The assignment of forty-eight cities to the priests and levites, including the most important places in the country, is an extravagance even for the sacerdotal imagination, comparable to Ezekiel's partition of the land in parallel strips. It is the counterpart of Num. xxxv. 1-8, in a late supplement to the priestly laws, and directly contradicts the older principle (Num. xviii. 21-24) that neither priests nor levites shall have any landed property. Thus in Joshua, as in the Pentateuch, the priestly element is neither of one sort nor of one age: and again the evidence of the Greek version shows that additions and changes continued to be made in the text till the neighbourhood of 200 B.C. There is no evidence that the author of our Book of Joshua was the same as the author of the present Pentateuch; various indications point rather to the contrary. Nor can the author of the deuteronomist history of the conquest be certainly identified with any one of the hands engaged in the compilation and enlargement of the Book of Deuteronomy; all that can be affirmed is that he was of the same spirit, and that literary dependence upon Deuteronomy, and sometimes on younger parts of it, is visible in many places in Joshua. The Book of Joshua closes with a farewell address by Joshua to the tribes of Israel assembled at Shechem, in which, after a brief résumé of God's dealing with their fathers from the calling of Abraham, the exodus, and their own more recent experiences down to the present, he exhorts them to put away the gods which their fathers served "beyond the river" (in Mesopotamia), and worship Jehovah alone. Thereupon the people solemnly pledge themselves to serve him only and hearken to his words (Jos. 24). There is no question that this discourse is derived from E; a counterpart to it from the hand of the author of the deuteronomist Joshua stands in c. 23, and corresponds to the address of Moses in Deut. xxxi. 1-8. The sequel of Jos. xxiv. 28 is found in Judg. ii. 6-9. The restoration at a late time, of the old fragment Judg. i. 1-36, and the division of the books at this point, led to the repetition of the verses in Jos. xxiv. 29 ff. The importance of this fact is the proof it gives that E narrated the history of the generations following the death of Joshua as an apostasy from the religion of Jehovah such as the dying leader had warned the people against (Jos. xxiv. 19), and thus determined the treatment of the whole period which we now find in the Book of Judges. The last injunctions of Joshua in the deuteronomist history (Jos. xxiii. 14-16) exhibit the same conception of the subsequent history; in Judg. ii. 11-iii. 6, both E and the deuteronomist author are represented. CHAPTER IX JUDGES