Joshua 15:45

Ekron, with her towns and her villages. Literally, her daughters and her farm hamlets (see note on Joshua 13:28 ). These cities of the Philistines had, like Gibeon, daughter cities dependent on them, and must therefore have been, like Gibeon, "great cities as the royal cities" ( Joshua 10:2 ). They do not appear to have come under regal government till later times (cf. 1 Samuel 5:8 , 1 Samuel 5:11 , with 1 Samuel 27:2 ). "Around it (Gezer) and along the sides were distributed a series of small isolated centres of agglomeration … This disposition to scatter itself, of which Gezer surely does not offer us the only specimen, explains in a striking manner the Biblical phrase, 'the city and her daughters'". This explanation, however, is doubtful (see Joshua 9:17 ). According to Knobel, this passage cannot have been written by the Elohist, because he confines himself to the description of the cities the Israelites actually possessed. Why a lair writer, writing presumably when Israel's fortunes were at a lower ebb, should have added a description of the territory Israel did not possess, he does not explain.