The Cycle

Judges 2:11 to 19 sets out the pattern, and it is the reader's manual for everything that follows. Israel does evil and serves the Baals. The LORD gives them into the hand of plunderers. They are distressed. The LORD raises up a judge who saves them. And then the sentence that breaks the wheel: when the judge died, the Israelites became even more corrupt than their fathers. Not as corrupt. More. The pattern has a direction, and the direction is down.

Notice something else missing from the standard diagram. In 2:18 the LORD is moved to pity by their groaning, but outside Judges 10 the text never says Israel repents. They cry out, which in Hebrew is the shout of someone in pain, not the confession of someone who has changed. Judges 10:10 to 16 is the one place Israel makes a confession, and God's reply there is close to sarcasm: go and cry out to the gods you have chosen, let them save you. Israel then puts away its foreign gods, and the text's last word is a phrase the BSB renders 'He could no longer bear the misery of Israel'. The Hebrew says literally that his soul grew short with Israel's trouble. The BSB reads that as pity, and many agree. Others hear exasperation with a people whose confession has become a technique, and note that God never says here that he will save them; in chapter 11 the elders go and recruit a deliverer themselves. Either way, the verse does not make their repentance the reason for what follows. The engine of the book is not Israel's repentance. It is God's unaccountable unwillingness to let them go.

The word translated judge is shophet, and it is a poor fit for our courtroom sense. A shophet here is a deliverer, a local chieftain who settles a crisis; the verb can mean to judge, to rule, to vindicate. Only one figure in the book is actually shown sitting and deciding cases, and it is Deborah. The rest are military. Keeping that straight prevents a lot of confusion about why these people behave so little like magistrates.

Martin Noth's 1943 proposal that Deuteronomy through Kings forms a single continuous history, written from a Deuteronomic standpoint, is the frame most scholars still work inside, whether they accept his single author or argue for successive editions. On any version of it, Judges is the hinge: the book that demonstrates what Joshua 24:19 predicted, that Israel would not be able to keep the oath it had just sworn. Judges is the case file for the prosecution.

Watch the deliverers in order and the descent is unmistakable. Othniel in 3:7 to 11 is the paradigm and gets five verses with nothing wrong in them. Ehud in 3:12 to 30 wins by assassination and deception, told with a comedian's relish for Eglon's fat and the locked upper room. Deborah wins but has to drag Barak. Gideon needs three signs, then turns predator. Jephthah kills his own daughter and then forty-two thousand Israelites. Samson never fights for Israel at all. Then the last five chapters have no deliverer, and the nation does to itself what no foreign oppressor managed.

Deborah is introduced in 4:4 with three descriptions stacked up: a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, and she was judging Israel at that time. She sits under a palm between Ramah and Bethel and the people of Israel come up to her for judgement. She is the only figure in the book who does the job the book is named after, and the narrator reports it without a syllable of apology, explanation or surprise. That silence is data. Whatever else Judges is arguing, it is not arguing that a woman judging Israel requires a justification.

The friction in the chapter is Barak's. Deborah summons him with a direct word from the LORD and he answers, in 4:8, that he will go if she goes with him, and not otherwise. She goes, and tells him the consequence: the glory of the kill will go to a woman. It does, but not to Deborah. Sisera flees on foot to the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite, who gives him milk, covers him, and drives a tent peg through his temple while he sleeps. Judges makes no comment on the ethics of killing a guest under your own hospitality. Chapter 5 sings about it.

Judges 5, the Song of Deborah, is one of the most important poems in the Old Testament and one of the hardest. Its Hebrew is full of forms that look archaic, and a long line of scholars including William Foxwell Albright, David Noel Freedman and Frank Moore Cross argued from that language that it is among the oldest surviving Hebrew poetry, plausibly from the twelfth or eleventh century. That dating has been challenged in recent decades by scholars who doubt that linguistic archaism can carry a date on its own, and you should hold it as the strong majority view rather than a certainty. Either way the poem gives us a different angle on the same battle: which tribes came, which did not, a curse on Meroz, a torrent that sweeps the chariots away, and the earth and the stars fighting for Israel.

