Judges 12
Ephraim quarrels with Jephthah over not being called to battle; the resulting conflict produces the famous shibboleth password test. Three minor judges follow.
Summary
The men of Ephraim muster and cross northward to Zaphon, confronting Jephthah: why did you cross over to fight the Ammonites and did not call us to go with you? We will burn your house over you with fire. Jephthah replies: I and my people had a great dispute with the Ammonites, and when I called you, you did not save me from their hand. When I saw that you were not going to help, I took my life in my hand and crossed over against the Ammonites, and the Lord gave them into my hand. Why then have you come up to me this day to fight against me? Jephthah gathers the men of Gilead and fights Ephraim. Gilead defeats Ephraim, and the Gileadites capture the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. When any fugitive of Ephraim says, let me go over, the men of Gilead say to him: are you an Ephraimite? If he says no, they say: say shibboleth. If he says sibboleth, for he could not pronounce it right, they seize him and kill him at the fords. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fall.
Jephthah judges Israel for six years and dies, buried in the cities of Gilead. After him Ibzan of Bethlehem judges Israel. He has thirty sons and thirty daughters; he sends his daughters outside and brings in thirty daughters from outside for his sons. He judges seven years and dies. After him Elon the Zebulunite judges Israel for ten years and dies. After him Abdon son of Hillel the Pirathonite judges Israel. He has forty sons and thirty grandsons who ride on seventy donkeys. He judges Israel eight years, dies, and is buried at Pirathon in the hill country of the Amalekites. The list of minor judges now closes, and the book shifts to its longest single narrative.
- 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.