The book of Joshua closes with Israel having taken possession of the land of Canaan, and throughout that book, we saw the sweeping military success Israel experienced. However, when we flip the page to the book of Judges, we get quite a different picture.
The book of Joshua ends with Joshua gathering the people of Israel together, and laying out God’s law before them and asking Israel to commit to following the Lord God alone. Joshua reminds the people that if they would stray from serving God, or if they follow the gods of the Canaanites, then the Lord will bring disaster on them. In response, the Israelites make a solemn promise that they would serve the Lord only and obey him. In this way, Joshua ends with Israel having promised that they would indeed be the holy, set apart people of God. They would, in fact, fulfill their role in being a blessing to all the nations around them.
As we flip the page into the book of Judges, things turn for the worse. The book itself is structured with a double introduction, the record of Israel’s increasingly useless judges in the middle, and a shocking conclusion.
The first part of the double introduction of the book is a historical introduction, and is found in chapter one. It shows us that the sweeping military success of Joshua wasn't so sweeping after all. In fact, Israel had problems driving out various tribes in Canaan. For example, even though the Lord was with them, the people of Judah could not drive out the people living in the plains because their chariots were too strong. Other tribes also failed to drive out the people living in their sections of the promised land and ended up living among the Canaanites.
The second part of the double introduction is a theological introduction which gives us the reason why Israel was not fully successful. Here we read that the Angel of the Lord appears to Israel and tells Israel that they have disobeyed the Lord, and so the people of the land of Canaan will become a snare for Israel. Their idols will take Israel away from the Lord, and in chapter two, we see that once Joshua’s generation dies out, the following generation doesn't know the Lord. They worship the gods of the people around them. Instead of being a light to the nations and a blessing to those around them, the holy set-apart people of Israel end up being exactly like the nations around them. As a result of Israel’s apostasy, the Lord allows them to be conquered by the people around them.
The middle of the book details a descending spiral of apostasy among Israel. Each time Israel is oppressed by one of the nations around them, Israel remembers the Lord and cries out to him. The Lord then raises up a deliverer, called a judge, to save Israel from her enemies. Once this happens, Israel worships the Lord for a while but invariably returns to worshiping other gods. However, the cycle is actually a downward spiral in that each of the judges themselves becomes a progressively worse character. The first judge is Othniel, of whom Judges has nothing bad to say. Next, you have Ehud, who was left-handed, and he delivers Israel by being a sneaky assassin – hardly the most glorious way of delivering people. They are followed by Deborah and Barak. Barak was supposed to be the judge, but he was too scared to go alone, and so Deborah has to come along to deliver Israel. In the end, the glory goes to her.
Gideon follows, and while it is true that he finally delivered Israel with only 300 men as the Sunday school stories teach us, he was a coward hiding from the Midianites. It took a number of miracles for the Lord to convince him that he was the one to deliver Israel. Hardly the actions of the hero of faith we often make Gideon out to be.
It continues through Tola, Jair, and Jephthah. Jephthah is worth pausing at because it shows us how far Israel had fallen. Jephthah was the son of a prostitute, but he was a mighty warrior. He makes a promise to the Lord that if God would give him victory over the Ammonites, he would offer a thanksgiving sacrifice to the Lord. This would be whomever, or whatever exits his house first when he comes home. Ultimately, Jephthah does defeat the Ammonites, and his daughter comes to meet him. Sad though he was, he sacrificed his daughter to the Lord as a thanksgiving offering. This is all the more shocking when we remember that one of the reasons God instructed Israel to wipe out the Canaanites was because they offered their children in sacrifice to the gods of their land. Now Israel’s leader had committed the very same atrocity.
The downward spiral of judges finds its worst judge in Samson. Most know Samson as the man who had long hair and when his hair was cut off magically lost his strength. But Samson slept around, killed people in anger, married a Philistine who he knew wanted to steal his strength. Ultimately, he gave in to a nagging wife, despite the vow he had made to the Lord, and he was finally captured and blinded. Ultimately, Samson sacrifices himself and kills the entire ruling class of the Philistines with one blow.
The middle section of the book concludes with the story of a man named Micah who set up a kind of false temple in his house and hired himself a private priest. The author of Judges throws in a comment in the middle of this story, “In those days Israel had no king, everyone did as they saw fit.” This transitions us from the middle section to the double conclusion.
The book ends with a shocking conclusion. The first section of the double conclusion is a theological one. We find this in chapter 19, which is one of the darkest and most chilling chapters in the Old Testament. It tells the story of a Levite and his concubine. She runs away from the Levite and goes back to her father’s house in Bethlehem. After a number of months, the Levite decides to go and get her back. He did not really care for her, as is evident by the fact that it took him months before he bothered to do something about the situation.
After a number of delays, he finally leaves with his concubine, but because they left later than expected, they now need somewhere to stay the night. They choose to stay in Gibeah, an Israelite town, and they go to wait in the town square for someone to invite them in. An old man finally invites them in because it is not safe overnight in the square. Soon a party of wicked men surround the house and demand that the Levite be sent out so they could rape him. This is a direct parallel to what happened to Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah (see Genesis 19).
The Levite sends out his concubine, and she is raped and abused all through the night and ultimately collapses at the door of the house where the Levite was staying. As the Levite leaves, he coldly tells the woman to get up so they could leave, but she has died. To add insult to injury, when he gets home, he cuts up her body, limb by limb and sends the pieces to the rest of Israel in order to get them enraged enough for him to take revenge on the Gibeanites for his lost property.
The book ends with that same refrain: In those days, Israel had no king, and everyone did as they saw fit.
Now, what does this all mean in the overarching story? Judges forces us to do a reality check. The point of the book is this: when Israel has no king, they turn very quickly into Sodom and Gomorrah. The Levite, who was from the very priestly tribe of Israel, has become one of the worst people in scripture. The sin which so offended God that he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah has now become commonplace in Israel, the people who were supposed to be holy and set aside to show the nations the blessing of being God’s people. The reason for this is that human hearts are so wicked and so corrupt that when we are left to our own devices, this is who we become. Without a divine king to rule us, we are no better than that Levite.
Israel needed a king, and a king was coming. But more on that, next time…