Judges

Overview

Judges covers the time between Joshua's death and the rise of the monarchy, roughly two centuries in which Israel lived as a loose federation of tribes in Canaan with no central government. The "judges" (shofetim) were not mainly courtroom officials. They were leaders raised up by God to rescue particular tribes from foreign oppressors, after which they "judged" Israel for a time. There are twelve in all: six major figures with full stories (Othniel, Ehud, Deborah with Barak, Gideon, Jephthah and Samson) and six minor ones mentioned in a verse or two.

The book is arranged around a repeating cycle. Israel does evil and serves the Baals, God hands them over to an enemy, they cry out, God raises up a deliverer, and the land has rest until the deliverer dies. Then it starts again, and each time things get worse. The judges themselves become more flawed as the book goes on, from Othniel, who has no faults recorded, to Samson, who is ruled by his appetites. The closing chapters show Israel's religious and moral collapse, and they repeat a refrain: "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Jewish tradition credits Samuel with writing the book. Modern scholars usually see it as part of the Deuteronomistic History, compiled from older tribal stories and poems such as the very ancient Song of Deborah.

The book has three parts: a double introduction (1:1–3:6), the stories of the judges (3:7–16:31), and two closing appendices showing Israel in chaos (chs 17–21).

Part 1 — Unfinished Conquest, Unfaithful People (1:1–3:6)

Incomplete victory (1). After Joshua's death, Judah and Simeon fight on, taking Bezek and Hebron, and Othniel wins Debir and marries Caleb's daughter Achsah. But Judah "could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." The chapter lists tribe after tribe that "did not drive out" the Canaanites: Benjamin in Jerusalem, Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali and Dan, which is pushed back into the hills.

Bochim and the cycle (2:1–3:6). The angel of the LORD comes to Bochim ("weepers"). Because Israel made treaties with the Canaanites, they will become "thorns in your sides" and their gods "a snare". After Joshua's generation dies, "there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD." The narrator then explains the pattern for the whole book: apostasy, oppression, crying out, a deliverer, rest, and then a deeper apostasy. The remaining nations are left "to prove Israel".

Part 2 — The Deliverers (3:7–16:31)

Othniel (3:7–11). Israel serves the Baals and Asherahs and is oppressed for eight years by Cushan-rishathaim of Mesopotamia. The Spirit of the LORD comes on Othniel, Caleb's nephew, who defeats him. The land has rest forty years. He is the model judge.

Ehud (3:12–30). Eglon king of Moab, "a very fat man", rules Israel from Jericho for eighteen years. Ehud, a left-handed Benjamite, brings tribute with a two-edged dagger strapped to his right thigh. In Eglon's private upper room he says, "I have a message from God unto thee," and stabs him. He escapes while the servants wait outside the locked door, rallies Ephraim, and seizes the Jordan fords. Moab is defeated and the land rests eighty years.

Shamgar (3:31). He strikes down six hundred Philistines with an ox goad.

Deborah, Barak and Jael (4–5). Jabin, a Canaanite king of Hazor, oppresses Israel for twenty years with his general Sisera and nine hundred iron chariots. Deborah, a prophetess, judges Israel under the palm tree between Ramah and Bethel. She summons Barak of Naphtali to Mount Tabor with ten thousand men. Barak will not go without her, so the honour will go to a woman. God routs Sisera at the River Kishon, and the Song of Deborah suggests a storm and flash flood made the chariots useless ("The river of Kishon swept them away"). Sisera flees on foot to the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite. She gives him milk, covers him, and while he sleeps drives a tent peg through his temple. Chapter 5, the Song of Deborah, is one of the oldest poems in the Bible. It praises the tribes who came, scolds those who stayed away, celebrates Jael as "blessed above women", imagines Sisera's mother waiting at her window, and ends: "So let all thine enemies perish, O LORD: but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might." The land rests forty years.

