What Was the Period of the Judges? (7 of 15)

Roughly three hundred years with no king, no capital, and no central authority, in which the same disaster happens over and over.

The book is also structured as a decline. The deliverers get worse as it goes.

What Is the Judges Cycle?

Four stages, repeating, and the text states it explicitly in Judg 2.

Israel does evil and serves other gods. God hands them over to an oppressor. They cry out. God raises a deliverer, and there is peace for a period. Then the deliverer dies and it begins again.

Sin, servitude, supplication, salvation. The pattern is announced in chapter two and then demonstrated a dozen times.

What is worth noticing is that the crying out is not described as repentance. They cry out because of the oppression, not because they have concluded they were wrong, and God responds anyway.

What Does a Judge Actually Do?

Deliver rather than adjudicate.

The word covers legal judgment and Deborah does hold court, but the primary function in the book is military and charismatic. These are people raised up for a crisis, usually to lead a tribal coalition against an oppressor, and their authority is local and temporary.

There is no succession. Each one dies and the office does not pass on, which is precisely why the cycle repeats.

They also did not rule one after another over the whole nation. The judgeships were regional and they overlapped. No judge before Samuel led all twelve tribes. Barak and Shamgar overlap. The Ammonite and Philistine oppressions overlap. Jephthah operates in Gilead while Samson operates in Dan and Eli and Samuel work the centre.

That matters for reading the book. The numbers do not add up into a single national timeline because they were never a single national timeline.

Who Were the Early Judges?

Othniel, then Ehud, then Shamgar, in a sequence that gets less conventional as it goes.

Othniel is the model case, presented briefly and without complication.

Ehud is the one people remember. Judg 3:12-30. He is left-handed, which lets him conceal a short double-edged sword on his right thigh where a search would not look. He brings tribute to Eglon of Moab, requests a private word, and kills him in his upper chamber.

The account is unusually graphic and it is also, in places, comic at Eglon’s expense. Hebrew narrative is not squeamish and it is not solemn about Israel’s enemies.

Shamgar gets one verse and an oxgoad.

Who Were Deborah and Jael?

A prophet who was already leading, and the woman who ended the battle.

Judg 4-5. Deborah is holding court under a palm and summons Barak, telling him God has commanded him to take ten thousand men against Sisera.

Barak’s answer is conditional: if you go with me, I will go; if not, I will not. Deborah agrees and adds that because of the way he is going about it, the honour will not be his, because the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman.

Sisera flees on foot to the tent of Jael, who gives him milk, covers him, and drives a tent peg through his temple while he sleeps.

Judg 5 is the song, and it is among the oldest Hebrew poetry preserved. It ends with an extraordinary scene of Sisera’s mother watching at the window, wondering why his chariot is delayed, and her attendants suggesting the men are dividing the spoil.

The poet gives the enemy’s mother that moment, knowing what the reader knows. It is a piece of narrative cruelty and craft at the same time.

What Is the Point of Gideon’s Three Hundred?

That the size of the force was the problem.

Judg 7. Gideon has thirty-two thousand men facing a vastly larger Midianite coalition. God says there are too many, in case Israel boasts that its own strength saved them.

Anyone afraid is sent home, and twenty-two thousand leave. Still too many. The remainder are tested at the water and three hundred are kept.

The attack is trumpets, jars, and torches at night, and the enemy camp turns on itself.

Gideon’s own story is less flattering than the battle. He asks for repeated signs before acting, and afterward he makes an ephod from the plunder that becomes an object of worship and a snare to his family. His son Abimelech then murders seventy of his brothers to seize power.

The deliverer’s legacy is a idolatrous object and a fratricide.

Was Samson a Hero?

He is a judge, and the book does not present him as admirable.

Judg 13-16. Set apart from birth as a Nazirite, with a vow that included not cutting his hair, avoiding wine, and avoiding contact with the dead.

He violates each of those, and his story is a sequence of personal grievances that God uses. He touches a lion’s carcass and takes honey from it. He marries and abandons a Philistine woman. He kills a thousand with a donkey’s jawbone, in revenge rather than in deliverance. He goes to a prostitute at Gaza.

