1And it happened after the death of Joshua that the Israelites inquired of the LORD, saying, “Who will go up for us first against the Canaanite to do battle with him?” 2And the LORD said, “Judah shall go up. Look, I have given the land into his hand.” 3And Judah said to Simeon his brother, “Go up with me in my portion, and let us do battle with the Canaanite, and I, too, shall go with you in your portion.” And Simeon went with him. 4And Judah went up, and the LORD gave the Canaanite and the Perizzite into their hand, and they struck them down in Bezek—ten thousand men. 5And they found Adoni-Bezek in Bezek and did battle with him, and they struck down the Canaanite and the Perizzite. 6And Adoni-Bezek fled, and they pursued him and seized him, and they chopped off his thumbs and his big toes. 7And Adoni-Bezek said: “Seventy kings, their thumbs and their big toes chopped off, used to gather scraps under my table. As I have done, so has God paid me back.” And they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died there. 8And the Judahites did battle against Jerusalem, and they took it and struck it down with the edge of the sword, and the town they set on fire. 9And afterward the Judahites went down to do battle with the Canaanite dwelling in the high country and the Negeb and the lowland. 10And Judah went against the Canaanite dwelling in Hebron—and the name of Hebron was formerly Kiriath-Arba—and they struck down Sheshai and Achiman and Talmai. 11And they went from there against the inhabitants of Debir—and the name of Debir was formerly Kiriath-Sepher. 12And Caleb said, “Whoever strikes Kiriath-Sepher and takes it, to him I shall give Achsah my daughter as wife.” 13And Othniel son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother, took it, and he gave him Achsah as wife. 14And it happened when she came, that she enticed him to ask a field of her father, and she alighted from the donkey, and Caleb said to her, “What troubles you?” 15And she said to him, “Give me a present, for you have given me desert-land, and you should have given me springs of water.” And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the lower springs. 16And the sons of the Kenite, the father-in-law of Moses, came up from the Town of Palms with the Judahites from the Wilderness of Judah which is in the Negeb of Arad, and they went and dwelled with the people. 17And Judah went with Simeon his brother and they struck down the Canaanite dwelling in Zephath and put it under the ban, and they called the name of the town Hormah.
18And Judah took Gaza and its territory and Ashkelon and its territory and Ekron and its territory. 19And the LORD was with Judah, and he took possession of the high country, but he was not able to dispossess the inhabitants of the valley, for they had iron chariots. 20And they gave Hebron to Caleb as Moses had spoken, and he dispossessed from there the three sons of the giant. 21But the Jebusite dwelling in Jerusalem, the Benjaminites did not dispossess, and the Jebusite has been dwelling with the Benjaminites in Jerusalem to this day. 22And the sons of Joseph, too, went up to Bethel, and the LORD was with them. 23And the House of Joseph scouted out Bethel—and the name of the town was formerly Luz. 24And the lookout saw a man coming out of the town and said to him, “Show us, pray, the way into the town, and we shall deal kindly with you.” 25And he showed them the way into the town, and they struck the town by the edge of the sword, but the man and his clan they sent off. 26And the man went to the land of the Hittites and built a town and called its name Luz—that is its name to this day. 27And Manasseh did not take possession of Beth-Sheʾan and its hamlets nor Taanach and its hamlets nor the inhabitants of Dor and its hamlets nor the inhabitants of Ibleam and its hamlets nor the inhabitants of Megiddo and its hamlets, but the Canaanite went on dwelling in this land. 28And it happened, when Israel grew strong, that it put the Canaanite to forced labor, but it did not dispossess him. 29And Ephraim did not dispossess the Canaanite dwelling in Gezer, and the Canaanite dwelled in his midst in Gezer. 30Zebulun did not dispossess the inhabitants of Kitron, nor the inhabitants of Nahalal, and the Canaanite dwelled in his midst and did forced labor. 31Asher did not dispossess the inhabitants of Acco, nor the inhabitants of Sidon, Ahiab, Ach zib, Helbah, Aphek, and Rehob. 32And the Asherite dwelled in the midst of the Canaanites, inhabitants of the land, for he did not dispossess them. 33Naphtali did not dispossess the inhabitants of Beth-Shemesh and the inhabitants of Baal-Anath, and he dwelled amidst the Canaanites inhabitants of the land, and the inhabitants of Beth-Shemesh and of Beth-Anath did forced labor for them. 34And the Amorites drove the Danites into the high country, for they did not let them come down into the valley. 35And the Amorite continued to dwell in Mount Heres, in Ajalon, and in Shaalbim, but the hand of the house of Joseph lay heavy upon them, and they did forced labor. 36And the territory of the Amorites was from the Ascent of Akrabbim, from Sela on up.
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
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1. And it happened after the death of Joshua. These words are a pointed repetition of the formula that begins the Book of Joshua, “And it happened after the death of Moses.”
the Israelites inquired of the LORD. This idiom indicates inquiry of an oracle in all likelihood, the Urim and Thummim, which could be used to yield a yes-no answer or to select an individual from a group. Some commentators have suggested that after Joshua’s death, there was no longer a central leader with access to God and hence the oracular device was necessary.
