1. The decisive victory over the Amorites at Gibeon exposed the states which had fancied themselves secure behind the mountainous regions of Palestine. At the instigation of Jabin, king of Hazor, a coalition was formed which appealed to all those who wished to make a supreme effort to thrust back the invader. But the rapidity of Joshua's marches once more foiled the enemy's enterprise.
The distance he had to go was about seventy miles, and Josephus says the march was made in five days. When Joshua was within a few miles of the enemy God spoke to him saying, “Be not afraid because of them; for to-morrow about this time will I deliver them up all slain before Israel: thou shalt hough their horses, and burn their chariots with fire.” Suddenly, while the Canaanites supposed him to be far away, Joshua swooped down upon them, or, as the original has it, fell upon them like a thunderbolt. Thrown into confusion, their numbers impeding their progress, they were put to the sword. Then ensued a panic rivalling the one at Gibeon. Having pursued them for a time, Joshua returned and invested Hazor, burning it, and destroying the inhabitants, including the great King Jabin himself. So he treated all the cities that had gone with the confederation, but spared the buildings. Nearly the whole of Palestine was now subject to Joshua. It is true that the whole of the people were not subdued; but, so far as was necessary for the great purpose Joshua had in view, Palestine was conquered. Thus, after these fierce but prosperous wars in which two kings on the east of the Jordan were defeated and dispossessed and thirty kings on the west, the weary land had rest.
The Jewish scholars who edited the Book of Joshua during the exile held a theory that Joshua completed the conquest of Canaan; they expressed their views in numerous paragraphs, enumerating among the places conquered by him all the districts of Palestine, and most of its important cities. This view is directly contradicted by Jdg_1:1-36; Jdg_18:1-31, which state, as they now stand, that the process went on after the death of Joshua, and that even then the Israelites did not succeed in occupying the whole land.… When the combined action of Israel had secured a basis of operations in the valley of the Jordan and the central highlands, separate tribes and clans broke off on new ventures of their own. They found their opportunities in the weakness of isolated cities; in the need of some Canaanite prince for allies; or in the willingness of townsmen to hire out their pasture lands for tribute to the nomad herdsmen. Thus by degrees the Israelites spread themselves over the country, here and there establishing settlements that were practically small independent states, interspersed among the towns and territories of the Canaanites; elsewhere mingling with the natives, sometimes absorbing them, sometimes being absorbed by them. The Books of Judges and Samuel tell us how after some centuries this process issued in the formation of a single united Israelite state. It may be interesting to compare this invasion with the Saxon and Norman invasions of England. Israel, and many of the inhabitants of Canaan, like the Normans and Saxons, were closely allied in race; and Canaan, like England at the Conquest, included a heterogeneous mixture of peoples. But, unlike England, Canaan was not organized as a single state, and its civilization was higher than that of its invaders. There is a somewhat greater resemblance between the Israelite and the Saxon Conquest. It is true that the differences of race, manners, customs and religion between the Saxons and the Romanized Britons were greater than those between Israel and Canaan. But Roman Britain like Canaan was far more civilized than its invaders; the Saxon Conquest was gradual; it sometimes found its opportunity in an alliance with a native prince; it resulted in the foundation of separate states, which eventually united in a single kingdom.1 [Note: W. H. Bennett, Joshua and the Palestinian Conquest, 72.]
2. These wars of Joshua leave the last word yet to be said. The moral difficulty, let it be frankly confessed, is enormous: we should not have known how enormous, were it not for the New Testament. It is as the mystic tender light from the Gospels falls upon these ancient battle-fields that we shudder. Joshua had with his faith the terrible intolerance of the true believer. There is nothing more exterminating than the idea of the one God when it is not modified by the doctrine of the cross. And Joshua was ruthless, but with the ruthlessness there was also determined thoughtfulness towards his end. He slew, not because he delighted in cruelty, but because he was resolute to get the land for Israel, to satisfy the long desire of Moses, to fulfil what he believed to be the will of God. He slew, not because he loved blood, but because he was fixed in his resolution to overthrow idolatry, and the only way men could think of doing that then was by fire and sword. The world had not seen the more excellent way of Christ. And Joshua won his day.
Foremost captain of his time,
Rich in saving common-sense,
And, as the greatest only are,
In his simplicity sublime.1 [Note: Tennyson.]
Hake, the biographer of General Gordon, says: “The work he had begun and was bent on finishing was fraught with peculiar perils. It demanded a tact, an energy, and a force of will almost superhuman. He had to deal not only with worthless and often mutinous governors of provinces, but with wild and desperate tribesmen as well; he had to disband 6000 Bashi-Bazouks, who were used as frontier guards, but who winked at slave-hunting and robbed the tribes on their own account; he had to subdue and bring to order and rule the vast province of the Bahr Gazelle, but now beneath the sway of the great slaver Sebehr. It was a stupendous task: to give peace to a country quick with war; to suppress slavery among a people to whom the trade in human flesh was life and honour and fortune; to make an army out of perhaps the worst material ever seen; to grow a flourishing trade and a fair revenue in the wildest anarchy in the world. The immensity of the undertaking; the infinity of details involved in a single step towards the end; the countless odds to be faced; the many pests-the deadly climate, the horrible vermin, the ghastly itch, the nightly and daily alternation of overpowering heat and bitter cold-to be endured and overcome; the environment of bestial savagery and ruthless fanaticism-all these combine to make the achievement unique in human history. Like the adventurer in Browning's magnificent allegory, my hero was face to face with a vast and mighty wrong; he had everything against him, and he was utterly alone; but he stood for God and the right, and he would not blench. There stood the Tower of Evil-the grim ruined land, the awful presences, the hopeless task, the anarchy of wickedness and despair and wrath. He knew, he felt, he recognized it all; and yet-
And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew.-“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”1 [Note: A. E. Hake, The Story of Chinese Gordon, 294. (Hake in the quotation uses “stag-horn”; Browning's word is “slug-horn.”)]
