From the Book of Judges we learn that after the death of Joshua the children of Judah smote Jerusalem, and set it on fire. The border between Judah and Benjamin ran on the south side of the city, along the Valley of Hinnom, and to the head of the Valley of Rephaim. The town thus lay in the lot of Benjamin, but the conquest was not complete; for the “children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that inhabited Jerusalem, but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem unto this day”--that is, till the time of David at least. Josephus thought that the lower city only--perhaps not yet protected by a wall--was taken, and that the upper city was the Jebusite stronghold; nor is this an improbable explanation, since the lower city seems--as will appear later--to have already existed in David’s time. In the time of Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, Jebus was regarded as “the city of a stranger that is not of the children of Israel,” and it even possessed a Canaanite king in David’s time.[79] We may endeavour therefore to form some idea of the position and extent of Jebusite Jerusalem. It was a royal city, a sacred place, and a fortress of great strength, the taking of which was one of David’s greatest exploits. The site indeed seems to have been chosen for its strength, which has again and again been proved by many long and desperate sieges. The city has always been taken from the north, and the upper city on the south-west hill has always been the last quarter to fall. This flat hill, rising 2,500 feet above the level of the sea, measures about 600 yards east and west by 800 yards north and south, thus containing an area of about 100 acres. Since the fourth century A. D. the name Zion has been applied to this hill, which is surrounded on all sides by deep valleys having steep slopes or precipices--that called Hinnom forming a natural fosse which sinks some 400 feet below the hill plateau, and defends the hill on the west and south, while the Tyropœon Valley--about 500 feet wide--sinks on the north to about 150 feet below the plateau, and turns south, defending it on the east. The hill of Zion is only joined to the watershed by a narrow neck, or isthmus, of high ground at the north-west corner of the upper city, and it required to be defended by a fortress wall at this point, which has always been the place attacked by besiegers. The lower city lay to the north, in the broad Tyropœon, and was defended by a smaller summit, now occupied by the Cathedral of the Holy Sepulchre, which rises 2,497 feet above sea-level, and bulges out eastwards from the plateau of the Judean watershed which runs north, west of Jerusalem. Thus, as Josephus says, the city as a whole lay “over against the temple in the manner of a theatre”[80]; for the horseshoe shape was caused by the head of the Tyropœon on the north side of the upper city, the original form of which has been somewhat obliterated by the accumulation of from 40 to