Judah at the Walls of Hasor

The terror that fell on the cities after Simeon and Levi destroyed Shechem lasted one year. After that, the Amorites came back.

The ancient sources preserved in the apocryphal Sefer Jerahmeel are careful about this sequence. The surrounding cities had been so frightened that they said: if two sons of Jacob could exterminate an entire town, what would happen if all of them gathered? They held off. But after a year the kings of the Amorites assembled when they heard that Jacob and his sons had settled again in Shechem, and they came with their armies. Their reasoning was direct: it is not enough that they killed all the men of Shechem; now they come to take the land too.

Judah saw them coming and ran forward first. He picked his opponent from the enemy lines: Ishub, King of Tapuah, who was covered from head to foot in iron and brass and rode a powerful horse. This king could throw javelins with either hand from horseback, in front and behind, and had never missed his target. Judah picked up a stone weighing sixty shekels and threw it from a distance of a hundred and seventy cubits. It struck the king's shield and rolled him off his horse.

Judah moved to finish him before he could stand, but the king rose fast and came at him shield against shield. He drew his sword and aimed at Judah's head. Judah raised his shield and took the blow; the shield split in two. Judah ducked and cut the king's feet off at the ankles. The king fell. The sword slipped from his hands. Judah killed him.

Nine more men attacked Judah while he was stripping the first king's armor. He smashed the first with a stone. He picked up the dead man's fallen shield and used it against the remaining eight while his brother Levi shot the King of Ga'ash with an arrow. By the time Judah killed all eight, Jacob had also shot and killed Zehori, King of Shiloh. The Amorites broke and fled. Judah killed a thousand men before sunset on that first day, and the complete account of the campaign records every subsequent day with the same precision.

Day two brought a harder fight at Hasor, where Jacob shot and killed four kings with his arrows and Judah climbed the wall first, alone, and killed four warriors who came against him before Naphtali reached the top to join him. They stood on opposite sides of the wall and killed everyone on the battlements together. Day three was the siege of Sartan, a city built on a height with walls that were nearly impossible to scale. The sons came at it from four directions simultaneously: Judah from the east, Gad from the west, Simeon and Levi from the north, Reuben and Dan from the south, while Naphtali and Issachar set fire to the gates. The blood ran off the walls like a river.

Day four brought the inhabitants of Shilo out to rob the sons of Jacob of their accumulated booty. They killed them all before noon and entered the town with the surviving fugitives. Day five was Mount Ga'ash, the hardest fight of the campaign. The Amorite fortress there had three walls, one inside the other, and the inhabitants stood on the battlements shouting insults down at the sons of Jacob. Judah climbed the outer wall in fury and nearly died there, surrounded on all sides. Jacob came forward with his bow and shot arrows to protect him until Dan reached the wall. Simeon and Levi came up after Dan. The blood flowed until sunset.

On the sixth day, the Amorites came without weapons. They promised to keep peace. They handed over Timna and the whole land of Hararyah. Jacob accepted and made peace with them. His sons returned to the Amorites double what they had taken from them, two sheep for every one. Jacob built Timnah. Judah built Zabel.

It is this campaign that Jacob referred to when he gave Joseph his deathbed portion: I have given you a share above your brothers, which I took from the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my bow. He was not speaking metaphorically. He had been in the field, six days in a row, shooting kings from horseback and protecting his sons on city walls. The blessing of Judah that Jacob spoke earlier, the lion's whelp holding the scepter from whose tribe no ruler would ever depart, was not prophecy about a distant future. It was a description of a man Jacob had watched fight beside him for six days while the Amorite world collapsed.

Jacob's statement to Joseph at the end of his life, that he had given him a portion above his brothers taken from the Amorite with his sword and his bow, was not a boast about land. It was a description of what kind of father Jacob had been. He had not sent his sons to fight while he waited behind. He had been on the wall at Ga'ash shooting arrows with his right hand and drawing his sword with his left while Judah nearly died on the parapet above him. The sages who preserved this account in the apocryphal sources understood that the blessing of Judah, the lion's whelp, the holder of the scepter, was earned in those six days, in plain sight, in front of his father.