Old Testament · History · book 7 of 66 · 2 min read
The book of Judges
A spiral, not a sequence: six cycles of collapse and rescue in which each deliverer is worse than the last and the book ends in atrocity.
“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes.”
At a glance
- Chapters
- 21
- Author
- Anonymous; part of the Deuteronomistic history
- Written
- Final form likely sixth century BC
- Written for
- Readers being shown what disorder costs
- Themes
- cycles, decline, deliverers, disorder
What it is about
Judges has a repeating structure that is easy to spot and easy to underestimate. The people abandon the covenant, are oppressed, cry out, are rescued by a judge, and have peace until the judge dies. Then it happens again.
What makes the book more than a loop is that the quality declines each time. Deborah is admirable. Gideon needs three signs and makes an idol at the end. Jephthah sacrifices his daughter. Samson is a disaster with strength attached. By the closing chapters the narrative has stopped commenting at all and simply reports a sequence of horrors, twice pausing to observe that there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.
It is the bleakest book in the Old Testament and it is constructed that way deliberately.
Where to start
Chapter 4, the Deborah and Barak cycle, which shows the pattern at its cleanest. Then chapter 6 for Gideon, where the decline becomes visible.
The chapters worth knowing
- Judges 4 — Deborah, the cycle at its cleanest and with its most capable leader.
- Judges 7 — Gideon's three hundred, and the signs he needed before he would go.
- Judges 19 — The chapter the lectionaries skip, and the one that explains the book's closing refrain.
What people get wrong about it
That the judges are heroes. The book is not holding them up as models; it is documenting a slide, and several of its central figures are presented as increasingly unfit for the role they occupy.
Questions
What is the cycle in the book of Judges?
Abandonment, oppression, crying out, rescue by a judge, peace, and then repetition. It occurs six times, and the deliverers get worse with each iteration.
Why does Judges end so badly?
Because the ending is the argument. The last chapters describe atrocities without comment except for the refrain that there was no king and everyone did what was right in their own eyes — which sets up the books that follow.