Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/251

 BIBLICAL SOCIOLOGY 237

the hill-country, and the south, and the lowland, and the slopes, and all their kings. He left none remaining, and he utterly destroyed all that breathed" (10:40). "So Joshua took the whole land" ( 1 1 :23). The conquest being now complete, the soil was divided among the families and clans of Israel, who settled down to peaceful occupation. In the closing verses of the book, we read that after the i>eople had been sent away, every man to his inheritance, it came to pass that Joshua died, and was buried in the border of his estate in the hill-country of Ephraim.

The account of the invasion found in the Book of Judges as we have seen, contrasts vividly with the foregoing narrative. In the first place, the compiler of Judges takes the view that the invasion of Canaan did not occur during the lifetime of Joshua, but after his death. "And it came to pass, after the death of Joshua, that the children of Israel asked of Yahweh, saying, Who shall go up for us first against the Canaanites, to fight against them?" (Judg. 1:1). In this view, Joshua was not a factor in the invasion. There was no commanding general. Nor were the Israelites organized into a single, grand army. On the contrary, the invaders went up in separate clan-groups, each fighting for itself.

Before invading the territory west of the Jordan, the Israel- ites appear to have established themselves first of all in the hills of Gilead east of the Jordan. It was here that the clan of Reuben was said to have located, whose father is called the "first-bom" of Israel, probably in recognition of the fact that Gilead was the earliest Israelite settlement in Canaan (Gen. 49:3; Josh. 22:9). No notice of the conquest of this region is found in Judges; yet Gilead appears in that book to have been Israelite from a very early period. It had this character in the time of Deborah (Judg, 5:17). It was inhabited by Israelites in the days of Gideon (Judg., chap. 8). A little later it furnished an inconspicuous "judge" in the person of Jair (Judg. 10:3). The hero Jephthah was from Gilead (Judg. 11 :i). The first military exploits of King Saul were in defense of the Gileadite village of Jabesh (I Sam., chap. 11). It was Mahanaim in Gilead that received Ishbaal, the fugitive son of Saul, when the kingdom