Even the great sanctuary of Beth-el, destined to be the possession of Benjamin as well as of Ephraim,[256] had not fallen into the hands of ‘the house of Joseph’ when Joshua died, though the ‘ruined heap’ of Ai which lay near it was one of the first of the Israelitish conquests. All the chief towns in the territory of Manasseh—Megiddo and Taanach, Dor and Beth-Shean—remained Canaanite, the utmost that Israel could do in the days of its strength being to exact tribute from them. Gezer defied the power of Ephraim down to the time when it was given to Solomon by the Egyptian Pharaoh; while the great cities of Zebulon and Naphtali, like those of Manasseh, never became Israelitish, but paid tribute to the Hebrews whenever the latter were ‘strong.’ Asher failed to secure the territory that had been assigned to him, where Moses in his song had promised that his foot should be dipped in oil and his sandals should be of iron and bronze. The Phœnicians continued to hold the coast long after the Israelitish tribes had been carried into Assyrian captivity, and even in the mountains that overlooked the shore the Asherites were forced to live and be lost among the older Canaanites (Judg. i. 32). ‘The children of Dan’ were in even worse case; the Amorites drove them into the mountains and ‘would not suffer them to come down to the valley.’ When at last their enemies were made tributary by ‘the house of Joseph,’ it was too late; the tribe of Dan was merged into that of Judah, or had found a refuge in the city of Laish in the extreme north. Joshua, therefore, was not the conqueror of Canaan in any exact sense of the term. The districts east of the Jordan had been occupied by the Israelites before the death of Moses, and north of Moab the occupation had been fairly complete. In Canaan itself the amount of territory won by Joshua was practically confined to the passage over the Jordan and the mountainous region of the centre. Few of the Canaanitish cities were captured by him; and with the exception of Jericho and Lachish, and perhaps Hazor, none of them was of primary importance. But he succeeded in doing what had been attempted in vain in earlier days; he led his people into Palestine, and planted them there so firmly that the future conquest of the whole country became merely a matter of time.