What's Judges about?

After the people claim the land God had promised long ago,

they repeatedly abandon God’s inclusive love and justice,

but God does not abandon them

The book of Judges tells what happened during the several hundred years after the people crossed the Jordan River under Joshua’s leadership and captured the city of Jericho. However, this history was actually written about 700 years after those events. At the time of writing, the Israelites had been conquered and enslaved by the Babylonian empire and seventy years later they were released and returned to Jerusalem where they attempted to re-build the ruined temple.

The religious leaders at the time of writing explained that their captivity had been caused by God allowing their injustice and oppression of one another to bring down such dire consequences. The leaders then interpreted their return to Jerusalem as God acting to care for the people despite their refusal to care for one another or to follow God’s instructions to care.

These leaders then gathered all the ancient stories they could remember and arranged them to illustrate how the same sequence of events had happened ever since they entered the land under Joshua. The book mostly consists of a series of stories about how the people became selfish and exploited the poor (usually called “being unfaithful to the Lord”), followed by a military disaster, after which God raises up a special leader who is given God’s spirit, the leader then leads the people back to peace and justice and all is well until the people again abandon God’s command to care, and the cycle begins again.

The leaders were temporary and often took the status of an army general. Their traditional title of “judge” had little or nothing to do with the modern idea of a judge—in the stories it means someone who judged that the time for intervention had arrived. The book ends with the last, and most famous “judge,” Samson.

The same idea, but applied to kings, continues in the following books of Samuel (describing the first two kings Saul and David) and the books of Kings and Chronicles (describing the ever worse kings) up to the time of the country being captured by the Babylonian empire, and its subsequent rescue by God.

How is Judges important for us?

Judges makes sense for us of the confusions in our contemporary world. The “us first” attitude of most national leaders in which our own country never quite gets as much as it would like, and so always postpones care for the poor, is exactly what the book of Judges is describing. When unrest happens in a country because of extremes of wealth and poverty and people give up hope of ever getting out of poverty, we see what results from not treating the poor with care. Internal and external chaos around the globe is the result.

But Judges also insists there is hope. The hope doesn’t arise from our being clever enough to design a better country, but from God always inspiring a leader to bring us back to the priorities for which humanity was made. The challenge for us is to encourage such leadership and to follow it when it arises. In Canada one such example would have been Tommy Douglas, a Methodist ordained minister, who insisted that care for all persons, whether of means or not, was an absolute priority in this country. The result is our universal health care law. If we take the book of Judges seriously, we will encourage and support such leaders in our time.