Wednesday Bible Study: Picking through Judges part one

 

While Isaiah had some chapters to go, and several famously quoted verses, last week pretty much got the whole point of the book across.  This week, I want to do something with Judges.  A few weeks back, our Pastor preached a "fly by Judges" series, often admitting that it was a book he didn't like to preach.  Because let's face it, there are two unpleasant circumstances about it.  The first being, the seven cycles that Israel goes through- they stray from the Lord, they pay by being oppressed, they pray for deliverance, when they receive it, they celebrate (say, "Yay", as Pastor Denny put it), and then they stay- for a time; then they drift off again, and it starts over.

The second, is the violence of the era.  Sometimes it's hard to get a grasp on how the same God that sent Christ to die for us condones and even orders this violence.  But what you have to understand here is twofold.  First, He is a Holy God, and can only put up with sin so long; and two, He purposefully kept the Hebrews out of the promised land until that point had been hit:

Gen 15:13  Then the LORD said to Abram, "Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years.
Gen 15:14  But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.
Gen 15:15  As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age.
Gen 15:16  And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete." 

 

But now, that point had been reached, and God was bringing judgment on these peoples with the advent of the Hebrews into the area.  In Judges 1, you get testimony from their own mouths of how bad it had gotten, and how they deserved what was coming:

Jdg 1:5  They found Adoni-bezek at Bezek and fought against him and defeated the Canaanites and the Perizzites.
Jdg 1:6  Adoni-bezek fled, but they pursued him and caught him and cut off his thumbs and his big toes.
Jdg 1:7  And Adoni-bezek said, "Seventy kings with their thumbs and their big toes cut off used to pick up scraps under my table. As I have done, so God has repaid me." And they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died there.

But here's the main thing to draw from the first chapter:  While they started out working together, and succeeding:

Jdg 1:2  The LORD said, "Judah shall go up; behold, I have given the land into his hand."
Jdg 1:3  And Judah said to Simeon his brother, "Come up with me into the territory allotted to me, that we may fight against the Canaanites. And I likewise will go with you into the territory allotted to you." So Simeon went with him.

-which led to the above victory against Adoni-Bezek, they didn't KEEP working together, with predictable consequences...

Jdg 1:29  And Ephraim did not drive out the Canaanites who lived in Gezer, so the Canaanites lived in Gezer among them.
Jdg 1:30  Zebulun did not drive out the inhabitants of Kitron, or the inhabitants of Nahalol, so the Canaanites lived among them, but became subject to forced labor.
Jdg 1:31  Asher did not drive out the inhabitants of Acco, or the inhabitants of Sidon or of Ahlab or of Achzib or of Helbah or of Aphik or of Rehob,
Jdg 1:32  so the Asherites lived among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land, for they did not drive them out.
Jdg 1:33  Naphtali did not drive out the inhabitants of Beth-shemesh, or the inhabitants of Beth-anath, so they lived among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of Beth-shemesh and of Beth-anath became subject to forced labor for them.

And on it went- peoples who God judged and ordered destroyed were left alive.  That they were enslaved made no difference; while they lived, they infected Israel with their pagan ways.

Jdg 2:10  And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel.
Jdg 2:11  And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals.
Jdg 2:12  And they abandoned the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed down to them. And they provoked the LORD to anger.
Jdg 2:13  They abandoned the LORD and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth.

This is our object lesson:  you can't live with sin and expect to stay pure.  Even as you declare yourself its master, it enslaves you from beneath.  So it wasn't long before God Himself called them out:

Jdg 2:1  Now the Angel of the LORD went up from Gilgal to Bochim. And he said, "I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers. I said, 'I will never break my covenant with you,
Jdg 2:2  and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their altars.' But you have not obeyed my voice. What is this you have done?
Jdg 2:3  So now I say, I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare to you."
Jdg 2:4  As soon as the angel of the LORD spoke these words to all the people of Israel, the people lifted up their voices and wept.
Jdg 2:5  And they called the name of that place Bochim. And they sacrificed there to the LORD.

