But it does not follow that because there was one king of Hazor called Jabin, there should not have been another of the same name. Such repetitions of name have been common in other countries of the world, and it is difficult to see why the rulers of Hazor should not be allowed a similar privilege. That a city should rise from its ruins and recover its former power is again no unique event. Much depends upon its position and the character of its inhabitants. We gather from the Egyptian annals that the towns of Canaan were accustomed to capture and temporary destruction. But they soon recovered themselves, the old population flocked back, and their ruined walls were again repaired. It is true that the conquest of the country by Joshua could not have been as thorough as the narrative describes. But that we already knew from the first chapter of Judges (vv. 30-33). Oriental expressions and modes of thought are not to be measured by the precise terminology of the modern West, and an Eastern writer speaks absolutely where we should speak relatively. When it is said that ‘all the earth sought to Solomon, to hear his wisdom’ (1 Kings x. 24), the universality of the statement must be very considerably limited, and so too when it is said that ‘Joshua took all that land’ (Josh. xi. 16), the expression admits of a similarly liberal discount. In fact, the narrative itself contains its own corrective. The words, ‘All the cities of those kings ... did Joshua take, and smote them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed them’ (ver. 12), are followed immediately by the conditioning clause, ‘Only the cities which were built upon _tels_, Israel burned none of them: Hazor alone did Joshua burn.’ Between the story of Joshua’s campaign and that of the rising under Barak there is no resemblance whatever. In the time of the Hebrew judge the army of Jabin was commanded by Sisera, not by Jabin himself. The decisive battle took place on the banks of the Kishon, not on the shores of Lake Hûleh, miles away to the north, and the city of Hazor was neither captured nor destroyed. Kadesh of Galilee and other districts were already in the hands of the Israelites, and must therefore have been occupied by them at some earlier period. The account in the book of Joshua, brief as it is, tells us when the occupation took place.