Lecture 30: Introducing Judges: The Downward Spiral and the Covenant That Held

The lecture, section by section

1. Three centuries at speed

   The book takes its name from its central human characters, the judges God raised up, introduced as a class in chapter 2 and given individual narratives through chapter 16, twelve of them, though not all of Israel's judges: Eli and Samuel wait for the next book. Narrative time accelerates hard: twenty-one chapters cover roughly three centuries, from Joshua's death around 1390 BC to the era's end, with the first judges arising as the third generation comes of age around 1375 to 1350. And the notice that the Jebusites live with Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day shows the author working from material older than David's capture of the city.

2. The neglected book

   Across the Jewish and Christian traditions, Judges has been the least preached book from Joshua to Esther; the earliest surviving treatment of it comes from Philo in the first century. For about a thousand years, when the church touched it at all, the judges were preached as types of Christ, deliverers foreshadowing the Deliverer, and the man who broke that mold was John Calvin, who returned the judges to their historical setting with a grammatical-historical reading, an irony worth savoring when Calvin's modern heirs campaign for the older christocentric method. Twenty-two years ago Essex could recommend no major exegetical commentary on the book; today the shelf is full, and Daniel Block, the starred first buy, argues that no Old Testament book speaks more directly to the church's present culture.

3. The Hebrews 11 dilemma

   What forces the book back onto the table is the New Testament. Hebrews 11:32 sets Gideon, Barak, Samson, and Jephthah in the roll of faith beside David, Samuel, and the prophets, the same company as Abel, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. Under the Spirit's direction the preacher of Hebrews calls these four men of faith, and if Samson and Barak qualify, Othniel and Ehud surely do. The standing dilemma of interpretation is exactly here: how to honor that positive verdict inside a narrative this dark, and the failure to hold the two together is much of why the book went unpreached.

4. Where judges came from

   The office did not appear from nowhere. Jethro's counsel in Exodus 18 gave Israel judges: able men who fear God, men of truth who hate dishonest gain, set over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens to adjudicate by the statutes Moses taught. Deuteronomy 16:18 to 20 institutionalized it, judges in every town at the gates, appointed by tribes, charged with righteous judgment, no partiality, no bribes, with appeals rising, per Deuteronomy 17, ultimately to the priest. Note the design: judges belong first to their tribes, unlike Moses and Joshua, who spoke to all Israel, and unlike the king to come.

5. Deliverers first, adjudicators mostly

   The judges God raises in this book are the same office intensified: theocratic deliverers first, for a Torah-breaking people needs saving before it can be judged, but for the majority of their years they were adjudicators, pressing Torah back upon the tribes as the standard of life. There lies the book's irony: the later judges are hardly Torah men themselves, and no one would mistake Samson for an expert in the law he was raised up to administer.

6. Primary and secondary

   The twelve are usually sorted major and minor, but Block's terms are better: primary and secondary. The secondary judges, Shamgar through Abdon, get only verses, though some judged as long as any primary figure and Shamgar wrought a mighty deliverance; the Spirit simply chose six men whose ministries were paradigmatic of the era, and gave them progressively longer narratives. The longest belong to Gideon and Samson, and Essex smiles at the afterlife of each: Gideon got the hotel-room Bibles, Samson got the Hollywood movies, and the rest got nothing. Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson also introduce the evaluation problem, how do you weigh a deeply flawed man of faith, that will return with Saul and Solomon.

7. Incomplete obedience, three ways

   Chapters 1 and 2 indict the second generation on three counts. Militarily, chapter 1: the tribes began well and then stalled, cowed by iron and chariots and tempted by Canaanite labor, leaving Deuteronomy 7 unfinished. Religiously, chapter 2: because Israel made covenants and left altars standing, God declared he would no longer drive the nations out; they would remain as thorns and their gods as snares, the warning that opens and closes the chapter like an envelope. And educationally: Deuteronomy 6 went unobeyed, and there arose another generation who did not know the Lord or the work he had done for Israel.

8. The cycle

   Chapter 2:11 to 19 gives the pattern the primary narratives will replay. Israel sins, serving the Baals, the many local Baals, and the Ashtaroth; Yahweh sells them into servitude to plunderers; the people groan and cry out in supplication; the Lord, moved to pity, raises up a judge who brings salvation; the land enjoys security while the judge lives; and at his death the next generation acts more corruptly than their fathers. Essex strings it on s-words, sin, servitude, supplication, salvation, security, and adds Webb's correction to the familiar diagram: this is not a circle but a spiral, each revolution descending, the sin deeper, the servitude harsher, the stubbornness harder.

9. Sanitized on purpose

   Psalm 106 looks back on the era and says what Judges does not: they sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons, and the land was polluted with innocent blood. The narrative of Judges, brutal as it reads, is the restrained version; the historical reality was worse, and even some English translations soften further what would be read aloud with women and children present. Essex draws the lesson for a tell-it-like-it-is culture: the Spirit portrayed sin's depths sufficiently without portraying them exhaustively, and writers and preachers might weigh that example.

10. The miracle of chapter 21

    Read Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, then read Judges, and the astonishing fact is the ending: Israel still exists. By every covenant sanction the nation should have been swept away centuries early; the social disintegration and religious stubbornness earn the ultimate curse, and it does not fall. Later Scripture names the reason. Psalm 106, in the middle of cataloguing the era's sins, says he remembered his covenant for their sake and relented according to the greatness of his lovingkindness; Nehemiah 9 tells the same story. Write the Abrahamic covenant before chapter 1 and after 21:25, Essex counsels: the whole book is enveloped in a loyalty older than Sinai, and that is why the period of the judges became, of all things, the great encouragement of the exiles: the God who had compassion then will have compassion still.

11. The Spirit, and the Angel

    What made ordinary tribesmen into deliverers was not talent: the Spirit of Yahweh came upon them, and mere men became theocratic warriors. And Yahweh speaks in the book through his messenger, the angel of Yahweh, most fully in the birth narrative of chapter 13, and the angel of Yahweh, Essex notes in passing, is Yahweh himself.

12. No king in Israel

    The refrain of the closing chapters, in those days there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes, cuts deeper than politics. Gideon refused the crown, though he took an ephod his son Abimelech would not have refused; but the missing king is finally Yahweh himself, for a people who spurn Torah are spurning their true King's authority. The tribal judges, faithful or flawed, changed nothing in a stiff-necked people, and so the question the book leaves open is the one Samuel will take up: if God is to reassert his rule over Israel, it will be through a human king over all the tribes, and everything turns on what kind of king he is.

1. Block argues the church's culture today is more like the era of the judges than any other period of Israel's history. Where do you see the parallel, and what would faithfulness modeled on the era's faithful actually look like this week?

2. The cycle ran on supplication: Israel only cried out when the consequences bit. What is the difference between crying out under consequences and true repentance, and how does God's pity in Judges speak to both?

3. Judges tells the truth about sin without telling everything, and Psalm 106 shows how much was left out. What does that restraint teach about how Christians should portray and discuss evil, in preaching, in writing, in what we watch?