History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Thus Joshua began and to a great extent completed the conquest of Canaan. He may not have commanded all the Israelites, at any rate at the beginning. Nor did he conduct a full-scale invasion. Much of the settlement was a process of infiltration, or reinforcement of affiliated tribes who, as we have seen, already held such towns as Shechem. But there were numerous skirmishes and several spectacular sieges. The Canaanites were a higher material civilization than the Israelites and must have had much better weapons as well as strongly built stone cities. There is an air of desperation about the Israelites’ conquest and this helps to explain why they were so ruthless when they took a town.

  The first place to fall, after the crossing of the Jordan, was Jericho, one of the most ancient cities in the world. The excavations of Kathleen Kenyon and carbon-dating show that it goes back to the seventh millennium BC. It had enormous walls in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, and the strength of its defences produced one of the most vivid passages in the Bible. Joshua the prophet-general ordered the priests to carry the Ark round the city, with their ram’s-horn trumpeters, on six consecutive days; and on the seventh, ‘when the priests blew with the trumpets’, he commanded to all the people: ‘Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city.’ Then ‘the people shouted with a great shout, that the walls fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city.’126 Owing to erosion, the Kenyon researches threw no light on how the walls were destroyed; she thinks it may have been an earthquake which the Israelites attributed to divine intervention. The Bible narrative says: ‘And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword.’ Miss Kenyon established that the city was certainly burnt at this time and that, in addition, it was not reoccupied for a very long time afterwards, which accords with Joshua’s determination that no one should rebuild it, and his threat: ‘Cursed be the man before the Lord, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho.’127

  Joshua did not storm a city if he could avoid it. He preferred to negotiate a surrender or better still an alliance and peaceful settlement. This was what happened, for instance, at Gibeon. But its inhabitants, he discovered, had deceived him over the terms of their covenant, and though he saved them from Israelite vengeance, he ‘made them that day hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation’.128 Gibeon, says the Bible, was a ‘great city’, ‘one of the royal cities’. Its precise location was finally established after the Second World War by the American archaeologist James Pritchard. There are no fewer than forty-five references to Gibeon in the Bible and Pritchard was able to confirm many of them. It was the centre of a fine wine-producing area, and the city had underground cellars for storing wine in nine-gallon vats. On the handles of no fewer than twenty-five of these Pritchard found the letters gb’n—Gibeon.129 The loss of the city was regarded as so important that five Amorite city-kings tried to retake it. Joshua came to its rescue from Gilgal, ‘and all the men of war with him, and all the mighty men of valour’—he now had a small regular army—and defeated the Amorites in a hectic battle fought during a hailstorm: ‘they were more which died from hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword’. Then followed a dramatic scene, according to the Bible record. Joshua needed daylight to complete the destruction of the Amorite army, so he prayed to the Lord for the weather to clear: ‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.’130

  Joshua then went on to achieve a still more important victory over Jabin, King of Hazor, who had tried to create a coalition in the northern part of Canaan to keep out the Israelite intruders. He collected an enormous army, ‘even as the sand that is upon the seashore in multitude’, but the Lord ‘burnt their chariots with fire’. Then Joshua ‘turned back, and took Hazor, and smote the king thereof with the sword…. And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them: there was not any left to breathe: and he burnt Hazor with fire.’131 Hazor was thoroughly excavated by the Israeli archaeologist-general, Yigael Yadin, in 1955-9. He found a vast and splendid town, with a lower section of 200 acres and a citadel of 24 acres, housing perhaps over 50,000 people. There were strong gates and massive walls. Here, again, the evidence of burning and destruction during the thirteenth century BC, the time of the Israelite conquest, is entirely consistent with the Biblical record. Among the debris Yadin found a deliberately mutilated temple stele of the moon-god Baal Hamman with the uplifted hands symbolizing his wife Tanit; so evidently Joshua’s men had carried out the injunction to ‘tear down their altars’.132

  Despite Joshua’s spectacular victories, however, the conquest of Canaan was by no means complete at the time of his death. The consolidation of the Israelite settlement, the reduction of the remaining towns, and the final occupation of the coast took more than two centuries, 1200-1000 BC, and was not accomplished until the unified kingdom of Israel came into being at the end of the millennium. The different Israelite tribes acted independently of each other, and sometimes fought. They had a variety of enemies: Canaanite enclaves, incursive Bedouin tribes, the new menace of the Philistines pushing in from the coast. They also had to take over from the Canaanites they had beaten, restore the cities, work the land. In the Book of Joshua, God says to them: ‘I have given you a land for which ye did not labour, and cities which ye built not, and ye dwell in them; of the vineyards and oliveyards which ye planted not do ye eat.’133 This is abundantly confirmed by excavations which show the Israelites strikingly inferior to their Canaanite predecessors in civil technology, notably building and pottery.134 The children of Israel had a lot to learn.

