The Battle for the City Israel Had Sworn to Spare

This is the first time the name Jerusalem appears in the Bible. Its king, Adoni-zedek, “my lord is righteousness”, bears a name built like that of Melchizedek, “king of righteousness”, the king of Salem who blessed Abraham (Genesis 14:18). Two kings of the same city, one blessing Abraham, one fighting his descendants.

The fear that melted Jericho has reached Jerusalem. “Mighty” is gibborim, warriors: Gibeon’s men were soldiers, not the weary travellers of chapter 9. The subject shifts from “he had heard” to “they feared”, the king and his people together.

The Amarna letters, written to Pharaoh in the fourteenth century BC, include letters from rulers of Jerusalem and of Lachish, each accusing others of disloyalty. The king of Eglon is named Debir, the same as a city conquered later in the chapter.

“Help” is azar, and both sides use it. Jerusalem’s king asks his allies to help him strike Gibeon; in verse 6 Gibeon asks Joshua to help against Jerusalem. The coalition’s target is the city that changed sides, not Israel’s camp.

All five are called “kings of the Amorites”, though Jerusalem is elsewhere a Jebusite city (15:63). The spies had reported that “the Amorites dwell in the mountains” (Numbers 13:29), and the name is used loosely for the hill country peoples.

“Slack not thy hand” uses rapha, to let the hands drop, the verb of God’s promise to Joshua, “I will not fail thee” (1:5). Gibeon asks Joshua to do for them what God promised to do for him. Three imperatives follow at speed: come up quickly, save, help.

Two groups march: “all the people of war” and “all the mighty men of valour”. The Hebrew can also be read as one group described twice, the whole army, namely its fighting men. Either way, Joshua takes everyone, not a detachment as at Ai.

“There shall not a man of them stand before thee” repeats the promise of 1:5 almost word for word, now fastened to a particular battle. The assurance comes after Joshua has already set out, not before he decides to go.

The Hebrew gives the reason in a trailing clause: he came on them suddenly, for he had gone up all night. From Gilgal by the Jordan to Gibeon in the hills is a climb of some twenty miles, marched in darkness and followed by a battle at dawn.

“Discomfited” is hamam, to throw into panic, the verb used when God “troubled the host of the Egyptians” at the sea (Exodus 14:24) and when he routed Sisera (Judges 4:15). The ascent of Beth-horon was the main pass from the coast into the hills, where Judas Maccabeus later won a battle and a Roman army was routed in AD 66.

Hail was the seventh plague on Egypt (Exodus 9:23–25), and this is the first time since that God fights with it. Job 38:22–23 speaks of “the treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war.”

Gibeon lies to the east, the valley of Ajalon to the west. A sun over Gibeon and a moon over Ajalon is how the sky looks in the early morning, with the sun rising and the moon setting, which has led some interpreters to place Joshua’s words soon after dawn.

Jasher means “the upright”. “Stood still” translates damam, which can also mean to be silent or to cease, and some have proposed that Joshua asked the sun to cease its heat or be darkened; the verse’s own gloss, “hasted not to go down”, pulls toward a longer day.

Habakkuk 3:11 remembers the day in his own hymn: “The sun and moon stood still in their habitation: at the light of thine arrows they went.” The verse sums the day in two clauses: God listened to a man, and God fought for Israel.

The Greek Old Testament does not have this verse, or the matching verse 43. In the Hebrew it reads as a closing line spoken early: the account then turns back to fill in the pursuit and the kings, and repeats the return at the end.

The Hebrew has “the cave” with the article, as though a well known cave at Makkedah. The kings flee alone, without their armies, and hide in the ground while their men are still being chased along the road.

“It was told Joshua” is the same passive phrase that told the king of Jericho about the spies (2:2). The reports now travel the other way: the hunters of chapter 2 are the hunted, and Joshua hears where the kings are hiding.

“Roll” is galal, the verb that gave Gilgal its name when God “rolled away” the reproach of Egypt (5:9). Stones rolled over the cave’s mouth turn a hiding place into a lock up, guarded, while the army goes on.

“Smite the hindmost” is the verb for cutting off the tail of a column, used elsewhere only of Amalek’s attack on Israel’s stragglers (Deuteronomy 25:18). Joshua orders Israel to do to the fleeing Amorites what Amalek once did to them, before they reach their walls.

“Fenced cities” are fortified cities; “fence” in 1611 still meant defence. The spies at Kadesh had reported cities “walled, and very great” (Numbers 13:28) and lost their nerve. Here the walls are simply where the fugitives run.

“None moved his tongue” is literally “no one sharpened his tongue”, the idiom of Exodus 11:7, where on the night of the exodus “against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue”. Not so much as a dog barked at Israel.

