We may gather from the silence of history that there was neither siege nor massacre to make an impression on the memory of posterity. And the inference is confirmed by what we know of the subsequent history of Shechem. In the time of Gideon and Abimelech its population was still half-Amorite (Judg. ix. 28). As at Jerusalem, the older inhabitants cannot have been destroyed or driven out. Like the Gibeonites, they must have made terms with the invaders, or mixed peaceably with them in the course of years. At the outset, however, Shechem would have been the capital of Ephraim. Here was the sepulchre of the founder of ‘the house of Joseph,’ here were the two sacred mountains of the Law, and here, too, it was that Joshua gathered the people together to hear his last words. Like Moses at Sinai and Kadesh-barnea, ‘Joshua made a covenant with the people ... and set them a statute and an ordinance in Shechem. And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the Law of God, and took a great stone, and set it up there under the terebinth that was in the sanctuary of the Lord.’ Here, therefore, was the local sanctuary of Ephraim, separate from the central one at Shiloh, and a sacred terebinth stood within its precincts. Criticism finds no reason to doubt that ‘the great stone’ spoken of in the text was actually set up, like a ‘Beth-el,’ under the shadow of the tree, and it is hard to see why it should be more sceptical towards the further statement that the covenant which the stone commemorated was written by Joshua ‘in the book of the Law of God.’ While Shechem was thus the local sanctuary of Ephraim, the tribes east of the Jordan had consecrated a ‘great altar’ of their own on the banks of the river. The altar was the occasion of a dispute between the two branches of the house of Israel, which nearly resulted in war. But the danger was averted through the mediation of the priests; and although the tribes east and west of the Jordan necessarily had different interests, it was long ere this led to open hostility, or even to forgetfulness of their common ancestry and common God. Deborah reproaches Reuben and Gilead for having stood aloof while Zebulon and Naphtali were hazarding their lives in the field, and the son of Gideon had his kingdom on the eastern side of the Jordan.