The Gibeonites Gabaonites

(2 Sam. 21:1) — Hivites, inhabitants of Gibeon, who by cunning succeeded in entering into a covenant with Joshua. They sent envoys to him, who dressed in worn-out clothing and put on worn-out shoes, with dry, moldy bread in their sacks and patched wineskins, and thus deceitfully passed themselves off as foreigners, as it were from a very distant land. To the question, who they were and whence they had come, the envoys answered Joshua: we, your servants, have come from a very distant land, for we have heard much of the Lord your God, of His glory, and we ask to make a covenant with us.

By this false representation they deceived Joshua and the elders, who forgot to inquire of the Lord and, without further thought, made a covenant with them. The treaty was solemnly confirmed by an oath and upheld by Joshua, although the people grumbled when they learned that the supposed travelers from a very distant land belonged to the Canaanites, condemned by God to destruction. However, though out of pious regard for the solemn oath their lives were spared, nevertheless Joshua and the elders determined that they should perform servile duties for all the people in perpetuity, and especially at the Tabernacle, such as: cutting wood and carrying water.

From them later arose a special class of temple servants, known by the name of Nethinim, that is, “the given ones.” Later than this, Saul, out of zeal for the descendants of Israel and Judah, slew many of the Gibeonites and thereby violated the covenant made with them by the Israelites, and the solemn oath before the Lord. This rash act of Saul brought down the wrath of God, which fell heavily upon his house: seven descendants of Saul — two sons and five grandsons, handed over by David to the Gibeonites — were hanged by them at Gibeah, Saul’s city (2 Sam. 21:1–9).

After this, the Gibeonites are not mentioned again in Holy Scripture. Mention is made only of a few persons descended from the Gibeonites, such as, for example, Ishmaiah the Gibeonite, one of David’s thirty mighty men, Melatiah, who helped, together with other Gibeonites, in the restoration of the wall of Jerusalem in the days of Nehemiah (Neh. 3:7), Hananiah the false prophet, the adversary of Jeremiah (Jer. 28:1, 10, 12, and elsewhere); but all these persons, it must be supposed, were not so much descendants of the ancient Hivites as Benjamites born in Gibeon.