[Sidenote: [_ca._ 1200-1020 B.C.]]
The Bible gives the title of Judges (_Sophetim_) to those “deliverers”
whom Jehovah raised up from time to time; but they were not elective
magistrates, like the Suffetes of Carthage, who bore the same name;
they were valiant chieftains who placed themselves at the head of a
band of patriots to free their own tribes. Some successful exploit
would give them a kind of moral authority for the remainder of their
lives, but they were not invested with regular powers recognised by
the whole nation. Though the Bible is careful to state the duration of
the government of each one, these figures cannot serve as the basis of
a sound chronology, for it is probable that many of the judges were
contemporary and belonged to different tribes. We are given details
concerning three or four of them; others are merely named. The first of
whom mention is made is Othniel, the nephew of Caleb, who delivers the
tribes of the north from the dominion of the king of Mesopotamia. Then
a king of Moab takes possession of Jericho and oppresses Israel for
eighteen years; Ehud the Benjamite slays him by treachery and delivers
the land. The Bible next names Shamgar, the son of Anath, who slew six
hundred Philistines with an ox goad. The much longer narrative of the
expedition of Barak and Deborah seems to be historical in character.
It tells of the defeat of Sisera and his death at the hands of Jael
(Judges iv.). On this occasion Deborah composed a savage and spirited
canticle, the oldest piece of Hebrew poetry that has come down to us.
The invasion of Canaan by the Israelites was not an unexampled
occurrence; in all ages the nomadic Bedouins of the desert had cast
covetous glances at the fertile cultivated plains of Palestine. When
the tribes of Israel had succeeded in establishing themselves there,
they, in their turn, were forced to defend themselves against fresh
hordes of invaders. “Because of Midian the Children of Israel made
them the dens which are in the mountains, and in the caves, and the
strongholds. And so it was, when Israel had sown, that the Midianites
came up, and the Amalekites, and the Children of the East; they came up
against them and destroyed the increase of the earth, till thou come
unto Gaza, and left no sustenance in Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor
ass.”
A peasant of the tribe of Manasseh placed himself at the head of a few
resolute men and delivered Israel. His name was Jerubbaal, and he was
surnamed Gideon, that is, the Sword, just as Judas, the Asmonæan was
surnamed Maccabæus, that is, the Hammer. The little band, with torches
and trumpets, made a night attack on the camp of the Midianites, who
were seized with panic and slew one another. Gideon sent messengers
to the men of Ephraim who hastened up to cut off the retreat of the
fugitives at the ford of the Jordan.
The Children of Israel said to Gideon, “Rule thou over us, both thou
and thy son, and thy son’s son also: for thou hast saved us out of the
hand of Midian.” He answered, “I will not rule over you, neither shall
my son rule over you, Jehovah shall rule over you.” After his death one
of his seventy sons, Abimelech, had himself proclaimed king at Shechem,
and had himself proclaimed king by the oak of Shechem. Civil war broke
out. Shechem was destroyed and its ruins sown with salt. Abimelech set
fire to the tower of the temple of Baal-berith, where the principal
inhabitants of the city had taken refuge; a thousand souls perished
in it. He next besieged the city of Thebez; the inhabitants shut
themselves up in the citadel; and as he drew near to set it on fire, a
woman cast a millstone on his head, and he commanded his armour bearer
to kill him, that he might not die by the hand of a woman.
After repulsing the invasion of the Midianites, the tribe of Manasseh,
whose territory lay on both banks of the Jordan, were desirous of
enlarging their borders to the east, and completed the conquest of the
land of Bashan. The Ammonites, however, laid claim to the country,
which had formerly belonged to them. They gathered together and
encamped at Gilead. “And it was so, that when the children of Ammon
made war against Israel, the elders of Gilead went to fetch Jephthah
out of the land of Tob; and they said unto Jephthah, Come and be our
chief, that we may fight with the Children of Ammon. And Jephthah vowed
a vow unto Jehovah, and said, If thou wilt indeed deliver the children
of Ammon into mine hand, then shall it be, that whatsoever cometh forth
of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the
children of Ammon, it shall be Jehovah’s, and I will offer it up for
a burnt offering. So Jephthah passed over unto the Children of Ammon
to fight against them, and Jehovah delivered them into his hand. And
Jephthah came to Mizpah unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came
out to meet him with timbrels and dances; and she was his only child;
beside her he had neither son nor daughter. And it came to pass, when
he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas, my daughter! thou
hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me: for
I have opened my mouth unto Jehovah, and I cannot go back. And she said
unto him, My father, thou hast opened thy mouth unto Jehovah; do unto
me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch
as Jehovah hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies. And she
said unto her father, Let this thing be done for me: let me alone two
months, that I may depart and go down upon the mountains and bewail my
virginity, I and my companions. And he said, Go. And he sent her away
for two months: and she departed, she and her companions, and bewailed
her virginity upon the mountains. And it came to pass at the end of two
months, that she returned unto her father, who did with her according
to his vow which he had vowed: and she had not known man. And it was a
custom in Israel, that the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament
the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite.”
