15:20-63 Here is a list of the cities of Judah. But we do not here find Bethlehem, afterwards the city of David, and ennobled by the birth of our Lord Jesus in it. That city, which, at the best, was but little among the thousands of Judah, Mic 5:2, except that it was thus honoured, was now so little as not to be accounted one of the cities.

Verse 45. - Ekron, with her towns and her villages. Literally, her daughters and her farm hamlets (see note on Joshua 13:28). These cities of the Philistines had, like Gibeon, daughter cities dependent on them, and must therefore have been, like Gibeon, "great cities as the royal cities" (Joshua 10:2). They do not appear to have come under regal government till later times (cf. 1 Samuel 5:8, 11, with 1 Samuel 27:2). "Around it (Gezer) and along the sides were distributed a series of small isolated centres of agglomeration .... This disposition to scatter itself, of which Gezer surely does not offer us the only specimen, explains in a striking manner the Biblical phrase, 'the city and her daughters'" (Pal. Expl. Fund, Quart. Paper, Jan., 1874). This explanation, however, is doubtful (see Joshua 9:17). According to Knobel, this passage cannot have been written by the Elohist, because he confines himself to the description of the cities the Israelites actually possessed. Why a lair writer, writing presumably when Israel's fortunes were at a lower ebb, should have added a description of the territory Israel did not possess, he does not explain.

Ekron, with her towns and her villages. One of the five principalities of the Philistines, which with two more next mentioned, though they fell to the lot of the tribe of Judah, were never possessed by them; for which reason perhaps Gath and Ascalon are not mentioned, and these are put for the rest; see Joshua 13:3.

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