It is, moreover, difficult to reconcile the statement that Hebron was captured by Joshua after the defeat of the five kings with the narrative of its capture by Caleb, which is given in detail elsewhere (Josh. xv. 13, 14; Judg. i. 9, 10). Here, as in other parts of the book of Joshua, we find a tendency to ascribe the gradual occupation of Canaan to a single point of time, and to assign all the successive conquests made in it by the Israelites to the general who first led them across the Jordan. The individual hero has absorbed all the victories gained by his people, and the past has been foreshortened in the retrospect of the later historian. As in the books of Kings the murder of Sennacherib is made to follow immediately after his flight from Judah twenty years before, so in the book of Joshua, the conquest of Canaan is all placed in one age, the lifetime of the hero himself. As Moses was the lawgiver of Israel and its deliverer from the house of bondage, posterity saw in his successor the conqueror of Canaan. It is noticeable, however, that neither Jerusalem nor Gezer is said to have been taken after the battle of Makkedah. Both cities were doubtless too strong to be attacked; and though Gezer was subsequently forced to become the vassal of Ephraim, Jerusalem was destined to fall before a Jewish and not an Ephraimitish leader. The battle of Makkedah became the subject of a national song. It was embodied, like David’s dirge over Saul and Jonathan, in the book of Jashar, a fragment of which is quoted by the compiler of the book of Joshua. ‘Sun, be thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon!’ cried Joshua, ‘in the sight of Israel,’ ‘when the Lord delivered up the Amorites’ before them: ‘and the sun was still, and the moon stayed until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.’ So ran the words of the poem, and the prose historian seems to have taken them literally. The alliance with Gibeon and the destruction of Lachish opened the way to the south. Westward, the sea-coast was in the hands of the Philistines, whom the Israelites would have found more formidable enemies than the disunited and effeminate Canaanites. The five Philistine cities, accordingly, which had been but recently wrested from Egyptian hands, were left untouched, and the Israelitish raiders made their way into the Negeb towards the south-east, where they succeeded in penetrating as far as Arad and Zephath. They had thus reached the very spot where the first attempt to invade Canaan had failed, and from which the disappointed tribes had been driven back again into the wilderness. Zephath was not far distant from Kadesh-barnea, so that it is with a pardonable exaggeration that the Jewish historian describes Joshua as smiting his enemies ‘from Kadesh-barnea even unto Gaza’ (Josh. x. 41).