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Today’s instalment takes us to the eleventh of our twelve judges of Israel. We are getting there.
At least eight tribes provided Israel with leadership and deliverance during the period of the judges, and perhaps as many as ten.* The tribal affiliation of at least two judges is questionable, so we cannot confirm precisely which tribes did not receive representation in leadership during the period. We can say with certainty that Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Gad go unmentioned.
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Joseph had two sons during his glory years in Egypt, Ephraim and Manasseh. When his father Jacob was old and full of years, he blessed the two boys and adopted them as his own sons, meaning that Joseph effectively received the birthright in his generation, the double portion of Jacob’s inheritance that Reuben, his older brother, had forfeited by sleeping with his father’s concubine. In Canaan, Ephraim and Manasseh grew to be among Israel’s most powerful and numerous tribes, and Manasseh held territory on both sides of the Jordan.
We have previously mentioned irony in Judges: there’s lots and lots of it. We come to more of it today. The last chapter of Jephthah’s story involves conflict between two brother tribes.
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I try very hard never to negotiate with God.
Perhaps you struggle with that too. The habit is hard to kick, especially when you want some particular outcome very badly and believe only Heaven can deliver it. But promising God this or that provided he does what I want for me is a pagan instinct, not a Christian one. In his Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus instructed his Jewish followers, for whom vows and oaths were commonplace, not to take oaths at all.
Keeping that in mind, I try never to put myself in the position of promising the Lord things I may not be able to deliver.
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New readers of Old Testament history may occasionally find themselves lost in a sea of names, places and peoples. Ammonites and Amorites both begin with the letter “A”, but seasoned readers know the Ammonites were fellow Hebrews descended from Lot, as Israel was descended from Abraham, whereas the Amorites were descendants of Canaan son of Ham. They founded the Old Babylonian Empire and ruled Mesopotamia, the Levant and parts of Egypt for four centuries prior to and including Israel’s time in Egypt.
In fact, one reason the Lord obliged Israel to spend so long in Egypt was to give the Amorites opportunity to repent. God told Abraham their iniquity was “not yet complete”. He would judge their sin at the appropriate time, and not before.
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As in other cases, some judges ruled over specific portions of Israel rather than the entire nation. The action in these next two chapters takes place almost entirely outside Israel proper. Jephthah’s dispute with the Ammonites was over territory acquired in battle three centuries earlier under Moses prior to Israel entering the Promised Land. Often referred to as Gilead, this region now belonged to the tribes of Reuben, Gad and the eastern half of Manasseh.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the Ammonites had previously crossed the Jordan to harass Judah, Benjamin and Ephraim, but Jephthah met and fought their army east of the Jordan.
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After four chapters devoted to the history of and repercussions flowing from the life of a single judge (Gideon), we come to a chapter in which the entire life’s work of two judges (Tola and Jair) and the manner in which they each delivered their nation are summed up in a mere five verses. Thirteen more are devoted to setting up the story of the next judge (Jephthah). Sixty-four years covered in eighteen verses.
We might view the relative brevity of these next two accounts as an imbalance of sorts, especially if we are used to reading secular history.
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You may have heard the expression “sow it with salt” before. It’s most commonly associated with the incident we are reading about today, in which Abimelech destroyed the city of Shechem and sowed it with salt thereafter. Salting the earth apparently became common in the ancient Near East. Hittite and Assyrian sources both mention the practice, but none predates the Judges account.
Maybe Abimelech was a trendsetter.
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The one-sided battle between Israel and Midian and its allies was winding down, moving into what we might call the cleanup stage. The writer of this portion of Judges now presents us with a series of incidents that effectively illustrate the level of spiritual and moral degradation in the nation during the period. While not quite as awful as some of the later chapters of Judges, these vignettes still require some consideration and explanation.
The Holy Spirit also ties up the story of Gideon for us, and sets up the grisly and somewhat predictable events to come in chapter 9.
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When the Lord calls a man to lead his people, these leaders do not generally ask those they lead to do things they are unwilling to do themselves. They do not sit in their comfy tents far behind the battle lines like the kings of the nations, shouting out orders while taking no risks themselves. Rather, they are right in there with their people, doing the same things they are asking them to do and taking the same risks they are.
I don’t want to read too much into a small turn of phrase from Gideon, but it’s hard to miss the takeaway here.
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The Hebrew word šāḥâ [literally, “bow down”; figuratively, “worship”] appears a grand total of four times in the book of Judges. That’s not a lot. But it gets worse. All but one of these four have to do with worshiping idols. The solitary exception, where the word refers to the worship of the God of Israel, is in today’s reading.
That’s a sad commentary on the state of Israel during the period of the judges. Accordingly, we may not expect to find out much about true, biblical worship in these pages.
Then again …
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The practice of “putting out a fleece” is not widespread among evangelicals these days, at least as far as I know. You’re probably familiar with the phrase though. We might call it the superstitious interpretation of events as divine guidance in an area where God has already revealed his will.
So you ask for a specific bit of circumstantial evidence, and if the thing you have prayed for happens, you interpret it as God’s direction to move forward with your plans. “Lord, if it rains tomorrow, then I will know you want me to go to Bible College even though my parents want me to go to university.” “Lord, if the phone rings in the next five minutes, I’ll know I should leave my husband.” That sort of thing.
This chapter is where some Christians get the mistaken notion that the fleece trick might actually work. It worked for Gideon.
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The angel of the Lord called Gideon a mighty man of valor. Considering that he said it to a man hiding from the Midianites in a winepress, perhaps he meant it tongue in cheek. Then again, many centuries later he would make Simon the coward into a rock and Saul the persecutor of Christians into the foremost teacher and prophet in Christian history. The Lord’s choices invariably appear counterintuitive by human standards.
