Judges 2
An angel announces the consequences of accommodation, and the editors step forward to explain the recurring pattern that will govern the entire book.
Summary
The chapter opens with the angel of the Lord travelling from Gilgal to Bochim and delivering an accusation before the assembled people of Israel. The Lord had commanded them to make no covenant with the inhabitants of the land and to break down their altars. They did not obey. Therefore the Lord declares he will not drive out the inhabitants before them — those nations will become snares and their gods a trap. The people weep and sacrifice at Bochim. Then the narrative notes the death of Joshua at the age of one hundred and ten, his burial on his own inheritance in the hill country of Ephraim, and the service that the people gave the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great work the Lord had done for Israel.
Then the generation that knew those things died, and another generation arose who did not know the Lord or the work he had done. The editors articulate the cycle explicitly: the people did evil, served the Baals, abandoned the Lord, followed other gods, and the Lord's anger burned. He gave them into the hand of plunderers who plundered them. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil. Yet whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, he was with the judge and saved them from their enemies all the days of the judge. And when the judge died, they would relapse and behave worse than their ancestors. The chapter closes with the Lord's explanation: the nations Joshua did not drive out will be left to test Israel, to teach war to those who had not known it.
- 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.