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Judah invited Simeon his brother, i.e., their brother tribe, to take part in the contest. The epithet is applied to Simeon, not because Simeon and Judah, the sons of Jacob, were the children of the same mother, Leah (Genesis 29:33, Genesis 29:35), but because Simeon's inheritance was within the territory of Judah (Joshua 19:1.), so that Simeon was more closely connected with Judah than any of the other tribes. “ Come up with me into my lot (into the inheritance that has fallen to me by lot), that we may fight against the Canaanites, and I likewise will go with thee into thy lot. So Simeon went with him, ” i.e., joined with Judah in making war upon the Canaanites. This request shows that Judah's principal intention was to make war upon and exterminate the Canaanites who remained in his own and Simeon's inheritance. The different expressions employed, come up and go, are to be explained from the simple fact that the whole of Simeon's territory was in the shephelah and Negeb, whereas Judah had received the heart of his possessions upon the mountains.

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The notice respecting the Kenites, that they went up out of the palm-city with the children of Judah into the wilderness of Judah in the south of Arad, and dwelt there with the Judaeans, is introduced here into the account of the wars of the tribe of Judah, because this migration of the Kenites belonged to the time between the conquest of Debir (Judges 1:12.) and Zephath (Judges 1:17); and the notice itself was of importance, as forming the intermediate link between Numbers 10:29., and the later allusions to the Kenites in Judges 4:11; Judges 5:24; 1 Samuel 15:6; 1 Samuel 27:10; 1 Samuel 30:29. “ The children of the Kenite, ” i.e., the descendants of Hobab, the brother-in-law of Moses (compare Judges 4:11, where the name is given, but קין occurs instead of קיני , with Numbers 10:29), were probably a branch of the Kenites mentioned in Genesis 15:19 along with the other tribes of Canaan, which had separated from the other members of its own tribe before the time of Moses and removed to the land of Midian, where Moses met with a hospitable reception from their chief Reguel on his flight from Egypt. These Kenites had accompanied the Israelites to Canaan at the request of Moses (Numbers 10:29.); and when the Israelites advanced into Canaan itself, they had probably remained as nomads in the neighbourhood of the Jordan near to Jericho, without taking any part in the wars of Joshua. But when the tribe of Judah had exterminated the Canaanites out of Hebron, Debir, and the neighbourhood, after the death of Joshua, they went into the desert of Judah with the Judaeans as they moved farther towards the south; and going to the south-western edge of this desert, to the district on the south of Arad (Tell Arad, see at Numbers 21:1), they settled there on the border of the steppes of the Negeb (Numbers 33:40). “ The palm-city ” was a name given to the city of Jericho, according to Judges 3:13; Deuteronomy 34:3; 2 Chronicles 28:15. There is no ground whatever for thinking of some other town of this name in the desert of Arabia, near the palm-forest, φοινικών , of Diod. Sic. (iii. 42) and Strabo (p. 776), as Clericus and Bertheau suppose, even if it could be proved that there was any such town in the neighbourhood. ויּלך , “ then he went (the branch of the Kenites just referred to) and dwelt with the people ” (of the children of Judah), that is to say, with the people of Israel in the desert of Judah. The subject to ויּלך is קיני , the Kenite, as a tribe.

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The man whom they had permitted to go free, went with his family into the land of the Hittites, and there built a town, to which he gave the name of his earlier abode, viz., Luz. The situation of this Luz is altogether unknown. Even the situation of the land of the Hittites cannot be more precisely determined; for we find Hittites at Hebron in the times of Abraham and Moses (Gen 23), and also upon the mountains of Palestine (Numbers 13:29), and at a later period on the north-east of Canaan on the borders of Syria (1 Kings 10:29). That the Hittites were one of the most numerous and widespread of the tribes of the Canaanites, is evident from the fact that, in Joshua 1:4, the Canaanites generally are described as Hittites.

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