Judges 1:5

And they found Adonibezek in Bezek,.... Who was king of, the place, and whose name signifies lord of Bezek; not that they took him there, for he is afterwards said to make his escape from thence, but

And they found Adonibezek in Bezek: and they fought against him, and they slew the Canaanites and the Perizzites. They found , [ wayimtsª'uw (H4672), they found, came upon].

Adoni-bezek; the lord or king of Bezek, as his name signifies, in Bezek; whither he fled, when he had lost the field. Against him, i.e. against the city wherein he had encamped himself, and the rest of his army.

5 I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not. Ver. 5. Afterward destroyed] Their preservation was but a reservation, as was Sennacherib’ s, Pharaoh’ s, and theirs whom God threatened to destroy, after that he had done them good, Joshua 24:20.

(5) They found.—The expression perhaps alludes to the suddenness of their march, which enabled them to take the lord of Bezek by surprise. Adoni-bezek.—This is not a proper name, but a title, meaning “lord of Bezek,” as Adoni-zedek, in Joshua 10:1, and perhaps Melchi-zedek, in Genesis 14:18. They slew the Canaanites and the Perizzites.—This seems to refer to a second battle, or perhaps to the slaughter in the city after the battle described in the last verse.

Verse 5. And they found Adoni-bezek] The word מצא matsa, "he found," is used to express a hostile encounter between two parties; to attack, surprise, &c. This is probably its meaning here. Adoni-bezek is literally the lord of Bezek. It is very probable that the different Canaanitish tribes were governed by a sort of chieftains, similar to those among the clans of the ancient Scottish Highlanders. Bezek is said by some to have been in the tribe of Judah. Eusebius and St. Jerome mention two villages of this name, not in the tribe of Judah, but about seventeen miles from Shechem.

5. And they found] The plural verb is the natural continuation of Jdg 1:3. Adoni-bezek in Bezek] The chieftain’s name was no doubt taken to mean ‘lord of Bezek,’ as though he were called after his capital; but Judges 1:7 at least suggests that Jerusalem was his capital, not Bezek. No proper names in the O.T. are compounded with the name of a place; and by all analogy Adoni-bezek must mean ‘(the god) Bezek is Lord.’ A god Bezek, however, is unknown. The double Bezek excites suspicion: in Bezek may be allowed to stand, because the context requires the name of a place; the error probably lies in the name of the chief. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Adoni-bezek here is the same person as Adoni-zedek in Joshua 10:1; Joshua 10:3, the head of the Canaanite confederacy which is said to have opposed the Israelite invasion after the capture of Ai. Advancing from Gilgal or Jericho the first stronghold to confront the invaders would be Jerusalem; and by correcting ‘Adoni-bezek’ to Adoni-zedek king of Jerusalem, the form in which Joshua gives the text, we obtain the right situation for Judah’s first encounter. The name Adoni-zedek (cf. the Hebrew Adoni-jah and the Phoenician Adoni-eshmun) means Zedek, or rather Ṣ ?edeḳ ?, is Lord, Zedek being the Canaanite (Phoen.) god Συδέκ (Philo Bybl., Fragm. Hist. Graec. iii. 569); cf. the Canaanite names Ben-ṣ ?edeḳ ? (Amarna Letters, no. 125, 37 ed. Winckler), Ṣ ?idḳ ?i-milk (Cooke, North-Semitic Inscriptions, p. 349), Melki-ṣ ?edeḳ ? Genesis 14:18, Psalms 110:4. Probably the Hebrew scribes altered the name in order to introduce a distinction between the two narratives in Jud. and Josh.; ‘Bezek’ suggested itself from the context; and the whole name was given the erroneous meaning ‘lord of Bezek.’ The Greek scribes, on the other hand, identified the two names by reading Adoni-bezek both in Josh, and in Jud. (LXX). Another way of accounting for the alteration is proposed by Moore: by changing Adoni-zedek to Adoni-bezek it was possible to give the name a contemptuous twist, ‘the Lord scatters’; in Aram. bezaḳ ? = ‘scatter.’ The situation of the town Bezek is unknown, but it was probably near Jerusalem, Judges 1:7 b. The Bezek of 1 Samuel 11:8 = the modern Ibzik on the road to Bηsβn, 14 m. N.E. of Nβblus, is too far north and outside the range of Judah’s operations. Possibly the name has not been preserved correctly; Azekah (Joshua 10:10) is suggested as an improvement (Steuernagel, Einwanderung, p. 85). the Canaanites and the Perizzites] Cf. Judges 1:4; mentioned together in Genesis 13:7; Genesis 34:30 J; both appear in the lists of the seven nations of Canaan, e.g. Deuteronomy 7:1. What the difference was between them is not known; ‘Perizzites’ seems to be a formation from perβzξ = ‘country folk,’ ‘inhabitants of unwalled towns’; perhaps the name was given not to a separate tribe, but to the Canaanites who lived in the villages or open country.

5. Found — Discovered and apprehended unexpectedly. Adoni-bezek — The name means, lord of Bezek. He seems to have commanded these Canaanite and Perizzite forces in this war.