Adoni-zedek

Adoni-zedek was the king of Jerusalem who, in the book of Joshua, organized a five-king Amorite coalition against Gibeon and Israel and was captured and executed by Joshua. His name is Hebrew, meaning something like “my lord is righteousness” (from ʼadon, “lord,” and tsedeq, “righteousness”).

The narrative in Joshua 10 presents him as the leading figure among the five kings: the text says he sent to Hoham king of Hebron, Piram of Jarmuth, Japhia of Lachish, and Debir of Eglon (Joshua 10:3), and later all five are named together as “the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, and the king of Eglon” (Joshua 10:23). When the men of Gibeon appealed to Joshua for rescue because the Amorite kings had gathered against them (Joshua 10:6), Yahweh told Joshua not to fear, “for I have delivered them into your hands” (Joshua 10:8). The text then describes Yahweh confusing the enemy before Israel, a great slaughter at Gibeon, pursuit by way of the ascent of Beth Horon, and hailstones that killed more than the sword did (Joshua 10:10–11). It also records Joshua’s command, “Sun, stand still on Gibeon! You, moon, stop in the valley of Aijalon!” and the comment that there was no day like it before or after, “for Yahweh fought for Israel” (Joshua 10:12–14).

The five kings hid in a cave at Makkedah and were brought out to Joshua, who had the chiefs of his warriors put their feet on the kings’ necks and told Israel not to be afraid, “for Yahweh will do this to all your enemies against whom you fight” (Joshua 10:24–25). The text says Joshua then struck them, put them to death, and hanged them on five trees until evening (Joshua 10:26). Linguistically, the name shares both of its elements with Melchizedek, the earlier king of Salem/ Jerusalem (Genesis 14:18), and both are kings of Jerusalem; historically, Late Bronze Age Jerusalem is attested in the Amarna letters as a Canaanite city-state ruled by its own king and subject to Egypt, which fits the picture of a local city-king here. One way to read the story is as a deliberate contrast between a king whose name claims righteousness and a city whose king ends hanged on a tree, with the victory credited entirely to Yahweh rather than to Israel’s strength (Joshua 10:14, 10:25).

Christian traditions read this material differently. Many read the chapter as reliable narrative of a real campaign and a real divine deliverance, with the sun standing still taken as a miracle in the ordinary sense; others, including a number of modern Catholic and Protestant interpreters, treat the language as the phenomenological description of a long day from the observers’ standpoint without insisting on a cosmological mechanism, and some critical scholars read Joshua 10 as theologized conquest narrative shaped by later editors. The execution and public display of the kings is also read variously: as an account of ancient Near Eastern warfare recorded without endorsement, or as a theologically framed act of judgment in which the herem belongs to Yahweh’s war rather than to human vengeance. Patristic and liturgical readers have often treated Joshua as a type of Christ and the day the sun stood still as a figure of the cross, while traditions that emphasize the literal-historical sense stress the plain sequence of events; the text itself gives no explicit interpretation of Adoni-zedek beyond his defeat.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.