a. Introduction to the period (2:6–3:6)
2. Israel in the period of the Judges (2:6–16:31)
a. Introduction to the period (2:6–3:6)
2:6–10. The death of Joshua. These verses are paralleled in Joshua 24:28–31, strengthening the view noted in the Introduction that 1:1–2:5 comes from a separate source but was possibly introduced by the original editor to provide the background for the main part of his book. In Joshua the section concludes the book and the account of the Conquest, here it really introduces the period of the judges, and the minor differences are easily accounted for when this is borne in mind. For instance, in verse 7 the adjective great qualifies the work of the Lord, but this is not found in Joshua 24:31. The addition is significant, for the apostasy of the period of the judges is all the more reprehensible when set against the great work of the Lord. Great privileges do involve great responsibilities.
Verse 6 helps us to understand the nature of the Conquest. The united campaigns under Joshua’s leadership had broken the back of the Canaanite resistance, but much of the local campaigning was left to the individual tribes. So after the covenant-renewal ceremony at Shechem the tribes, having been dismissed by Joshua, set about completing the occupation of their own allotted territory. Joshua 23, dating from the period when ‘Joshua was old and well advanced in years’, i.e. from approximately the same time as chapter 24, makes it clear that the tribes had a considerable amount of hard fighting to do before the land could properly be said to be conquered. Some of the problems associated with the Conquest are eased when it is borne in mind that there were these two phases.
The influence of Joshua is revealed in Israel’s loyalty to the Lord during his lifetime and that of the elders who were associated with him. In the biblical records stress is laid upon the soldierly qualities and exploits of Joshua. Underlying these, however, there was obviously a deep loyalty to the Lord and an integrity of conduct akin to that of his great predecessor, Moses. Joshua, and true men of God of all the ages, are the salt of the earth, staying corruption and ensuring purity. But each generation must enter into its own living religious experience; it cannot continue in the spiritual strength of its past heroes. It is clear that paganism was never very far from the surface during this early period of Israel’s history and, when Joshua and his close contemporaries died, the new generation shared neither their faith nor their recollections of the great deliverance wrought for them by the Lord (2:10).
In the Introduction 30 years was suggested for the period of Joshua, and the elders who survived him. This must be regarded as a minimum, since Joshua, 110 years old at his death, was a young man at the time of the Exodus (cf. Exod. 33:11). He is described here as the servant of the Lord (8), a designation frequently used of Moses and also applied to other outstanding leaders in Israel’s history, such as David and the prophets. It implies a vocation to a special mission. There is no higher and more honoured position than that of a faithful servant of the Lord (cf. Heb 3:5). Timnath-heres (9) should be read as ‘Timnath-serah’, as in Joshua 19:50; 24:30; a scribe has obviously reversed the consonants. The site of Joshua’s burial has been fairly certainly identified as the modern Tibneh, 10 miles north-west of Bethel.
2:11–19. God’s judgment on Israel’s apostasy. The history of almost two centuries is here summarized, indicating the principles behind the Lord’s dealings with Israel. During this period there was a recurring cycle of four phases: apostasy, servitude, supplication and deliverance. It is this pattern which is illustrated in the succeeding chapters. The nation forsook the Lord, a crime which involved disloyalty to their forefathers and a wilful overlooking of the mighty works of the Lord on their behalf, especially the deliverance from Egypt. All the evidence of their traditions ought to have ensured their faithfulness, but instead they turned to the gods of the people into whose midst they had come, whose religion seemed more directly concerned with their own prosperity.
