The list of destroyed and surviving Canaanite cities at Judges 1:17-36 is an account of the failures and successes of the military campaigns of the Israelites in their attempt to conquer Canaan. While the Book of Joshua portrays complete victory, Judges presents the tribes which were to become the western half of the Kingdom of Israel as having several failures. In each of these cases, the book of Judges says that the tribes later subjugated the Canaanites into forced labour.
According to the Bible, God inflicted the later tribulations in Judges upon the Israelites partially because they failed to completely extinguish the Canaanite race despite his somewhat genocidal command elsewhere to the contrary. According to modern textual criticism the discrepancy with the picture of victory that Joshua portrays is down to the use of different sources. The less pious and more realistic presence of failures leading to the text being considered more historically reliable, and from a potentially earlier, less censured, source.
The list does not consider the tribes who became the eastern half of the Kingdom of Israel, but the western part of the Kingdom of Israel are only described as failing, and the only successes are by those tribes which became the Kingdom of Judah. In particular, even where Judah fails, an excuse is given - the occupants had chariots. Hence, many biblical critics see the list as biased, and partly deliberate propaganda, by an author hailing from the Kingdom of Judah.
One curious feature of the list is that Jerusalem is described as having not been conquered and containing Jebusites to this day. This is somewhat in contrast to the slightly earlier Judges 1:8, which says that everyone there was killed and the city burnt to the ground. Another unusual feature is that it lists every single tribe whose lands are west of the Jordan, except Levi, the holy tribe, and Issachar, who apparently had no failures, but also no successes worthy of mention.
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“I made a list of things I have
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but I see they are the same list.”
—Linda Pastan (b. 1932)
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Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmastered importunity.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
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“1st Murderer. Where’s thy conscience now?...
2nd Murderer. I’ll not meddle with it. It makes a man a coward.... It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust to himself and live without it.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)