There was a special reason why Jerubbaal should thus have come forward to deliver his countrymen from the Midianites. The Bedâwin raiders had slain his brothers in a previous struggle at Mount Tabor (viii. 18-21). Jerubbaal thus had a blood-feud to avenge. He was the last and presumably the youngest of his family, and upon him therefore devolved the duty of revenging his brothers’ death. Moreover, it would appear from the words of the Midianite chiefs that Joash and his sons were not only the heads of their clan, but that they also exercised a sort of kingly authority in Ophrah and its neighbourhood. The history of Abimelech seems to imply that the family of Abi-ezer had succeeded to the power and even the name of the Canaanitish ‘kings’ of Shechem, and that the subsequent ingratitude of the inhabitants of Shechem to the house of Jerubbaal was due to jealousy of the preference displayed by it for Ophrah. Shechem contained a large Canaanitish element which was wanting at Ophrah, where the population was more purely Israelitish. If Joash were thus king of a mixed population, recognised by Canaanites and Israelites alike, we can understand why by the side of the altar of Baal there stood also the symbol of the Canaanitish goddess. The very fact that the sanctuary of Ophrah belonged to him (vi. 25) indicates that he possessed royal prerogatives. Even at Jerusalem the temple of Solomon was as it were the chapel of the kings.[339] It has been suggested that the Baal whose altar stood on the land of Joash at Ophrah was the Baal-berith or ‘Baal of the Covenant,’ worshipped at Shechem,[340] and that the ‘covenant’ over which the god presided was that made between the Canaanites of Shechem and their Hebrew master. Doubtless the two elements in the population would have interpreted the name in a different way. For the Hebrews the ‘Baal of the Covenant’ would have been Yahveh; for the Canaanites he would have been the local sun-god. But there is nothing to prove that the attributes of the Baals of Ophrah and Shechem were the same, or that they were adored under the same form. Indeed, the fact that the altar erected by Jerubbaal at Ophrah was dedicated to the ‘Yahveh of Peace’ tells rather in a contrary direction. Shechem had its Baal-berith, while Ophrah may have had its Baal-shalom. While the one commemorated the covenant that had been entered into between the two parts of the population, the other would have commemorated its ‘peaceful’ settlement. For the Canaanite it was a covenant, for the Hebrew it was peace.