The End of the Beginning

Joshua and Judges

Johanna W. H. van Wijk-Bos

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780802868381
• eBook ISBN: 9781467457309
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

The End of the Beginning presents a chapter-by-chapter interpretation of Joshua and Judges, based on the author's translation. Johanna van Wijk-Bos accompanies the reader through the story of Israel from the entry into Canaan up to the time of Samuel. van Wijk-Bos weaves together the memories of ancient Israel's past into a story that speaks to the traumatic context of postexilic Judah.

The books of Joshua and Judges were written for education, edification, and entertainment. Some of the stories may exhilarate us, some may appall; all will speak to the imagination if we let them. They show a people forging a path forward into an uncertain future in the hope that God will forgive past failures and begin again with them. Christians enter the stories of Israel's past as outsiders, while at the same time claiming a bond with the same God. We expect more from the text than lessons of the past intended for a different people. These are not our stories, but we too hope for insight and for a guiding word in our own uncertain future.

This is the first volume of A People and a Land, a multi-volume work on the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.

JUDGES

Delivering the Land

Introduction

Content

When all hell breaks loose, when the militia volunteer, bless Adonai.¹

A lengthy introduction (1:1–3:6) sets the stage for what is to follow, beginning with the efforts of the Judah tribe, joined by Simeon, to establish itself in its territory. Judah is depicted as successful (1:1–20), but its achievement is followed by a list of failures on the part of the tribes who did not accomplish the goal of driving out the resident occupants and therefore had to be content to live “among” the inhabitants (1:27–36). “The Canaanites lived among them” and “they lived among the Canaanites” (1:29, 30, 32, 33). The introductory chapters underline the distinction between the generation that benefitted from Joshua’s guidance and those who came after: “And a new generation arose after them/ and did not know Adonai/ or the work he had done for Israel” (2:10). The Joshua text has prepared the ground well both for the reality of living “among the Canaanites” and for the possibility of abandoning the worship of the God of Israel and serving other gods, together with the harmful consequences (Josh 24:1–26, esp. 20).

In the main part, Judges tells the stories of individual leaders, identified as divinely appointed “saviors” or “judges,” who go on military campaigns to guarantee a period of peace after the Israelites have been subjected to hostile forces, which as often as not originate from outside the land (Judg 3:7–16:31). In the opening section, these characters are introduced as “judges” (shofetim), a word from a root with a wide range of meanings, from administering or providing justice, to passing judgment, to ruling (2:16). Yet few of the protagonists in the narratives receive this title (although a number of them are said to “have judged” Israel). Some of these characters receive only a few lines, beginning with Otniel and Shamgar (3:7–11, 31), continuing with Tola and Ya’ir (10:2, 3), and concluding with Ibsan, Elon, and Avdon (12:8, 11, 13). Another set function as central figures in detailed stories of violent conflict—sometimes military campaigns, sometimes acts of deceit to vanquish the foe—beginning with Ehud of Benjamin (3:15–30); followed by Deborah and Barak of Naftali (chs. 4–5), who are aided by Yael, a Kenite woman; Gideon of Manasseh (6:11–8:32); Jefta of Gilead in the Transjordan (11:1–12:7), perhaps also a Manassite; and, finally, Samson of Dan (13:2–16:31). In between the actions of Gideon and Jefta, about midway through the book, Gideon’s son Abimelek enforces royal rule (9:1–57), an adventure that does not end well, with Abimelek the first of the Israelite leaders to die a violent death (9:53–54). Although it is difficult to find a representative of each tribe in the combined list of “major” and “minor” leaders, their total does number twelve.

The final chapters, Judges 17–21, feature narratives with prominent roles played by individuals, most of them nameless, as well as tribes. Micah of Ephraim serves to depict a situation of cultic confusion and is a foil for an unnamed Levite (17:6) who joins a band of roving and pillaging Danites (ch. 18). Another Levite appears in chapter 19 as the protagonist in a sordid tale of rape and murder which eventually leads to intertribal warfare (chs. 20–21). The book ends with the observation “in those days there was no king in Israel,” a refrain that occurs four times in the final five chapters, twice with the added notation that “everyone did what was right in their own eyes” (17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25).²

Judges contrasts starkly with Joshua in terms of content. The forces of hostility and danger, though mentioned in Joshua, appear in full force in Judges to paint the Israelites as an embattled group, struggling to maintain itself against the odds. The genre of conquest account, so prevalent in certain chapters of Joshua, is thus missing; the herem receives only rare mention. There are very few gatherings of the people as a whole in either a cultic setting or for a secular purpose. The cultic acts referred to do not always conform to expectation; the Ark, a central unifying symbol of divine presence in Joshua, is virtually absent, mentioned only in passing in one of the final chapters (20:27). As Amit has observed, there is no sense here of a central place of worship, no reference to a scroll with the Teaching of Moses.³ On the other hand, the presence of Adonai permeates the stories. God seems to be everywhere, accessible to everyone. Rather than the Deity communicating through one leader as in Joshua, Deity and individuals—as well as groups—interact continuously, albeit in sometimes fraught circumstances. In the confessional section of chapter 10, there is no mention of representatives approaching God, whether leaders, elders, heads of ancestral houses, or priests. At the beginning, the ones who inquire of Adonai about leadership are called “the Israelites.” Those who cry out and confess their wrongdoing are also “the Israelites,” and God addresses the entire people (10:10–15). Only in chapters 20 and 21 is there mention of the “congregation” or “assembly,” of leaders, of a priest, and of customs of worship (20:1–2, 28; 21:10, 13, 16), but even then, as often as not, the gathering is referred to as “the Israelites” (20:18, 26–27; 21:1–5).

