Part 2
(Continued from last week)
The period of Joshua and the conquest covers roughly the Late Bronze Age, which spanned from about 1200 BC to about 500 BC. Joshua’s time was a little earlier, from about 1400 to about 1300 BC. Huge amounts of research have been done on the subject of Canaan in the early, middle and late Bronze Age and the closest we have to Joshua’s time is the Late Bronze Age. As I wrote earlier, there are no known statistics of the population and therefore everything is guesswork, assumptions and estimations.
Some researchers have used 2.0 hectares (100 acres) or more, per person, in a city/town; 0.5-2.0 in a village; and less than 0.5 in a farmstead. On that basis, they came to a population of 200-250 per hectare. With that assumption, they came to a population of 90,000 by including newly discovered sites. This calculation and the resulting assumptions are strongly disputed by other researchers who claimed that the 200-250 figure is based on Muslim village settlements in the Ottoman empire of the 19th century, in other words, totally inapplicable to the Canaan time.
Other researchers came to a figure of 137,000 plus 13,500 for unidentified/undiscovered sites, plus 36,000 for Nomads, for a total population of 187,000.
Various others came to range from a low of 60,00-70,000 to a high of 600,000-750,000. So have your pick of what population figure you want to accept. One thing is clear: The population of the Late Bronze Age was considerably lower than that of the Early and Middle Bronze Age due to famine, natural disasters and wars.
It is therefore anyone’s guess what populations the Israelites faced during the invasion.
Militarily, if the armies of the kingdoms had been unified under one command, the invasion would have been much more difficult, and more help from Hashem would have been needed. As it was, the various tribes were not unified; they were constantly fighting with each other and each little kingdom was always trying to take land away from its neighbors.
Consequently, the Israelites were able to cross the Jordan unopposed by the enemy on dry land, since Hashem stopped the flow of the river. They were even able to follow Hashem’s command to carry 12 stones from the middle of the Jordan to their next lodging place.
The first indication of the number of soldiers comes from the 2 ½ tribes that passed over the Jordan first, which are defined as “40,000 armed for war.” Based on 40,000 for 2 ½ tribes we can assume there might have been 192,000 soldiers for the 12 tribes or somewhat less, since the 2 ½ tribes were known to be more aggressive. Not an insignificant number if correct.
But not everything went well, since the 2,000-3,000 men Joshua sent to Ai were defeated with an unusually small loss of only 36 men. That was a punishment for one Israelite soldier having kept the spoils of war instead of turning it in for holy use, as Israel had been commanded.
After this happening, Joshua “chose out” 30,000 men and defeated Ai in an ambush he directed Joshua. In other words, the wording suggests that Joshua had a lot more than 30,000 men. On the morning of the planned ambush, Joshua took 5000, presumably out of the 30,000, to actually set the ambush.
When the king of Hazor called on the kings of Madon, Shimron, Achshaph and others to combine their forces with the Canaanites, Amorites, Hittites and others, to fight Joshua, the combined forces are described by Josephus as having consisted of 300,000 infantry, 10,000 cavalry and 20,000 war-chariots. Obviously, it was a huge army arrayed against the Israelites even if the figures are exaggerated. Despite that huge army, Joshua defeated and utterly destroyed the enemy. No figures for the size of the Israelite army are given, but it can be assumed that the total number of infantry available from the 12 tribes was far less than, maybe half, of 300,000. The Israelites had no cavalry at all.
In “Judges” we read that the prophetess Deborah commanded Barak to take 10,000 men from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun (Isaachar is assumed to have been included as well) to go with her to fight Sisera, who had 900 iron chariots. It can be assumed that in addition to the chariots, Sisera also had a large number of infantry with him, since two-wheeled chariots, which carry a driver and a shield-bearer, alone, cannot fight a battle. Barak, despite having no cavalry, defeated Sisera. The story of Sisera after the defeat is well known.
What have we learned from this “new perspective”? It is not the number of soldiers or cavalry that enabled Joshua, and those who followed him, to defeat the enemies again and again, but only the people’s trust in Hashem and their strict compliance with Hashem’s instructions.
My thanks go to Titus Michael Kennedy of the University of South Africa, Pretoria, whose 2013 analysis, as a demographer of the Late Bronze Age in Canaan, gave me a lot of information that I was able to use in this article.
By Norbert Strauss