Gideon (6–8). The Midianites, with the Amalekites and "children of the east", invade every harvest "as grasshoppers for multitude" with camels beyond counting, and Israel hides in caves. A prophet reminds the people of the Exodus. The angel of the LORD finds Gideon threshing wheat in a winepress to hide it and says, "The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valour." Gideon protests that his clan is the weakest in Manasseh and he is the least in his family. Fire from a rock consumes his offering. That night he pulls down his father's altar of Baal and the Asherah pole and builds an altar to the LORD. When the town demands his death, his father Joash replies, "If he be a god, let him plead for himself," and Gideon is nicknamed Jerubbaal. Gideon asks for signs: a fleece wet with dew on dry ground, then dry on wet ground. God cuts his army from 32,000 to 10,000 by sending home the fearful, then to 300 who lap water from their hands, "lest Israel vaunt themselves." After overhearing a Midianite's dream of a barley loaf flattening a tent, Gideon divides the 300 into three companies with trumpets and torches hidden in jars. At night they blow the trumpets, break the jars and shout, "The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon!" The Midianites panic, turn on one another and flee. Gideon pursues them across the Jordan, punishes the towns of Succoth and Penuel for refusing help, and kills the kings Zebah and Zalmunna. Offered a hereditary crown, he refuses: "The LORD shall rule over you." But he makes a gold ephod from the spoil, and "all Israel went thither a whoring after it: which thing became a snare unto Gideon." The land rests forty years.

Abimelech (9). After Gideon dies, his son by a concubine in Shechem, Abimelech, hires "vain and light persons" and kills his seventy half-brothers on one stone. Only Jotham, the youngest, escapes. From Mount Gerizim Jotham tells a fable: the olive, fig and vine refuse to be king of the trees, but the bramble accepts and threatens fire. He warns that Abimelech and Shechem will destroy each other. After three years they fall out. Abimelech burns the tower of Shechem with its people inside, but at Thebez a woman drops an upper millstone on his head. He orders his armour-bearer to kill him so it cannot be said a woman did it. "Thus God rendered the wickedness of Abimelech."

Tola and Jair (10:1–5). Two minor judges. Jair had thirty sons who rode thirty donkeys and ruled thirty towns.

Jephthah (10:6–12:7). Israel's idolatry grows to include the gods of Syria, Sidon, Moab, Ammon and Philistia. When they cry out, God answers, "Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen," but they put away the foreign gods and "his soul was grieved for the misery of Israel." Jephthah, the son of a prostitute, had been driven out by his half-brothers and led a band of raiders. The elders of Gilead now ask him to lead them against Ammon. He sends the Ammonite king a careful historical argument about Israel's claim to the land, which is rejected. The Spirit of the LORD comes on him, but he makes a rash vow to offer as a burnt offering whatever first comes out of his house to meet him if he wins. He defeats Ammon, and his only daughter comes out dancing with timbrels. "I have opened my mouth unto the LORD, and I cannot go back." She asks for two months to mourn with her friends in the mountains, and "he did with her according to his vow." Interpreters debate whether this means sacrifice or lifelong dedication. Afterwards the Ephraimites pick a quarrel. At the Jordan fords anyone who says "Sibboleth" instead of "Shibboleth" is killed, and 42,000 Ephraimites die.

Ibzan, Elon and Abdon (12:8–15). Three more minor judges, remembered for their many children and grandchildren.

Samson (13–16). Israel does evil and the Philistines rule them for forty years. The angel of the LORD appears to the childless wife of Manoah of Dan: she will bear a son who will be a Nazirite from the womb, and "no razor shall come on his head… he shall begin to deliver Israel." When Manoah offers a sacrifice, the angel ascends in the altar flame. Samson grows up, and "the Spirit of the LORD began to move him." Against his parents' wishes he insists on marrying a Philistine woman from Timnah: "she pleaseth me well." On the way he tears apart a young lion with his bare hands, and later finds honey in its carcass. At the wedding feast he sets a riddle, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness," which his bride, threatened by her people, gets out of him and passes on. He kills thirty men of Ashkelon to pay the wager. When his wife is given to another man, he ties torches to three hundred foxes and burns the Philistine grain, vineyards and olive groves. The Philistines burn his wife and her father. The men of Judah hand Samson over bound, but he breaks the ropes and kills a thousand men with a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and God gives him water from a hollow at Lehi. In Gaza he tears out the city gate, doors, posts and bar, and carries it to a hilltop near Hebron. Then he loves Delilah of the valley of Sorek. Each Philistine lord offers her 1,100 pieces of silver. Three times Samson lies about his strength: fresh bowstrings, new ropes, and his hair woven into a loom. Finally he tells her the truth. While he sleeps on her knees she has his seven locks shaved, and "he wist not that the LORD was departed from him." The Philistines gouge out his eyes and set him grinding grain in the prison at Gaza, "howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again." At a great feast for their god Dagon, they bring him out to entertain them. Samson prays, "O Lord GOD, remember me… strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once," braces himself against the two middle pillars and pushes. The temple falls on the lords and three thousand people on the roof, so that "the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life." He had judged Israel twenty years.

