JUDGES
The Book of Judges falls into three parts, namely, (1) Judg. i. 1-ii.
5, which intrudes, as has already been observed, between the close of
Joshua and its immediate sequel in Judges ii. 6 ff.; (2) Judg. ii.
6-xvi. 31, stories of a succession of champions and deliverers of
Israel in the centuries preceding the establishment of the kingdom;
(3) Judg. 17-18; 19-21, two additional stories laid in the time of the
Judges. In the Christian Bibles the story of Ruth, which also is said
to have occurred in the days of the Judges, follows.
The introduction, Judg. ii. 6-iii. 6, gives a summary of the whole
period: as soon as Joshua and his generation had passed away, the
Israelites fell away from the religion of Jehovah, and worshipped the
gods of Canaan; indignant at this defection, he allowed them to be
overrun and subdued by their enemies; when in their distress they
turned to their own God for help, he raised them up champions who
delivered them; but their amendment was brief, they presently relapsed
into heathenism; and so it went on from bad to worse. In
correspondence with this general scheme each epoch in the history is
opened in some such way as this: The Israelites again did what was
evil in the sight of Jehovah; he delivered them into the power of
such and such a tyrant or nation; when they cried unto him, he raised
up so and so as a deliverer. Thereupon follows the story of the
deliverance (see iii. 7-11; iii. 12-15; iv. 1 ff.). Sometimes, as in
vi. 1-10, x. 6-18, these preambles are expanded, but the purport
remains the same.
Another feature of the book is the systematic chronology in which the
frequency of the numbers twenty, forty, and eighty (forty years being
in the Old Testament equivalent to a generation) at once strikes the
attention; see iii. 11, 30; iv. 3; v. 31; viii. 28; xiii. 1; xv. 20
(xvi. 31). In several other instances the figures vary a little on
either side of twenty (eighteen, twenty-two, etc.). The duration of
the oppression is given in the introduction of the story; the period
of peace and prosperity which succeeded the deliverance, at the end;
see, e.g., iv. 3; v. 31. In the same way the life of Moses is divided
into three parts of forty years each; Eli judged Israel forty years;
David and Solomon each reigned forty years. It can hardly be doubted
that this chronology is artificial, and that the key to it is found in
1 Kings vi. 1, which reckons four hundred and eighty years (i.e.
twelve generations) from the exodus to the building of Solomon's
temple; but the actual figures in Judges and Samuel do not foot up to
this sum, and there are some gaps in the series, namely, the years of
Joshua after the conquest, the rule of Samuel, and that of Saul. The
symmetry of the scheme has been broken by intrusions or accidental
omissions in the later history of the book.
The author of the part of the Book of Judges we are now considering
(ii. 6-xvi. 31) sees in the history of these centuries a series of
"oppressions" by the native kings or by neighbouring peoples which the
Israelites brought upon themselves by neglecting their own God and
worshipping the deities of the Canaanites, the Baals and Astartes.
This is making history illustrate and enforce the prophetic teaching
of Hosea in the eighth century and Jeremiah in the seventh.
About the oppressions the author of Judges had clearly no information
independent of what he extracted from the stories of the deliverances
in his sources. In accordance with his theory of national sin and
national disaster he converted what are in the stories themselves
local conflicts, involving particular tribes or regions, into
oppressions and deliverances of all Israel; where the story tells of
raids by the Midianites, for example, the introduction gives them the
Amalekites and the Eastern Bedouins for allies, and extends the
devastation these wrought across the whole country to the
neighbourhood of Gaza. The exaggeration of the evils and the
emphasizing of the moral, as in other cases, invited later editors to
amplifications in the same spirit. Of the heroes who delivered Israel
from its oppressors the author made a succession of dictators
("judges"), who differed from the kings after them chiefly in that
their office was not hereditary, and to most of them he gives in his
chronology a long reign.
The setting of the history is thus unmistakably a product of the
so-called deuteronomist school of the sixth century which we have
already recognized in Joshua, and shall learn more of in Kings. The
stories themselves have, however, not been recast or extensively
retouched by deuteronomist hands; only at the beginning and the end,
where they had to be fitted into the frame, are such retouches common.
