Judges: Everyone Did What Was Right in Their Own Eyes

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. It is part of the long history from Joshua to Kings, built from older hero stories.

When: Some of it is very old. The Song of Deborah in chapter 5 may be among the oldest Hebrew poetry there is. The book was edited in the 600s and 500s BC.

Where it fits: Between Joshua and the first king. It opens after Joshua’s death (Judges 1:1) and covers the generations, set roughly in the 1100s BC, before Samuel anointed Saul (1 Samuel 10:1).

Where I quote it: Never.

If you only read three chapters: Judges 5, Judges 9 and Judges 19.

Words to Know

Judge — not a courtroom judge. The Hebrew shophet means a leader raised up to rescue the people in a crisis.

The cycle — the pattern the book repeats: the people turn from God, an enemy oppresses them, they cry out, God sends a rescuer, there is peace, and it starts again.

Nazirite — someone under a vow not to drink wine, cut their hair or touch the dead. Samson was one from birth.

Concubine — a secondary wife, with fewer rights than a full wife.

The Book in Brief

Judges opens where Joshua left off. Chapter 1 lists the towns the tribes did not conquer. Chapter 2 explains what will happen next: a new generation forgets the LORD, serves the gods of Canaan and falls to its enemies. Each time the people cry out, God raises up a leader, a judge, to rescue them.

Chapters 3 to 16 tell the judges’ stories, one after another. Othniel defeats a king from Mesopotamia. Ehud, a left-handed man, stabs the fat king of Moab in his upper room. Deborah, a prophet, sends Barak against the Canaanite general Sisera, and a woman named Jael kills Sisera in her tent. Chapter 5 is the song of that victory. Gideon tears down his father’s altar to Baal, tests God with a fleece, defeats the Midianites with three hundred men, and refuses to be king. His son Abimelech murders his brothers and makes himself king, until a woman drops a millstone on his head. Jephthah, an outcast, beats the Ammonites and sacrifices his daughter to keep a vow. Samson, strong as long as his hair is uncut, fights the Philistines on his own. He is betrayed by Delilah, blinded, and dies pulling down the temple of their god Dagon. Several lesser judges get only a line or two.

Chapters 17 to 21 have no judges at all. A man named Micah makes an idol and hires a Levite as his private priest. The tribe of Dan steals both and burns a peaceful town to take its land. Then a Levite’s concubine is raped and killed in Gibeah, and the other tribes go to war against the tribe of Benjamin and almost wipe it out. To keep Benjamin alive, they find wives for its survivors by force.

The book ends by saying that there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

I grew up in the hills of Galilee, about six miles from Mount Tabor. It is the rounded mountain you can see from the ridge above Nazareth. In this book, that is where Deborah’s army gathered before the battle (Judges 4:6, 14).

So these were local stories to me. But I never quoted this book, and once you read it, you may understand why. It is one of the most violent books in the scriptures, and it does not tell you who to cheer for.

The cycle

The book tells you its own pattern at the start (Judges 2:11–19). The people forget God. An enemy crushes them. They cry out. God raises up a judge to rescue them. There is peace while the judge lives. Then they forget again.

Each time the circle comes around, it gets worse. The judges get more violent and less admirable as the book goes on.

Deborah and Jael

The first great story is about two women.

Deborah is a prophet and the leader of Israel. She sits under a palm tree and settles the people’s disputes (Judges 4:4–5). She summons a general, Barak, to fight the Canaanite commander Sisera. Barak will not go unless she goes with him. She goes, and tells him the glory will go to a woman.

The enemy army is routed. Sisera runs and hides in the tent of a woman named Jael. She gives him milk, covers him with a rug, and when he is asleep, she drives a tent peg through his head (Judges 4:21).

Then Judges 5 tells the story again, as a song. Many scholars think it is one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew in the Bible.¹ At the end, the song does something strange. It goes to the enemy’s house. Sisera’s mother is at her window, wondering why her son is so late. Her ladies reassure her that the men must be dividing the plunder: A lady, two ladies to every man (Judges 5:28–30).

The poet makes you look at the enemy’s mother, waiting for a son who will never come home, telling herself that he is late because he is busy capturing other people’s daughters. It is victory and grief and horror in one picture.

Go deeperTen tribes, not twelve

The Song of Deborah does something no later list of Israel’s tribes does. It calls the roll, and not everyone answers.

The song praises the tribes that came to fight: Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulun, Issachar and Naphtali. It scolds four that stayed home. Reuben sat among the sheepfolds. Gilead stayed across the Jordan. Why did Dan remain in ships? Asher sat still at the haven of the sea (Judges 5:17). The song even curses a town called Meroz for not coming to help (Judges 5:23).

