Wednesday Bible Study: Picking through Judges part 2

 

The Next story is of the judge Ehud- and this is one my pastor didn't like telling, because, well, it IS blood and guts....

Jdg 3:21  And Ehud reached with his left hand, took the sword from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly.
Jdg 3:22  And the hilt also went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not pull the sword out of his belly; and the dung came out.

But of course, that's skipping ahead, and I'll try to be a tad more delicate.  At any rate, let's go to the beginning of the story...

Jdg 3:12  And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and the LORD strengthened Eglon the king of Moab against Israel, because they had done what was evil in the sight of the LORD.
Jdg 3:13  He gathered to himself the Ammonites and the Amalekites, and went and defeated Israel. And they took possession of the city of palms. 

 

Amazingly enough, there's a lot to be seen here.  I want to point out that, unlike Cushan the Double-Wicked last week, Eglon had to be "strengthened by God for the Job.  Why?

Jdg 3:17 ...Now Eglon was a very fat man...

In other words, we were dealing with a man of indolence, not a warrior.  So to do God's will, he needed allies, hence the Ammonites and Amaelekites.  Now, the Ammonites were "cousins" of Moab (both races sprang from Lot's incestuous daughters, and thus were- as my Dad used to say- 'shirttail relations' of Israel.  But now Amalek?  He is a real example of God's promises fulfilled.  Look here...

Exo 17:13  And Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the sword.
Exo 17:14  Then the LORD said to Moses, "Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven."


And then, here...

Although Egyptian and Assyrian monumental inscriptions and records of the period survive which list various tribes and peoples of the area, no reference has ever been found to Amalek or the Amalekites. Therefore, the archaeologist and historian Hugo Winckler suggested in 1895 that there were never any such people and the Biblical stories concerning them are entirely mythological and ahistorical.- Wikipedia

Finally, we should note that "the City of Palms" has another, more famous name...

Deu 34:3  ...the Negeb, and the Plain, that is, the Valley of Jericho the city of palm trees, as far as Zoar...

So now we know the enemy and the places.  Next we look at Ehud....

Jdg 3:15  Then the people of Israel cried out to the LORD, and the LORD raised up for them a deliverer, Ehud, the son of Gera, the Benjaminite, a left-handed man. The people of Israel sent tribute by him to Eglon the king of Moab.

Notable here, he was a Benjaminite, and later in Judges this becomes not a good thing, but for now, being one was cool.  He was also an official of sorts, the man that brought the yearly tribute to Fat Boy, which means he was no stranger to the Moabite court.  Plus, he's left handed, which comes in handy in a bit.  But next, we have to look at his "job prep":

Jdg 3:16  And Ehud made for himself a sword with two edges, a cubit in length, and he bound it on his right thigh under his clothes.

The phrase "made himself" was key, because back then when you got conquered, one of the first things that got done was shutting down of metalworking.  So not only was he a craftsman, he was a sneaky craftsman.  And the right thigh?  Well, most people were right handed and drew a weapon from the opposite side- the left thigh scabbard.  Thus, combine the fact that security knew him well enough with his apparently concealed left-handedness, and you get a weapon that gets past security.  Another perk of his familiarity in the court is that he could get away with this:

Jdg 3:18  And when Ehud had finished presenting the tribute, he sent away the people who carried the tribute.
Jdg 3:19  But he himself turned back at the idols near Gilgal and said, "I have a secret message for you, O king." And he commanded, "Silence." And all his attendants went out from his presence.

Eglon, to some extent, trusted Ehud.  Which gave Ehud the opportunity to do what he did in that first part I shared. I won't belabor that scene, other than to point out that the curiously translated "dung", which other versions translate 'dirt' and my paper Bible calls "his entrails" is one of those "only used once" words from the Old Testament.

