Judges 17
With no judge in Israel, a man of Ephraim builds a private shrine, hires a wandering Levite as his household priest, and considers himself blessed by the Lord.
Summary
There is a man of the hill country of Ephraim whose name is Micah. He tells his mother: the eleven hundred pieces of silver that were taken from you, about which you uttered a curse — here is the silver, I took it. His mother says: blessed be my son by the Lord. She takes two hundred of the eleven hundred pieces of silver and gives them to the silversmith, who makes carved and metal images. They are in Micah's house. The man Micah has a shrine, and he makes an ephod and household gods, and ordains one of his sons to be his priest. In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
A young man from Bethlehem in Judah, of the family of Judah, who is a Levite, goes out to sojourn wherever he can find a place. He comes to the hill country of Ephraim, to the house of Micah, as he travels. Micah asks: where do you come from? From Bethlehem in Judah, the young man says, and I am going to sojourn wherever I may find a place. Micah says: stay with me and be a father and priest to me, and I will give you ten pieces of silver a year and a suit of clothes and your living. The Levite is content to stay with the man; the young man becomes to him like one of his sons. Micah ordains the Levite, and the young man becomes his priest, and is in the house of Micah. Then Micah said, Now I know that the Lord will prosper me, because I have a Levite as priest.
- 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.