“Y’hoshua at that time came and cut off the ‘Anakim from the land — from Hevron, D’vir, ‘Anav and from all the hill-country of Y’hudah and Isra’el; Y’hoshua utterly destroyed them and their cities. No ‘Anakim were left in the land of the people of Isra’el — only in ‘Azah, Gat and Ashdod did some remain.”-Joshua 11:21-22
Okay, we’ve finally arrived at the closing verses of Joshua Chapter 11.
We’re told that the Joshua and his army also hunted down and cut off the “Anakim” from the land.
Who were this strange breed of people?
Well, we know two things about the Anakim.
First, they were descended from Anak who were also known as the Anakites.
Second, we know that the Anakites were in some mysterious way connected to that race of evil giants called the REPHAIM who existed even before God sent the Great Flood to destroy all known human civilization (save Noah and his family).
Apparently, these humongous warriors of old were the result of fallen angels having sex with human women.
The most famous Anakite of them all was a warrior called Goliath who was later slain by King David (I’m sure you’ve all heard of him).
And when I say “giant”, I’m not kidding.
These Anakim dudes stood a good whopping 8 to 9 feet tall and harassed every one in the region, not just the Israelites.
The Israelites pretty much killed them all off in the Promised Land except for a few remaining survivors in the areas of Gaza, Gat and Ashdod.
Onward.
Next, we’re told in verse 23 that…
“Y’hoshua took the whole land, in keeping with all that Adonai had said to Moshe and to Israel according to their divisions into tribes.”
Okay, so the first thing you need to know about these verses is that the territories in the land of Canaan didn’t started to be officially handed out to the Tribes of Israel until AFTER everything we’re reading about here in Joshua Chapters 10 and 11 happened.
And then even after that, we’ll see later it was far from a smooth process.
It didn’t happen all at once and each of the individual tribes were responsible for driving out the enemy inhabitants from the territory that had been deeded to them.
Some of the tribes took fast action to achieve that end.
Others procrastinated (which is understandable considering how fighting a war is such a pain in the neck).
Hence, some of the tribes acquired their assigned territory rather quickly while it took much longer for the other tribes to establish real dominance over the areas they had been assigned.
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