Summary: Bible - Book of Judges

The GIST

Judges is the seventh book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, and it covers the rough, leaderless years between the conquest under Joshua and the founding of a kingdom in the books of Samuel. The tribes of Israel are in the land they were promised, but they have not finished taking it, and they keep worshiping the gods of their neighbors. Disaster follows. Then, each time, a deliverer appears. These deliverers are the judges, and they are less magistrates than champions: war leaders raised up for a crisis.

The book is built on a pattern it states at the start and repeats until it wears thin. Israel does evil. It is handed over to an enemy. The people cry out. God raises up a leader, and the spirit of God comes on that leader. The enemy is beaten, and the land has peace until the cycle begins again. What makes Judges gripping, and disturbing, is that the pattern decays as it goes. The rescuers become more compromised, the victories costlier, and by the end Israelites are killing one another. Its refrain is its verdict: "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes."

What It Says

A double prologue (chapters 1 to 3:6). The book opens after the death of Joshua with the tribes asking God who should go up first against the Canaanites. The answer is Judah. What follows is a record of partial success that reads as a confession of failure, since the Canaanites remain everywhere. The second opening explains why it matters. The generation that had seen God's great works died, "and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD." They turned to Baal and Ashtaroth, were given into the hands of raiders, and were greatly distressed. "Nevertheless the LORD raised up judges." Even so, the text says, they would not listen for long. The nations left in the land, the five lords of the Philistines among them, remain as a test of whether Israel will keep the commandments.

The first deliverers (chapter 3). The pattern runs cleanly the first time. Israel serves a foreign king for eight years, cries out, and is rescued by Othniel, the younger brother of Caleb, on whom the Spirit of the LORD comes; the land has rest for forty years. Next comes Eglon, king of Moab, a very fat man who holds Israel for eighteen years. The deliverer is Ehud, a left-handed Benjamite who makes himself a two-edged dagger a cubit long, straps it under his clothes on his right thigh, brings the king his tribute and then announces a secret errand so that the attendants are sent out of the room. A single verse mentions a third figure, Shamgar.

Deborah and Barak (chapters 4 and 5). The oppressor is now Jabin, a Canaanite king reigning in Hazor, whose general Sisera commands nine hundred iron chariots and has crushed Israel for twenty years. Israel's leader is a woman. Deborah, a prophetess, sits under a palm tree in the hills of Ephraim, and the people come to her for judgment; she is the only major judge shown deciding cases. She summons Barak and tells him God commands him to take ten thousand men to Mount Tabor. Barak will go only if she comes too. She agrees, with a warning that the glory will not be his, "for the LORD shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman." The chariots are routed, and Sisera flees on foot to the tent of Jael. Chapter 5 retells the victory as a poem, the Song of Deborah. It praises the tribes that came, rebukes those that stayed home, and sees the whole creation enlisted: "the stars in their courses fought against Sisera."

Gideon (chapters 6 to 8). For seven years the Midianites and their allies sweep in at harvest like grasshoppers, with camels beyond counting, and strip the land, until Israelites are living in caves. The angel of the LORD finds Gideon threshing wheat in a winepress to hide it and greets him, with some irony, "The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valour." Gideon answers with a question many readers have shared: if the LORD is with us, why has all this happened? He protests that his family is poor and he is the least in it, and he asks for a sign. When he does raise an army, God tells him it is too large, in case Israel should boast that its own hand saved it. The fearful are sent home, twenty-two thousand of them. The rest are tested at the water, and only those who lap from their hands are kept. "By the three hundred men that lapped will I save you." The victory is complete, but the aftermath is sour. Gideon takes brutal revenge on Israelite towns that refused his men bread, and the golden ephod he makes afterward becomes a snare to the people.

