Judges 10
Two minor judges are listed, then Israel's apostasy deepens and the Ammonites oppress them for eighteen years; the Lord refuses to deliver a people who keep forgetting him.
Summary
After Abimelech, Tola son of Puah, of the tribe of Issachar, rises to save Israel and judges for twenty-three years, then dies and is buried at Shamir. After him, Jair the Gileadite judges Israel twenty-two years. He had thirty sons who rode thirty donkeys and had thirty cities in Gilead, called Havvoth-jair. He dies and is buried at Kamon. Then the people of Israel again do evil in the sight of the Lord and serve the Baals and Ashtaroth, the gods of Syria, Sidon, Moab, the Ammonites, and the Philistines — they forsake the Lord and do not serve him. The Lord's anger burns and he sells them into the hand of the Philistines and Ammonites. The Ammonites cross the Jordan to fight against Judah, Benjamin, and Ephraim, and Israel is severely distressed.
The Israelites cry out to the Lord: we have sinned against you, we have forsaken our God and served the Baals. The Lord's answer is unlike the previous deliverances. He recites what he has already done — he delivered them from Egypt, the Amorites, the Ammonites, the Philistines, the Sidonians, the Amalekites, the Maonites — and still they left him and served other gods. I will save you no more. Go and cry out to the gods you have chosen; let them save you in the time of your distress. Israel dispenses with the foreign gods and serves the Lord. The Lord becomes impatient over the misery of Israel. The people gather at Mizpah in Gilead. The Ammonite commanders camp in Gilead. The elders of Gilead ask: who is the man who will begin to fight against the Ammonites? He shall be head over all the inhabitants of Gilead. The next chapter gives the answer.
- Judges 1Chapter 1 functions as a historiographical preface to the whole book, cataloguing the success or failure of each tribe to dispossess the Canaanites after Joshua's death.
- Judges 2Chapter 2 is the hermeneutical key to Judges.
- Judges 3Chapter 3 introduces the judge cycle in action for the first time.
- Judges 4Chapter 4 is the prose account of the same events that chapter 5 will sing.
- Judges 5The Song of Deborah in chapter 5 is widely considered one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew poetry in the entire Bible, possibly dating to the twelfth century BCE, nearly contemporaneous with the events it describes.
- Judges 6Chapter 6 is the opening of the Gideon narrative, which runs through chapter 8 and is the longest major-judge story in the book.
- Judges 7Chapter 7 is the central action of the Gideon narrative and one of the most memorable military scenes in the book.
- Judges 8Chapter 8 is the darkest portion of the Gideon narrative.
- Judges 9Chapter 9 is the longest chapter in Judges and the only episode in the book devoted to an anti-judge — a man who makes himself king by violence and holds it for exactly three years.
- Judges 10Chapter 10 performs two functions.
- Judges 11Chapter 11 is one of the most morally complex chapters in the Hebrew Bible.
- Judges 12Chapter 12 begins with a conflict that is structurally parallel to the Ephraimite quarrel after Gideon's battle in chapter 8, but this time Jephthah's response is not diplomacy — it is war.
- Judges 13Chapter 13 is the birth narrative of Samson, and it is the most elaborate annunciation scene in Judges.
- Judges 14Chapter 14 introduces the adult Samson and establishes the pattern that will govern the rest of his narrative: a desire for a Philistine woman, a display of supernatural strength, a riddle or trap, betrayal by intimacy.
- Judges 15Chapter 15 escalates the private vendetta between Samson and the Philistines into a series of increasingly spectacular acts of violence.
- Judges 16Chapter 16 is the climax and conclusion of the Samson narrative.
- Judges 17Chapter 17 begins the two-part appendix with which Judges closes, and the shift in tone is immediate.
- Judges 18Chapter 18 is the first of the book's two closing appendices.
- Judges 19Chapter 19 is one of the most disturbing chapters in the Hebrew Bible, and the text makes no attempt to soften it.
- Judges 20Chapter 20 is the longest military account in Judges and is remarkable for what it shows about what has gone wrong with Israel as a political and moral community.
- Judges 21Chapter 21 closes the book and extends the moral horror of chapter 19-20 in a different register: the horror of improvised solutions to self-inflicted catastrophe.