13. Baal, the son of El in the Canaanite pantheon, was the god of the storm and the rains and therefore the controller of vegetation. He was the great active god, El being a somewhat nebulous figure, and Baal worship was widely diffused in the Ancient Near East. Several local variants are noted in the Old Testament, for example Baal-berith (Judg. 9:4), Baal-peor (Num. 25:3), Baal-gad (Josh. 11:17), and Baal-zebub, or more probably Baal-zebul (2 Kgs 1:2). Jezebel introduced into Israel the worship of Baal-melqart, the Phoenician variety. Hadad was the name of the Syrian counterpart of the Canaanite Baal. It is for this reason that the Old Testament writers, somewhat contemptuously, lump the various forms together as Baalim, the plural form. The fact that Baalim may also mean ‘husbands’, ‘owners’ or ‘lords’ gives point to the metaphor of adultery (cf. verse 17) so frequently employed by the prophets (e.g. Hos. 2:1ff.; 3:1ff; Jer. 3:6ff., etc.).
Ashtaroth, the consort of Baal, is the plural form of Astarte, the goddess of war and fertility, who was worshipped as Ishtar in Babylonia and as Anath in North Syria. In the Ugaritic texts Anath, often styled as ‘the Virgin’, is the sister of Baal and the great active goddess. There is a certain fluidity in the interrelationships of the nature gods of the Fertile Crescent. The religion of these fertility gods was accompanied by all kinds of lascivious practices, especially in Canaan, where it was found in a degraded form which even incorporated child sacrifice.
14, 15. Israel’s failure to exterminate the Canaanites automatically allowed for the continued worship of the Canaanite gods. Thus the nation which had defeated the inhabitants of the land in battle succumbed to the enervating influences of the gods of the land. The historian, however, was keenly aware that the gods of the land had no existence except in the imaginations of their worshippers. Only one god was God and his sovereign displeasure at Israel’s infidelity was shown in the way he used the surrounding nations as a rod of chastisement to his own people. Israel was harried, enslaved and enfeebled, and, through the operation of the law of cause and effect (the sapping of its spiritual strength by the sensuous Baal cult being accompanied by a corresponding decline in its moral and physical vitality), the nation was brought into deep distress. Their forsaking of the Lord had one further consequence. Since the bond which united the nation was primarily a religious one, centred in the covenant and expressed in worship at the amphictyonic shrine, the weakening of the bond led to a weakening of their unity and they became disorganized and divided.
16. No express mention is made here that in their distress the Israelites turned to the God whom they had forsaken, but the regularity with which this is noted subsequently (3:9, etc.) allows us to assume it here. When the nation did cry to the Lord he, in his mercy and longsuffering, raised up judges to save them from their oppressors. We have already observed in the Introduction1 that these men were conceived to have been divinely endowed with supernatural powers, which they manifested in delivering the people and in their subsequent rule. But even their influence was short-lived. The Israelites had short memories and when the immediate crisis was over they forgot both their earlier misery and the state of temporary repentance which it had induced. Their ‘turning to the Lord’ was thus revealed as a superficial expedient. It may be that we can recall something similar in our own lifetime, either in the life of our nation (witness the days of national prayer during the world wars of this century) or, more pertinently, in our own experience. How easy it is to use Almighty God as a kind of emergency, crash-aid service! Gratitude for deliverance, both for Israel of old and the spiritual Israel of today, ought to be expressed in lifelong dedication (cf. Rom. 12:1ff.).
17. Imperfect obedience was shown even during the lifetime of the judges themselves, a process which is described as spiritual adultery, they went a whoring after other gods (AV, RV), or they played the harlot after other gods (RSV). Israel, called to be the bride of the Lord, had forsaken him to follow other lovers, i.e. the fertility gods of Canaan. This graphic imagery of the violated covenant of marriage provides the background for the entire book of the eighth-century prophet to Israel, Hosea, and is also applied by Jeremiah to the equally desperate situation in Judah a century and a half later (Jer. 3:1ff.).
19. A progressive deterioration is revealed, each successive cycle being characterized by a greater descent into apostasy and corruption, and by a more superficial repentance, than the one preceding. This process is consistent with our modern understanding of the psychology of man. Terminology changes with the passing of the years, but the profound insights into human nature which the Old Testament gives us cannot be denied. The voice of conscience can become dulled by successive acts of sin, and repentance can become more and more superficial until, ensnared in the character formed by a multitude of thoughts and actions, a miracle is needed to produce a genuine repentance and a seeking of the Lord with the whole heart.
