Judges

The generation after the conquest, and the book is honest about how badly it went. Judges states its own pattern in chapter 2 — the people abandon Yahweh, are handed to an oppressor, cry out, are rescued by a deliverer, and after his death do worse than before — and then runs it six times, with each deliverer more compromised than the last. Othniel is exemplary and gets three verses. Gideon needs three signs, tears down one idol and builds another. Jephthah wins a war and loses his daughter to a vow nobody asked him to make. Samson has one weakness and it is the whole plot. The book ends with no deliverer at all: two appendices about a stolen shrine and a horrifying crime at Gibeah, both framed by the sentence that is the book's thesis — in those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. It is the darkest narrative in the Old Testament, and it is not told in order to be admired; it is told to explain why what comes next had to come.

Themes

• The cycle — Stated as a formula in 2:11-19 and then run six times: apostasy, oppression, outcry, deliverance, rest, relapse — with the relapse worse each time.
• Everyone did what was right in his own eyes — The book's closing verdict, and its diagnosis: not lawlessness in the abstract but each person as their own authority.
• Deliverers who need delivering — Gideon's ephod, Jephthah's vow, Samson's appetites — the book keeps rescuing Israel through people who are part of the problem.
• Yahweh raised up judges — The rescues are attributed to God, not to the heroes' qualities; the Spirit comes on people the narrative gives no reason to admire.
• Women in the story — Deborah and Jael win the book's greatest victory; Jephthah's daughter, the Levite's concubine and the women of Jabesh and Shiloh are what its collapse costs.
• No king in Israel — Four times in the last five chapters, twice with the second half attached — the sentence that makes the book an argument.

Outline

• 1. They did not drive them out — A conquest report that turns into a list of failures, tribe by tribe, ending with Israel living among the people it was sent to displace.
• 2. Another generation arose — An angel at Bochim, Joshua's generation buried, and the book's own statement of the cycle it is about to run six times.
• 3. Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar — Nations left as a test, one exemplary judge in five verses, and a left-handed assassin with a homemade sword.
• 4. Deborah and Barak — A prophetess judging under a palm tree, a general who will not go without her, and a tent peg.
• 5. The song of Deborah — One of the oldest poems in the Bible: stars fighting, a river sweeping men away, tribes praised and shamed by name, and a mother at a window.
• 6. Gideon — A farmer threshing in a winepress, called mighty warrior; an altar torn down at night; and two nights of testing a fleece.
• 7. Three hundred — An army reduced twice, a dream overheard in an enemy camp, and jars, torches and trumpets instead of weapons.
• 8. The ephod — A pursuit that turns vengeful, a crown refused with the right words, and a gold object that becomes a snare to Gideon's own house.
• 9. Abimelech — Seventy brothers killed on one stone, a fable about trees choosing a king, and a millstone dropped from a tower.
• 10. Go and cry to the gods you have chosen — Two quiet judges, then an oppression and the sharpest refusal in the book — followed by God's patience anyway.
• 11. Jephthah — An outcast recalled to lead, a diplomatic argument about three hundred years of land claims, and a vow that costs him everything.
• 12. Shibboleth — A civil war over an insult, decided by a pronunciation test at the fords — and three more judges in eight verses.
• 13. The angel and the barren woman — An annunciation to a woman who is never named, a husband who keeps missing the point, and a Nazirite from the womb.
• 14. Out of the eater — A wedding, a riddle, a lion, and a marriage that ends before it starts.
• 15. The jawbone — Three hundred foxes, a betrayal by Judah, and a man who kills a thousand and then nearly dies of thirst.
• 16. Delilah — Four attempts, three lies, and a strength that leaves quietly — with a last prayer under a temple roof.
• 17. Micah's shrine — Stolen silver returned and made into an idol, a private shrine, a hired Levite, and the first 'no king in Israel'.
• 18. The Danites — A tribe looking for land takes a priest, a shrine and a defenceless town, and calls it providence.
• 19. The Levite's concubine — Hospitality refused in an Israelite town, a night that reads like Sodom, and a body cut into twelve pieces.
• 20. War against Benjamin — All Israel gathered as one man against one tribe, three battles, and an ambush that nearly ends Benjamin.
• 21. Wives for the survivors — A rash oath solved by two atrocities, and the book's last sentence: everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Chapters