Spend your attention on the poem's last movement. Judges 5:28 to 30 leaves the battlefield and puts us at a window in Sisera's palace, where his mother watches the road and her ladies reassure her that he is delayed because he is dividing the spoil, a girl or two for each warrior (literally, in the Hebrew idiom, 'a womb or two'). It is the most humane and the most devastating thing in the book: the enemy commander's mother, waiting, comforting herself with the rape of Israelite girls. Then verse 31 slams shut: so may all Your enemies perish, O LORD. The poem gives you sympathy and curse in consecutive breaths and refuses to help you reconcile them. Do not help your students reconcile them either. Learning to sit inside a text that does two incompatible things at once is most of what reading the Old Testament well consists of.

One honest note. Judges 4:2 calls Sisera's overlord Jabin king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor, and Joshua 11 has Joshua kill a Jabin king of Hazor and burn the city. Some read Jabin as a dynastic title, some read the two accounts as variant traditions of one memory, some read the Judges setting as reflecting the smaller Hazor that existed after the great city fell. There is no agreed solution, and the archaeology of Hazor covered in lesson two is part of the argument on every side.

Gideon is the pivot of the book, and the reason is that his story does not end where Sunday school ends it. Chapters 6 and 7 are the famous part. He is found threshing wheat in a winepress, which is to say hiding, and greeted as a mighty man of valour, which is either encouragement or irony. He pulls down his father's altar to Baal and the Asherah beside it and earns the name Jerubbaal. He asks for a sign, gets fire from a rock, then asks for the fleece wet and the ground dry, then asks for the reverse. God gives him all three. Then his army is cut from thirty-two thousand to ten thousand and then to three hundred, with the stated reason in 7:2 being that Israel must not be able to say its own hand saved it. Jars, torches, trumpets, and Midian destroys itself in the dark.

Chapter 8 is the part that changes what the earlier chapters meant. Gideon pursues the Midianite kings across the Jordan and asks the town of Succoth for bread. They refuse, prudently, since he has not yet won. When he has won he comes back and takes the elders of Succoth and disciplines them with the thorns and briers of the wilderness, and kills the men of Penuel and pulls down their tower. Then he executes Zebah and Zalmunna, and the reason he gives is not national: they killed his brothers at Tabor, and he says plainly that if they had spared them he would not kill them. The deliverer has become a man conducting a blood feud with the resources of a nation.

Then Israel asks him to rule, and he gives the right answer in 8:23: 'I will not rule over you, nor will my son. The LORD shall rule over you.' Hold that sentence, because it is the theological high point of the book and the man who says it immediately empties it. In the next breath he asks for a share of the plunder, collects seventeen hundred shekels of gold in earrings, and makes an ephod. An ephod is priestly equipment, associated with seeking a decision from God, and a gold one at his home town of Ophrah is a private sanctuary with a private oracle. Verse 27: 'But soon all Israel prostituted themselves by worshiping it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and his household.' He refused the crown and built the shrine. He would not be king and he made himself pontiff.

The rest follows mechanically. He takes many wives and has seventy sons, which is a royal household in everything but name, and names a son by a Shechemite concubine Abimelech, which means 'my father is king'. Chapter 9 then lets Abimelech do what the ephod made thinkable: he kills his brothers on a single stone, seventy men by the text's count, with only Jotham escaping, is crowned at Shechem, and rules three years. Jotham stands on Mount Gerizim and tells the fable of the trees, in which the olive, fig and vine all decline the kingship because they have useful work, and only the thornbush accepts, a plant good for nothing but fuel and scratching, which offers shade it cannot give and fire it certainly can. Abimelech dies when a woman drops an upper millstone from a tower onto his skull, and he asks his armour-bearer to run him through so that it will not be said a woman killed him. Israel remembered the detail; it is still being cited in 2 Samuel 11:21.

So the sequence to teach is this: a reluctant farmer, a genuine deliverance explicitly designed to leave no room for boasting, then extortion, private vengeance, a golden oracle, a harem, a son named for a crown, and seventy corpses on one stone. Gideon is not a good man who slipped at the end. He is the book showing you how the cycle descends: through a deliverer who says the right thing about God's rule and then builds an alternative.

Jephthah is the son of a prostitute, driven out of his father's house by his half-brothers, who becomes the leader of a band of worthless men in the land of Tob. When Ammon attacks, the elders of Gilead who expelled him come asking for help, and he negotiates: not just command of the army but the headship of Gilead, permanently. Then he does something no other judge does. He sends a long, carefully argued diplomatic letter to the king of Ammon, rehearsing three hundred years of territorial history, and he includes the line in 11:24: 'Do you not possess whatever your god Chemosh grants you?' Whether that is diplomatic courtesy or theological confusion is debated, and it is exactly the sort of thing to notice about a man who talks like a Yahwist without knowing Torah.

