The life of Joshua was drawing to an end. He was an old man; it was said he was 110 years of age at his death, the length of time the Egyptian wished his friends to live. He had brought his people into the Promised Land, had shown them how to take cities and defeat their adversaries, and had planted Israel firmly in the mountainous part of Canaan. Before his death the tribes were provisionally established in the territories subsequently called after their names. We are not bound to believe that the division of the land was made with the mathematical precision which had become possible in the days of the compiler of the book of Joshua, but to deny that it was made at all is merely an abuse of criticism. In the period of the Judges we find most of the tribes actually settled in the very districts which we are told were given to them, and the fact that in one or two instances—Dan and Simeon, for example—the tribe never gained possession of the larger part of the territory said to have been assigned to it, shows that the story of the division could not have been based on the later geographical position of the tribes. The doctrine of development may have no limitations in the domain of organic nature, but history has to take account of individual action and the arbitrary enactments of great men. To suppose that the tribal division of Palestine was the result of a process of development has little in support of it, and fails to explain the geographical position traditionally assigned to a tribe like Dan. There was one tribe, however, to whose history the theory of development is to some extent applicable. This was the tribe of Judah. The tribe was only partly of Israelitish descent. Its most important family, that of Caleb and Othniel, belonged to the Edomite tribe of Kenaz; while another Edomite tribe, that of Jerahmeel, occupied the southern part of the Jewish territory (1 Chron. ii. 25-33, 42). Even ‘the families of the scribes which dwelt at Jabez’ were Kenites from Midian (1 Chron. ii. 55).[271] Down to the time of the kings the Israelitish members of the tribe of Judah mixed freely with their neighbours; David himself was descended from Ruth the Moabitess, and Bath-sheba, the mother of his successor, had been the wife of a Hittite. As has been already noticed, the prisoners whose figures surmount the names of Shishak’s conquests in Judah have the features of the Amorite and not of the Jew. In the Song of Deborah the tribe of Judah, like those of Dan and Simeon, is unknown. It is Ephraim and Benjamin who form the Israelitish vanguard against the Amalekites of the southern desert. And the deliverers of southern Israel from its two first oppressors were Othniel the Kenizzite and Ehud the Benjamite.