Bible Commentaries

Verses 1-23

Joshua 11. Defeat of Jabin and his Coalition.— Jabin, king of Hazor, gathers a vast army of Canaanites at the Waters of Merom (locality uncertain, p. 32). The coalition was utterly defeated, the king was slain, and his city burnt. In Judges 4, a king of the same name and the same city appears, who “ for twenty years mightily oppressed the children of Israel.” Joshua’ s victory here seems to be inconsistent with the account given of Jabin in Judges 4. The original story of Barak’ s campaign (Judges 5) has no reference to Jabin, but only to Sisera. The prose narrative (Judges 4) combines the war against Sisera with that against Jabin, and makes the former the general of the latter. It is noticeable that the terms of the short narrative in which the battle is here described are very vague and general, and 8, with its statement that the Israelites pursued their enemies as far as Zidon in the N. and Mizpah in the E. is simply the result of the writer’ s ignorance of the distances of these places from the battle-field. That there may have been some severe conflict in the N. is quite possible, but that such a sweeping victory took place, which had so little effect that it had to be repeated some time afterwards, is against all probability. Joshua 11:1-9 is, in the main, from Jeremiah , Joshua 11:10-23 from the Deuteronomist.

Joshua 11:13 . cities that stood upon their mounds: this may be illustrated by a quotation from Driver’ s Schweich Lectures (p. 87). He says, “ At Gezer we have first the rough earth rampart, with stone facings, of the aboriginal Neolithic population, followed by the more massive stone walls built by subsequent occupiers.” The “ rough earth rampart” would constitute the “ Tell” or mound, and would doubtless be known to the writer.