The author's source was a collection of stories of struggles in
different parts of the land, both east and west of the Jordan, with
the older settled populations or with invaders, and the exploits of
the leaders and champions of the Israelite tribes in these struggles.
It included Ehud's assassination of the king of Moab, the defeat of
Sisera and the Canaanite kings of the great Plain by Barak and
Deborah, the rout and pursuit of the Midianite invaders by Gideon, and
Jephthah's victory over the Ammonites in Gilead. The history of
Abimelech's kingdom of Shechem--sequel to the story of Gideon--which
is not accompanied by the author's moralizing comments, and the
stories of Samson, which have no more than a chronological
introduction and close, evidently belong to the same cycle of heroic
legends; as do also the stories of Micah's idol and the migration of
the Danites (cc. 17-18), and the older form of the story of the levite
and his concubine and the sanguinary vengeance on Benjamin in cc.
19-21. The two last-named stories were not comprised in the
deuteronomist Judges, whose doctrine they could not well be made to
exemplify. On the other hand we shall see that this work included Eli
and Samuel among the judges, and came to its natural conclusion with
the establishment of the kingdom, as it began with the death of
Joshua.
In several of the stories we recognize not merely such additions and
improvements as are commonly made to popular tales in the retelling,
but evidences of the combination of two versions of the same exploit
or accounts of other doings of the same hero. This is particularly
plain in the story of Gideon, where in Judg. vii. 24 f. (vs. 23 is a
harmonistic note), viii. 1-3, the business of the chiefs of Midian is
effectually finished, while in viii. 4 ff. it is all still to be done.
The phenomenon is entirely similar to those which we have had repeated
occasion to observe in the Pentateuch and Joshua and is to be
explained in the same way. The two versions of the story had been
united before the time of the author of the deuteronomist Judges, for
in the joints of the narrative no trace of his peculiar motives or
style occur.
The stories recount the exploits of local or tribal heroes, and
doubtless represent the traditions of the regions or tribes concerned;
with the union of the tribes under the kingdom, however, these
traditions became the common property of the nation, and more than one
writer made collections of them. As in the patriarchal legends, two
strands may be distinguished, which have such affinities with the
Judæan and the Israelite histories in the Hexateuch respectively that
they are naturally regarded as the continuations of J and E. To J may
be probably attributed the story of Ehud (disregarding the
introduction and conclusion), say Judg. iii. 16-28; in the story of
Gideon, viii. 4-60 (with small exceptions), and a part of cc. 6-7;
part of the history of Abimelech; and the adventures of Samson. A good
specimen of the other narrator is the beginning of the story of
Abimelech, with the fable of Jotham, Judg. ix. 1-25.
Here, again, additions have been made at various stages of the
transmission: to the sources independently, by the author who first
combined them, by the deuteronomist author, and in some places by
editors at a much later time. These hands cannot always be certainly
discriminated, but the main outlines of the literary history are clear
enough. A peculiar problem is presented by the so-called Minor Judges,
of whom nothing is told but the length of their rule and the sultanly
size of their families (Judg. x. 1-5; xii. 8-15). They seem to be
brought in only for the sake of the chronology, the difficulties of
which they do not diminish.
Except the curt notices that, the Israelites having again offended
their God, he gave them into the power of the Philistines for forty
years, and that Samson judged Israel for twenty years, it has already
been remarked that the stories of Samson have no such introduction and
conclusion as those which precede. The statement about the duration of
Samson's judgeship occurs both at the end of Judg. 15, and at the end
of c. 16, and it has been inferred from this that whoever put this
formal close in xv. 20 left out the adventure with Delilah and
Samson's tragic end (c. 16).
