population of the country. As in Britain after the Saxon conquest, the
invaders settled in the country rather than in the towns, so that while
the peasantry was Israelite the townsfolk either remained Canaanite or
were a mixture of the two races.

The mixture introduced among the Israelites the religion and the
beliefs, the manners and the immoralities, of the Canaanitish people.
The Mosaic legislation was forgotten; the institutions prescribed in the
wilderness were ignored. Alone at Shiloh, in the heart of Ephraim, was a
memory of the past observed; here the descendants of Aaron served in the
tabernacle, and kept alive a recollection of the Mosaic code. Here alone
no image stood in the sanctuary of the temple; the ark of the covenant
was the symbol of the national God.

But the influence of Shiloh did not extend far. The age that succeeded
the entrance into Canaan, was one of anarchy and constant war. Hardly
had the last effort of the Canaanites against their invaders been
overthrown on the banks of the Kishon, when a new enemy appeared in the
south. The Philistines, who had planted themselves on the sea-coast
shortly before the Israelites had invaded the inland, now turned their
arms against the new-comers, and contended with them for the possession
of the country. The descendants of Jacob were already exhausted by
struggle after struggle with the populations which surrounded them.
Moabites and Midianites, Ammonites and Bedâwin, even the king of distant
Mesopotamia, had sacked their villages, had overrun their fields, and
exacted tribute from the Israelitish tribes. The tribes themselves had
lost coherence; they had ranged themselves under different "judges" or
"deliverers," had forgotten their common origin and common faith, and
had even plunged into interfraternal war. Joshua was scarcely dead
before the tribe of Benjamin was almost exterminated by its brethren;