Joshua 9:21

Hewers of wood. According to verses 23 and 27, this service was to be for the congregation and for the house of God. Such laborers were reckoned among the lowest class of people (Deuteronomy 29:10, 11), and these services were to be performed by the strangers among them. The assignment of these menial tasks constituted the punishment of the Gibeonites. Had they dealt honestly with Israel, their lives would still have been spared, and they would probably have been exempted from servitude. Yet even a curse may be turned into a blessing. They were servants, it is true, but their service was for the house of God. By doing the work of the house of the Lord, they would be in a position where they could readily learn of the true God. They were thus placed under an influence that would prevent their returning to the idolatry of their fathers. Though bondmen to Israel, they would be freemen of the Lord, for in His service the lowest office is liberty, and His work is its own wages. Some have thought that the “Nethinims” of Ezra and Nehemiah (Ezra 2:70; 8:20; Nehemiah 7:60) were the Gibeonites, inasmuch as the Nethinim were the temple servants. The Hebrew nethinim means “given ones” or “devoted ones”; this lends some support to their possible identity with the Gibeonites. That the Gibeonites existed as such in the time of David is evident from the circumstance mentioned in 2 Samuel 21:1-9. However, it is possible that Saul’s misguided zeal all but annihilated them, and that David replaced them with a new order — the Nethinim of Nehemiah’s day.