1. when Jabin king of Hazor heard. Though no grammatical object for the verb appears, the obvious sense is that he heard of Joshua’s initial conquests. The pointed parallel with 10:1 makes this clear. Altogether, this whole chapter appears to have been composed to create a symmetrical complement to the account of the defeat of the southern alliance in the previous chapter. Here, the alliance is one of northern kings. The reach of this new conquest, going all the way to Sidon in Lebanon and, to the south on the Mediterranean coast, to Misrephoth-Mayim, is scarcely historical, and it seems devised to convey the idea of the completeness of the conquest of the land.

Hazor. This was an important city in northeastern Canaan in the Middle Bronze Age, a memory perhaps reflected in making its king the leader of the alliance, but by Joshua’s time it had become a relatively small town.

2. Chinneroth. This is the same place as Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee.

3. Hermon. This is a mountain to the northeast, on the border between present-day Israel and Syria.

5. the waters of Merom. The location is in the high country of north-central Canaan.

6. Their horses you will hamstring and their chariots you will burn in fire. The chariot, a formidable instrument of warfare, was not generally adopted by the Israelites, who were essentially guerilla fighters from the high country, for another two centuries. These Canaanite chariots in all likelihood were made out of wood, hence the burning. As to hamstringing of the horses, Boling and others think this was a cunning strategy to disable the horses at the onset of the battle, although it is not entirely clear how easy it would have been for the Israelite warriors to get close enough to the chariots in order to maim the horses. Alternately, they might have hamstrung the horses after the victory in order to make sure they would not be used again to draw chariots, a possibility encouraged by the previous verse in which the enemy troops appear to be defeated before the hamstringing.

7. came against them suddenly at the waters of Merom. This is the same strategy of surprise attack used against the southern alliance, with the enemy caught unawares at its own encampment.

11. living person . . . breathing person. The two Hebrew terms, nefesh and neshamah, are phonetically and semantically related. Nefesh is the life-breath and, by extension, the living person; neshamah explicitly means breath or anything that breathes.

13. the towns standing on their mounds. The “mound,” tell, is the heaped-up layers of earlier habitation on which old cities stand. (It has become a technical archaeological term.) What the expression may mean in context is towns of notable antiquity, though that is not entirely certain.

15. As the LORD had charged Moses. The genocidal imperative is spelled out several times in Deuteronomy.

16. the high country of Israel. This rather odd phrase, matched in verse 21 with “the high country of Judah,” probably reflects an awareness of the division into a southern and northern kingdom after the death of Solomon.

17. Mount Halak. Boling wittily and accurately observes that this could be translated as Bald Mountain.

18. Many days. The Hebrew yamim is an elastic indicator of time, and so it could mean here months or even years.

20. For it was from the LORD to harden their heart for battle against Israel. This is one of two verbs used in the Exodus story for the hardening or toughening of the heart of Pharaoh. There, the divinely instigated obduracy was in order to enable the display of God’s overwhelming power. Here it is to provide grounds for wiping out the indigenous population.

21. the Anakites. Although in the present context this looks like a gentilic designation, in other biblical texts the word refers to giants.

22. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did they remain. These are three of the five Philistine towns on the southern part of the Mediterranean coast. Goliath the Philistine was, of course, a giant, though the Hebrew ʿanaq is not attached to him in the story in 1 Samuel 17. It is conceivable that the association of huge physical proportions with the Anakites derives from a perception that the Philistines, of original Aegean stock, were bigger than the indigenous population of Canaan though archaeological evidence suggests the Canaanites were also big. The Philistines invaded the coastal areas around 1200 B.C.E., but later writers (as in Genesis) imagined them as longtime residents of the coastal strip.