Jdg 3:24  When he had gone, the servants came, and when they saw that the doors of the roof chamber were locked, they thought, "Surely he is relieving himself in the closet of the cool chamber."
Jdg 3:25  And they waited till they were embarrassed. But when he still did not open the doors of the roof chamber, they took the key and opened them, and there lay their lord dead on the floor.
Jdg 3:26  Ehud escaped while they delayed, and he passed beyond the idols and escaped to Seirah.
Jdg 3:27  When he arrived, he sounded the trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim. Then the people of Israel went down with him from the hill country, and he was their leader.
Jdg 3:28  And he said to them, "Follow after me, for the LORD has given your enemies the Moabites into your hand." So they went down after him and seized the fords of the Jordan against the Moabites and did not allow anyone to pass over.

And that was the end of that 18-year cycle of punishment.  But now, I want to jump ahead to a curiosity before we start the next cycle.  At the end of the next judge's story, a song is sung that has this line...

Jdg 5:6  "In the days of Shamgar, son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were abandoned, and travelers kept to the byways.
Jdg 5:7  The villagers ceased in Israel; they ceased to be until I arose; I, Deborah, arose as a mother in Israel.

Now, I'll come back to the Jael part of that next week, but I wanted to use this to introduce Shamgar, of whom all we see is this:

Jdg 3:30  So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel. And the land had rest for eighty years.
Jdg 3:31  After him was Shamgar the son of Anath, who killed 600 of the Philistines with an oxgoad, and he also saved Israel.
 

Note here:  He is NOT named a judge of Israel- just a deliverer.  There is a lot of controversy about him because of that.  The Jews believed that his mention in the song meant that he was an oppressor, not a hero; they believed that his name got transposed with another, who- as killing a platoon of Philistines with a glorified long-handled shovel would indicate- also had great strength:

2Sa 23:11  And next to him was Shammah, the son of Agee the Hararite. The Philistines gathered together at Lehi, where there was a plot of ground full of lentils, and the men fled from the Philistines.
2Sa 23:12  But he took his stand in the midst of the plot and defended it and struck down the Philistines, and the LORD worked a great victory.

This IS a very similar story, from the lists of David's mighty men.  And the Jews think somebody confused "Shamgar" and "Shammah".  Another site I found had another explanation.  Maybe you remember this line from last week:

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. 

So here we find Shamgar's father Anath established a house in the lands of Napthali, in the north.  The site I found points out that Shamgar's name is not Hebrew, or even Semitic:

It turns out that Shamgar is non-Semitic, and most likely Hurrian. Toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age (sometime around 1550 BCE, more than 200 years before the Israelite settlement) there was an influx of Hurrians into Canaan, explaining how names like Shamgar arrived in the area.

The site (Biblical Historical Context) goes on to give further evidence of this, and postulates that his short shrift in Judges is because he WAS a foreigner- and from the distance between Napthali and the Philistines, I wonder (my own thoughts here) if he was not paid to help the Hebrews.  However, you'd think that he'd have come better armed had he been paid:

The ox goad, as now used in those parts, is an instrument fit to do great execution with it, as Mr. Maundrell (s), who saw many of them, describes it; on measuring them, he found them to be eight feet long, at the bigger end six inches in circumference, at the lesser end was a sharp prickle for driving the oxen, and at the other end a small spade, or paddle of iron, for cleansing the plough from the clay...- John Gill's Exposition

 

To kill 600 men by himself with this instrument, I think, marks Shamgar as a man of supernatural strength, perhaps like Shammah and this guy...

Jdg 15:15  And he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and put out his hand and took it, and with it he struck 1,000 men.
Jdg 15:16  And Samson said, "With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of a donkey have I struck down a thousand men."

The last curiosity I'll share in this story was the part where the Jews (from the Jewish Encyclopedia) found it unbelievable to accept his story, but on last week's debate on Othniel's parentage, they say, "Othniel's real relation to Caleb is plain if the narrative is allowed to tell its own story." So why is what's good enough for Othniel not good enough for Shamgar?  Next week, we'll look at just why I started his story with that song clip, as well as the story of Debrorah, Barak, and Jael...