2. Judah shall go up. The prominence of Judah in the vanguard of the conquest patently reflects a later period when Judah was the seat of the Davidic monarchy and the chief remaining tribe. The report here moves from Judah’s military success in the south to the failures of the other tribes in the north.
3. Simeon his brother. This indication of fraternity and military cooperation probably derives from a moment in later history when Simeon was closely allied with or assimilated in Judah.
4. ten thousand men. Like almost all numbers in biblical narrative, this is formulaic, meant to indicate a large group. The reference to “seventy kings” in verse 7 is similarly formulaic, although it does register the fact that Canaan was divided among many small city-kingdoms, which were often at war with one another.
5. Adoni-Bezek. This name, which means “master of Bezek,” appears to be a hereditary title rather than a proper noun.
6. they chopped off his thumbs and his big toes. The mutilation, which on the evidence of Adoni-Bezek’s own words in the next verse was evidently a common practice, is both a humiliation and a means of permanently preventing the captured leader from becoming a combatant again because he would be unable to wield a bow or sword or run on the battlefield. It should be observed, moreover, that this grisly detail is an apt thematic and imagistic introduction to Judges, the most violent of all the books of the Bible. In the stories that follow, swords will be thrust into bellies, tent pegs into heads; people will be variously mashed and crushed; and toward the end of the book, the dismembered parts of a murdered woman’s body will be sent out to the sundry tribes in order to ignite a civil war. The mutilation of the king, then, introduces us to a realm of political instability in which both people and groups are violently torn asunder.
7. And they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died there. This notation and the one in the next verse about the total destruction of Jerusalem by Judah are a puzzlement. It is contradicted here by verse 21, in which it is said that Judah was unable to drive out the Jebusites but continued to coexist with them. 2 Samuel 5 reports, with some historical plausibility, that it was David who conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites (almost two centuries after the putative time of the events in Judges). One suspects that the Judahite writer was swept up by the momentum of his own historical moment: Jerusalem had long been the capital city of the Davidic monarchy, and so it was difficult for the writer to imagine that it had not been part of the initial conquest of his tribe.
12. Whoever strikes Kiriath-Sepher and takes it, to him I shall give Achsah my daughter as wife. The story here, including the two previous verses, repeats in virtually identical language the story told in Joshua 15:13–19. The offer of the hand of the daughter to the victorious hero is an obvious folkloric motif and recurs in the episode of David and Goliath.
13. Othniel. He is to become the first judge.
15. desert-land. The term negev (rendered elsewhere in this translation as the place-name “Negeb”) means terrain that supports little or no vegetation, probably deriving from a verbal stem that means “dry” or “desolate.” The region in the southern part of the Land of Israel is that sort of terrain and hence is given the geographical name Negeb. Another term, midbar, is represented in this version, as it is in most English translations, as “wilderness” because it includes land in which animals can graze.
16. the Town of Palms. On the basis of other biblical occurrences, this is Jericho.
17. Hormah. The name puns on ḥerem, “ban.”
18. And Judah took Gaza and its territory. This verse is another instance in which the writer’s location in a time when the Philistine coastal enclave had long been subdued is retrojected to the period of the Judges. Here three of the five towns of the Philistine pentopolis are said to be conquered by Judah. But in the subsequent narrative, down to the time of David, the Philistines remain autonomous and a potent military threat; and in Judges itself, in the Samson story, Gaza is very much in the hands of the Philistines.
19. was not able. The Hebrew of the received text sounds odd at this point: “was not able” occurs in Onkelos’s Aramaic version.
20. the three sons of the giant. Though many interpreters prefer to understand the last term here, ʿanaq, as a proper noun, it does mean “giant,” and there is a clear tradition reflected in Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges that some of the indigenous inhabitants of the land were giants.
22. Bethel. The report now moves to the north. Bethel was to become a central cultic location in the northern kingdom of Israel after the split in the monarchy.
24. the way into the town. Yigal Yadin has cited archaeological evidence that some Canaanite towns had tunnels that provided secret access to them. That sounds plausible here because the lookouts are surely not asking directions to the main gate of the town.
28. Israel . . . put the Canaanite to forced labor, but it did not dispossess him. Whether this subjugation of the Canaanite population to the Israelites was a historical fact or is merely a face-saving formula for the failure of the conquest is uncertain. In any case, the chapter from this point on spells out a theme of incompletion that had fluctuated through the Book of Joshua. In the first half of Joshua, the conquest of the land appears to be comprehensive; in the second half, there are some indications that much remains to be conquered. Now we have a whole catalogue of failed conquests, all attributed to the northern tribes that would constitute the breakaway kingdom of Israel.
31. Acco . . . Sidon, Ahiab, Achzib. These coastal towns bring us far to the north, near present-day Haifa and beyond, with Sidon actually being a Phoenician city.
35. upon them. These words are merely implied in the Hebrew.