Did the Israelites take Jerusalem from the Jebusites?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Judges 1 is a textbook composite conquest summary that its redactor never fully reconciled. Verses 1-8 form a Judah-centric account in which Judah and Simeon sweep through the south, capture Jerusalem, put it to the sword, and burn it. Verse 21 belongs to a contrasting catalogue — the so-called negative-occupation list — enumerating the tribes that failed to dispossess the Canaanites; Jerusalem appears there as Jebusite territory that Benjamin "did not drive out," with the telling redactional clause "the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem unto this day." That "unto this day" formula presupposes a continuing Jebusite presence at the time of writing, which flatly contradicts a city burned to the ground thirteen verses earlier. The same negative-occupation tradition surfaces in Joshua 15:63, where it is Judah (not Benjamin) that cannot drive out the Jebusites — itself evidence that the tribal attribution of the failure was unstable across sources.

The standard harmonization, in K. Lawson Younger's NIVAC volume and earlier in Keil, runs: Judah captured and burned the lower city but did not garrison it; the Jebusites retained or recaptured the fortified citadel (the later Zion/Ophel stronghold); and Benjamin subsequently inherited a still-Jebusite Jerusalem. Daniel Block offers a milder form — the city was torched but not depopulated, and the Jebusites simply persisted. This is internally coherent and the lower-city/citadel distinction is archaeologically real. But it requires inserting an unnarrated sequence — a Jebusite recapture or survival of the citadel — between v. 8 and v. 21 to keep both verses literally true. The text reports a burning and then a failure to dispossess; it never reports the reversal the harmonization depends on.

The source-critical reading is more economical. Trent Butler in WBC and Robert Boling in the Anchor Bible Judges treat the chapter as stitched from distinct traditions; Butler regards v. 8 as a later Judahite, pro-monarchic notice celebrating a conquest the older negative list in v. 21 simply does not know. The two verses encode rival memories rather than sequential events. The external evidence reinforces this. There is no destruction layer at Jerusalem fitting a Late Bronze / early Iron Age conquest of the scale Judges 1:8 implies; Finkelstein and Silberman lay out the archaeological case that Jerusalem was a modest, continuously occupied highland settlement in this period. Decisively, 2 Samuel 5:6-9 has David capture Jerusalem from the Jebusites at his accession — generations after Judges 1:8 supposedly burned it — and the Jebusites are still in possession of the stronghold. The downstream narrative aligns with v. 21, not v. 8.

So the data converge: an internal contradiction within a single chapter, an archaeological absence where Judges 1:8 needs a destruction, and a later canonical narrative that presupposes a still-Jebusite Jerusalem. The harmonization preserves inerrancy only by supplying a Jebusite reconquest the text withholds.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction, best explained as the unsmoothed juxtaposition of competing conquest traditions.