b. The capture of Bethel (1:22–26)
b. The capture of Bethel (1:22–26)
This ancient account of the capture of Bethel raises the question of its connection with the narrative of the Conquest in Joshua, which nowhere tells of the capture of Bethel but which includes the men of Bethel as allies of the men of Ai (Josh. 8:17). The two cities were very close together (Josh. 8:9, 12), but archaeology shows clearly that the site of Ai was unoccupied from c. 2200 BC. It is unlikely that a mistake has been made in the identification of the site or that a Middle or Late Bronze Age town has been completely eroded. This problem has led many to conjecture that the names Ai and Bethel were used to refer to the same place, or, less likely, that the men of Bethel used the ruins of Ai (the name itself means ‘a ruin’) as an armed outpost against the advancing Israelites. The involvement of all the men of both cities (Josh. 8:17) demands some correlation of the two accounts. The sending up of spies is a point that both have in common (1:23–25; Josh. 7:2, 3), but this was a stratagem frequently employed by the Israelites, as in the case of Jericho (Josh. 2:1ff.). There is a broad parallel with the campaign against Jericho in that the informer and his family escaped the destruction which overtook the town. Notice, as in the case of Judah (1:2–4), that the presence of the Lord (22) was the guarantee of victory. Bethel, associated with the patriarch Jacob (Gen. 28:19), was to become one of the principal sanctuaries of the period of the judges. Afterwards, following the death of Solomon and the Disruption, it became the national shrine of the northern kingdom. Its name means ‘house of God’, using not Israel’s distinctive name for its deity (Yahweh) but a designation common amongst Israel’s neighbours; El was the nominal head of the Canaanite pantheon.
The Hittites (26) were a people of Indo-European descent who established a great Empire in Asia Minor and Syria during the period 1800–1200 BC. Archaeologists have discovered many connections between incidents in the patriarchal and Mosaic periods and Hittite laws and observances, notably in the Hittite suzerainty treaties which have thrown light on the earlier period of Israel’s history. The area of Syria was known as ‘the land of the Hittites’ at the time of the Conquest (Josh. 1:4), while later Assyrian and Babylonian records refer to Syria and Palestine as the ‘Hatti-land’. The man who betrayed Bethel may have been a Hittite, left behind at the decline of the Empire, who returned to his own race after this incident. The location of Luz is completely unknown.