Judges

Author: Unknown

Judges tells the generations after Joshua, when Israel repeatedly abandons the Lord and is rescued by judges.

Outline

  1. The pattern is set (1–3)

    Conquest stalls, a new generation does not know the Lord, and the cycle of apostasy and rescue begins.

  2. Deliverers (4–16)

    Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, and others rescue tribes, often with mixed character.

  3. No king in Israel (17–21)

    Micah’s idol, the Danite migration, and the crime at Gibeah show the land without a center.

Key verses

  • Judges 2:16–19

    The Lord raises judges to save Israel, and the people return to corruption when the judge dies.

  • Judges 17:6

    The narrator says everyone did what was right in his own eyes, because there was no king.

  • Judges 21:25

    The book ends by repeating that there was no king and that each person did what was right in his own eyes.

Judges begins with the death of Joshua still in view and asks what Israel does next. The tribes go up against the remaining Canaanite cities, and the results are uneven. Judah has success. Other tribes live among the nations they were told to drive out, or put them to forced labor. The angel of the Lord says the nations will stay as a snare. A generation grows up that did not see the works of the exodus or the conquest, and they serve the Baals. The rest of the book is that failure told again and again, with a refrain: Israel does evil, an oppressor is raised up, the people cry out, a judge saves them, and when the judge dies they turn away once more.

The judges are not kings, and they are not a single office with a clean succession. Othniel, Ehud, and Shamgar are brief. Deborah and Barak occupy a longer story. Deborah judges under a palm tree. Barak will not go to war unless she goes with him, and the glory of the victory over Sisera passes to a woman, Jael, who kills the commander in her tent. The song in chapter 5 is one of the oldest pieces of poetry in the Bible, and it praises the tribes who came and asks after the tribes who stayed home. Already the nation does not act as one.

Gideon’s call is the next long account. He is threshing wheat in a winepress to hide it from Midian. He asks for signs, including the fleece. With three hundred men he throws the Midianite camp into confusion. The victory is real, and so is what follows. Gideon makes an ephod from the gold of the spoil, and Israel plays the harlot after it. His son Abimelech kills his seventy brothers and rules Shechem until a woman drops a millstone on his head. The book is willing to call these men deliverers and also to show the damage they leave.

Jephthah is an outcast who is brought back to fight Ammon. He vows that whatever comes out of his house to meet him will be the Lord’s, and his daughter comes out. The story is told without a rescue. Samson’s cycle is longer still. He is a Nazirite from the womb, and the Spirit rushes on him, but his strength is paired with a series of choices about Philistine women, riddles, and revenge. Delilah learns the secret of his hair. He is blinded and set to grind in Gaza. His last act pulls down the temple of Dagon and kills more at his death than in his life. The deliverer and the disaster are the same man.

The last five chapters are not dated to a single judge. They are illustrations of the line that frames them: in those days there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Micah hires a Levite to serve a private idol. The tribe of Dan steals both. A Levite’s concubine is abused to death in Gibeah, a town of Benjamin. The other tribes nearly wipe Benjamin out, then arrange wives for the survivors by further violence. Judges does not end with a reform. It ends with the need for an order the book itself does not yet have. Samuel will begin to answer that need.

Chapters