10 DISPLACEMENT AND EXTINCTION OE EACES. 



undeluged earth ;" while they accomplished, as fully as any other 

 descendants of Noah, the appointed repeopling, and were fruitful 

 and increased, and brought forth abundantly in the earth, and mul- 

 tiplied therein, even as did the most favoured amoug the sons of Shem 

 or Japhet. When some five centuries after the Canaanite had entered 

 on his strangely burdened heritage, the progenitor of its later and 

 more favoured inheritors was guaranteed by a divinely executed 

 covenant, the gift to his seed of that whole land, from the river of 

 Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the covenant was not 

 even then to take place until the fourth generation, because the 

 iniquity of the Amorites — one of the generations of Canaan, used by 

 synecdoche for the whole— was not yet full. "When that appointed 

 period had elapsed, and only the narrow waters of the Jordan lay 

 between the sons of Israel and the land of the Canaanites, their leader 

 and lawgiver, who had guided them to the very threshold of that 

 inheritance on which only his eyes were permitted to rest, foretold 

 them in his final blessing : " The eternal God shall thrust out the 

 enemy from before thee, and shall destroy, and Israel shall dwell in 

 safety alone." No commandment can be more explicit than that 

 which required of the Israelites the utter extirpation of the elder 

 occupants of their inheritance : " When the Lord thy God shall bring 

 thee into the land, and hath cast out before thee seven nations greater 

 and mightier than thou, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy 

 them ; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto 

 them." Nevertheless we find that the Israelites put the Canaanites 

 to tribute, and did not drive them out ; that the children of Benjamin 

 did not drive out the Jebusites ; but, according to the author of the 

 book of Judges, they still dwelt there in his day ; and so with various 

 others of the aboriginal tribes. So also, the Gribeonites obtained by 

 craft a league of amity with Israel, and they also remained — bondmen, 

 hewers of wood, and drawers of water, yet so guarded by the sacred- 

 ness of the oath they had extorted from their disinheritors, that at a 

 long subsequent date we find seven of the race of their supplanters, 

 the sons and grandsons of the first Israelitish king, sacrificed by 

 David to their demand for vengeance on him who had then attempted 

 their extirpation. 



Even more remarkably significant than all those evidences of a 

 large remnant of the ancient Hamitic population, surviving in the 

 midst of the later Semitic inheritors of Canaan, is the appearance of 

 the name of liahab, the harlot of Jericho, in the genealogy of Joseph, 

 as recorded by Mathew. The purity of descent of the promised seed 

 of Abraham and David was most sacredly guarded through all the 



