Adoni-bezek

The lord of Bezel (Judges i. 4, 5.)

Adon’i-be’zek. (lord of Bezek). King of Bezek, a city of the Canaanites. See Bezek. This chieftain was vanquished by the tribe of Judah, Jdg 1:3-7, who cut off his thumbs and great toes, and brought him prisoner to Jerusalem, where he died. He confessed that he had inflicted the same cruelty upon 70 petty kings whom he had conquered. (B.C. 1425).

("Lord of Bezek", a city of Canaan.) Leading the confederated Canaanites and Perizzites, he was conquered by Judah and Simeon, who cut off his thumbs and great toes. Conscience struck, he confessed that 70 kings (petty princes) had gleaned (margin) their meat under his table, deprived of thumbs and great toes: "As I have done, so God hath requited me" (Jdg 1:4-7). Brought a prisoner to Jerusalem, he died there. God pays sinners in their own coin (1Sa 15:33). Judah was not giving vent to his own cruelty, but executing God’s lex talionis (Lev 24:19; Rev 16:6; Pro 1:31). The barbarity of Canaanite war usage’s appears in his conduct. The history shows that Canaan was then parceled out among a number of petty chiefs.

(Heb. Adoni’-Be’zek, אֲדנַיאּבֶזֶק, lord of Bezek; Sept. Α᾿δωνιβέζεκ), a chieftain of Bezek (q.v.), who had subdued seventy of the petty kings around him, and, after barbarously cutting off their thumbs and great toes, had compelled them, to gather their food under his table (Jdg 1:5-7). Elated with this success, he ventured, at the head of the confederate Ganaanites and Perizzites, to attack the army of the tribes of Judah and Simeon, after the death of Joshua; but was himself defeated, captured, and served in the same manner as he had treated his own captives — a fate which his conscience compelled him to acknowledge as a righteous retribution for his inhumanity. He died of these wounds at Jerusalem, whither he was taken, B.C. cir. 1590. (See Kitto’s Daily Bible Illust. in loc.; and comp. AElian, Var. Hist. 2, 9)

By: Ira Maurice Price, Louis Ginzberg

—Biblical Data:

Canaanitish king (Judges, i. 5-7), in the town of Bezek. He was routed by Judah and fled, but was caught. His thumbs and great toes were cut off, as a divine retribution—as he himself acknowledged—for the same mutilation visited by him upon seventy kings. Such treatment rendered the captives practically harmless in case of war, as they could neither run nor handle the bow. See Adoni-zedek.

I. M. P.—In Rabbinical Literature:

The Midrash suggests that the purport of the Biblical account ofAdoni-bezek's former greatness was to show how very powerful and wealthy were the Canaanites whom Israel conquered by the grace of God. For even Adoni-bezek, compared with others among them, must have been only an unimportant chieftain; since his name is lacking in the list of kings in Josh. xii. 9-24, and this in spite of the fact that he had subjugated seventy other kings (Yalḳ. on Judges, § 37, quoted from Sifre, but not found there).

ADONI-BEZEK (perhaps a corrupted form of Adoni-zedek, Jos 10:1-27).—A king of Bezek (a different place from that mentioned in 1Sa 11:8), who was defeated by Simeon and Judah. The mutilation inflicted upon him—the cutting off of the thumbs and great toes—was in order to render him harmless, while retaining him as a trophy; but he died on reaching Jerusalem. Adoni-bezek boasted of having mutilated seventy kings in a similar manner. The passage (Jdg 1:5-7) which speaks of Adoni-bezek does not appear to be intact; the original form probably gave more details.

W. O. E. Oesterley.