There is so great a resemblance between this tradition and the Greek
legend of the sacrifice of Iphigenia that we may well believe that one
was borrowed from the other. It may be that Phœnician mariners, or
even Israelite prisoners sold into slavery on the coast of Asia Minor,
recounted the tragic story of a general who gained the victory at the
price of the sacrifice of his daughter. The very name of Iphigenia
seems to be no more than a Greek translation of the words “daughter of
Jephthah.” The legend is unknown to Homer. Euripides borrowed it from
a cyclic poem, the _Cypria_. According to this poem the sacrifice was
not consummated; the goddess substituted a hind for the maiden. Some
theologians have tried to extenuate the sacrifice of Jephthah in the
same way, and have maintained that his daughter was vowed to perpetual
celibacy. This explanation, however, has failed to win acceptance.
“The text,” says M. Munk, “leaves no room to doubt that Jephthah did
actually offer up his daughter as a burnt offering, and Josephus
expressly says so” (_Antiq._, V, 7, 10).
While the tribes of the north were striving with the Canaanites, and
those of the east with the Midianites and Ammonites, the tribes of
the south were not always successful in defending their independence
against the Philistines. The isolated position of the Israelite tribes
made it possible for the Philistines to subjugate those in their
immediate neighbourhood. The resistance of Israel to this suppression
is personified in Samson, the hero of the tribe of Dan, the Israelitish
Hercules.
Samson cannot be considered an historical figure. He appears to bear
a strong resemblance to Samdan, the Assyrian Hercules, and, generally
speaking, to all solar divinities. Like Apollo, his hair has never
been cut; like Hercules he subdues lions and is himself subdued by
women. The metamorphosis of an ancient divinity into a local hero is
of common occurrence in all mythologies. The existence of a city of
the sun, Beth-shemesh, within the borders of the tribe of Dan, leads
us to suppose that the oldest inhabitants paid peculiar honours to the
sun; it is natural that the Israelites, who held a different religion,
should graft the legend of a hero on the fables current in the locality.
As a sequel to the legend of Samson, we find two narratives which form,
as it were, an appendix to the Book of Judges. The first seems to refer
to the actual period of the conquest, for the tribe of Dan had no
territory as yet, and sought an inheritance to dwell in. Five men were
sent out to explore the land. “And they came unto their brethren to
Zorah and Eshtaol; and said unto them, Arise, and let us go up against
them; for we have seen the land, and, behold, it is very good: but keep
ye silence, be not slothful to go and to enter in to possess the land.”
As they pass through the hill country of Ephraim, their spies inform
them that, in the house of a certain man named Micah, there is an
ephod, teraphim, and a graven image, under the charge of a Levite. They
represent to the Levite that it will be to his advantage to be the
priest of a tribe rather than the chaplain of a private individual, and
carry him off, taking the graven image, the ephod, and the teraphim
with them. Micah pursues him and complains of the theft, they bid him
hold his peace or they will set fire to his house. Then the Danites
come to Laish: “They came unto a people quiet and secure, and smote
them with the edge of the sword; and they burnt the city with fire.…
And the children of Dan set up for themselves the graven image: and
Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Moses, he and his sons were
priests to the tribe of the Danites until the day of the captivity
of the land. So they set them up Micah’s graven image which he made,
all the time that the house of God was in Shiloh.” If we attribute
the Decalogue, with its prohibition of graven images, to Moses, we
must suppose that the precepts of the lawgiver had been very quickly
forgotten, even in his own family.
The story of the Levite of Ephraim throws a yet more melancholy light
on the morals of the Israelites. The wife of this Levite is outraged
and murdered by a band of men at Gibeah, of the tribe of Benjamin.
The husband cuts the corpse into twelve pieces, which he sends to the
twelve tribes of Israel. And all men, when they saw it, said, “There
was no such deed done since the day when the Children of Israel came
up out of Egypt.” The Benjamites are required to give up the culprits,
they refuse and take up arms, to the number of twenty-six thousand
men. The other tribes put four hundred thousand soldiers in the field,
according to the Bible, and inquire of Jehovah who shall march first to
battle. Jehovah appoints the tribe of Judah. But twice in succession
the Benjamites come forth out of Gibeah and gain the advantage over the
enormous army of Israel, which loses forty thousand men in two days.