The stories of Micah and the migration of the Danites (Judg. 17-18)
and of the levite and his concubine and the decimation of Benjamin
(cc. 19-21) were not included in the deuteronomist book; but there is
no reason to doubt that they are of the same age as the other stories
in Judges, nor that they were found in one or more of the literary
collections of these stories. In cc. 17-18 the character of the
narrative in the main suggests the same source with the stories of
Samson (J), but there are some duplications and inconsistencies which
may be regarded as fragments of a closely parallel account of not
greatly inferior age. In cc. 19-21, again, the original story seems to
be from J (with perhaps traces of another version in c. 19), but in
the following account of the vengeance taken by all Israel on the
Benjamites, the older narrative has been united with a second, which
in its point of view, its language, and its unimaginable
exaggerations, is evidently akin to parts of the Books of Chronicles,
or to the youngest additions to the Pentateuch such as the vengeance
on the Midianites (Num. 31), and doubtless belongs to the most recent
stratum of the Old Testament.
Judges i. 1-ii. 5, as has been pointed out above, is foreign to the
connection in which it stands, and can only have been introduced there
by a late compiler or editor. It is a remnant of the most historical,
and presumably the oldest, account of the establishment of the tribes
in western Palestine. That, in completer form, it had originally a
place in the Judæan history (J) is unquestioned, and in that work it
may have been closely followed by stories of exploits such as those of
Ehud, Barak, Gideon. Inasmuch as it contradicted the theory of the
complete conquest and extermination of the Canaanites, it was left out
of the works which described the conquest in that way, but scraps of
it were subsequently introduced in Joshua, and finally the whole
restored in its present position. It is easily seen that the recurring
apostasies into Canaanite heathenism, as well as such stories as those
of Deborah and Barak and of Abimelech, assume that the Canaanites had
not been killed off to the last man, but, on the contrary, were very
much alive; and, in fact, the authors of Judg. ii. 20-iii. 4 feel the
necessity of explaining why God had allowed these heathen to survive.
The historical value of the stories in Judges is very great. However
large the element of legendary embellishment may be in them, they give
us a picture of the social and religious conditions in the period
preceding the founding of the kingdom which has an altogether
different reality from the narratives of the exodus and the
wanderings.
The trustworthiness of this picture is confirmed by one contemporary
monument of prime significance, the triumphal ode in Judg. 5, commonly
called the Song of Deborah, celebrating the victory of the Israelite
tribes over Sisera and his hosts and the death of the fleeing king by
the hand of a Bedouin woman in whose tent he sought refuge. The text
in the middle of the poem has suffered greatly, but the beginning and
end are better preserved and display not only a developed poetic art
but poetic inspiration of the highest kind. To the historian it has an
even greater interest for the light which it throws on the times: the
independence of the tribes on both sides of the Jordan, the subjection
of those along the Great Plain to the Canaanite kings with their
walled cities and their formidable chariotry, the summons to the
struggle in the name of religion and the varying response, the victory
of Jehovah over his foes. It should not be overlooked that Judah is
ignored; it was not counted among the tribes of Israel.
The moralizing improvement of the history in the Book of Judges is not
carried beyond the story of Jephthah, but neither at that point nor
after the stories of Samson is there anything to indicate that the
author is done. The introduction in Judg. ii. 11-iii. 6, a passage in
which both the deuteronomist historian and a predecessor in the same
way of thinking have had a hand, seems to require a correspondingly
solemn conclusion, and the example of Deuteronomy and Joshua suggests
that this would take the form of a hortatory address such as Moses and
Joshua deliver as their testament to the people. Exactly such a
discourse is found in 1 Sam. 12, where the aged Samuel, on the point
of laying down his office as judge, reminds the people's conscience of
the chief crises of the times of the judges in terms reminiscent of
the introduction to the Book of Judges and to the several oppressions,
upbraids them for their sin in desiring a king, and closes with
admonitions for the future. Here Samuel appears as a judge, the last
in the succession; as a judge he is represented also in 1 Sam. 7,
where he delivers his people from the Philistines in the great victory
at Ebenezer through the efficacy of his sacrifice and prayers--a
Gideon or a Jephthah went about the business in a more secular
fashion! Eli also is said to have judged Israel forty years. At some
stage in the history of the sources of Judges and Samuel, therefore,
Eli and Samuel were enumerated among the judges, and the close of the
period was marked by the address of Samuel which we now read in 1 Sam.
12. The contents and form of this address have their parallels in the
writings of the sixth century or the latter part of the seventh, and
to that time it is doubtless to be ascribed.