Five Daughters Claim a Promise; Joseph Asks for More

Gilead is both a man and a region: Machir is “the father of Gilead”, and his descendants took the land that bore the name (Numbers 32:39–40). “A man of war” explains the grant: the eastern tableland went to a clan able to hold it against raiders from the desert.

Abiezer was the clan of Gideon, whose trumpet “gathered” the Abiezrites after him (Judges 6:11, 34). Pottery notes found at Samaria, from the eighth century BC, record several of these names, Abiezer, Helek, Asriel, Shechem and Shemida, as districts sending oil and wine to the capital.

Some of the daughters’ names are also place names. Tirzah became the northern kingdom’s early capital, and Hoglah and Noah appear as districts on the same Samaria pottery notes. The Book of Numbers lists the five in two different orders (26:33; 36:11).

Numbers 36 had added a condition to their inheritance: they must marry within their father’s tribe, so that the land would not pass to another tribe, and they married their cousins (Numbers 36:6–11). The daughters come to the commission as Joshua’s fellow Manassites, “among our brethren”.

The arithmetic can be traced: Manasseh had six clans (verse 2), and Hepher’s share passed through Zelophehad to his five daughters. Five male clans and five daughters make the ten portions west of the Jordan, besides the eastern lands.

Job 42:15 uses almost the same phrase for Job’s daughters, to whom “their father gave them inheritance among their brethren”. Here the phrase describes a law; there a father’s free gift. The verse sets the daughters in the list of heirs as sons.

“On the right hand” means southward: Hebrew geography faced east, so the right hand pointed south, and the word for right hand, yamin, gives Yemen its name. The border runs past Shechem, the old city of Jacob’s well and Joseph’s grave (24:32).

The split between town and fields at Tappuah is the same arrangement the Book of Joshua later uses at Hebron, where the city goes to the priests and “the fields of the city, and the villages thereof” to Caleb (21:11–12). Ownership of a place could be divided in layers.

The verse restates 16:9 from the other side. There Ephraim had separate cities among Manasseh’s; here the cities of Ephraim sit south of the brook Kanah among Manasseh’s towns. The two descriptions agree, told once from each tribe’s point of view.

Manasseh’s northern edge is not traced town by town; the text simply names its neighbours, Asher to the north and Issachar to the east. With the sea on the west, the tribe’s land is defined by who surrounded it.

Every town here has later history. Saul’s body was fastened to the wall of Beth-shean (1 Samuel 31:10); Jehu’s men shot King Ahaziah near Ibleam (2 Kings 9:27); Saul consulted the woman at Endor (1 Samuel 28:7). “Three countries” may mean “the three heights”, perhaps including the heights of Dor.

“Would dwell” is yoel, “were determined to dwell”: the Canaanites insisted on staying. Judges 1:27–28 repeats this list of five cities almost exactly in the record of what Manasseh did not take.

Deuteronomy 20:11 permitted a city to be made tributary only when it was one of the distant cities that accepted terms of peace. Putting Canaanite towns inside the land to forced labour used the law meant for far off cities on the peoples near at hand.

The “me” is Joseph speaking as one person, a whole house talking in the first person singular. Jacob had blessed Joseph as “a fruitful bough” (Genesis 49:22), and Moses gave him “the ten thousands of Ephraim” (Deuteronomy 33:17). They are claiming the blessing’s arithmetic.

“Cut down” is bara, in a form that means to clear or hew, the same root as “God created” in Genesis 1:1. Joshua tells the tribe to make its own room. The forested hills of the Perizzites and the Rephaim were land they could take with axes.

“Chariots of iron” were chariots fitted with iron, fearsome on the flat. Judah met the same obstacle (Judges 1:19), and Sisera would bring nine hundred such chariots into this very valley of Jezreel (Judges 4:3).

Joshua was himself of Ephraim (Numbers 13:8), so he is answering his own tribe, and he gives it no favour beyond the challenge. He speaks to both, Ephraim and Manasseh, and repeats their boast back to them in the affirmative.

“Though they be strong” uses chazaq, the verb of Joshua’s own commission. In the valley of Jezreel the iron chariots were finally broken in Deborah’s day, when the river Kishon swept them away (Judges 5:21).