The people go up to Bethel, where the Ark of the Covenant then was;
they fast, they offer burnt offerings, and Jehovah promises them the
victory. The attacking force surrounds the enemy, and defeats them with
such slaughter that only six hundred men escape and take refuge in the
wilderness. The victors burn all the cities of Benjamin and put all
their inhabitants to the sword.
After this vengeance, however, they regret the annihilation of a whole
tribe, and offer terms of peace to the six hundred survivors of the
Benjamites.
At the beginning and at the end of this narrative the Bible says that
in those days there was no king in Israel, and that every man did that
which was right in his own eyes. The author imagines that thus he can
explain the atrocities he has related; but there was no king in the
Greek cities either, and nothing of this kind took place there.
We may be astonished that a nation which “rose up as one man to punish
a crime and blot out a stain from Israel” should not be able to unite
to repulse a foreign foe. But this contrast is not enough to cast
doubt upon the Bible narrative; it is unhappily true that an age and
a country may witness at one and the same time the most merciless
reprisals in civil war and the most deplorable weakness in face of the
outside world. The Philistines had already subjugated the southern
tribes, Dan, Judah, and Zebulun; they were now menacing those of the
centre.
The Israelites remembered that after their coming forth out of Egypt
the Ark of the Covenant had led them to the conquest of Canaan, and
they thought that now again it would insure them the victory. The Ark
was at that time at Shiloh, under the charge of the aged Eli, who
combined the office of high priest with the title of Judge in Israel.
So the Ark was brought from thence in charge of the two sons of Eli.
But its presence was after all of no avail. “Israel was smitten, and
they fled every man to his tent: and there was a very great slaughter;
for there fell of Israel thirty thousand footmen. And the Ark of the
God was taken; and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were
slain.”
Such a blow could not but daunt the spirit of the nation. As a matter
of fact, the Philistines did not keep the trophy long; believing that
the presence of a hostile god would bring misfortune upon them, they
sent the Ark of the Covenant back to the Israelites. But to prevent
any attempt at rebellion, they forbade the vanquished to bear arms and
carried off all the smiths, so that no Israelite could mend his plough
unless he went to the Philistines.
The reawakening of the national sentiment took the form of a revival of
religious zeal, as it does among the Arabs of this day. The initiative
in this religious movement is attributed to Samuel, of the tribe of
Ephraim. From his childhood he had been dedicated to the service of
Jehovah, and he was early believed to receive direct communication from
God. He was therefore what was called a _nabi_ (inspired person). This
word is usually translated by “prophet,” which signifies soothsayer,
because such inspired persons were supposed to be gifted with the power
of foreseeing the future, and themselves believed that they possessed
it.
The distinction between priests and prophets is clearly marked, even
in the legend of Moses; for the lawgiver, the interpreter of Jehovah,
reserves the sacerdotal office, not for his own descendants, but for
those of his brother Aaron. This distinction is not peculiar to the
Hebrews; the Greeks also had soothsayers, who received inspiration from
a god, and priests, or rather sacristans, who were charged with the
maintenance of the temples and superintended the ceremonial of worship.
The Hebrew priesthood became by degree an exclusive caste; prophecy
which had its origin in personal inspiration, could not be hereditary,
for the spirit bloweth where it listeth. There were no priestesses
among the Israelites, though there were prophetesses, like Miriam
the sister of Moses, or Deborah. In the same way it was a woman, the
Pythia, who transmitted the oracles of Apollo at Delphi.
Samuel tried to make prophecy a permanent institution. After the death
of Eli he went back to his own home, Ramah, a city of Benjamin, and
there founded a college or convent of prophets (_najoth_). There were
similar schools at Bethel, Gilgal, and Jericho. The members of these
brotherhoods lived in community, for enthusiasm is contagious. Music
was the means employed to call down inspiration. With the prophets of
Israel, as with the Pythia of Delphi, the ecstasy was the result of a
morbid excitation, a kind of intoxication, an intermittent delirium;
when this phase of exaltation was over the prophet became an ordinary
man once more.
But the trait that distinguishes the religious institutions of the
Hebrews from anything analogous that may have existed at other times
and in other countries, is their exclusively national character and
their attitude of unvarying hostility towards the outer world. The
religion of Israel is intolerant because it is but the ideal form of a
fanatical patriotism. For this reason every awakening of public spirit
among the Hebrews manifests itself by a fresh outbreak of invective
against the religions of their neighbours.[d]
[Illustration: A PALACE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL]