The compiler of the book of Judges has turned this hero of popular story, this lover of Philistine women, into a Judge of Israel. He was, however, merely a Danite champion, the one hero of Danite tradition, of whom indeed the tribe had little reason to be proud. Even in Judah his achievements gained him no honour. When the Philistines sought to seize him after he had burnt their corn, ‘three thousand men of Judah’ ascended to his place of refuge ‘on the top of the rock Etam’ and handed him over to his enemies. The wiles of a Philistine harlot deprived him of his strength and his eyes, and he ended his days as a fettered slave at Gaza, grinding wheat for his Philistine lords. The glory of his death, however, in the eyes of his fellow-tribesmen redeemed the rest of his life. Called to make sport for his masters in the temple of Dagon, while they feasted in honour of their god, he laid hold of the two central columns on which the building was supported, and brought it down on the assembled crowd. Samson and the Philistines alike were buried under its ruins. And ‘so,’ the chronicler adds, ‘the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.’ In the story of Samson we hear for the first and the last time in the book of Judges of ‘the men of Judah.’ It is the first time that they appear in history. Judah produced no Judges, for Othniel was a Kenizzite, and throughout the epoch of the Judges its history is a blank. Nothing can show more clearly how modern a tribe it was as compared with the other tribes of Israel, and how insignificant was the power which it possessed. The original Judah had its home at Beth-lehem, shut in between the Jebusite Jerusalem and the Edomite Hebron, and it was not until it had absorbed and coalesced with the other occupants of its future territory that the Judah of history was born. It is possible that the union was brought about, or at all events completed, by the Philistine wars; at any rate we find no traces of it at an earlier date. Even Lachish had been an Ephraimitic conquest, and in the time of Deborah it must still have been reckoned among the cities of Ephraim.[367] Ephraim was yet to have a judge, the last of the race. Though the title must be denied to Samson, it must be given to Samuel the seer. In Samuel the judges and the prophets of Israel met together, and the spirit of Yahveh which had marked out the judge now passed over into the prophet.