1. And it happened after the death of Joshua. These words are a pointed repetition of the formula that begins the Book of Joshua, “And it happened after the death of Moses.”

the Israelites inquired of the LORD. This idiom indicates inquiry of an oracle in all likelihood, the Urim and Thummim, which could be used to yield a yes-no answer or to select an individual from a group. Some commentators have suggested that after Joshua’s death, there was no longer a central leader with access to God and hence the oracular device was necessary.

2. Judah shall go up. The prominence of Judah in the vanguard of the conquest patently reflects a later period when Judah was the seat of the Davidic monarchy and the chief remaining tribe. The report here moves from Judah’s military success in the south to the failures of the other tribes in the north.

3. Simeon his brother. This indication of fraternity and military cooperation probably derives from a moment in later history when Simeon was closely allied with or assimilated in Judah.

4. ten thousand men. Like almost all numbers in biblical narrative, this is formulaic, meant to indicate a large group. The reference to “seventy kings” in verse 7 is similarly formulaic, although it does register the fact that Canaan was divided among many small city-kingdoms, which were often at war with one another.

5. Adoni-Bezek. This name, which means “master of Bezek,” appears to be a hereditary title rather than a proper noun.

6. they chopped off his thumbs and his big toes. The mutilation, which on the evidence of Adoni-Bezek’s own words in the next verse was evidently a common practice, is both a humiliation and a means of permanently preventing the captured leader from becoming a combatant again because he would be unable to wield a bow or sword or run on the battlefield. It should be observed, moreover, that this grisly detail is an apt thematic and imagistic introduction to Judges, the most violent of all the books of the Bible. In the stories that follow, swords will be thrust into bellies, tent pegs into heads; people will be variously mashed and crushed; and toward the end of the book, the dismembered parts of a murdered woman’s body will be sent out to the sundry tribes in order to ignite a civil war. The mutilation of the king, then, introduces us to a realm of political instability in which both people and groups are violently torn asunder.

7. And they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died there. This notation and the one in the next verse about the total destruction of Jerusalem by Judah are a puzzlement. It is contradicted here by verse 21, in which it is said that Judah was unable to drive out the Jebusites but continued to coexist with them. 2 Samuel 5 reports, with some historical plausibility, that it was David who conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites (almost two centuries after the putative time of the events in Judges). One suspects that the Judahite writer was swept up by the momentum of his own historical moment: Jerusalem had long been the capital city of the Davidic monarchy, and so it was difficult for the writer to imagine that it had not been part of the initial conquest of his tribe.

12. Whoever strikes Kiriath-Sepher and takes it, to him I shall give Achsah my daughter as wife. The story here, including the two previous verses, repeats in virtually identical language the story told in Joshua 15:13–19. The offer of the hand of the daughter to the victorious hero is an obvious folkloric motif and recurs in the episode of David and Goliath.

13. Othniel. He is to become the first judge.

15. desert-land. The term negev (rendered elsewhere in this translation as the place-name “Negeb”) means terrain that supports little or no vegetation, probably deriving from a verbal stem that means “dry” or “desolate.” The region in the southern part of the Land of Israel is that sort of terrain and hence is given the geographical name Negeb. Another term, midbar, is represented in this version, as it is in most English translations, as “wilderness” because it includes land in which animals can graze.

16. the Town of Palms. On the basis of other biblical occurrences, this is Jericho.

17. Hormah. The name puns on ḥerem, “ban.”

18. And Judah took Gaza and its territory. This verse is another instance in which the writer’s location in a time when the Philistine coastal enclave had long been subdued is retrojected to the period of the Judges. Here three of the five towns of the Philistine pentopolis are said to be conquered by Judah. But in the subsequent narrative, down to the time of David, the Philistines remain autonomous and a potent military threat; and in Judges itself, in the Samson story, Gaza is very much in the hands of the Philistines.

19. was not able. The Hebrew of the received text sounds odd at this point: “was not able” occurs in Onkelos’s Aramaic version.

20. the three sons of the giant. Though many interpreters prefer to understand the last term here, ʿanaq, as a proper noun, it does mean “giant,” and there is a clear tradition reflected in Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges that some of the indigenous inhabitants of the land were giants.

22. Bethel. The report now moves to the north. Bethel was to become a central cultic location in the northern kingdom of Israel after the split in the monarchy.

24. the way into the town. Yigal Yadin has cited archaeological evidence that some Canaanite towns had tunnels that provided secret access to them. That sounds plausible here because the lookouts are surely not asking directions to the main gate of the town.

28. Israel . . . put the Canaanite to forced labor, but it did not dispossess him. Whether this subjugation of the Canaanite population to the Israelites was a historical fact or is merely a face-saving formula for the failure of the conquest is uncertain. In any case, the chapter from this point on spells out a theme of incompletion that had fluctuated through the Book of Joshua. In the first half of Joshua, the conquest of the land appears to be comprehensive; in the second half, there are some indications that much remains to be conquered. Now we have a whole catalogue of failed conquests, all attributed to the northern tribes that would constitute the breakaway kingdom of Israel.

31. Acco . . . Sidon, Ahiab, Achzib. These coastal towns bring us far to the north, near present-day Haifa and beyond, with Sidon actually being a Phoenician city.

35. upon them. These words are merely implied in the Hebrew.