JOSHUA
JOSHUA
787
by Israel of the midlands of W. Palestine by the fords near Tell Adarai and up the Wady tera'a. Such a conclusion, too, would fill the great gap which yawns in all the other records : the absence of all account of the conquest of Ephraini and Manasseh.
But, attractive as this conclusion appears, there are many objections to it. The crossing of all Israel opposite Jericho is not only conhrnied by the earliest traditions, one of which is E itself, but ia supported by historical probabilities. The centre of Israel's power in E. Palestine was immediately orposite Jericho.* Nor was the crossing in face of the one fortified city which the Jordan Valley contained south of Beth-shan so improbable as it seems. Jericho, as we shall presently see, was never able to resist a siege ; and many subsequent invaders of W. Palestine from the h. have even gone out of their way to take the city before attempting the hill-country behind her, even by the ojien passes to the N. Their strategj' is in- telligible. Once captured, Jericho became a well- stocked and well-watered base for campaigns in the comparatively barren hills to the west of her. The oldest traditions assert that Joshua made himself acquainted with the defenceles.sness of this single fortress on the W. bank of .Jordan, by a means of espionage frequently eiiiidoyed by com- manders of invading armies. His spies were aiiled by a harlot anionjj the enemy. Tlie same docu- ments, and P, record that Israel were demor.ilised bj- thevicious women of the land (Nu '25'" ); J E ascribes to the .same frailty the land's betrayal to Israel.
Joshua, then, led Israel across Jordan opposite to Jericho. All the traditions assign the pass;ige to a miracle, similar to that by which the people sscaped from Egypt across the Red Sea. 1 lie vaters of the river were stopped in a great heap, not at the place of the passage, but, as appears from a somewhat corrupt te.xt (3'"), higher up, where the valley of Jordan is narrower, and where it is not ■n-ithcmt interest to remember that an Arabic chronicler records the sudden damining of the river by a land.slip in A.r>. 1267. t The miracle was commemorated by a stone monument, according to three lines of tradition which, however, vary as to where it was erected (see above, § iv. a, c). On tlie story of the Circumcision see above, § iv. c. Soon after this, Jericho became an easy prey to the invaders ; and here again, as we have seen (§ iv. c), the traditions diller as to details. But the fact on which they agree, that the citj' fell to the mere challenge of her besiegers, is an issue singularly in harmony with the fate of Jericho before every subsequent attack whicli history records, and is also very explicable by the etl'eminate character of her inhabitants (see aistorkal Geogr. pp. 200-268). The city wius razed, the site cursed, and Israel's oamp continued to be at Gilgal, which is re]>re- sented as the starting-point and return of the subsequent caniiiaigns (see above, § ix.).
The Bk. of Joshua represents these as under- taken by Joshua in person with all Israel behind him ; but, as we have seen, the oldest traditions describe the invasion as prosecuted from this point by dilferent tribes in different directions. Jg 1 indicates the.se directions as two, in uni- firisitv with the geographical jiosition of Jericho and Gilgal, from which there are roads, S.W. into what Wiis afterwards Jud:i'a, X.W. into what became the territory of Manasseh and Ephraim. According to Jg 1, Judah and Simeon followed the
• Stade has inde«d attempted to show llml thia territory 3ppoHit« Jericho waA Moubite, but he can <lo so only after tmnBrcrrin^ the sonj; (Nu i\) which ccletfrntea the defeat of 8ih0D to the 9th crnt. rjion tliia Bee the present writer's HUtorical deography. A])p. II. p. 061 f. ; aiin cf. McCurdy, Bitt, Prvph. and the Monuments^ il, p. 112, and the footnote.
t See article by Li»ut.-Col. Watson in I'SFSI, ISIKS, p. K3B.
first of these ; and the double tribe of Joseph, stih under the leadership of Joshua, the second. But tlie independent action of Judah and Simeon is not incompatible with Joshua's continued headship over all Israel ; for, as we have seen, the same document, J, which relates their campaign, still sees in him the arbiter of the tribes, and assigns to him the allotment of their spheres of conquest (Jos 17"""). Ai and Bethel, both of them on the easiest road from Jericho to the backbone of the range, were taken by Joshua, and his army returned toUilgal (10«).
At this point, the most natural in the course of events, occurs the narrative of the service at Shechem (ch. 8^"), founded on E, which event, however, presupposes the conquest or occupation of the hill-country of Ephraim and Manasseh ; and about this not a word, as we have seen, is said It has been supposed that the story was missing in the documents ; and if so, this would be an argu ment in favour of the reliability of the late: tradition and redactions, which abstained from inventing a story, even if the event had happened, when they had no materials for it. But why was this one event missing on all the lines of tradition ? The problem is one for which no satisfactory solu- tion has yet been offered. It is to the same point in the course of conquest that the Bk. of Joshua assigns the treaty with Gibeon. That this treaty was made in Joshua's time has been denied by many critics on the evidence of the later history. There is, however, nothing in the latter which makes so early a treaty with Gibeon an impossible thing. Budde {ZATU vii. p. 135 11.) marks the fact that in Deborah's time Judah was cut oil' from the tribes to the N. of her by a belt of territory in pos- session of the Canaanites, and argues that Gibeon's independence of Israel was necessary to make that belt continuous between Jebus and Gezer.* But the geographical data do not make this a necessary conclusion ; the northern Israelites may very well have been in alliance with Gibeon and still unable to maintain connexion with Judah ; and Kittel {desc/i. i. p. 272 H'.) h;is plausibly argued that the story of Joshua fighting the Can.aaiiites near Gibeon, if historical, renders his treaty with Gibeon extremely probable. But, as we have seen, there is ancient evidence in the poetical piece, ch. lO'-"", for the battle of Beth-boron and Joshua's defeat of the Canaanites there. The oldest tradi- tion, which makes him return after it to Gilgal, is of course to be preferred to the Deuteronumic summary, which follows and assigns to him the con- quest of the south : this must rather be assigned, as J assigns it, to Judah and the Calebites, who under- took it independently from Jericho, while Joshua himself led the house of Joseph against Ai, Bethel and the midlands. To Joshua are also as.signed by fragments of E a campaign and victory in the N. of the Jordan Valley, and against the probability of this there is no conclusive argument : the narra- tive as it stnnds, however, in ch. 11 is largely the work of the Deuteronomist. For details of the question see Dillmaiin's Comm. ; Budde, ZATW vii. p. 14911'. ; and Moore's Comm. on Jij 4.