The changed environment

From the beginning of this period on, the Hebrew spear to have had little trouble with the Canaanites. They may still in many regions have had to hew their own wood and draw their own water; but they were now, especially in the south, fast absorbing the old Canaanitish stock. The Books of Samuel which have to do professedly with all Israel, though they, in fact, deal principally with David's own clan, mention the Amorites only twice and the Canaanites but once. The Books of the Kings have scarcely more to say of them. It is evident that in Solomon's day the process of absorption, while far from complete in the lowlands, and particularly in the north, was fast going on. The Hebrews could now begin to think of the land as theirs. Centuries of occupancy enabled them to regard it as in some real sense their fatherland, the home of their mythical progenitors. Though they might be spoken of by their neighbours as “Outlanders,” or “Hebrews,” their grip had so tightened that they could speak of the land as Tahweh's. If in their eyes he as their God had not wholly usurped Baal, if the proprietorship was still a divided proprietorship, the thought was at least an advance upon the older thought of the distant Sinai as the home of Yahweh. For that matter, all along there had been a contradiction in their thought of Yahweh's abiding-place, for to most of them the Ark was Yahweh's seat. It seems at times as though they identified it with their God, so that the loss of it was temporarily the loss of him. ¹ It is probable that in the north the problem of getting the better of the Canaanites and absorbing them had to be faced a century longer than it had in the south. Granting this, we may still declare that the environment of the social life of the people as a whole had changed, and that they had come into closer touch with the world without. ² The great nations were for a considerable time to leave them singularly alone, perhaps because, on the whole, they despised them; ³ but when the propitious moment came, they were to step in and demand tribute. Till then the lesser highways, as that trodden by Ehud when he went with his gift-bearers to Eglon of Moab, were not to be traversed by such agents save as coming from some near-lying foreign people, they should bring their forced gratuities to the Hebrews.