Delilah asks him three times how he can be subdued, he lies three times while she demonstrably tries each answer, and then he tells her the truth anyway. That is not a man deceived. That is a man who watched the trap being set and stepped into it.

He is blinded, bound, and set to grinding, and his last act brings down the temple of Dagon on himself and on the assembled Philistines.

Heb 11 lists him among the faithful, which is its own commentary on how that chapter works.

Where Does Ruth Fit?

In the same period, and as a deliberate contrast.

The book opens in the days when the judges ruled. A famine, a family leaving Bethlehem for Moab, three deaths, and Naomi returning empty with a Moabite daughter-in-law who will not leave.

Ruth’s declaration to Naomi, that where she goes she will go and her people will be her people and her God her God, is a covenant statement made by a foreign woman to a bitter widow with nothing to offer.

Boaz acts as kinsman-redeemer, and the book ends with a genealogy running to David.

Set beside Judges, the contrast is the whole point. The same chaotic period produces both, and the line of the coming king runs through the quiet story rather than through any of the deliverers.

How Does Judges End?

With two atrocities and a refrain.

The last five chapters are not about a judge at all. They contain the account of Micah’s idols and the migration of Dan, and then the Levite’s concubine at Gibeah and the near-destruction of Benjamin in the civil war that follows.

That final episode is among the worst material in Scripture and it is not told approvingly.

The refrain that runs through the closing chapters, and closes the book, is this: in those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.

It functions as an inclusio, opening and closing the final section, and it is doing more than advertising for a monarchy. Judg 17 to 21 shows people who need no king in order to do as they please, and the phrase extends to ordinary Israelites the high-handedness the later kings would show.

Block reads the missing king as God. Israel’s identity in Deuteronomy is as Yahweh’s kingdom, and the refrain is saying the nation recognised no one at all as king, not even him.

The other refrain running through the book supports that. The Israelites did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord, and the Israelites did what was right in their own eyes, are two descriptions of the same condition.

That is the book’s own diagnosis and it sets up everything that follows in Samuel.

Part of a series following the Old Testament timeline.

Footnotes2

1. That the crying out in the cycle is never described as repentance is worth dwelling on. The text says they cried out because of their oppressors. God responds to distress rather than to contrition, repeatedly, across the whole book.
2. The declining quality of the deliverers is a structural argument and the decline runs on several tracks at once. In scope, from national deliverance to personal grievance. In ethics, from admirable to questionable to indefensible. And in the framework itself, which grows murkier as the book proceeds until it stops working. Othniel is presented without complication, Gideon leaves an idol behind, Jephthah makes a vow that costs his daughter, and Samson is a disaster who happens to be strong.

J. Cheryl Exum reads the breakdown of the pattern as deliberate rather than as editorial failure, arguing that the instability of the text mirrors the instability of the situation. The frame deconstructs because what it was framing has come apart.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Judg 2-21, especially 2:11-19, 3:12-30, 4-5, 7, 13-16, and 21:25, along with Ruth 1-4 and Heb 11:32.

John H. Walton, Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel (Zondervan, 2009), 99. Supports the overlapping and regional character of the judgeships.

Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth, New American Commentary (Broadman & Holman, 1999), 6:475-476. Supports the reading of the no-king refrain as pointing at a divine king and the inclusio structure of the closing chapters.

W. Gary Philips, Judges, Ruth, Holman Old Testament Commentary (Holman Reference, 2004), 5:10. Supports the account of decline across scope, ethics and structure.

J. Cheryl Exum, cited in Mercedes L. García Bachmann, Judges, Wisdom Commentary (Liturgical Press, 2018), 7:xliv. Supports the reading of the framework's breakdown as intentional dissolution rather than editorial failure.

Dennis T. Olson, "The Book of Judges," in New Interpreter's Bible (Abingdon, 1994-2004), 2:864. Supports the equivalence of the two refrains.

Where the sourcing stops: the chronology of the judges period is difficult, since the stated periods of oppression and rest may overlap regionally rather than run consecutively, and total figures vary between reconstructions.