After Joshua died, Israel had no leader. The people asked God who should fight the Canaanites, and God told them to cast lots. The lot fell on Kenaz, from the tribe of Caleb, who became Israel's first judge. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, Kenaz was no ordinary ruler. He was a warrior-prophet who purged Israel of its hidden idolaters and then received one of the most haunting visions in all of Jewish literature.
Kenaz first ordered a census to root out anyone who had secretly worshipped foreign gods during Joshua's campaigns. He commanded the sinners to confess. Many did, revealing that they had hidden Amorite idols, golden images, and magical books beneath their tents. Kenaz gathered the forbidden objects and brought them before God. He placed the stolen idols, precious stones, and pagan books on a new altar on the mountain, and God consumed them all with fire.
That night, God performed something extraordinary. He transformed the remains into twelve precious stones engraved with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. God instructed Kenaz to place these stones in the Ark of the Covenant alongside the tablets of the law. They would remain there until Solomon built the Temple, when they would be set upon the two Cherubim as a memorial.
Then God revealed the future. When Israel's sins reached their limit and the Temple was defiled, God would remove the stones and the tablets and return them to the place from which they originally came. There they would wait until the end of days, when God would bring them back as an everlasting light, seven times more powerful than the sun or the moon. When Kenaz finished prophesying, his soul returned to him and he remembered nothing of what he had said. His only response was devastating: "If such is the rest the righteous receive after death, it would be better for them to die at birth than to sin in this world." Kenaz died, and his son Othniel arose after him.