The Spirit of the LORD comes upon him in 11:29. Then, in 11:30 to 31, with the Spirit already on him, he makes a vow: if God gives him Ammon, then whatever comes out the door of his house to greet him on his return shall be the LORD's, and he will offer it up as a burnt offering, an 'olah. He wins. His daughter comes out with tambourines and dancing. She is his only child. He tears his clothes and says, in 11:35, that he has given his word to the LORD and cannot take it back. She asks for two months to wander through the mountains with her friends and mourn her virginity, and then, 11:39: she 'returned to her father, and he did to her as he had vowed. And she had never had relations with a man. So it has become a custom in Israel'.

Two readings exist and both must be stated fairly, because this is the passage students will be ambushed by. The first is that she was killed. The verb in the vow is to offer up as an 'olah, which is the standard term for a burnt sacrifice and has no non-literal use. The narrative treats the outcome as catastrophic, which a life of celibacy would not quite warrant. And this is the reading of nearly all ancient interpreters, including Josephus and the author of Pseudo-Philo, of most rabbinic and patristic commentary, and of the large majority of modern scholars of every theological stripe. The second reading is that she was dedicated to perpetual virginity in the service of the sanctuary. It was argued in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Ibn Ezra and by Joseph Kimhi and his son David Kimhi, known as Radak, and taken up in the fourteenth by Gersonides and later by many Christian commentators. Its case rests on reading the Hebrew connective in 11:31 as disjunctive, so that the vow says the thing shall be the LORD's, or else he will offer a burnt offering; on the text's repeated emphasis on her virginity rather than her death; and on the annual four-day observance by the young women of Israel in 11:40, which on this reading is a visit or commemoration rather than mourning. The BSB prints 'lament' there, which is the mourning reading; the Hebrew verb is rare, and the translators had to choose.

Now the judgement a teacher owes a class. The virginity reading is possible Hebrew and it is not a modern invention, but it is the weaker case, and it should not be preached. The connective in 11:31 most naturally means 'and', and the BSB prints it that way ('will belong to the LORD, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering'), which closes the question in English; the Hebrew letter waw is the ordinary connective and can sometimes bear 'or', and that is the other side's grammatical case; its other two planks, the stress on her virginity and the verb in 11:40, are set out above. No Israelite order of celibate women is attested anywhere. The texts the seclusion reading reaches for, Exodus 38:8 and 1 Samuel 2:22 on the women who served at the entrance to the tent of meeting, never describe them as celibate, and 1 Samuel 2:22 implies the reverse. That is an argument from silence together with cultural implausibility, and it should be weighed as one rather than taken as settled. And Leviticus 27:1 to 8 provides a procedure for a person vowed to the LORD, a valuation in silver that releases them, which means Jephthah had a lawful way out and did not take it. The objection is in the same chapter: 27:28 to 29 says that a devoted thing, a person under herem included, may not be ransomed at all. If the vow was a vow of valuation, Jephthah had a release; if it was a vow of herem, he did not. Note that the vow in 11:31 uses the language of a burnt offering rather than of herem. The plain sense is that a judge of Israel burned his daughter because he thought a vow obliged him to, and that he was wrong on every count: wrong to bargain with God, wrong about what God wanted, and wrong that he could not take it back.

Then notice what the text does and does not do. It never says God accepted the sacrifice. It never says God asked for it. It does not editorialise at all, and that silence has been read two ways: as a narrator too appalled to comment, or as a narrator whose whole book is the comment. What follows immediately is chapter 12, where Jephthah fights Ephraim, uses their pronunciation of shibboleth as a death test at the fords, and kills forty-two thousand Israelites. A man who could not get out of a vow he made himself had no trouble at all killing his own countrymen over a consonant. And in Hebrews 11:32 his name appears in the list of those who conquered by faith, alongside Gideon and Samson. That list praises faith, not conduct, and it is a good place to teach students that the Bible's commendations are narrower than they assume.

