Forty-Five Kings Came for Joshua and Lost

Thirty-one kings were dead. The land had been divided. The twelve tribes had received their territories, the borders drawn in the aftermath of campaigns that had taken years and reshaped the map of the entire region. Israel had sung its victory song, the song of thanksgiving for everything God had done since Egypt, and it seemed, in that particular moment, as if the wars were over.

Then the letter arrived from Armenia.

The account preserved in Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg (1909-1938), drawing on Talmudic and midrashic sources, records the origin of the coalition that formed against Joshua in the period after the conquest. Among the thirty-one kings he had defeated, one had a son. Shobach became king of Armenia after his father's death and organized his entire life around a single purpose. He spent years traveling to the courts of Persia and Media, making his case, building relationships, calling in obligations, until he had assembled something unprecedented: forty-five kings united under a single coalition, plus the warrior Japheth, all of them pointed at the same target.

They sent Joshua a letter. The tradition preserves its language, and what's striking about it is the combination of contempt and scrupulous fairness. "Thou wolf of the desert!" it begins, which is not diplomatic. Then: "We know what you did to our kinsmen. In thirty days we shall come, forty-five kings, each commanding sixty thousand warriors. Prepare for combat and do not say afterward that we took you at unawares."

Shobach despised Joshua and planned to destroy him. He also gave him a month's warning and told him exactly what was coming. The midrashic tradition notes this without sentimentalizing it: by warning Joshua, the coalition gave him time to prepare, to pray, to marshal his strength. The cruelty of the message was wrapped in a procedural courtesy that ended up being more useful to Joshua than to Shobach. This is the kind of irony the tradition finds instructive.

The math was staggering. Forty-five kings, each commanding sixty thousand soldiers: two million seven hundred thousand warriors converging on a nation whose entire male population at the Sinai census had numbered six hundred thousand. The coalition outnumbered Israel by a factor of four to one, and these were not the scattered and demoralized defenders of Canaanite cities. These were the organized armies of Persia and Media, battle-hardened and motivated by the specific grievance of watching thirty-one of their allied kings burned and destroyed.

Joshua prayed. The Ginzberg collection is extensive on the character of Joshua's prayer life throughout the campaigns, and the tradition of his trial makes clear that prayer was not a preliminary ritual he performed before trusting in military strategy. It was the strategy. Every major engagement in Joshua's career was preceded by extended prayer, and the tradition consistently attributes the outcomes not to Joshua's tactical genius but to the quality of his relationship with God under pressure.

The song of victory Israel had already sung was about to be tested against an alliance of a scale that dwarfed the thirty-one kings of Canaan. The Canaaanite kings had been defending their own territory from inside their own cities. Shobach's coalition was coming from outside, organized specifically for offense, with vengeance as its organizing principle rather than territorial defense. These were different conditions, and everyone knew it.

The Midrash Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, preserves the outcome with a brevity that is its own kind of emphasis. The coalition came. Joshua met it. The same God who had stopped the sun over Gibeon, who had rained hailstones from Egypt on the Canaanite forces attacking the Gibeonites, who had parted the Jordan at flood stage and held the Red Sea open for forty minutes, was still operating on Joshua's side.

Shobach had built something extraordinary in his years of diplomatic work. Forty-five kings in coalition was a military achievement that few commanders in the ancient world had managed. He had identified the right enemy, assembled the right force, given the right notice, and led the assault himself. His intelligence about Joshua was accurate. His assessment of Israel's weakness was not wrong.

What he had not accounted for, and what the tradition suggests cannot be accounted for by military analysis alone, was what Joshua had accumulated over years of honoring commitments, keeping oaths to people who tricked him, going to war for Gibeonites who deserved nothing from him, trusting the book of Deuteronomy when all his inherited knowledge had disappeared in the moment of grief after Moses died. Character, in the tradition's accounting, is not a soft asset. It produces results that outnumber armies.

The thirty days passed. The coalition arrived. The battle was fought. Shobach, who had spent years building the largest military alliance his region had ever seen, discovered what the thirty-one kings of Canaan had also discovered: that the math of purely human resources does not always determine outcomes, and that vengeance, however carefully organized, is not a sufficient substitute for whatever Joshua had on his side.

The song Israel had already sung turned out to be premature only in the sense that there was more to add to it.