time to have suffered severely. Of its three older branches, Er, Ouan, and Shelah, one only survived, and only by the accession of foreign elements did the tribe regain its vigour, by the fresh blood which the Kenites of the Negeb brought. For Zarah and Pharez, which took the place of Er and Onan after these had disappeared, belonged originally, not to Israel, but to Hebron or the Kenites ; under this designation are included families like those of Othniel, Jerachmeel, and Caleb, and, as has been already remarked, even in David s time these were not reckoned as strictly belonging to Judah. Thus the depletion which the tribe had to sutler in the struggle with the Canaanites at the beginning of the period of the judges was the remote cause Oi the prominence which, according to 1 Chron. ii., the Bne Hezron after wards attained in Judah. The survivors of Simeon also appear to have been forced back upon these Hezronites in the Negeb ; the cities assigned to them in the book of Joshua all belong to that region. erman- Even after the united resistance of the Canaanites had been broken, each individual community had still enough ^* t e ~ to do before it could take firm hold of the spot which it had searched out for itself or to which it had been assigned. The business of effecting permanent settlement was just a continuation of the former struggle, only on a diminished scale ; every tribe and every family now fought for its own hand after the preliminary work had been accomplished by a united effort. Naturally therefore the conquest was at first but an incomplete one. The plain which fringed the coast was hardly touched ; so also the valley of Jezreel with its girdle of fortified cities stretching from Acco to Bethshean. All that was subdued in the strict sense of that word was the mountainous land, particularly the southern hill country of "Mount Ephraim"; yet even here the Canaanites retained possession of not a few cities, such as Jebus, Shechem, Thebez. It was only after the lapse of centuries that all the lacunrc were filled up, and the Canaanite enclaves made tributary. The Israelites had the extraordinarily disintegrated state of the enemy to thank for the ease with which they had achieved success. The first storm subsided compara tively soon, and conquerors and conquered alike learned to accommodate themselves to the new circumstances. Then anaan- the Canaanites once more collected all their energies to e reac- strike a blow for freedom. Under the hegemony of Sisera a great league was formed, and the plain of Jezreel became the centre of the reorganized power which made itself felt by its attacks both northwards and southwards. The Israelites were strangely helpless ; it was as if neither shield nor spear could be found among their 40,000 fight ing men. But at last there came an impulse from above, and brought life and soul to the unorganized mass ; Deborah sent out the summons to the tribes, Barak came forward as their leader against the kings of Canaan who had assembled under Sisera s command by the brook Kishon. The cavalry of the enemy was unable to with stand the impetuous rush of the army of Jehovah, and Sisera himself perished in the flight. From that day the Canaanites, although many strong towns continued to be held by them, never again raised their heads. After these occurrences some further changes of a funda mental character took place in the relations of the tribes. an. The Danites proved unable to hold against the forward pressure of the Philistines their territory on the coast to the west of Benjamin and Ephraim ; they accordingly sought a new settlement, which was found in the north at the foot of Hermon. In this way all the secondary tribes westward of Jordan (Asher, Naphtali, Dan) came to have their seats beside each other in the northern division of the land. Eastward of Jordan, Reuben rapidly fell from his old prominence, sharhig the fate of his next eldest brethren Simeon and Levi. When Eglon of Moab took Jericho, and laid Benjamin under tribute, it is obvious that he must previously have made himself master of Reuben s Reuben, territory. This territory became thenceforward a subject of constant dispute between Moab and Israel ; the efforts to recover it, however, did not proceed from Reuben himself, but from Gad, a tribe which knew how to assert itself with vigour against the enemies by which it was surrounded. But, if the Hebrews lost ground in the south, they materially enlarged their borders in the north of the land eastward of Jordan. Various Manassite families, finding their holdings at home too small, crossed the Jordan and founded colonies in Bashan and northern Gilead. Although this colonization, on account of the Gilead. rivalry of the Aramaeans, who were also pressing forward in this direction, was but imperfectly successful, It never theless was of very great importance, inasmuch as it served to give new strength to the bonds that united the eastern with the western tribes. Not only was Gilead not lost ; it even became a very vigorous member of the body politic. 1 The times of agitation and insecurity which fol owei upon the conquest of Palestine invited attacks by the eastern nomads, and once more the Israelite peasantry showed all its old helplessness, until at last the indignation of a Manassite of good family, Gideon or Jerubbaal, was Gideon, roused by the Midianites, who had captured some of his brothers and put them to death. With his family, that of Abiezer, he gave pursuit, and, overtaking the enemy on the borders of the wilderness, inflicted on them such chastisement as put an end to these incursions. His heroism had consequences which reached far beyond the scope of his original purpose. He became the champion of the peasantry against the freebooters, of the cultivated land against the waste ; social respect and predominance were his rewards. In his native town of Ophrah he kept up a great establishment, where also he built a temple with an image of Jehovah overlaid with the gold which lie had taken from the Midianites. He transmitted to his sons an authority, which was not limited to Abiezer and Manasseh alone, but, however slightly and indirectly, extended over Ephraim as well. On the foundations laid by Gideon Abimelech his son Abime- sought to establish a kingship over Israel, that is, oversell. Ephraim and Manasseh. The predominance, however, which had been naturally accorded to his father in virtue of his personal merits, Abimelech looked upon as a thing seized by force and to be maintained with injustice ; and in this way he soon destroyed those fair beginnings out of which even at that time a kingdom might have arisen within the house of Joseph. The one permanent fruit of his activity was that Shechem was destroyed as a Canaanite city and rebuilt for Israel. 2 The most important change of the period of the judges National went on gradually and in silence. The old population of growth, the country, which, according to Deuteronomy, was to 1 It is probable that Manasseh s migration to the territory eastward of Jordan took place from the west, and later than the time of Moses. The older portions of the Hexateuch speak not of two and a half but only of two trans-Jordanic tribes, and exclude Manasseh ; according to them the kingdom of Sihon alone was subdued by Moses, not that of Og also, the latter indeed being a wholly legendary personage. In the song of Deborah, Machir is reckoned among the western tribes, and it was not until much later that this became the designation of the Manassites eastward of Jordan. It is also worth noticing that Jair s colonization of northern Gilead did not take place until the time of the judges ( Juclg. x. 3 sqq. ), but is related also in Num. xxxii. 39-42. 2 On the narratives contained in the book of Judges see Bleek, EinL ins Alte Testament (4th ed.), 88-98, and especially the sections on Barak and Sisera, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, the Danite migration, and the Benjamites of Gibeah ( 93-98). XIII. 51