Hot Pursuit into Canaan
Compares the brief account of Israel's victory over the King of Arad in Numbers 21:1-3 and 33:40 with the seemingly parallel episode in Judges 1:16-18, and adopts historian Ze'ev Yavitz's proposal that both describe the same event: an early, independent incursion by the tribe of Judah into Canaan that was later folded into the national narrative and, separately, into Judah's own tribal conquest history.
Spero tackles the puzzle of why the defeat of the King of Arad appears both in Numbers, attributed to Israel as a whole during the wilderness years, and in Judges, attributed specifically to the tribes of Judah and Simeon after the conquest. Following historian Ze’ev Yavitz, he argues the two accounts describe a single early operation led by Judah alone, later remembered nationally in Numbers and folded into Judah’s own conquest history in Judges.
Shubert Spero was ordained at Yeshiva Torah Vodaath. He has a B.S. from CCNY, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University. He is the Irving Stone Professor of Jewish Thought at Bar Ilan University and the author of Morality, Halakha and the Jewish Tradition, God in All Seasons, and Holocaust and Return to Zion.
Cite this article
Shubert Spero. "Hot Pursuit into Canaan." Jewish Bible Quarterly 38, no. 4 (October – December 2010): 247–250.
Shubert Spero. "Hot Pursuit into Canaan." Jewish Bible Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2010, pp. 247–250.