1And the whole community of Israelites assembled at Shiloh and they set up the Tent of Meeting there, and the land was conquered before them. 2And there remained seven tribes among the Israelites that had not taken the share of their estate. 3And Joshua said to the Israelites, “How long will you be idle about coming to take hold of the land that the LORD God of your fathers has given to you? 4Set out for yourselves three men to a tribe, that I may send them and they may rise up and go about the land and write it out according to their estate, and come to me. 5And they shall share it out in seven parts. Judah will stay by its territory in the south, and the house of Joseph will stay by its territory in the north. 6As for you, you shall write out the land in seven parts and bring them back to me here, and I shall cast a lot for you here before the LORD our God. 7But the Levites have no share in your midst, for the LORD’s priesthood is their estate.” And Gad and Reuben and the half-tribes of Manasseh had taken their estate across the Jordan to the east, which Moses servant of the LORD had given them. 8And the men rose up and went off, and Joshua charged those who went to write out the land, saying, “Up, go about in the land and write it out and come back to me, and here I shall cast the lot for you before the LORD in Shiloh. 9And the men went off and passed through the land and wrote it out by towns into seven parts in a scroll, and they came back to Joshua, to the camp at Shiloh. 10And Joshua cast the lot for them in Shiloh before the LORD, and Joshua shared out the land to the Israelites according to their portions. 11And the lot of the tribe of the Benjaminites fell out, and the territory by their lot came out between the Judahites and the Josephites. 12And they had the boundary on the northern edge from the Jordan, and the boundary went up to the flank of Jericho on the north and went up to the high country westward, and its far reaches were the Wilderness of Beth-Aven. 13And the boundary passed on from there to the flank of Luz, which is Bethel, to the south, and the boundary went down to Atroth Addar in the high country that is south of Lower Beth-Horon. 14And the boundary swung round south toward the sea of the high country which is opposite Beth-Horon to the south, and its far reaches were at Kiriath-Baal, which is Kiriath-Jearim, town of the Judahites. This was the western edge. 15And the southern edge was from the border of Kiriath-Jearim, and the boundary went out westward, and went out to the spring of the waters of Naphtoah. 16And the boundary went down to the edge of the high country which is opposite the Vale of Ben-Hinnom, which is in the Valley of Rephaim to the north, and it went down the Vale of Hinnom to the flank of the Jebusites on the south and down to Ein-Rogel. 17And it swung round from the north and went out to Ein-Shemesh and went out to Geliloth, which is over against the Ascent of Adummim, and it went down to the Stone of Bohan son of Reuben. 18And it passed on northward to the flank opposite the Arabah and went down to the Arabah. 19And the boundary passed on northward to the flank of Beth-Hoglah to the edge of the Jordan, and the far reaches of the boundary northward were at the tongue of the Salt Sea at the southern end of the Jordan. This was the southern boundary. 20And the Jordan marked its boundary at the eastern edge. This was the estate of the Benjaminites by its boundaries all around, according to their clans. 21And the towns that were the Benjaminite tribe’s were Jericho and Beth-Hoglah and Emek-Keziz, 22and Beth-Arabah and Zemaraim and Bethel, 23and Avvim and Parah and Ophrah, 24and Chephar-Ammonah and Ophni and Geba—twelve towns and their pasturelands. 25Gibeon and Ramah and Beeroth, 26and Mizpeh and Chephirah and Mozah, 27and Rekem and Irpeel and Taralah, 28and Zela-Eleph, and the Jebusite, which is Jerusalem, Gibeath, Kiriath-Jearim. Fourteen towns and their pasturelands—this was the estate of the Benjaminites according to their clans.
CHAPTER 18 NOTES
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1. And the whole community of Israelites assembled at Shiloh. This marks a shift from the role of the encampment at Gilgal as the national assembly place. Shiloh, as its representation in the early chapters of 1 Samuel indicates, was a central sanctuary, until its destruction by the Philistines sometime in the eleventh century B.C.E. Placing the Tent of Meeting there would have confirmed its centrality. In subsequent narratives, the Tent of Meeting is not mentioned but rather the Ark of the Covenant, which would have been within the Tent of Meeting.
2. And there remained seven tribes. If one subtracts Judah, Reuben, Ephraim, Manasseh, and Levi, all of which have already been accounted for, seven tribes are left to be given their tribal territories.
6. write out the land. Still more literally, this would be “write the land.” The obvious sense is to draw up a set of notations of the boundaries of the tribal territories.
I shall cast a lot for you here before the LORD. The drawing up of tribal boundaries by the representatives of the seven tribes is then to be confirmed by divine lot. As Shmuel Ahituv has shown, the use of such a lottery for the division of land was widespread in the ancient Near East.
10. cast the lot. The Hebrew text here uses a different verb from the one in verse 6, but both mean to cast or fling, suggesting that the mechanism for the lot involved dicelike objects.
11. fell out. Literally, “went up.”
16. Vale of Ben-Hinnom . . . the Valley of Rephaim. The Hebrew uses two different words for “valley,” geiʾ and ʿemeq. It is possible that the former designates a smaller topographical entity. Both valleys are within the perimeters of modern-day Jerusalem, though they would have been outside the city to the west in ancient times.
28. Jerusalem. It is a little surprising that Jerusalem, conquered from the Jebusites by David, who was a Judahite, is here assigned to the tribe of Benjamin. It has been suggested that this apportionment reflects a later period, when the unity of Benjamin and Judah, the two southern tribes, was firmly established and the old rivalry between the two, registered in the Book of Samuel, had long since vanished.
Kiriath-Jearim. The Masoretic Text reads qiryat ʿarim, “Kiriath towns” (or “city of towns”). This translation adopts a proposal, in part based on the Septuagint, that a haplography occurred, with the original text reading qiryat yeʿarim ʿarim, “Kiriath-Jearim, [fourteen] towns.”