But even mighty men of valor are not invulnerable. Many have fallen before their time. The key to Gideon’s success was this: the Lord sent him, and the Lord promised to be with him. That’s all God’s servants ever need.
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How would you feel if you had just seen God and escaped alive?
The modern believer has difficulty putting himself in the sandals of an oppressed Israelite whose family worshiped Baal, and whose only impressions of the God of Israel came from oral history: of his nation’s deliverance from Egyptian slavery, its sojourn in the wilderness and its miraculous conquest of Canaan. Gideon had stories of wonderful deeds recounted by the elders of his people. Meanwhile, Christians thousands of years later are habituated to platform messages in which the word “Abba” is alleged to give us license to crawl into Daddy’s lap for a good cuddle.
Ugh. It’s a frivolous and childish view of God, and it’s not the least bit like what Gideon experienced when the angel of the Lord appeared to him.
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Last week, we looked at the historical circumstances in which God called Gideon to serve as his judge and deliverer of Israel. The Holy Spirit has given us ten verses of explanation to set up the situation, and I felt I would be unwise to ignore them.
This week, we look at Gideon’s call to service. Othniel judged because the Spirit of the Lord came upon him. Ehud judged because the Lord “raised him up” and Shamgar did his bit with the ox goad for reasons the writer of Judges does not disclose. Deborah judged because she was in touch with heaven and there was nobody else willing to do the job. The people came to her for guidance.
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Today’s chapter begins with sad, familiar words: “The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” The writer does not specify the nature of this evil immediately, though we could surely guess by now, but God shortly sends his prophet to declare it. Our narrator will also tell us that the first instruction God gave Gideon, his next appointed deliverer of Israel, was to tear down his own father’s altar to Baal, then chop down his Asherah pole and use it for firewood.
This also would be a clue.
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If we were looking at chapter 5 of Judges purely from a literary standpoint, we might call it largely redundant. While it contains a few interesting bits of information we will comment on here, for the most part it simply recapitulates much of the historical narrative from the previous chapter in the form of a Hebrew song of praise to God. A secular editor might be inclined to cut to the chase and move us right on to Gideon’s storyline.
Thankfully, our Editor had a better idea.
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The fourth judge of Israel was a woman named Deborah. Yes, there was a female judge. Deborah was also a ‘prophetess’, a term the politically sensitive programmers of my word processor are desperate to render obsolete and refuse to dignify by acknowledging as legit English. I therefore refuse to stop typing it: it’s in my Bible, after all. Such is life in 2025.
Brace yourself for the inevitable if you dare to Google-search the combo of ‘Deborah’ and ‘judge’. Tanya Hendrix conjectures, “She was a warrior.” Christianity.com is confident being a judge and prophetess means Deborah “preached” and led “worship services”. The Jewish Women’s Archive hypothesizes, “Torah scholars would come to learn from her” and that she was “a worker at the temple”.
*Sigh*. Oh well, as Michael Buffer used to so memorably intone, “Let’s get ready to rumble!”
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The gory doings in Judges continue this week (and probably the next two) with the story of Jael and Sisera. I will probably not dwell on Jael’s novel use for a tent peg at great length, but scripture devotes two chapters to the deliverance of Israel from the king of Hazor and its aftermath, so we should probably examine some of the historical background to the chapters that Sunday school teachers tend to leave out.
Of special interest (to me at least) is the song preserved in chapter 5, which gives us far more detail about the battle than the summary in chapter 4, which takes all of four words: “the Lord routed Sisera”.
So he did. No great credit to Barak, the leader of Israel’s armies.
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“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.
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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.
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The phrase “the children of Israel did evil” (in some modern translations, “people”) appears exactly seven times throughout the book of Judges, once in the introductory summary and once at the beginning of each of six of its twelve historical sections. In order, these are: Othniel (oppressing nation: Mesopotamia, period of national servitude: 8 years); Ehud (Moab, 18 years); Deborah (Canaan, 20 years); Gideon (Midian, 7 years); Jephthah (Ammon, 18 years); and Samson (Philistines, 40 years).
So then, six notable periods of extended oppression from six different nations, totaling 111 of the 300-plus years the judges judged Israel.
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Verse 7 of Judges 3 will bring us to the next section of Judges, telling twelve stories of the judges God raised up to deliver Israel over the next fourteen chapters. But before we get to these tales, each with their own lessons, the writer or writers of Judges present us with a historical overview of the entire period, along with a preview of some of the enemies Israel will encounter in subsequent chapters as a result of its sins.
Running like a red thread through this era of spiritual decline is the mercy of God …
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The word šāpāṭ, frequently translated “judge”, appears 21 times in the Hebrew version of the book of Judges, beginning with the second chapter. It’s far from the first time the word occurs in scripture, also being present at least 30 times in the first six books of the Bible. The vast majority of this content almost surely dates earlier than Judges, establishing the meaning of the word for us as its initial readers understood it.
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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.
“There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”
If the COVID era had a defining passage, surely it was Romans 13. To say that large numbers of Christians employed verses 1-7 to justify passivity under pressure of government mandates and/or fear of negative opinions from our neighbors, families and friends is no exaggeration. While no small number of believers balked at the extended closure of church buildings and seemingly arbitrary health-related rules of conduct enforced on us, others simply submitted to any and all restrictions, no matter how bizarre or ineffective, as “God’s will”.
Romans 13 was their evidence. “Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.” Of course, they were also letting our rulers define “good” and “bad” for us.
