o have left open to them the way to
Jerusalem--less than six miles distant--would have been a perfectly
futile proceeding. We may be sure, therefore, that from the moment when
he learned that Adoni-zedek was besieging Gibeon, Joshua's first aim was
to cut off the Amorite king from his capital.

The fact that the Amorites fled, not towards their cities but away from
them, shows clearly that Joshua had specially manoeuvred so as to cut
them off from Jerusalem. How he did it, we are not told, and any
explanation offered must necessarily be merely of the nature of surmise.
Yet a considerable amount of probability may attach to it. The
geographical conditions are perfectly well known, and we can, to some
degree, infer the course which the battle must have taken from these,
just as we could infer the main lines of the strategy employed by the
Germans in their war with the French in 1870, simply by noting the
places where the successive battles occurred. The positions of the
battlefields of Mars-la-Tour, Gravelotte, and Sedan would show clearly
that the object of the Germans had been, first, to shut Bazaine up in
Metz, and then to hinder MacMahon from coming to his relief. So in the
present case, the fact that the Amorites fled by the way of the two
Beth-horons, shows, first, that Joshua had completely cut them off from
the road to Jerusalem, and next, that somehow or other when they took
flight they were a long way to the north of him. Had they not been so,
they could not have had any long start in their flight, and the
hailstorm which occasioned them such heavy loss would have injured the
Israelites almost as much.

How can these two circumstances be accounted for? I think we can make a
very plausible guess at the details of Joshua's strategy from noting
what he is recorded to have done in the case of Ai. On that occasion, as
on this, he had felt his inability to deal with an enemy behind
fortifications. His tactics therefore had consisted in making a feigned
attack, followed by a feigned retreat, by which he drew his enemies
completely away from their base, which he then seized by means of a
detachment which he had previously placed in ambush near. Then, when the
men of Ai were hopelessly cut off from their city, he brought all his
forces together, surrounded his enemies in the open, and destroyed them.

It was a far more difficult task which lay before him at Gibeon, but we
may suppose that he still acted on the same gen