No King in Israel (1)

All over the world and all through history, wherever you have kings, dynasties invariably follow — at least until some nasty person ends them prematurely. I suppose over the course of the last several millennia, there may have been one or two gentle fellows who ruled a nation for thirty years and then thought, “Say, I’m not going to live forever, am I? Maybe the throne should go to the man who will do the best for my kingdom.”

Well, there may have been. I have no evidence of it. What happened instead was that — good, bad or indifferent — son replaced father if someone didn’t kill dad first.

Introduction

Right In His Own Eyes

The most common editorial comment in the book of Judges is something along these lines: “There was no king in Israel.” It actually appears four times, in 17:6, 18:1, 19:1 and in the last verse of the book, 21:25. Twice this inescapable and dark conclusion follows: “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Kings are far from the perfect solution to anarchy, and there is always the risk that the king will perform very badly indeed. Nevertheless, even a bad king is vastly preferable to no government at all. When Solomon handed over his glorious kingdom to a loser like Rehoboam, it was certainly a step down for those governed by the son rather than the father. At its worst, however, it was also much, much better than the last five chapters of Judges, in which there are no judges at all, let alone kings.

No Dynasties for Old Judges

If we can say one thing for the judges of Israel, it is that they didn’t do dynasties. They governed, they died, and God raised up someone else the next time leadership was needed. On only two occasions did anyone try to introduce the judge-dynasty: Abimelech tried to become king of Israel on the coattails of his father Gideon, and Samuel, good man though he was, tried to pass his judgeship on to his comparatively unspiritual sons. Both efforts failed.

But living under the temporary, self-abnegating leadership of a judge requires both obedience to God and dependence on him. Israel characteristically did neither. By the end of the book, we will see that something else was required. Don’t worry, Israel’s kings would fail too. They just failed differently.

Writer and Timing

The writer of Judges goes unnamed, but he (or they; there were almost surely more than one significant contributor) was probably more of a compiler and editor than the immediate author of its contents. Like all historical books of the Bible that cover hundreds of years, it seems clear (to me at least; others may differ) that anyone writing about these events after the fact had to work from existing historical manuscripts which may or may not have been God-breathed, but which were on the whole an accurate representation of events. The Holy Spirit then led this man or men to select and edit the histories to emphasize the spiritual truths important to him, providing spiritual commentary along the way. Either that, or a believer in the inspiration of scripture may hold that the writers of such books were prophets given personal and detailed divine revelations of historical events long after the fact. Both positions are orthodox, but the second seems to me both unlikely and unnecessary.

Rough drafts of the material that would eventually become Judges probably began to appear and to be preserved shortly after 1350 BC, and this process surely continued over the next few centuries. The final version of the book cannot have been complete until sometime after 722 BC when the northern kingdom went into Assyrian captivity, a fact noted in 18:30. Any book that takes over 600 years to complete can hardly be the work product of a single individual; hence, the Jewish tradition that Samuel was the writer of Judges seems unlikely, though he may certainly have been a significant contributor.

Duration of the Period of Judges

When we total up the various periods of oppression and rest internally recorded in the book, we get around 395 years. Adding Eli and Samuel, who are also called judges, brings us to about 495 years and overlaps to some extent with the period of the kings. Historians tell us this is quite a bit too long, and indeed, Judges makes no claim to be a linear record. In some places it demonstrably is not. One of the best and most detailed attempts at reconciling the histories with other “knowns” from both scripture and secular history is this one, which reduces the period of the judges to 336 years, from 1350 through 1014 BC. The researcher achieves this by making Shamgar, Deborah and Gideon to some extent contemporaries, which a technical reading of the text permits, and through similar devices. I will not be pursuing a detailed investigation of the timeframe in this series, as the spiritual lessons of Judges seem a more fruitful thing to investigate in ongoing blog posts.

