No central government existed in this confederation. So, in times of crisis or war, the people were led by ad hoc chieftains known as judges. In the Book of Judges, a cyclical pattern is given to show the need for the various judges. These needs included times of a leaderless state of the Israelite people, hardship, and the crying out to the Lord for rescue.
The judges were the successive individuals, each from a different tribe of Israel, chosen by God to rescue the people from their enemies and establish justice and the practice of the Torah amongst the Hebrews. In accordance with the needs of the time, their functions were primarily martial and judicial. However, they were really not comparable to a king. All Biblical Judges performed judicial duties and the institute of Judges was separated from the institute of King.
Their main task was to obtain justice for the tribes of Israel in the face of their enemies, annihilate or drive out their oppressors, and bring salvation, rest and peace to the land. Very little is said about how these judges led the nation once they had delivered it. There are two notable judges in the Bible. The first was a great field commander and counselor. Now there are a few rare, bright moments.
Deborah, in Chapters , is awesome. Gideon also has some glimmers of faith and courage, especially when he decides to enter a battle armed with empty clay pots and a torch!
But his angry streak gets the best of him in the end, and he makes a ritual object that the Israelites end up worshipping after his death. People in the ancient world seem to have been far more comfortable telling long stories about deeply flawed people who ruin their lives than we are. This is not Hollywood style storytelling, if you see what I mean. These stories give us a close study of how a person slowly starts making choices of moral compromise that lead to greater and greater consequences.
Almost no one starts out in life planning on self-ruin. So how does one reach a place where destructive life choices become habit? Tragic stories reflect how life actually works.
These kinds of stories stand as important warnings, allowing us to experience catastrophe through literature instead of real life. You walk away from tragic stories a bit more sober-minded, evaluating your own life habits and values. This prologue actually plays an even more specific role. The author provides the basic plot outline for all of the stories in Chapters None of them live up to his level of integrity.
However, they are faint images of him nonetheless, which makes the last detail on this topic really interesting. It becomes clear these stories are showing that the moral corruption within Israel is going to be solved by one thing alone: Israel needs a good king! Israel needs a really good one who is actually like Moses, not just a faint image of him like the figures we met in Chapters 3— And so we have hit upon the major contribution of the Book of Judges to the storyline of the Old Testament.
Thus, the Book of Judges points to David and beyond him, to the promised messianic King from the line of David. It should irritate you the same way a news report about child sex-trafficking should irritate you. These stories should arouse a holy impatience with human selfishness and sin. In that sense, the Book of Judges tells us stories from the past in order to arouse our hope for the future. Tim Mackie is a writer and creative director for BibleProject.
He wrote his dissertation on the manuscript history of the book of Ezekiel, with a focus on the Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls. What a total nerd! He is a professor at Western Seminary and served as a teaching pastor for many years. How to Read the Bible. Listen Now. The text of Judges gives no indication as to who wrote the book, but Jewish tradition names the prophet Samuel as the author.
The namesake of 1 and 2 Samuel, Samuel was the last of the judges, one of the special leaders whom God raised up during this time period to rescue His people. The judges did not oversee merely legal matters, as in our sense of the role; their tasks often included military and administrative authority as well.
Why Samuel? The author of Judges certainly lived in the early days of the monarchy. Also, Samuel was known to write on occasion 1 Samuel We think about the judges as both a period of time and a book of the Bible. The period of the judges began after the death of Joshua in the early fourteenth century BC Joshua and continued until Saul was crowned king of Israel by the prophet Samuel in BC 1 Samuel Events within the book of Judges span the geographical breadth of the nation, happening in a variety of cities, towns, and battlefields.
Scholars believe some of the judges ruled simultaneously in separate geographical regions. Attempts to calculate the exact amount of time covered in Judges are inconclusive, but generally, the book begins soon after the death of Joshua and ends in the years just before the entrance of Samuel onto the scene, a period of about three hundred years. The contents of Judges were likely not written chronologically. The final few chapters Judges 17—21 give an overview of the moral climate during those days and, rather than occurring after the period of the judges listed earlier in the book, they probably happened in and around the times of various judges mentioned in earlier chapters.
The time of the judges brought about great apostasy in Israel. The nation underwent political and religious turmoil as the people tried to possess those parts of the land that had not yet been fully conquered.
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