We need to understand the place names here.  Gilgal is where the Israelites first crossed the Jordan, and the place was named Gilgal- "rolling" because it was there that God had rolled away the sins that kept them in the desert for 40 years.  But now, they had piled their own sins on top of themselves, and God went from Gilgal to Bochin- "weeping".  What could have been a string of victories under God was now going to be a cycle of failure.  And God was even specific about their punishments:

Jdg 3:1  Now these are the nations that the LORD left, to test Israel by them, that is, all in Israel who had not experienced all the wars in Canaan.
Jdg 3:2  It was only in order that the generations of the people of Israel might know war, to teach war to those who had not known it before.
Jdg 3:3  These are the nations: the five lords of the Philistines and all the Canaanites and the Sidonians and the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon, from Mount Baal-hermon as far as Lebo-hamath.
Jdg 3:4  They were for the testing of Israel, to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of the LORD, which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses. 

And that testing was about to begin...

Jdg 3:8  Therefore the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of Cushan-rishathaim king of Mesopotamia. And the people of Israel served Cushan-rishathaim eight years.

Cushan means black; these were African raiders aligned with Arabs, who plundered much of what would one day be Babylon in this era. the rest of the name means "double wickedness"; this was a violent, heartless enemy that they struggled under for 8 years, before enough of them got the good sense to pray for release.  Enter Othniel...

Jdg 3:9  But when the people of Israel cried out to the LORD, the LORD raised up a deliverer for the people of Israel, who saved them, Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother.

Now, the 'Caleb's younger brother" part got me.  Caleb was the same Caleb who had went with Joshua and the other ten spies into Canaan; still retaining his youthful vigor, at 85 Caleb had still been a force among the warriors.  But... Caleb's father had always been named as "son of Jephunneh", so how is it that Othniel had a different father named?  It became more confusing when you learn in the geneologies that Othniel had a grandson named Kenaz, and we never could nail down a spot where it showed Caleb and Othniel having the same parentage.  However, we can guess what probably is the answer from this passage:

Num 32:11  'Surely none of the men who came up out of Egypt, from twenty years old and upward, shall see the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, because they have not wholly followed me,
Num 32:12  none except Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite and Joshua the son of Nun, for they have wholly followed the LORD.'

And as Kenaz means "the Kenizzite", we see that Kenaz might = Jephunneh.  At any rate, Otyhniel had already had a heroic past:

Jdg 1:11  From there they went against the inhabitants of Debir. The name of Debir was formerly Kiriath-sepher.
Jdg 1:12  And Caleb said, "He who attacks Kiriath-sepher and captures it, I will give him Achsah my daughter for a wife."
Jdg 1:13  And Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother, captured it. And he gave him Achsah his daughter for a wife.

Othniel's name means "force of God"- and he's about to become one.

Jdg 3:10  The Spirit of the LORD was upon him, and he judged Israel. He went out to war, and the LORD gave Cushan-rishathaim king of Mesopotamia into his hand. And his hand prevailed over Cushan-rishathaim.
Jdg 3:11  So the land had rest forty years. Then Othniel the son of Kenaz died.

One thing we might get the impression of is that Samson was the only one who gained "super-strength" from God in this era- but I believe this is not so.I wonder if Othniel had been granted this strength to defeat the "Double-Wicked"- and we will later come upon a hero that surely also was gifted with it.  But to Othniel, let's keep in mind- Caleb, by his own words, was 85 upon entering the Promised land. seven years conquering the land puts him at 92 when Joshua dies at 110.  Even if Othniel was 20 years younger than Caleb, he's closing on 70 at this point, and you have to tack on the 8 years they were oppressed before he gets the call to defeat Cushan the Double-Wicked.  So he had to be close to the age Caleb was when he entered the Promised Land, and Caleb found his condition a miraculous promise kept by God:

Jos 14:10  And now, behold, the LORD has kept me alive, just as he said, these forty-five years since the time that the LORD spoke this word to Moses, while Israel walked in the wilderness. And now, behold, I am this day eighty-five years old.
Jos 14:11  I am still as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming.

And, even if you back-date Othniel's period of judging Israel to his first battle, by the time he spent 40 years judging Israel, he had to have passed Joshua's 110-year life some time ago.  Now, added to this, we need to remember what being a "judge" in this context meant.  A judge wasn't a simple law-giver, he was a warrior, leading Israel into battle, and often doing the heavy lifting himself.

Next time, we are at least going to hit Ehud the Judge, and possibly another obscure (to the extreme!) character.