Interestingly, the events chronicled in Ruth (the only other book of the Bible from this period) probably took place during the judgeship of Ehud, quite early on in Judges. Since Rahab the Canaanite prostitute from Jericho was Boaz’s mother, moving Ruth much further forward than the days of Ehud seems improbable. It’s also interesting that Ehud contended with Moab, and Ruth was a Moabite.

Theme

Online summaries of Judges glean a variety of main lessons from the book, from humanity’s tendency to trust itself over God, to the need for a king, to the fact that God will not allow sin to go unpunished. To my mind, none of these suggestions adequately encapsulates the book, which repeatedly depicts God’s faithfulness notwithstanding man’s unfaithfulness.

Structure of Judges

The structure of the book is among the simplest in the Old Testament:

I. Introduction

a. The limits of the Canaanite conquest (1:1-36)

b. Israel’s unfaithfulness (2:1-15)

c. God’s answer: the judges (2:16-3:6)

II. Twelve Judges in Chronological Order (3:7-16:31)

III. Two Historical Vignettes from the Period

a. Micah and the Danites (17:1-18:31)

b. Benjamin becomes Sodom (19:1-21:25)

The Twelve

There is no disputing the stories of twelve judges are chronicled in the book, six major and six minor:

	Connecting verse	Judge	Enemy (years oppressed)	Where Found	Relief Period
1		Othniel	Mesopotamia (8)	3:7-11	40 years of rest (3:11)
2	3:12	Ehud	Moab (18)	3:12-30	80 years of rest (3:30)
3	3:31	Shamgar	Philistines	3:31	—
4	4:1	Deborah	Canaanites (20)	4:1-5:31	40 years of rest (5:31)
5	6:1	Gideon	Midian (7)	6:1-8:35	40 years of rest (8:28)
	9:1	Abimelech	—	9:1-57	3 years of “rule” (9:22)
6	10:1	Tola	—	10:1-2	23 years judging (10:2)
7	10:3	Jair	—	10:3-5	22 years of judging (10:3)
8	10:6	Jephthah	Phil./Ammon (18)	10:6-12:7	6 years of judging (12:7)
9	12:8	Ibzan	—	12:8-10	7 years of judging (12:9)
10	12:11	Elon	—	12:11-12	10 years of judging (12:11)
11	12:13	Abdon	Amalek?	12:13-15	8 years of judging (12:14)
12	13:1	Samson	Philistines (40)	13:1-16:31	20 years of judging (16:31)

Abimelech doesn’t count. God did not raise him up; rather, he manipulated his way into power and styled himself not judge but king. That leaves twelve judges in Judges. The number twelve is a recurring scriptural theme: twelve sons of Jacob, twelve disciples, twelve judges. Readers of the Old Testament learn to get comfortable with such “coincidences”. God being sovereign over history, they are to be expected.

The Actual Number of Judges

Some writers speculate that there were more judges of Israel than appear in the book. Certainly, this is true of the two judges who lived after Samson and whose histories are found in 1 Samuel:

	Connecting verse	Judge	Enemy (years oppressed)	Where Found	Relief Period
13		Eli	Philistines		40 years of judging (1 Sam. 4:18)
14		Samuel	Philistines		Almost sixty years of judging, overlapping Saul’s kingship

This would technically bring the number of judges to fourteen. Removing Deborah (yes, that’s arbitrary and sexist, but I feel quite comfortable doing it, unless you are also prepared to count Athaliah among the kings of Judah) brings us to thirteen, which is a more interesting number. Technically, there were thirteen tribes of Israel, though Jacob had only twelve sons, as Joseph’s two sons each became acknowledged tribes, and Levi was taken for the priesthood by God. There were also technically thirteen apostles, once you remove Judas and add both Matthias and Paul. So thirteen total male judges does not seem an unreasonable number. My own take is that Deborah was an aberration (a woman ruling over the nation was never God’s preference, but Israel was deep in sin during her judgeship), and she knew it; if you asked her, she would probably have removed herself. She did a job no man was up to doing in her day, a sad commentary not on Deborah, but on those men.