  Moreover, Palestine, though small, is a country of great variety, broken up into forty different geographical and climatic units.135 That is what helps to give the land its extraordinary fascination and beauty. But it also tended to perpetuate tribal divisions and impede unity. The Israelite tradition, already strongly entrenched, of equality, communal discussion, acrimonious debate and argument, made them hostile to the idea of a centralized state, with heavy taxes to pay for a standing army of professionals. They preferred tribal levies serving without pay. The Book of Judges, covering the first two centuries of the settlement, gives the impression that the Israelites had more leadership than in fact they were prepared to tolerate. The ‘judges’ were not national rulers, holding power in succession. Normally they ran only one tribe each, and some may have been contemporaries. So every military coalition had to be negotiated on an ad hoc basis, summed up in the words of Barak, the chief of the Kedesh-Naphtali, to Deborah the warrior-prophetess: ‘If thou wilt go with me, then I will go; but if thou wilt not go with me, then I will not go.’136 The Book of Judges, though undoubted history and full of fascinating information about Canaan in the Late Bronze Age, is flavoured with mythical material and fantasy and presented in a confused fashion, so that it is difficult to work out a consecutive history of the period.

  This may not matter very much, for what the Book of Judges does convey is much more important. First it illuminates the essentially democratic and meritocratic nature of Israelite society. It is a book of charismatic heroes, most of whom are low-born, obtaining advancement through their own energy and abilities, which are brought out by divine favour and nomination. Thus, when Eblon the King of Moab, the oasis-sheikh who ‘possessed the city of palm trees’, oppressed part of the Benjaminites, ‘the Lord raised them up a deliverer’ in the shape of Ehud, ‘a man left-handed’, always a grave disadvantage in those times, especially for a poor man. Ehud was too lowly to have a weapon. So he ‘made him a dagger which had two edges, of a cubit length’, hid it ‘under his raiment’ and got the local Israelites to contribute to a gift, by which he obtained admission to the sheikh. Eblon was ‘a very fat man’, who was ‘sitting in a summer parlour, which he had for himself alone’. Ehud took out his home-made weapon, th
rust it into the sheikh’s belly ‘and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out’. This successful political assassination, carried out with great daring and skill, made Ehud a local commander, who then went on to subdue Moab: ‘And the land had rest fourscore years.’137

  Not only poor, left-handed men, but even women rose to heroism and so to command. Deborah, another figure from the oasis-country, was a fiery religious mystic, who prophesied and sang. She ‘dwelt under the palm tree’ and local folk ‘came up to her for judgment’. This extraordinary woman, married to one Lapidoth (though we hear nothing of him), organized a coalition army against Jabin, one of the senior kings of Canaan, and destroyed his army. As if this were not enough, the defeated Canaanite general, Sisera, took refuge in the tent of the still more ferocious Israelite woman Jael, ‘wife of Heber the Kenite’ (Cain-ite). Jael gave him a bed, allowed him to fall asleep, then pulled out a tent-peg, ‘took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground’.138 Whereupon Deborah, in the special sing-song tone which was the mark of the prophet, burst into a victory hymn, a savage and beautiful poem which descants on this appalling and treacherous act of violence.

  Then there was Jephthah, lowliest of all, the son of a prostitute, who was thrust out of his father’s house, while still young, by his elder brothers because of his mother’s trade. Jephthah had no choice but to dwell in the badlands and form a band: ‘And there were gathered vain men to Jephthah, and went out with him.’139 When the Ammonites attacked, this bandit leader, in a reversal of the natural order which was becoming typical of Israelite history, was sought out by the prominent members of the local Israelite establishment, who asked him to become their war-captain. He agreed, on condition he remained their leader in peace too. After a surprising attempt to negotiate a peaceful agreement-the stories in Judges are never without unusual twists, and this passage contains a fascinating glimpse into contemporary diplomatic-religious procedure—Jephthah swore a great oath to the Lord to solicit his help. Having received it, he defeated the enemy in battle and took twenty cities ‘with a very great slaughter. Thus the children of Ammon were subdued.’ But the terms of his oath were to sacrifice to the Lord whoever met him from his house when he returned home, and in the event this was his only child and daughter, who ‘came out to meet him with timbrels and dances’. So in this strange and horrible story, Jephthah feels obliged to fulfil his vow and sacrifice his child, and the daughter meekly accepts her fate, stipulating only a respite of two months so that she and her maidens ‘may go up and down upon the mountain, and bewail my virginity, I and my fellows’.140 We do not even know the name of this innocent and tragic creature.

