Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Nations That Remained
Judges 1:21-36
21 The children of Benjamin didn’t drive out the Jebusites who inhabited Jerusalem, but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day. · WEB
Seven tribes are listed with the same verdict — they did not drive them out — and the compromise that replaces conquest is forced labor.
The children of Benjamin didn't drive out the Jebusites who inhabited Jerusalem, but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day Judges 1:21.
The chapter's second half is a roll call of failure, and the phrase didn't drive out becomes its refrain — Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali, and Dan, each with a list of towns that stayed in other hands Judges 1:27 Judges 1:29–33. The writer keeps the accounting tribe by tribe, so the pattern cannot be mistaken for one region's bad luck.
When Israel had grown strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor, and didn't utterly drive them out Judges 1:28.
This is the key sentence, and it names the substitute. Israel was not too weak — when Israel had grown strong — and with the strength it chose revenue instead of obedience. Subject peoples paid, worked and stayed, which was the profitable arrangement and the forbidden one Deuteronomy 7:2 Exodus 23:32–33. The compromise looks like realism and functions like a mortgage: the neighbors who remained became the gods who remained.
The Bethel episode shows the same instinct in miniature. A man is caught leaving the city and offered his life for the location of the entrance; he takes the deal, the city is destroyed, and they let the man and all his family go Judges 1:24–25. It is a bargain rather than a battle, and it echoes another Canaanite who was spared for helping spies Joshua 6:25 — except that this man walks off and builds a new city with the old name Judges 1:26, carrying the thing Israel was told to end.
The Amorites forced the children of Dan into the hill country, for they would not allow them to come down to the valley Judges 1:34.
The last tribe named suffers a reversal: instead of driving anyone out, Dan is driven in, penned into the hills by the people it was supposed to dispossess. That detail is the reason for the migration recorded in the appendix, where Dan goes looking for territory elsewhere and takes idols with it Judges 18:1 Judges 18:30–31. The chapter's failures are not merely regrettable; the book will show each of them producing something.
So the opening chapter moves from Yahweh delivered the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand Judges 1:4 to a border description of the Amorites Judges 1:36 — from what God gave to what the enemy still held. Nothing has yet gone visibly wrong. A generation has simply stopped finishing what it was given, and the next chapter explains what that costs.
held with reason What this mark means