Joshua 12:22

Kedesh, a Levitical city and city of refuge upon the mountains of Naphtali (Jos 19:37; Jos 20:7; Jos 21:32), the home of Barak (Jdg 4:6), was conquered and depopulated by Tiglath-Pileser (Kg2 15:29), and was also a well-known place after the captivity (1 Macc. 11:61ff.) It is now an insignificant village, still bearing the ancient name, to the north-west of the lake of Huleh, or, according to Van de Velde (Reise. ii. p. 355), nothing but a miserable farmstead upon a Tell at the south-west extremity of a well-cultivated table-land, with a large quantity of antiquities about, viz., hewn stones, relics of columns, sarcophagi, and two ruins of large buildings, with an open and extensive prospect on every side (see also Rob. Bibl. Res. pp. 367ff.). Jokneam, near Carmel, as a Levitical town in the territory of Zebulun (Jos 19:11; Jos 21:34). Van de Velde and Robinson (Bibl. Res. p. 114) suppose that they have found it in Tell Kaimn, on the eastern side of the Wady el Milh, at the north-west end of a chain of hills running towards the south-east; this Tell being 200 feet high, and occupying a very commanding situation, so that it governed the main pass on the western side of Esdraelon towards the southern plain. Kaimn is the Arabic form of the ancient Καμμωνά, Cimana, which Eusebius and Jerome describe in the Onom. as being six Roman miles to the north of Legio, on the road to Ptolemais.

This chapter is a summary of Israel's conquests. I. Their conquests under Moses, on the other side Jordan (for we now suppose ourselves in Canaan) eastward, which we had the history of, Num 21:24, etc. And here the abridgment of that history (Jos 12:1-6). II. Their conquests under Joshua, on this side Jordan, westward. 1. The country they reduced (Jos 12:7, Jos 12:8). 2. The kings they subdued, thirty-one in all (v. 9-24). And this comes in here, not only as a conclusion of the history of the wars of Canaan (that we might at one view see what they had got), but as a preface to the history of the dividing of Canaan, that all that might be put together which they were not to make a distribution of.