portrayed as supremely capable conquerors, and even where Judah fails, an excuse is given – the occupants had iron chariots. Hence, many biblical critics see the list as biased, and partly deliberate propaganda, by an author hailing from the Kingdom of Judah. Tribes mentioned One curious feature of the list is that it mentions eleven Israelite tribes, namely Kayin (the Kenites), Simeon, Judah, Caleb, Benjamin, Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, Napthali, and Dan. This set of eleven is not only at odds with the traditional idea that there were Twelve Tribes of Israel, but also with the fact that Kayin and Caleb have never been recognised as sons of Jacob, and do not appear in any other lists of Israelite tribes either. Judges 1 does not specify the total number of tribes, nor mentions the (usually included) tribes of Levi (the landless priestly class), nor Issachar, nor Gad, nor Reuben. The fact that the Rechabites and the Jerahmeelites are also presented as Israelite tribes elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible led scholars such as Max Weber (in Ancient Judaism) and Ronald M. Glassman (2017) to conclude that there never was a fixed number of tribes. Instead, the idea that there were always twelve tribes should be regarded as part of the Israelite national founding myth: the number 12 was not a real number, but an ideal number, which had symbolic significance in Near Eastern cultures with duodecimal counting systems, from which inter alia the modern 12-hour clock is derived. Conquest of Jerusalem Another unusual feature is the conquest of Jerusalem as described in Judges 1:7–8: the Judahites capture Adoni-Bezek and take him to Jerusalem, everyone there was killed and the city burnt to the ground. In contrast, Judges 1:21 reports Jerusalem as having not been conquered and containing Jebusites to this day (confirmed by Joshua 15:63). Judges 19:11–12 again claims it is a city of Jebusites, with no Israelites. Later on in 2 Samuel 5:6–10, David even had to capture Jerusalem from the Jebusites in order to make it his capital. Throughout the centuries, various Christian editions of the Bible sought to resolve this problem in numerous ways, including implying that verse 8 referred to an earlier successful Judahite attack on Jerusalem, but that the city was lost again to the Jebusites later on; or that verse 8 merely describes a siege, not a capture; or that the Judahites only seized the