2:20–23. The result of continued apostasy. Israel’s obligation within the Sinaitic covenant was to give loyalty and unswerving obedience to the Lord who had wrought such mighty works for them. This could not be considered onerous in view of their unique relationship to their Saviour-God (Deut. 4:32–40), who had kept his side of the compact in fulfilling the promise made to the patriarchs concerning the Promised Land. Israel’s disobedience, however, was followed inevitably by the divine chastisement. To the modern reader it seems somewhat incongruous that God should leave the foreign elements within Israel’s borders as a punishment for apostasy, and to test the future faithfulness of the nation, when the very reason for the nation’s defection is attributed to the failure to drive out this alien population.
There was no such difficulty to the Israelite historian, whose view of the Lord’s sovereignty ruled out all secondary causes, everything being directly attributable to his overruling will. In the changed situation caused by Israel’s disobedience this sovereignty was still manifested: the Canaanites were allowed to remain so that the loyalty of the covenant-people might be adequately tested. It was a searching examination which the nation, in the main, failed to pass.
3:1–6. Israel and her neighbours. Another supplementary reason for the presence of a considerable alien element is introduced here. It was not only a punishment, or an opportunity to test the nation’s fidelity; it was also to provide them with experience in the art of warfare. These reasons must not be regarded as contradictory, for it was the manifold result, related directly to the Lord, which occupied the attention of the historian, rather than a single, all-embracing purpose. Israel was to be in a hostile environment for the major part of her history, due either to the pressures of the petty kingdoms which surrounded her or, at a later stage, due to her strategic position between the successive world-powers of Assyria, Babylonia, Persia and Greece on the one hand and Egypt on the other hand. Military prowess was a necessary accomplishment, humanly speaking, if she was to survive. And yet the attainment of this prowess only rarely obscured the fact that the victory was not the result of their own might but of the Lord’s working for them (e.g. 2 Sam. 8:6, 14).
It is likely that the original historian included the lists of verses 3 and 5. The former lists four nations compared with the latter’s six, the Canaanites and Hivites being common to both, suggesting that the two sources were available to the writer who made no attempt at conflation. The Philistines were established in their five-city state of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath. Their rulers are always referred to by the designation seren (lord), a word which is probably connected with the Greek koiranos or tyrannos, the tyrant familiar in Greek classical history. The Aegean ancestry of the Philistines has already been noted.2 Canaanites sometimes designates all the original inhabitants of the land, sometimes those who dwelt in the valleys and coastal areas. The Sidonians were the Canaanite inhabitants of the area around the port of Sidon. These were to be known as the Phoenicians in a later age. Sidon at this early date was of greater importance than Tyre. The Hivites are usually identified with the Horites (Gen. 36:2; cf. 36:20, 29) who established the flourishing kingdom of Mitanni in Upper Mesopotamia in the middle of the second millennium BC and encroached south-westwards into the Hermon and Lebanon ranges, and as far as the tetrapolis of the Gibeonites north-west of Jerusalem (Josh. 9:7, 17). Two suggestions have been made regarding the entering in of Hamath (AV, RV). It could mean either the point of access between the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon ranges to the great Syrian valley in which Hamath stands, or, as contemporary scholarship suggests, ‘Labo of Hamath’, the modern Lebweh, 14 miles north-north-east of Baalbek. A less likely identification links the Hivites with the Hebrew word for ‘tent village’ and regards them as a rural community. The Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites and Jebusites have been described in the exegesis of 1:4, 21, 26, 34. Surrounded by all these diverse elements Israel was unable to maintain her purity of race and religion; instead of remaining faithful to the Lord there was a facile acceptance of the nature gods of the land, and the corrupt practices associated with them. Israel’s resolutions and protestations of loyalty to her covenant-God disappeared swiftly when confronted with the forces of expediency and sensual attraction.