No King in Israel (6)

I’m not going to cut and paste the entire book of Judges into these posts for your reading pleasure but will pick verses here and there to reflect on in greater depth. I hope to travel through the twelve judges whose exploits we find in these chapters at a reasonable pace. I would encourage any readers unfamiliar with the stories to look them up as we move through the book. For most of our regulars, they will be well-known territory.

Then again, maybe your Sunday school teacher judiciously redacted the exploits of today’s judge from the curriculum when you were growing up. I’m not sure I recall getting his story in mine. It’s got some fairly PG-rated moments.

II. Twelve Judges in Chronological Order (continued)

2. Ehud

Judges 3:12-14 — Another Eighteen Years Lost

“And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord strengthened Eglon the king of Moab against Israel, because they had done what was evil in the sight of the Lord. He gathered to himself the Ammonites and the Amalekites, and went and defeated Israel. And they took possession of the city of palms. And the people of Israel served Eglon the king of Moab eighteen years.”

Eglon King of Moab

Israel’s oppressors during the era of the judges were certainly diverse, as we like to say today. Mesopotamia, Moab, Ammon, the Philistines, the Canaanites, the Amalekites — all these nations, mostly neighbors, took turns afflicting God’s people when they turned away from him and practiced the evils of the nations he left behind to test Israel. This is the first of twelve times the writer of Judges mentions the nation of Moab, and the last time Moab will be a major factor in the oppression of Israel during that period.

Moab had distant ethnic ties to Israel, in that the original Moab (the man) was the incestuous product of an unfortunate drunken one-nighter between Abraham’s nephew Lot and his eldest daughter, a sorry episode recounted in Genesis that also gave rise to the nation of Ammon. Like the Moabites, God also used the Ammonites to trouble Israel in Judges, including during the oppression from which Ehud was raised up to deliver Israel, as noted here.

Ruth and Moab

No specific judge is mentioned in the book of Ruth, but given Boaz’s mother was Rahab (of Jericho fame), it’s evident Naomi and her family sojourned in Moab to escape a famine quite early during the period of the judges. Famine is usually (not always) an indication of God’s disfavor, and suggests that their migration occurred during a time when Israel had once again done evil in the sight of the Lord, perhaps just prior to Moab’s period of ascendance.

Israel served Moab eighteen years. Since (as we will find out shortly), Ehud’s deliverance of Israel brought in a period of eighty years of rest, my best guess would be that Naomi and family sojourned in Moab in the interval between the judges Othniel and Ehud, and Naomi and Ruth returned to Israel after Ehud’s victory to enjoy the peace that prevailed.

Judges 3:15 — Two Tribes

“Then the people of Israel cried out to the Lord, and the Lord raised up for them a deliverer, Ehud, the son of Gera, the Benjaminite, a left-handed man.”

In Praise of Assassination

As mentioned, I’m skipping from verse 16 through 25 here, which tell the story of Ehud’s assassination of the king of Moab, not because they are no fun, but because they are simply an account of what happened: Ehud tricked and murdered Eglon by doing the unexpected. Ordinarily we do not praise such things, but the heroes of the Old Testament did them regularly, often with the blessing and aid of their God. If we are uncomfortable with such extreme means of resolving issues between nations, the problem is likely our inability to envision the degree of nastiness that oppressors tended to inflict on those over whom they had the advantage 3,000-plus years ago. That kind of horror just isn’t in our vocabularies or imaginations.

Thus, when Ehud says he has “a message from God” for Eglon, it is likely not hyperbole. The time for God’s deliverance of his people had arrived, and history tells us oppressors do not generally give up oppressing when confronted with nothing scarier than polite negotiations or persuasive rhetoric.

Tribal Affiliations

Ehud was a Benjaminite, and displayed the courage and ferocity that Jacob predicted would characterize that tribe. Othniel was from Judah. Certain scholars argue that each of the twelve judges in Judges came from a different tribe, giving all a chance at leading the nation. This is a neat, egalitarian and difficult argument to sustain from the text alone, since the writer of Judges does not tell us the tribal affiliations of all the judges, and what we do know with certainty suggests there were likely a few repeats. We know, for example, that Deborah lived in the hill country of Ephraim when she judged Israel, but she could just as easily been from Levi as Ephraim, or, frankly, any other tribe. If she were a married woman, she and her husband would have lived on his ancestral property, which might not have been in the same tribal allotment as her own family’s. (Barak was pretty obviously from Issachar.) Gideon was from Manasseh, Tola from Issachar, Jair from the Gileadite portion of Manasseh across the Jordan, and so on. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter a great deal, except perhaps to those who like the idea that God gives everyone an equal shot in life, another argument difficult to sustain.

A Left-Handed Man

Ehud’s left-handedness figures into the story in that it explains how he was able to get the drop on Eglon, but I’m not sure it has great significance beyond that. The Hebrew expression we translate “lefthanded” is literally “bounded on the hand”, meaning that the “normal” hand doesn’t work as well as its more fortunate counterpart. God delights in choosing men to serve him not just in spite of their limitations, but because of them. In this case, Ehud turned what his fellows perceived as a limitation into an asset.

Judges 3:26-30 — From Eighteen to Eighty

“Ehud escaped while they delayed, and he passed beyond the idols and escaped to Seirah. When he arrived, he sounded the trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim. Then the people of Israel went down with him from the hill country, and he was their leader. And he said to them, ‘Follow after me, for the Lord has given your enemies the Moabites into your hand.’ So they went down after him and seized the fords of the Jordan against the Moabites and did not allow anyone to pass over. And they killed at that time about 10,000 of the Moabites, all strong, able-bodied men; not a man escaped. So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel. And the land had rest for eighty years.”

Eglon’s assassination was only the beginning of sorrows for Moab. Ehud used his coup as a rallying cry to gather Ephraim, then Israel, to fight back for the first time in almost two decades. That the Lord was with Ehud and Israel is evident from their victory and from the lengthy peace that followed it. Moab would rise again, troubling Israel during the reigns of Saul, David and Solomon and showing up again as late as the reign of Ahab in the north, but as far as Judges is concerned, this was the end of direct Moabite attacks on Israel for along time. Indirectly, however, their worship of Chemosh and other false gods became a snare to Israel. It is rarely the frontal attacks of the enemy that do us the greatest damage.