Seven Kings Hid Under the Trees to Slaughter Jacob's Sons

Under the trees of Canaan, seven kings lay flat in the leaf shadow and waited. They had counted the flocks. They had counted the herders, who were only boys with staves, sons of a foreign shepherd grown fat on Canaanite grass. The plan was simple. Take the cattle. Kill whoever reached for them. Seven crowns crouching in the brush of one hill country, and every one of them remembered Shechem.

They were not nameless raiders. The king of Tâphû was there, and the king of 'Arêsa, and the kings of Sêragân and Sêlô and Gâ'as, and the king of Bêthôrôn, and the king of Ma'anîsâkîr. Seven rulers of the mountains and the woods, bound by one grievance. Two of Jacob's boys had walked into a circumcised city and left no man breathing in it. The land had decided not to wait for the other ten to grow up.

The Old Man Mourning in Hebron

Far from the ambush, Isaac sat heavy with grief in his house, and his grandsons would not leave him. Jacob stayed at the old man's side. So did Levi and Judah and Joseph. Young Benjamin, the baby, pressed close to his father's father and did not stir. The household had gathered to comfort one dying patriarch and did not know that seven living kings were already in the trees.

Then a herdsman came running with dust on his legs and panic in his mouth. "The kings of the Amorites have surrounded thy sons," he gasped, "and plundered their herds."

Six Thousand Swords Out of One House

Jacob did not weep and he did not pray first. He rose. He came out of his house, he and his three sons and all the servants his father had sent him, and behind him marched six thousand men with swords drawn. The shepherd who wrestled an angel in the dark of Peniel came down on the pastures of Shechem like a flood.

He slew them in the open grazing land. He chased the ones who broke and ran, and he cut them down with the edge of the sword. The seven crowns scattered into the grass. The kings who had hidden so well now had nowhere left to hide.

The Stone That Unhorsed the Iron King

The Amorites did not vanish quietly. Seven years after Shechem they came back in force, gathering against the valley with one cry between them. "Is it not enough that they killed every man of the city? Now they take the land itself." And so the brothers who had been boys in the leaf shadow met the kings in open battle.

Judah leaped first into the line of footmen. The man who came at him was Yashuv, king of Tappuah, sheathed head to heel in iron and bronze, mounted, hurling spears from both hands at once and missing nothing. Judah did not flinch at the iron. He bent, took a stone from the ground that weighed sixty sela'im, and from a hundred and seventy-seven cubits away he threw. The stone caught Yashuv on the shield and knocked him off his horse into the dirt.

Judah ran to finish him. But the iron king was up before he arrived, shield to shield, and his lance came whistling for Judah's neck. Judah lifted his own shield and the lance split it clean in two. So Judah seized the lance itself, turned the giant's weapon against the giant, and cut through both his legs above the ankle. Yashuv fell. The lance dropped from his hand. Judah leaped and took off his head.

Brothers Climbing the Walls of the Kings

Nine of Yashuv's men closed on Judah while he was still stripping the armor. He brained the first with another stone and took his shield. Then Levi arrived and put an arrow through Eilon, king of Gaash. Judah killed the other eight. And Jacob, the old wrestler, drew his bow and dropped Zeruri, king of Shiloh. After that the Amorites had no heart left to stand, only to run, and the sons of Jacob hunted them across the hills.

City by city the war ground on. At Hazor Jacob's arrows took down four more kings, and Judah went up the wall first, killing four warriors alone before Naphtali could climb to his side. They held the right and the left of the wall and emptied it. At Sartan, a high city whose mound crushed any man who came near, the brothers split to the four winds. Judah climbed from the east, Gad from the west, Simeon and Levi from the north, Reuben and Dan from the south, and Naphtali and Issachar set fire to the gate hinges. Judah took the tower and killed two hundred men on its roof.

At Gaash, ringed in three walls one inside the other, the defenders mocked them from the parapet until noon. Then the spirit of a warrior's fury came over Judah. He climbed alone with all his strength and nearly died on that wall. Stones rained on his right, swords waited on his left, and the whole city pushed to throw him down. Only Jacob's bow saved him, the old man firing left and right until Dan and Naphtali and Simeon and Levi could reach the top. Five of them held the wall while the blood ran down it in a stream, and they took the city as the sun leaned west.

Seven Crowns Come Bowing for Peace

On the sixth day the Amorites came out without a single weapon. They bowed to the ground before the household they had meant to ambush in the trees. They begged for peace, and they paid for it, returning every captive and two head of cattle for every one they had stolen. Jacob made peace with them. He turned toward Timnah, and Judah toward Arbel, and from that day the kings of the woods troubled them no more.

The Torah says only that they journeyed, and the terror of God lay on the cities around them, and no one pursued the sons of Jacob. Behind that one quiet verse stood seven dead crowns, a giant cut down by his own lance, and a wall at Gaash running red while an old man emptied his quiver to keep his fourth son alive.