Beyond leading his people into Canaan and establishing them too firmly in its midst to be ever dislodged, Joshua personally did but little.  The conquest of Canaan was a slow process, which was not completed till the days of the monarchy.  Jerusalem was not captured till the reign of David, Gezer was the dowry received by Solomon along with his Egyptian wife.  At first the Canaanites were treated with merciless ferocity.  Their cities were burned, the inhabitants of them massacred, and the spoil divided among the conquerors.  But a time soon came when tribute was accepted in place of extermination, when leagues were made with the Canaanitish cities, and the Israelites intermarried with the older population of the country.  As in Britain after the Saxon conquest, the invaders settled in the country rather than in the towns, so that while the peasantry was Israelite the townsfolk either remained Canaanite or were a mixture of the two races.

The mixture introduced among the Israelites the religion and the beliefs, the manners and the immoralities, of the Canaanitish people.  The Mosaic legislation was forgotten; the institutions prescribed in the wilderness were ignored.  Alone at Shiloh, in the heart of Ephraim, was a memory of the past observed; here the descendants of Aaron served in the tabernacle, and kept alive a recollection of the Mosaic code.  Here alone no image stood in the sanctuary of the temple; the ark of the covenant was the symbol of the national God.

But the influence of Shiloh did not extend far.  The age that succeeded the entrance into Canaan, was one of anarchy and constant war.  Hardly had the last effort of the Canaanites against their invaders been overthrown on the banks of the Kishon, when a new enemy appeared in the south.  The Philistines, who had planted themselves on the sea-coast shortly before the Israelites had invaded the inland, now turned their arms against the new-comers, and contended with them for the possession of the country.  The descendants of Jacob were already exhausted by struggle after struggle with the populations which surrounded them.  Moabites and Midianites, Ammonites and Bedawin, even the king of distant Mesopotamia, had sacked their villages, had overrun their fields, and exacted tribute from the Israelitish tribes.  The tribes themselves had lost coherence; they had ranged themselves under different “judges” or “deliverers,” had forgotten their common origin and common faith, and had even plunged into interfraternal war.  Joshua was scarcely dead before the tribe of Benjamin was almost exterminated by its brethren; and a few generations later, the warriors of Ephraim, the stalwart champion of Israel, were massacred by the Israelites east of the Jordan.  In the south, a new tribe, Judah, had arisen out of various elements—­Hebrew, Kenite, and Edomite; and it was not long before there was added to the cleavage between the tribes on the two banks of the Jordan, the further and more lasting cleavage between Judah and the tribes of the north.  Israel was a house divided against itself, and planted in the midst of foes.