The sign which gave Othniel the right to be a _Shophêt_ or ‘Judge’ was twofold. ‘The spirit of Yahveh came upon him,’ and he delivered Israel from its oppressor. The Shophêt was thus marked out by Yahveh for his office, and his success in war was a visible token that he had been called to be the leader of his people. The office was a peculiarly Canaanitish institution. When Kingship was abolished at Tyre in the time of Nebuchadrezzar, the kings were replaced by ‘Judges,’ and at Carthage the ‘Sufetes’ or ‘Judges’ were the chief magistrates of the state.[295] Whether the institution existed elsewhere in the Semitic world we do not know. But it was as it were indigenous to the soil of Canaan, and in submitting themselves to the rule of the Judges, the Israelites submitted themselves at the same time to Canaanitish influence. It was a step backward, a step towards absorption into the population around them, and it is therefore not without reason that the period of the Judges is a synonym for the period when the religion and manners of Canaan were dominant among the Israelitish tribes. The Pentateuch recognised the priest, the lawgiver, and the king; the judge was the creation of an age in which the Baalim seemed to have gained the mastery over Yahveh. That the first of the Judges should have been of Edomite descent is a striking commentary on what may be termed the catholicity of pre-exilic Israel. It was not race so much as participation in the worship and favour of Yahveh, that gave a right to be included among ‘the chosen people.’ The ancestress of David was a Moabitess, and the Deuteronomic law lays down that the children of an Edomite, or even of an Egyptian, ‘shall enter into the congregation of the Lord in their third generation’ (Deut. xxiii. 7, 8).[296] A ‘mixed multitude’ accompanied the Israelites in their flight from Egypt, and the Kenites, with whom Moses was allied, shared like the Kenizzites in the conquest of Canaan. Hebron, the future capital of Judah, and a Levitical city, was a Kenizzite possession, and the Judah of later days was itself a mixture of Israelitish and Edomite elements. How far the authority of Othniel extended it is difficult to say. But the fact that the enemy, whose yoke he had broken, was an invader from the north makes it probable that his rule was acknowledged in Mount Ephraim as well as among the northern tribes. That it was also acknowledged on the east side of the Jordan there is no proof. Though the Song of Deborah shows that the solidarity of Israel was recognised, it also shows that this feeling of a common God and of a common history had but little political effect. The eastern tribes lived apart from those of the west, and the judges whom we hear of as rising among them had purely local powers. Indeed, between Jephthah and the Ephraimites there was internecine war.