The Hebrew tribe of Judah was slow in following the example of its Edomite comrades. The ‘children of Judah,’ it is said, had at first been content to live with the Midianitish Kenites in the neighbourhood of Jericho, and when the Kenites returned to the desert of Kadesh-barnea to settle there along with them (Judg. i. 16). But there were other Jews who remained behind in Canaan, and there carved out a patrimony for themselves. Judah and Simeon, we are told, ‘went up’ together into the country which had been allotted to them, and eventually succeeded in occupying the greater part of it. The expression is a curious one, and seems to imply that the invaders started from the desert of Kadesh-barnea, though Lachish and its neighbourhood may be meant. At all events, Adoni-bezek, ‘the lord of Bezek,’ was defeated and captured, and his thumbs and great toes cut off, like those of the seventy vassal princes who had ‘picked up their meat’ under his own table. It is added that he was brought to Jerusalem, where he died. That he was brought there by the Hebrews is not certain. However, the compiler of the book of Judges seems to have thought so, as he goes on to say, ‘And the children of Judah fought[276] against Jerusalem, and took it, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and set the city on fire.’ It is difficult to reconcile this with the very definite statement in the book of Joshua (xv. 63), ‘As for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children of Judah could not drive them out: but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this day’; or with the equally explicit statement in the first chapter of Judges itself (verse 21), ‘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.’[277] The latter passage belongs to the period when Judah had not yet become a corporate whole, and when, therefore, as in the Song of Deborah, Benjamin was still regarded as forming the southern boundary of the tribes of Israel; but the first passage takes us down to the time when Benjamin had been supplanted by Judah, and Israel was being prepared to receive a king. It was during the earlier period that the Levite of Mount Ephraim, when returning from Beth-lehem, would not lodge in ‘Jebus’ because it was a ‘city of the Jebusites’ (Judg. xix. 10, 11); the later period extended to the time when Jerusalem was taken by David, and when the Jewish king, so far from massacring its inhabitants and setting it on fire, allowed the Jebusites in it to retain their property (2 Sam. xxiv. 18-24), and made it the capital of his empire. Doubtless Jerusalem might have been captured by the ‘children of Judah,’ and nevertheless have continued to exist. We may gather from the Tel el-Amarna tablets that such an occurrence actually took place at the close of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and one of the cities of