• Judges 1 — The chapter starts like a continuation of Joshua — the tribes asking who goes up first, and Judah winning — and then quietly turns into a list of failures. Seven times a tribe 'did not drive out' the inhabitants, and by the end the Canaanites are living among Israel rather than the other way round.
• Judges 2 — The book stops narrating and explains itself. An angel announces that because the covenant was broken the nations will stay as thorns; Joshua's generation is buried; and then, in nine verses, the pattern that will govern the next ten chapters is laid out in advance — with the detail that makes it a spiral rather than a circle.
• Judges 3 — The first cycles, and they are told at different lengths on purpose. Othniel gets five verses and everything goes right. Ehud gets nineteen, and the story is a piece of grotesque comedy in which a disability is a tactical advantage and a locked door buys an escape.
• Judges 4 — The one deliverance in the book that takes two people and gives the credit to a third. Deborah is already judging Israel when the story starts; Barak will not go without her; and the commander he is chasing dies in a tent, killed by a woman with the tools that were to hand.
• Judges 5 — One of the oldest poems in the Bible, and it tells the battle from inside. Stars fight from their courses, a river sweeps an army away, tribes are praised or shamed by name for turning up or staying home, and it ends at a window where a mother is doing arithmetic about why her son's chariot is late.
• Judges 6 — Israel is reduced to hiding food in caves, and the deliverer is found threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it out of sight — where an angel greets him as a mighty warrior. Gideon's whole story is the gap between that greeting and the man receiving it.
• Judges 7 — God's problem with Gideon's army is that it is too big — not too small — and the reason is stated outright: lest Israel say my own hand has saved me. Thirty-two thousand becomes ten thousand, then three hundred, and the weapons issued are jars, torches and trumpets.
• Judges 8 — The deliverance is over by verse 21 and the chapter keeps going, which is the point. Gideon handles a tribal complaint with a compliment, then threshes one town with thorns and pulls down another's tower, refuses a crown with impeccable words, and makes an ephod out of the plunder that his whole family ends up prostituting itself to.
• Judges 9 — The one man in the book who wants to be king takes the throne by murdering his brothers on a single stone, and the chapter is the anti-kingship argument in narrative form. It is also the only place in Judges where God is said to send a spirit to break something up rather than to rescue anyone.
• Judges 10 — Two judges in five verses, and then the sharpest exchange in the book. Israel cries out with a full confession, and God's answer is refusal: I delivered you from seven oppressors and you left me; go and cry to the gods you have chosen. What happens next is the more remarkable part.
• Judges 11 — A man thrown out of his family for his mother's profession is recalled when there is fighting to do, negotiates his own terms, wins an argument about three hundred years of land claims — and then makes a vow nobody asked for, which costs him the only child he has.
• Judges 12 — Ephraim brings the same complaint it brought to Gideon — why didn't you call us? — and this time it is not defused with a compliment. Forty-two thousand Israelites die at the Jordan fords, identified by how they pronounce one word.
• Judges 13 — The last deliverer is announced before he is conceived, to a woman who is never named, by a messenger who refuses to give his own name because it is 'wonderful'. Her husband spends the chapter trying to catch up, and she is the one who works out what has happened.
• Judges 14 — A deliverer whose entire career starts with 'get her for me; she looks good to me' — and the narrator adds a note that his parents did not know this was from Yahweh, who was seeking an occasion against the Philistines. The book will not let you read Samson as simply a bad man, or as a good one.
• Judges 15 — A private grievance escalates into a regional war, and every stage of it is personal. Samson burns the harvest because his wife was given away; the Philistines burn her and her father; he attacks them for that; and Judah hands him over rather than be caught in the middle.
• Judges 16 — The strongest man in the book is destroyed by a repetitive conversation. Delilah asks four times, he lies three times and each time lets himself be tied with what he described, and the narrative makes the reader watch him walk into it. The saddest line is not the blinding but 'he did not know that Yahweh had departed from him'.
• Judges 17 — The book stops producing deliverers and starts showing what the country is like without them. A man returns silver he stole from his own mother, she dedicates it to Yahweh and has an idol made with it, and everyone in the story is convinced they are being religious.
• Judges 18 — A tribe that never took its allotted land goes looking for somewhere easier, finds a quiet, defenceless town, and takes it — stealing a priest and a shrine on the way and calling the whole thing God's approval. Micah's protest gets the reply that summarises the book: don't let your voice be heard among us, or you will lose your life.
• Judges 19 — The worst chapter in the Bible, and it is told deliberately as a mirror of Sodom — except that the town is Israelite, the men demanding the guest are Benjamites, and nobody is rescued. A woman is handed out to save a man, and her husband's first words in the morning are 'get up, and let us go'.
• Judges 20 — The tribes assemble as one man for the first time in the book — and it is to make war on one of their own. Benjamin refuses to hand over the guilty men, and the result is three battles, two of them lost, and a tribe reduced to six hundred survivors hiding at a rock.
• Judges 21 — Israel weeps over the tribe it has just destroyed and then solves the problem it created with two more atrocities — a town massacred for not turning up to the war, and a mass abduction at a festival — while carefully keeping the letter of an oath nobody should have sworn.

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