The kings had been sealed in the dark through the whole pursuit, perhaps longer than a day. Joshua waits until the fighting is over before the cave is opened, and the reckoning with the kings becomes a separate, public act.

The five are listed again in the same order as verse 5, like a roll call. Their personal names from verse 3, Adoni-zedek, Hoham, Piram, Japhia, Debir, are not repeated; only their cities are named.

Kings of Egypt and Assyria were carved standing on defeated enemies. Psalm 110:1 uses the picture, “until I make thine enemies thy footstool”, and Solomon says God put David’s enemies “under the soles of his feet” (1 Kings 5:3). Joshua has his captains do it, not himself.

Joshua gives his officers the words Moses gave the whole people in Deuteronomy 31:6, and God gave Joshua in chapter 1. The kings under their feet are offered as a demonstration of what “thus shall the LORD do” means.

The word for tree, ets, means any piece of wood, a pole or stake as well as a living tree. Haman is hanged on an ets fifty cubits high (Esther 5:14; 7:10). The kings are killed first and their bodies displayed afterwards.

“Until this very day” uses the emphatic phrase, to this selfsame day. Three stone markers now stand in the land from this book’s battles: the heap in the valley of Achor (7:26), the heap at Ai’s gate (8:29), and the stones over the cave at Makkedah.

Makkedah’s location is still uncertain; several sites in the Shephelah have been proposed. The refrain that will run through the next eleven verses starts here: “he did to the king of Makkedah as he did unto the king of Jericho.”

The route turns southwest into the Shephelah, the low hills between the mountains and the coastal plain. Libnah means “whiteness”, perhaps from the chalk of the region. The verse uses three verbs that recur down the chain: passed, fought, and in the next verse, delivered.

Libnah was later a Levitical city (21:13). It revolted from Judah in the days of Jehoram (2 Kings 8:22), and Sennacherib’s army fought against it (2 Kings 19:8). Hamutal, mother of two of Judah’s last kings, came from Libnah (2 Kings 23:31).

Lachish, at Tell ed-Duweir, became the second city of Judah. Sennacherib’s siege of it in 701 BC was carved in stone reliefs for his palace at Nineveh, now in the British Museum. Here, for the first time in the chain, Israel “encamped against it”: a siege.

Clay letters found at Lachish, written about 588 BC as Babylon closed in, include the line “we are watching for the signals of Lachish... for we cannot see Azekah”. Jeremiah 34:7 names Lachish and Azekah as the last fortified cities left in Judah.

Gezer did not fall to Israel until centuries later: a Pharaoh burned it and gave it to his daughter, Solomon’s wife, as a wedding gift (1 Kings 9:16). Horam’s intervention costs him his army but not his city.

Eglon’s site is uncertain. One candidate, Tell el-Hesi, was where Flinders Petrie in 1890 first dug a Palestinian mound layer by layer, founding stratified excavation in the region. The name also belongs to the fat king of Moab in Judges 3.

Each city in the chain is defined by the one before it: Lachish was treated “according to all that he had done to Libnah”, Eglon according to Lachish, Hebron according to Eglon. The account builds a campaign out of links, each capture measured by the last.

Hebron sits high in the hills, the loftiest city in the south, and the verb changes to “went up”. It was where Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah and buried Sarah (Genesis 23:19), and where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were laid.

Hebron’s king Hoham was killed at Makkedah (verse 26), yet here its king is struck again, so either a successor had taken his place or the summary is general. Caleb will later have to drive the sons of Anak out of Hebron (15:13–14), and the city’s capture is told again.

“Returned” implies a change of direction: Debir lies southwest of Hebron, back toward the Negev. Its old name was Kirjath-sepher, “city of the book” or “of the scribe” (15:15), a name that has prompted much guessing about an archive or school there.

The last link loops back to the first: “as he had done also to Libnah, and to her king.” Debir too was taken again later, by Othniel, who won Caleb’s daughter Achsah as his prize (15:16–17; Judges 1:11–13).

Four regions are named: the hills, the Negev, the Shephelah, and the “springs”, ashedot, the slopes where the hills fall to the plains. “All that breathed” quotes Deuteronomy 20:16, “thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth”, the rule for the cities of the land.

Kadesh-barnea, where the spies’ report once turned Israel back, marks the southern edge of the sweep. Goshen here is not the Egyptian district but a region in southern Judah, with a town of the same name (15:51).

“Fought for Israel” is the phrase of Moses at the sea: “The LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace” (Exodus 14:14), and of Deuteronomy 3:22. The same clause closed verse 14; the chapter gives the same reason twice.

Gilgal remains the base camp by the Jordan through the campaigns. Judah will come to Joshua there to claim its land (14:6), and only in 18:1 does the congregation move to Shiloh and set up the tabernacle.