Joshua 10:40-43

Survey of the Results of the Campaign in Southern Canaan

40. all the country Rather, all the land, the hill country, &c. The entire region is comprehensively surveyed, and then treated with special detail: (a) The Hills;(b) The South; (c) The Vale; (d) The Springs.

(a) The Hills, i.e. the mountaindistrict of Judah extending southward from Jerusalem. It consists of calcareous limestone, and forms the water-parting between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, rising to the height of 3000 feet. It is generally, especially in the southern portion, an uneven and rocky district.

(b) The South = the Negeb, the "land of the south," the dry, parched land, where the mountain-brooks fail in the summer (Psalms 126:4). It is a limestone district, a land intermediate between wilderness and cultivated land, like the steppes of southern Russia. Because it lay in the south of Palestine, "Negeb" comes to mean generally "south" (comp. Numbers 35:5; Exodus 40:24; Joshua 17:9-10). It must, however, have once been fertile, for Palmer and Drake found grape-mounds all round the western border. "Almost sudden was the transition to the upland wilderness, the -Negeb," or south country a series of rolling hills, clad with scanty herbage here and there, especially on their northern faces; and steadily rising, till the barometer, falling three and a half inches, told us that we had mounted 3,200 feet above our camp of the morning." Tristram's Land of Israel, pp. 365, 366.

(c) The Vale, i.e. the Lowlands, or Shephêlah, a strip of land in southern Palestine stretching alone from Joppa to Gaza, "the plain of the Philistines." "Viewed from the sea this maritime region appears as a long low coast of white or cream-coloured sand, its slight undulations rising occasionally into mounds or cliffs, which in one or two places almost aspire to the dignity of headlands."

(d) The Springs, rather the Slopesor Declivities. The verb from which the original word is formed, denotes to pour, to rush down. Hence it means (i) an outpouring; (ii) a place, upon which something pours out. Comp. Deuteronomy 3:17, "from Chinnereth even unto the sea of the plain, even the salt sea, under Ashdoth-pisgah" = the springsor slopes of Pisgah(see margin), where the LXX. and English Version treat the word as a proper name. The word here denotes the district of undulating ground between the Shephêlahor "lowlands," just mentioned, and the hill or "mountain" of the centre.

as the Lord See Deuteronomy 20:16-17.