  Strangest of all are the three chapters of the Book of Judges which describe the rise and fall, and the martyr’s death, of Samson. He was another low-born member of society, a Nazarite, with wild, long hair, dedicated, in some way now obscure to us, to divine service. There is no question that Samson, despite the mythical elements in the narrative, which turn him into an Israelite Hercules, is a real person, a curious mixture of juvenile delinquent and hero, a strongman and a half-wit, with a paranoid streak of violence, a love of vandalism and arson, and a taste for low debauchery and wicked women. He is the outstanding example of the point which the Book of Judges makes again and again, that the Lord and society are often served by semi-criminal types, outlaws and misfits, who become by their exploits folk-heroes and then in time religious heroes. Israel was by its religious nature a puritanical society, but it is remarkable how often the Lord turns to sinners or responds generously when they turn to him. Thus Samson, disgraced, blinded and with fetters of brass, shouts to the Lord: ‘O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be avenged of the philistines for my two eyes.’141 God apparently responded, though the Bible does not actually say so. Some of Samson’s exploits are the least plausible recorded in Judges, but the background to his story is authentic. The pressure of the Philistines from the coast was then just beginning to be felt, but there was no warfare between them and the Israelites, and Samson does not lead an army. On the contrary: there is constant contact and trade, even intermarriage, and this is attested by the archaeological evidence, such as the Philistine artifacts found in the Israelite town of Beth-Shemesh.142 The marvels of Judges are always built upon a substratum of truth.

  This raises the second point about the period. The Israelites were enlarging the imaginative gifts we have already noticed, and seen from this point of view Judges is one of the greatest collections of short stories in the whole of world literature. There is an underlying unity of theme but an astonishing variety of incident. The economy of means is admirable. Vivid characters are sketched in a sentence or two and leap from the page; an ingeniously selected detail brings the background to life; the narrative is swift and deft.

  There is also a feature of the Bible which we notice here for the first time: the superfluous but unforgettable detail. Thus in Chapter 12 we are told that the escaping Ephraimites who were taken at the Jordan passage were forced to say the word ‘Shibboleth’ because the Gileadites knew they could not pronounce the sibilant ‘sh’; hence when they said ‘Sibboleth’ they were identified and slaughtered.143 The detail is not in any way important to the story, but it struck the narrator so forcibly—as it strikes us—that he could not bear to leave it out. We find this instinct again in the story of the young David in the first Book of Samuel, appearing before Achish King of Gath feigning madness, so that he ‘scrabbled on the doors of the gate and let his spittle fall down upon his beard’, provoking Achish to the furious comment: ‘Have I need of madmen, that ye have brought this fellow to play the madman in my presence?’144 Or again the brilliant writer responsible for the Second Book of Samuel feels he has to give us some fascinating details about Solomon’s officer Benaiah, son of Jehoiada, ‘who had done many acts. He slew two lion-like men of Moab: he went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow. And he slew an Egyptian, a goodly man: and the Egyptian had a spear in his hand; but he went down to him with a staff, and plucked the spear out of the Egyptian’s hand, and slew him with his own spear.’145

  This instinct was not merely or chiefly literary: it was historical. Israelite love of the past was so strong that they crammed their narratives with picturesque information even when the didactic purpose was unclear, or non-existent. The tales in the books of Judges and Samuel are not just short stories. They are history. Indeed, in the books of Samuel they are beginning to be great history. There is in Israelite-Jewish literature of this period none of the aimlessness of pagan myth and chronicle. The narrative is set down with an overwhelming purpose, to tell the story, both elevating and minatory, of a people’s relationship with God, and because the purpose is so serious, the story must be accurate—that is, the writer must believe in it, in his heart. So it is history, and since it deals with the evolution of institutions, as well as war and conquest, it is peculiarly instructive history to us.

  Indeed the Book of Judges, naïve though it is in some ways, is in another an essay on constitutional development, for it shows how the Israelites were obliged by harsh facts to modify their democratic theocracy to the extent of establishing limited kingship. Early in the book, Chapters 6-8, it tells the story of Gideon, another poor and lowly man, who ‘threshed wheat by the winepress’, and was raised up by God to be a ‘mighty man of valour’. Gideon was originally a commander on a small scale, with a mere 300 men, but his eventual success was so great that he was, for the first time in Israel’s history, offered the hereditary kingship: ‘Then the men of Israel said unto Gideon, Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son also: for thou hast delivered us from the hand of Midian.’ Gideon replied: ‘I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the Lord shall rule over you.’ This good and humble man, in rejecting
the crown, was stressing that Israel was still a theocracy.

  Even so, some historians believe that the house of Gideon would none the less have become the royal line of Israel had not Gideon’s son, Abimelech, developed into a monster and committed one of the most stupefying crimes in the entire Bible, slaughtering seventy of his father’s male children.146 That ruled out the tragic house of Gideon, but much of the rest of the Book of Judges shows by implication the unsatisfactory nature of the disunited tribal system, with the repeated moral: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel and every man did what was right in his own eyes.’ The story of Jephthah ends in a brief and violent episode of Israelite civil war. The last three chapters of the book narrate the atrocious rape-killing of the Levite’s concubine in the Benjaminite town of Gibeah, which leads to a desperately cruel dispute between the Benjaminites and the other tribes, a sort of miniature Trojan War. And in the meantime the Philistine menace was increasing as the tribes of Israel fought among themselves. The way the facts are presented may be ex post facto royalist propaganda—as some scholars argue—but the facts themselves were plain enough. An external enemy brought the tribes together and Israel adopted a central system of command for war because it had no alternative.