The first brunt of the Philistine attack was borne by Judah. But it was not long before the armies of the Philistines made their way northwards, and even penetrated into the fastnesses of Mount Ephraim.[357] Of all this, however, the record has been lost. The compiler of the book of Judges failed to find it in the fragmentary annals of the past, and has been compelled to fill up the interval between the fall of the kingdom of Manasseh and the supremacy of the Philistines in Palestine with notices of judges and events whose exact place in Hebrew history was uncertain. It is here, accordingly, that we have the names of the so-called lesser Judges, of whom little more was known than the names. Two of them, Tola the son of Puah, and Elon, belonged to Issachar and Zebulon; and it is somewhat singular that while the book of Numbers makes Tola and Puah the heads of families in Issachar, it makes Elon the head of a family in Zebulon.[358] Of Tola we are told that he lived and died at Shamir in Mount Ephraim, which at that time therefore must have been in the hands of Issachar, and that he judged Israel twenty-three years. The account of Elon is equally laconic; he judged Israel ten years, and was buried at Aijalon in Zebulon. Another judge in Zebulon was Ibzan of Beth-lehem,[359] who was judge for seven years only, but of whom it was recorded that he had thirty sons and thirty. daughters. A similar record has been handed down of another of these minor judges, Abdon the son of Hillel. He, it is said, had forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rode on seventy colts. Abdon was judge for eight years, and ‘was buried at Pirathon in the land of Ephraim, in the mount of the Amalekites.’ This statement seems to push back the date of Abdon to an early period when Benjamin had not yet separated from the ‘House of Joseph,’ and ‘the land of Ephraim’ accordingly extended southwards into the Amalekite region. It would be of the same age as that of the Song of Deborah. Gilead also had its judges, though the names of only two of them have been preserved. One was Jair, who ruled as judge for twenty-two years, and who ‘had thirty sons that rode on thirty ass-colts, and they had thirty cities which are called the villages of Jair.’ We hear something more of this Jair in the Pentateuch. He had taken the villages which were called after his name, and must have lived not long after the Israelitish conquest of Bashan.[360] He belongs, therefore, to the earliest period of Israelitish history in Canaan, and may have been a contemporary of Joshua himself.