Manna Praxis

The Book of Judges: When There Was No King

Introduction

Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book

Joshua ended on a mountaintop of promise. The land had been given, the tribes had been settled, and an old leader had gathered the people and set the great choice before them: choose this day whom you will serve. Judges opens in the valley that follows, in the generations after Joshua and the elders who outlived him have died, and it tells what happened when the choosing had to be made again, and again, by children who had not seen the Jordan heap up or the walls of Jericho fall. It is one of the hardest, saddest, most honest books in all of Scripture. It is the story of a people slowly forgetting the God who saved them, sliding down the same worn path over and over: they do evil, they are handed over to their enemies, they groan under the weight of it, they cry out, and the LORD, moved by their misery, raises up a deliverer to rescue them. Then the deliverer dies, and the people turn again, and the whole sorrowful circle begins once more, each turn a little lower than the last. Through all of it runs a single steady wonder, the thing that keeps this dark book from despair: the God against whom they keep sinning keeps saving them anyway.

As you read, hold this: In the long dark of a people who keep forgetting their God, the LORD keeps raising up rescuers, and the whole book aches toward the true King who alone can save.

The book is named for the men and women the LORD raised up in those years. In Hebrew they are the שֹׁפְטִים (shophetim, shoh-feh-TEEM), a word we translate “judges,” though they were far more than magistrates settling disputes. They were rescuers, deliverers, champions stirred up and empowered by the Spirit of God to save His people from the enemies their own sin had brought upon them. Othniel and Ehud, Deborah and Gideon, Jephthah and Samson: an unlikely gallery of the brave and the broken, the faithful and the deeply flawed, each one a proof that Israel could not save itself and that its salvation, when it came, came down from God.

The name and what it means

Judges is the second of the books that follow the five books of Moses, and it takes up the story right where Joshua sets it down. But the mood could hardly be more different. Joshua was a book of fulfillment, of promises kept and an inheritance received. Judges is a book of unraveling, of an inheritance half-held and steadily squandered, of a people who possessed the land but could not keep their hold on the God who gave it.

The word “judges” tells you what kind of book this is. It is not a book about kings, for Israel has no king yet. It is a book about emergency rescues, about a God who will not finally abandon a people who will not finally stay faithful. The judges are not a dynasty and they do not build anything that lasts. Each one holds back the dark for a while, and then the dark closes in again. And that very pattern is the book’s argument. Something more than a series of rescuers is needed. Someone must come who does not die and leave the people to relapse, a King who will rule their hearts and not merely their enemies.

The world of the book

The land is settled now, but not secured. The Canaanite peoples Israel failed to drive out still live among them in their towns and high places, and their gods, the Baals and the Ashtoreths, are always near at hand, always inviting. This is the great pressure of the book: a people called to worship the LORD alone, living shoulder to shoulder with neighbors who worship many gods, and forever tempted to hedge their bets and bow to both.

It is a rough, unsettled age, “in those days there was no king in Israel,” the book keeps saying, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Roads were unsafe. Tribes acted alone, sometimes against one another. Oppressors pressed in from every side: Mesopotamians and Moabites, Canaanites with iron chariots, Midianite raiders who stripped the harvest bare, Ammonites and Philistines. Into that danger and disorder the LORD sent His deliverers, and around them the book gathers some of the most vivid and unforgettable scenes in the Old Testament.

The shape of the book

Judges moves in three unequal parts, and it helps to see them before we begin.

Our walk begins at the beginning, with the unfinished conquest and the naming of the cycle, and moves forward through the judges in order. You are welcome to sit with more than one chapter at a time. Only keep them in order, for this book is built as a descent, and each step down lands rightly only after you have felt the one above it.

A word about the hard things in this book

There is no honest way to read Judges without meeting its darkness, and it will not do to look away. So let us say plainly, before we begin, how we will handle it.

Judges is, in large part, a book about what sin does to a people, and it does not flinch from showing us. There is violence here, some of it shocking: assassinations, a concubine’s murder, a rash vow that costs a daughter’s life, a civil war that nearly wipes out a tribe. There is idolatry, treachery, lust, and cruelty. Much of what the book records, it does not commend. This is crucial to understand from the first page. Judges is largely a work of honest reporting, not of endorsement. When it tells us that a man did a terrible thing, it is very often showing us the wreckage of a world where “everyone did what was right in his own eyes,” holding the ruin up as a warning, not a pattern. We will name the hard things soberly and truthfully, without lurid detail, and we will not pretend the Bible approves of what it is in fact grieving.

We will also refuse two easy mistakes. We will not sand the darkness away, as though Scripture were too polite to tell us the truth about ourselves. And we will not wallow in it, as though the point were the horror. The point is always the same: this is what a people become when they forget their God, and this is how patiently, how relentlessly, that God keeps reaching down to save them anyway. Where the deliverers themselves are flawed, and they nearly all are, we will let their flaws stand honestly alongside the genuine faith God worked through them, because that mixture is the mercy of the book. God saves through broken people. He always has.

The one thread to carry

If you take one thing from this book, take the two sentences that frame its darkest final section, the diagnosis the whole book has been building toward.

Judges 21:25 (BSB) — “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

That is not a boast about freedom. It is an epitaph. A people with no king over them and no King within them will not rise into noble self-rule; they will sink into everyone’s private version of right, and the strong will devour the weak. Judges is the proof, written in blood and tears, that Israel needed what it did not yet have: a true and righteous King. And so the book, for all its darkness, leans forward. It leaves you longing for a King who will not die and abandon His people to relapse, who will rule their very hearts and lead them home. The New Testament tells us His name, and it is telling that the deliverers of this book, for all their failures, are remembered by grace among the faithful.

Hebrews 11:32 (BSB) — “And what more shall I say? Time will not allow me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets,”

Read Judges, then, with clear eyes and a steady heart. Feel the weight of the descent, and feel underneath it the everlasting patience of God, who kept raising up rescuers for a people who did not deserve one, until at last He raised up the Rescuer they, and we, most needed of all. In the long dark of a people who keep forgetting their God, the LORD keeps raising up deliverers, and the whole book aches toward the true King who alone can save.