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.