The Pulpit Commentary — Joshua — Section 13

11s of old, the forbidden fruit seemed "good for food," and "pleasant to the eyes," and rt thing " to be desired to me.ke one wise ; " and when once it was tasred the mischief we.s done. The whole Jewish race from that day to this has paid the pona,Hy; just as the whole human race he.a paid the penalty of Adam's trans- gression. 'fhe two Captivities with their la.sting consequences were the direct result of the idolatry which de.tee from this forbidden intercourse with the Canaanites. The lesson is similar to that taught in Eden. Man's free-will involves the possibility of a fall, and one fall renders e.nother fall probable. Man's fallen nature can be regenerated only through suffering: and thus, what was in the first instance a punishment, by God's mercy becomes in the end a blessing. The certainty of punishment for sin, the possibility of repentance, the discipline of suffering-these are the great lessons of the Book of Judges. The period has been compared with the heroic age in Greece and other pagan lands. The analogy holds good in several interesting points. In both there is an invasion of new territory, and the prowess of the heroes is exhibited in the struggle with the primitive inhabitants for possession. In both there is a startling mixture of virtue and vice, of what is noble with what is vile, of splendid self-sacrifice and bravery with se.vagery, treachery, and lust. The analogy fails, however, in one most important pe.rticular. Even in the wildest of the Jewish heroes we find a consciousness of a divin~ mission, and a reliance on Goel, of which pagan heroes show little trace. And although brutal acts of licentiousness and cruelty are only too frequent amongst both, yet the popular conecience regards them with abhorrence in the one case, while it applauds them or looks upon them as e. matter of course in the other. A truer analogy seems to be found in the age of Christian chivalry; e.g., in the Crusades, a struggle for the so.me territory. There also we find a hideous amount of evil ;mixed with the good ; there also the evil too often triumphed while the good failed: but this must ever be the ca,se where an appeal is made on a large scale to force. Yet there was the more.I, the religious purpose at bottom, however much it might be alloyed or overlaicl with ignoble motives. And in the genere.l outcome of the period of the J uclges, as of the Crusades, the world has been gree.tly the gainer. Along with a, mere love of adventure, which is neither right nor wrong, along with treachery a,nd c1uelty and otlier grievous crimes, ce,"-Ilmitted both in the name of and in defiance of religion, there was a. power and a reality in bo1h, calculated to bring out all that is heroic in human nature: love of liberty, admiration of prowess, sympathy with suffering, patient endurance when hope seemed g!me, persevere.nee to the end The chronology of the period is involved in obscuiity, but this need not ea.use any serious difficulty. Chronology is not what the compiler of the various narratives nimecl at giving us; and therefore we need not be surprised that clear marks of time are wanting. The whole period is perhaps about a century and 11, be.If, as seems to be indicated by the genealogies. To add np the years of alternate oppres- sions and rests given in the book itself would only lead us astray: for (1) the narratives possibly run parallel to one another in certain cases, being accounts of what was going on in different parts of Canaan at one and the same time; (~) no great reliance can be placed upon the frequently recurring numbers, twe?.~ (cbs. iv._ 3; xv. 20; xvi. 81), forty (chs. iii. 11; v. 31; viii. 28; xiii. 1), eighty (eh. lll. 30), which may be round numbers with no pretension to exactness. Moclem cbronologers vary from 150 to 300 years; ancient writers give double that amount; e.g., Josephus 1192, E.webius 600. The date of the compilation of the book and the name of the l:Yi rnTnODUCTION TO THE HISTORICAL BOOKS: