No King in Israel (7)

“Shamgar had an oxgoad,
 David had a sling,
 Dorcas had a needle,
 Rahab had some string,
 Samson had a jawbone,
 Aaron had a rod,
 Mary had some ointment,
 and they all were used of God.”

So goes the children’s song, and in its first line it provides almost as much information about the third judge in the book of Judges as does scripture itself.

Almost, but not quite.

II. Twelve Judges in Chronological Order (continued)

3. Shamgar

Judges 3:31 — Yet Another Deliverance

“After him was Shamgar the son of Anath, who killed 600 of the Philistines with an oxgoad, and he also saved Israel.”

More About Our Protagonist

This single verse is not the only reference in scripture to Judge Number 3. Chapter 5 has Deborah and Barak singing a song that also name-checks him in passing. It reads, “In the days of Shamgar, son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were abandoned, and travelers kept to the byways. The villagers ceased in Israel.” The abandoning of the highways is a regular feature of life when bandits, soldiers or other predators might seize anything worthwhile you happened to be transporting, or kill you if you tried to defend it. That’s fairly obvious, and it doesn’t leave us with much to work with. Perhaps Deborah and Barak are saying that the days of Shamgar and the days of Jael (their own period) were concurrent, as some students of scripture have speculated. Or perhaps they are only saying their own circumstances were similar to those of Shamgar in that they too languished under the oppressive hand of an enemy nation until God raised up a deliverer. We cannot say with certainty.

“After Him”

The words “after him” suggest the writer(s) of Judges present their stories in chronological order, which turns out to be the case. That is not true of the two final episodes in chapters 17 to 21, which take place at different points during the period in which the judges were the primary means of God expressing his rule over Israel, but it is certainly true of the portion of the book concerned with the judges themselves.

Shamgar the Son of Anath

You will look in vain for any hard data in scripture about Shamgar’s father, whose name is included as a disambiguator in every biblical reference to his son. On the face of it, a disambiguator seems unnecessary, since there’s only one ‘Shamgar’ in the entire word of God. Of course, that doesn’t mean he was the only Shamgar in Israel in his time, or the only Shamgar known to early readers of Judges, for whom the clarification was probably more important than it is to us.

The name of Shamgar’s father does not help us much either. Anath does not appear in any Bible genealogies, and nothing about his name gives us a clue which tribe Shamgar came from. Some scholars have suggested the name Anath derives from a Phoenician or Canaanite goddess with a similar-sounding appellation. That seems unlikely so early in the history of the Judges. Remember, Anath was not of Shamgar’s generation but of the one prior, in which many of the original heroes of the Israelite conquest of Canaan were still around to put in a good word for the God of Joshua. Perhaps even Phinehas was still on watch, spear at the ready.

To name their son after a Canaanite goddess, the parents of Anath would have to have been real outliers in a time where the worship of YHWH in Israel was still the standard.

With an Oxgoad

What does an oxgoad look like? The modern equivalent in poor, rural societies is basically a pointed stick between six and eight feet long, sometimes with a sharp metal piece on the business end. A farmer beside or behind the ox will use it to direct the animal with the occasional judicious prod if the beast becomes distracted. A goad is designed to be uncomfortable, not deadly. The word comes from one of the Hebrew roots that means to “teach”. This is an instructive instrument, not an efficient weapon of war.

Shamgar killed 600 Philistines with a crude farm implement whose only martial value was that it had a point at the end. That must have been quite an embarrassment for the city-states of the Philistines. It’s also strong evidence God was at work.

Why a farm implement instead of a sword or spear? We get a clue from 1 Samuel:

“Now there was no blacksmith to be found throughout all the land of Israel, for the Philistines said, ‘Lest the Hebrews make themselves swords or spears.’ But every one of the Israelites went down to the Philistines to sharpen his plowshare, his mattock, his axe, or his sickle, and the charge was two-thirds of a shekel for the plowshares and for the mattocks, and a third of a shekel for sharpening the axes and for setting the goads. So on the day of the battle there was neither sword nor spear found in the hand of any of the people with Saul and Jonathan, but Saul and Jonathan his son had them.”

Bear in mind that it was probably more than 200 years later in the Samuel passage, but there’s no reason Philistines in Judges would not have done exactly the same thing to Israel in earlier periods of foreign rule. It’s just common sense. So Shamgar made do with what he had. That is often the Lord’s way.

Israel and the Philistines

Apart from the introductory matter at the beginning of Judges, in which the “five lords of the Philistines” are mentioned among the nations the Lord left in the land to test Israel, Shamgar’s generation was the first official encounter with this particular enemy of the people of God. Genesis refers to them in connection with Abraham and Isaac, but the relationship between God’s covenant people and the locals of the Mediterranean coast was generally uncontentious up to this point. From hereon in, the Philistines will become Israel’s major nemesis until the rule of David, who beat them decisively, though they would trouble Israel at times all the way to the reign of Hezekiah, over 500 years later. The Philistines are mentioned 29 more times in the book of Judges, most famously in connection with the judgeship of Samson.

The 600 Dead

Shamgar killed 600 Philistines with his oxgoad. On one level, that is a tremendously impressive accomplishment, miraculous even, since he did it without an army beside him. On another level, it’s not so big a deal numerically. Samson later struck down 1,000 with the jawbone of a donkey in only one of several solo encounters with the Philistines that ended badly for them, and more still in his death. Ehud and the Israelites he inspired killed 10,000 Moabites just a single verse earlier. Most of the time, the numbers of foreign dead killed by Israel under the major judges are not listed, but the victories they won were comprehensive and gave rest to the land for a generation or more. Shamgar’s deliverance does not appear to be on that scale, and yet we read, “he also saved Israel”.

Some battles are more limited in scope than others, but we are always happy to be on the winning side.