Historical Setting of Events

You may imagine then that this Book of Judges is not pleasant to read—much of it is quite ghastly.⁴

The children loved it.⁵

The events narrated in Judges take place following the death of Joshua and the first tentative conquest of the land before the beginning of the first millennium BCE. In terms of historical time, the period actually covers approximately 150 years up until the end of the eleventh century BCE, although the total of accumulated time in the text itself amounts to more than 400 years. The period forms a bridge between the initial entry of the Israelites into the land and the establishment of the monarchy as told in the books of Samuel. In contrast with Joshua, where Israel is the aggressor, Judges portrays the tribes as falling victim to hostility and oppression, sometimes from peoples inside their borders but predominantly from those outside Canaan. This situation is ascribed by the narrator to the people’s failure to abide by their sworn loyalty to Adonai and their falling prey to idol worship (2:11–3:6). The campaigns of various hostile groups are thus the means by which God punishes the people and at the same time attempts to woo them back, to change their faithless ways. God’s response to the people’s cries of distress is to send a “savior/deliverer,” who rises up to create resistance and defeat the enemy, upon which there follows a period of peace, marked at times by the phrase “then rested the land for . . . years” (3:11, 30; 5:31; 8:28; cf. Josh 11:23; 14:15).

The opening chapters establish the turbulence of a situation, already prepared for in Joshua, in which total conquest of all the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan by invaders from outside has proved to be unsuccessful, so that either by choice or force the fledgling nation is consigned to live among different ethnic groups in the land (see pp. 141–42, 146, 148, 174, 176–77 above). As long as there was strong leadership, represented by Joshua and those around him (the priests, leaders, heads of ancestral houses, etc.), the situation was containable or contained, but as the beginning of Judges makes clear, Joshua’s death left a vacuum, and there was no one to take his place. Individuals are thus appointed by God to act for a specific military purpose at a given time. These leaders who appear in the central section of the book are depicted as active on a local rather than a national level. They put out the fires that are burning at the time, but they establish no central leadership, and the one attempt to achieve this goal falters (9:1–53). At times, the saviors sent by God are “unlikely heroes,” as, for example, left-handed Ehud (3:15–30), the female Deborah (4:1–16), or the outcast Jefta (11:1). Regularly, however, they are persons of standing in the community, beginning with Otniel, whom we already met as a landowner in Joshua (Judg 1:13; 3:9); the prophet Deborah, who is depicted as dispensing justice even before she joins Barak on the battlefield (Judg 4:1–5:31); and Gideon, a son of a family of some means (6:11–8:32), himself in possession of multitudinous offspring (8:30), a signifier of wealth. Two of the minor judges listed in chapter 12 are similarly described (12:8–15).⁶

Following the exploits of Samson—who is said to have “judged Israel” for twenty years but during whose time there is no mention of peace or prosperity in the face of Philistine aggression (16:31)—the closing section of the book (chs. 17–21), although filled with violent and immoral activity on a sociopolitical and religious level, veers away from the focus on charismatic, episodic leaders to depict turmoil and intertribal conflict. Yet according to some perspectives, the situation, especially as painted in chapters 19–21, portrays more tribal cooperation and combined actions against injustice than anything that came before. Somehow, against the odds, something like a people was able to establish itself and find enough cohesion and stability to continue its existence in the land with the possibility of a future.

The period, though hard to reconstruct with historical verisimilitude, assumes for the Israelites localized leadership in the political realm and the absence of a standing army, with ad hoc military forces, at times poorly equipped and faced with enemies in possession of superior weaponry and organization. Socially, the context appears rural-agricultural, centered on clan and tribal kinship ties, accompanied by the cooperation as well as the conflict that such ties may bring. As observed by many commentators, the tales are notable for the presence of women. In the words of Tammi Schneider, “One of the major components affecting the evaluation of the judges is the role of women in their lives.”⁷ Women walk through the stories in all their complexity, as leaders, schemers, and seducers, as perpetrators and victors, as family members and as victims of collective violence. The fluctuations in the depiction of women in Judges may testify to a period when their function and role in the social and economic setting had a degree of fluidity, when appreciation of deeds of valor and violence was not limited by rigid perceptions of gender boundaries.

Historical Period of Composition and Themes of the Text

In spite of her continual disobedience, she survived, and, more often than not, thrived.⁸

The world proposed in Judges is stamped by the search of the people of Israel for a successful life in the promised land.⁹

Like Joshua, Judges was not composed in the period of which it tells, the twelfth or eleventh century BCE, but was compiled and edited from older existing materials at a much later date. Its final shape and placement may date to the postexilic period, although it is possible that an early edition was created in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE in the aftermath of the destruction of the Northern Kingdom by Assyria in 722, as argued by biblical scholar Yairah Amit.¹⁰ In either case, disintegration and cataclysmic destruction provided both impetus for and influence on the shape of the book. Theoretically, the book of Samuel could have served as a continuation of Joshua, and it was not strictly necessary ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Joshua: Entering the Land
• Judges: Delivering the Land
• Appendix: Hebrew Words in This Volume
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index