Part 3 — Israel Without a King (chapters 17–21)

Micah's idol (17). An Ephraimite named Micah returns stolen silver to his mother, who has part of it made into a carved and cast image. He sets up a shrine with an ephod and household gods, and hires a wandering young Levite from Bethlehem as his priest. "Now know I that the LORD will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest." The refrain appears: "every man did that which was right in his own eyes."

Dan's migration (18). The tribe of Dan, still without secure land, sends scouts north. They stop at Micah's house, then come back with six hundred armed men, take the idol and the priest, and the Levite goes with them gladly. They attack Laish, "a people that were quiet and secure", burn it and rebuild it as Dan. There they set up the idol, served by Jonathan, a grandson of Moses, "until the day of the captivity of the land."

The outrage at Gibeah (19). A Levite from Ephraim fetches his concubine back from her father's house in Bethlehem. Refusing to stop at Jebus (Jerusalem) because it is a foreign town, they reach Gibeah of Benjamin, where only an old man takes them in. Men of the town surround the house and demand the Levite, echoing the story of Sodom. The concubine is pushed out to them and abused all night, and at dawn she lies dead at the door with her hands on the threshold. The Levite cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them throughout Israel. "There was no such deed done nor seen from the day that the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt."

Civil war (20). Four hundred thousand men gather "as one man" at Mizpah. Benjamin refuses to hand over the guilty men of Gibeah and musters 26,000 men, including seven hundred left-handed slingers who "could sling stones at an hair breadth, and not miss." Israel is defeated twice. On the third day, after weeping and fasting before the ark at Bethel, where Phinehas still serves, they use an ambush, as at Ai, and take Gibeah. The tribe of Benjamin is almost destroyed, and only six hundred men escape to the rock of Rimmon.

Wives for Benjamin (21). Israel has sworn not to give its daughters to Benjamin, and now grieves that "there is one tribe cut off from Israel." Because Jabesh-gilead did not come to Mizpah, they destroy it and take four hundred young women for the survivors. The remaining two hundred men are told to hide in the vineyards at the yearly feast at Shiloh and seize girls as they come out to dance. The book closes with the refrain in full: "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes" (21:25).

Key themes, and the bridge to Ruth

• The downward spiral. Each round of the cycle is worse than the last. The judges grow more compromised, the tribes more divided, and by the end Israel's worst enemy is itself.
• God's patience. Again and again God hears the people's cry and sends a deliverer, even when they do not deserve it. "His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel."
• Unlikely deliverers. A left-handed man, a woman under a palm tree, a tent-dwelling wife, the least son of the weakest clan, an outcast's son and a flawed strongman. God works through weakness, but the book does not excuse their faults.
• The Spirit of the LORD. The Spirit "comes upon" judges for particular tasks, which looks ahead to the anointing of kings and prophets.
• Compromise with Canaan. Failing to drive out the nations leads to intermarriage, idolatry and imitation of their ways. By the end, Israel's own towns behave like Sodom.
• The need for a king. The refrain "no king in Israel" points ahead to the monarchy. It also raises the question Gideon raised, whether Israel needs a king or needs to obey the LORD as king.

Judges ends with Israel's tribes intact but scarred, its worship corrupted and its towns lawless. The next book, Ruth, is set "in the days when the judges ruled". In Bethlehem, the same town the Levite and his concubine came from, a famine, a widow and a loyal Moabite woman begin a story of faithfulness that leads to King David.