- 54-
movements which they could not follow. They had not long to wait. Above the dark
green olive trees, above the rising slopes, above the white walls, curled slowly in the
clear morning air the smoke of the burning city. Something in the attitude and
movements of Israel must have betrayed it, for "the men of Ai looked behind them,"
only to see that all was lost, and no means of escape left them. And now the host of
Israel "turned again," while those who had set Ai on fire advanced in an opposite
direction. Between these two forces the men of Ai were literally crushed. Not one of
them escaped from that bloody plain and slope. The slaughter extended to the district
around. Finally, the king of Ai was put to death, and his dead body "hanged upon a tree
till eventide."^91
But of what had been Ai "they made a Tel (or heap) for ever." Never was Scripture
saying more literally fulfilled than this. For a long time did modern explorers in vain
seek for the site of Ai, where they knew it must have stood. "The inhabitants of the
neighboring villages," writes Canon Williams, to whom the merit of the identification
really belongs, "declared repeatedly and emphatically that this was Tel, and nothing
else. I was satisfied that it should be so when, on subsequent reference to the original
text of Joshua 8:28, I found it written, that 'Joshua burnt Ai, and made it a Tel for ever,
even a desolation unto this day!' There are many Tels in modern Palestine, that land of
Tels, each Tel with some other name attached to it to mark the former site. But the site
of Ai has no other name 'unto this day.' It is simply et-Tel - the heap 'par excellence.'"
(^)