v 5. The people of Jebus taunted David, saying, “You’ll never get in here!”
But David captured the fortress of Zion, which is now called the City of David.
When the Jews escaped from Egypt under the leadership of Moses and entered the Promised Land they
were instructed to destroy all the earlier inhabitants. God had promised to give the land to them so
everyone else had to go. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to find that Joshua failed to finish the job off.
We can find the regions Judah inherited at that time in Joshua 15, but the chapter ends on a sour note in
v 63 But the tribe of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites, who lived in the city of Jerusalem, so the
Jebusites live there among the people of Judah to this day.
Jerusalem seemed impregnable, and was the one place that David needed to conquer and make into his
capital city. The Jebusites had been a blot on the Jewish landscape for around 400 years and felt they
were secure – nobody else had been able to shift them so they taunted David ‘“You’ll never get in here!”
Under the leadership of Joab, one of David’s nephews, the city was eventually captured and became
what we see it today, some 3,000 years later, the Jews’ capital city.