Samson gets four chapters, more than any other judge, and he is the worst of them. He is set apart from the womb as a Nazirite, and the vow he is born under has three terms: no wine, no contact with a corpse, no razor. He eats honey scooped out of a lion's carcass and gives it to his parents without telling them where it came from, holds his wedding feast among Philistines, uses the jawbone of a dead donkey as a weapon, and finally loses the hair. He never once musters an army. Every single act of violence he commits is personal retaliation: for a wife given away, for a wife and father-in-law burned to death, for a betrayal. Even at the end, blinded in the temple of Dagon, his prayer in 16:28 is to be avenged for his two eyes. Not for Israel. For his eyes.

What makes him theologically unbearable is that the Spirit of the LORD keeps coming on him anyway, and that Judges 14:4 says his demand for a Philistine wife was from the LORD, who was seeking an occasion against the Philistines. That verse is a genuine crux and the honest thing is to say so. It does not say God approved of Samson; it says God used him, which is a different and more disquieting claim. Students who have been taught that the Spirit's presence certifies a person's character will have to revise, and Judges is where they should do it.

Then the book runs out of judges. Chapters 17 to 21 have no deliverer at all. Micah in Ephraim makes an idol from his mother's silver and installs his own son as priest, then upgrades to a wandering Levite from Bethlehem at ten shekels a year plus clothes and food. The tribe of Dan, unable to hold its allotment, migrates north, steals the idol and hires the Levite away with the argument that it is better to be priest to a tribe than to one man. Judges 18:30 names that Levite as Jonathan son of Gershom son of Moses, though the Hebrew text as we have it writes Manasseh with a raised letter, which is generally understood as a scribal device to spare Moses' name. The BSB prints 'Moses' and adds a footnote saying that some Hebrew and Septuagint manuscripts and the Vulgate read so, while other Hebrew and Septuagint manuscripts read 'the son of Manasseh'. Israel's first freelance priesthood was staffed by Moses' own grandson.

Chapter 19 is the floor. A Levite's concubine is handed out to the men of Gibeah, a town of Benjamin, and abused until she dies on the threshold, and the chapter is constructed as a deliberate retelling of Genesis 19: the same offer of hospitality, the same crowd at the door, the same substitution of a woman. Only this time it happens in Israel, and there are no angels, and nobody is rescued. The Levite cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them through the tribes. Israel then destroys Benjamin down to six hundred men, realises it has sworn not to give them wives, and solves the problem by wiping out Jabesh-gilead for four hundred virgins and by authorising the abduction of the girls who come out dancing at Shiloh. That is how the book ends: the covenant people conducting a genocide against a tribe and then organising mass abduction to repair it, all of it scrupulously legal by their own oaths.

The refrain runs four times, twice in full: in those days there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes (17:6, 18:1, 19:1, 21:25). The straightforward reading is a monarchic apology, probably Davidic. The book opens with the LORD appointing Judah to go up first, its atrocities happen in Benjamin and specifically at Gibeah, which is Saul's town, and its decent people come from Bethlehem. On this reading the closing line means: this is what Israel was like before David, and Saul's country is where the worst of it happened. Marc Brettler and Marvin Sweeney have argued versions of that case. But there is a second reading with real teeth. The phrase echoes Deuteronomy 12:8 ('everyone does what seems right in his own eyes'), where the problem is not the absence of a monarch but Israel worshipping however it pleases instead of as commanded. Gideon has already said that the LORD shall rule over you. Jotham's fable is an argument against kingship. And 1 Samuel 8 will treat the demand for a king as a rejection of God's own kingship. On that reading the missing king is God, and the book is not advertising the monarchy but diagnosing a people with no acknowledged sovereign, which the monarchy will not in fact cure. Martin Buber's 'Kingship of God' argues that direct divine rule was the period's ideal, and W. J. Dumbrell, in an article of 1983 on the purpose of the book reconsidered, reads the refrain as pointing to Israel's dependence on the LORD's own rule rather than as an advertisement for a human king. Gregory T. K. Wong has argued directly against the pro-Judah reading, in 'Is There a Direct Pro-Judah Polemic in Judges?' (2005) and in his 'Compositional Strategy of the Book of Judges' (2006), and takes the king the refrain misses to be the LORD. Teach both, and note that they can be held together: an editor can think Israel needed a king and think that a king was never the real answer. The next book in the canon is 1 Samuel, and it thinks both at once.