Joshua 10:1

FIVE KINGS WAR AGAINST GIBEON, Joshua 10:1-5.

1. Adoni-zedek The name means lord of justice. Compare the kindred word Melchizedek, king of justice. Genesis 14:18. All that is known of this Amorite king and his four confederates is recorded in this chapter. Alarmed at the victories of Joshua and the defection of Gibeon, his nearest neighbour on the north, he aroused the kings in the south, and combined them against the seceding state. This drew Joshua to the aid of his ally, and to the discomfiture of his confederated foes, and the execution of Adonizedek and his four royal associates.

Jerusalem This is the first time that undisputed mention is made in the Bible of this celebrated city. Probably the Salem in Genesis 14:18, is Jerusalem, although Jerome contends that Salem was in the southern part of Galilee, near Scythopolis. Jerusalem is called “Jebus” and the “city of the Jebusites” in Judges and some later books. It became the metropolis of the Hebrews under David at a comparatively late date, after the nation had gone through the period of the Judges and entered on the Monarchy. Bethel, Hebron, and Shechem were ancient holy places when the Jebusite was still possessing Jerusalem.

It is a little south of the centre of Palestine, thirty-two miles from the coast and eighteen from the Jordan, and is two thousand six hundred feet above the level of the sea. It is surrounded on three sides by hills still higher, from which it is separated by precipitous ravines, which rendered it, before the invention of gunpowder, almost impregnable. “It is on the ridge, the broadest and most strongly marked ridge, of the backbone of the complicated hills which extend through the whole country, from the plain of Esdraelon to the desert. Every wanderer, every conqueror, every traveller, who has trod the central route of Palestine from north to south, must have passed through the table-land of Jerusalem. It was the water-shed between the streams, or, rather, the torrent beds, which find their way eastward to the Jordan and westward to the Mediterranean.” Stanley. See note, Matthew 2:1.

And were among them That is, were having amicable intercourse with the Israelites.