Abimelech (chapter 9). Gideon's son shows where this is heading. Abimelech persuades the men of Shechem to back him, hires ruffians with silver from a temple of Baal, murders his seventy brothers on one stone and has himself made king. One brother, Jotham, escapes and from the top of Mount Gerizim tells a fable: the trees went looking for a king, and the olive, the fig and the vine all declined because they had better things to do. Only the bramble accepted. Abimelech is a judge only in the sense of a chieftain, and he is an oppressor who comes from inside Israel.

Jephthah (chapters 10 to 12). After brief notices of two minor judges, Israel falls further than before, serving the gods of half a dozen nations. This time God's first answer is no. "Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen." Only when the people put the foreign gods away does he relent. The man they turn to is Jephthah, a warrior and the son of a prostitute, whose half-brothers drove him out and who now leads a band of outlaws. The elders who expelled him must beg him to come back. He wins the war against Ammon, but he has bound himself with a rash vow that costs him his daughter. Then the tribe of Ephraim picks a quarrel, and Israelite fights Israelite at the fords of the Jordan, where fugitives are identified by whether they can pronounce the word Shibboleth. Three more minor judges are listed.

Samson (chapters 13 to 16). The last judge is the strangest. Israel has been under the Philistines for forty years, and nobody is even reported crying out. An angel appears to the barren wife of a man named Manoah and promises a son who is to be a Nazarite from the womb, with no razor to touch his head, and who "shall begin to deliver Israel." Samson has prodigious strength and no discipline. He insists on a Philistine wife. He tears a lion apart with his bare hands, later finds honey in its carcass, and turns it into a riddle for his wedding guests: "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness." The guests extract the answer by threatening his bride, and a private feud becomes a small war of burned fields, reprisals and a thousand men struck down with the jawbone of an ass. His own countrymen in Judah hand him over bound to keep the peace. Finally there is Delilah, paid by the Philistine lords to find the secret of his strength. Three times he lies to her, and three times she springs the trap with the same words, "The Philistines be upon thee, Samson." She keeps pressing. In the end he tells her, is captured and humiliated, and in his death brings the Philistines' temple down on them and on himself.

A double epilogue (chapters 17 to 21). Two closing stories have no judge in them at all. In the first, a man named Micah sets up a private shrine with an idol made from silver he had stolen from his mother, makes one of his sons a priest, and then takes in a wandering Levite from Bethlehem. The story goes on to tell how the tribe of Dan, still without a territory of its own, wins one in the far north. In the second, the gang rape of a Levite's concubine leads to a war in which the other tribes nearly wipe out Benjamin, and then to the seizure of women to keep that tribe alive. The refrain about there being no king frames it all.

Why It Matters

Judges is the Bible's most unsparing account of what happens to a people that forgets. Its theology is that of Deuteronomy turned into narrative: loyalty to God brings peace, and abandoning him brings ruin. Yet the book is honest that mercy keeps arriving undeserved. God is moved by Israel's misery even when its repentance is shallow, and he works through whoever is at hand, including a left-handed assassin, a woman under a palm tree, a frightened farmer, an outcast and a brawler.

Readers have long noticed how the book is shaped as a downward spiral. The early judges are admirable, the later ones increasingly flawed, and the cycle itself breaks down as the Israelites' world disintegrates. Many take the last verse as pointing forward to the monarchy as a way out, which the books of Samuel will take up. Others read the refrain more broadly, as a warning about any society in which everyone is a law unto himself.

Scholars differ over its value as history. Some see genuine early memories in parts of it, the Song of Deborah above all. Most critical scholars regard the book as largely non-historical, and its scheme of years as a later addition. Others think its picture of temporary tribal alliances under war chiefs fits a stage between independent tribes and kingship. Parts of the book survive among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the earliest complete Hebrew copy is in the tenth-century Aleppo Codex.

Who Should Read It

Read Judges for some of the best storytelling in the Bible: it is violent, ironic, sometimes darkly funny, and unafraid of its heroes' faults. It suits readers interested in leadership, in how societies come apart, and in the question of why good beginnings fade. It is not gentle reading. The final chapters in particular are grim, and they are meant to be.