That makes ten names, and two of them, Machir and Gilead, are not among the familiar twelve tribes at all. Elsewhere Machir is a clan of Manasseh (Numbers 26:29), and Gilead is the land east of the Jordan. Judah, the tribe that later gave Israel its kings, is not mentioned, and neither is Simeon.²

Many scholars see in this a window onto the earliest Israel. If the song is as old as it seems, Israel in its day was a loose alliance of clans in the hills. Some came when they were called and some did not, and the neat system of twelve tribes took shape later. The archaeologist Lawrence Stager asked why some stayed away. He argued that the tribes that did not come had their living tied to other places, to the sea trade of the coast or to herding east of the Jordan, and had less to gain from the fight.²

The song does not pretend that Israel was united. It names the ones who did not come.

The man who would not be king

Gideon defeats an invading army with three hundred men. Afterward, the people beg him to be their king and start a dynasty.

He refuses. I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you. The LORD shall rule over you (Judges 8:23).

That was the old faith of my people: God is the king, and no man should be.

The bramble

Gideon’s son Abimelech did not share his father’s view. He hired thugs, murdered seventy of his brothers on one stone, and made himself king (Judges 9:5–6).

One brother escaped, the youngest, Jotham. He climbed a mountain above the town and shouted down a story. It is the first parable in the scriptures, and it is about kings (Judges 9:7–15).

The trees went out to choose a king. They asked the olive tree. The olive tree said, Should I stop producing my oil, with which they honor God and man by me, and go to wave back and forth over the trees? They asked the fig tree, and the fig tree said the same about its fruit. They asked the vine, and the vine said the same about its wine.

Then they asked the bramble, the thornbush. And the bramble said yes. Come and take refuge in my shade (Judges 9:15).

A thornbush has no shade. All it can give you is thorns and fire.

The useful trees were too busy doing good work to rule. The useless one wanted the throne. That is a parable my people told about power long before I told mine. When James and John asked me for the seats of honor and the others were angry with them, I said, You know that they who are recognized as rulers over the nations lord it over them … But it shall not be so among you, but whoever wants to become great among you shall be your servant (Mark 10:42–43).

The daughter

Jephthah was a bandit leader called back to fight for Israel. Before the battle, he made a vow: if God gave him victory, he would sacrifice whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me (Judges 11:31).

He won. And his only daughter came out of the house, dancing, to meet him.

He did it. He kept the vow. She is never named. The book says that every year afterward, the young women of Israel went out for four days to mourn her (Judges 11:34–40).

That is a vow that should have been broken. I told my followers not to swear oaths at all. Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ be ‘No’ (Matthew 5:37). There are promises that are wicked to keep.

Go deeperHow later readers faced Jephthah’s vow

Readers have argued about Jephthah’s daughter for two thousand years.

Some would not let him off. The historian Josephus, writing in the 90s AD, says plainly that Jephthah sacrificed her, and that the offering was neither lawful nor acceptable to God.³ A Jewish retelling of the Bible from the first century AD, known as the Biblical Antiquities, gives the daughter what the book of Judges never gives her: a name, Seila, and a lament of her own.⁴ The rabbis said that the vow could have been cancelled. The priest Phinehas could have released Jephthah from it. But Jephthah was too proud to go to Phinehas, and Phinehas was too proud to go to Jephthah, and so the girl died. Both men, they said, were punished for her blood.⁵

Others could not believe it happened at all. Some medieval Jewish commentators, among them David Kimhi and Levi ben Gershon, argued that Jephthah did not kill her. He dedicated her to God, and she lived the rest of her life unmarried and apart. That, they said, is why the story keeps saying that she mourned her virginity (Judges 11:37–39).⁶ When Handel set the story to music in 1752, in what proved to be his last oratorio, he gave it the same ending. An angel stops the sacrifice, and the daughter is sent to serve God as a virgin for life.⁷

The New Testament names Jephthah only once, in a list of people who acted by faith, between Samson and David (Hebrews 11:32). It does not mention his daughter.

Samson

Samson was dedicated as a Nazirite before he was born, and God’s spirit made him impossibly strong (Judges 13:5, 25; 14:6).

He is also a brawler who sleeps with whom he likes, kills thirty men to pay off a bet, and burns his enemies’ fields by tying torches to foxes’ tails. He is captured because he tells Delilah his secret. He dies pulling a temple down on himself and the Philistines inside it, with about three thousand more watching from the roof (Judges 16:27–30).

Children learn him as a hero. Read the actual chapters, and he is a warning about strength with no wisdom in it.

Go deeperWho the Philistines were

The Philistines were newcomers. Around 1175 BC, Pharaoh Ramesses III fought off invaders who came by land and sea, and on the walls of his temple at Medinet Habu, in Egypt, he had the battle carved and the enemy named. One of the peoples he names is the Peleset, the Philistines.⁸ Soon afterward they were living on the coast of Canaan, in five cities: Ashdod, Gaza, Ashkelon, Gath and Ekron (1 Samuel 6:17).

They were not like their neighbors. Their first pottery copies the styles of Greece and the Aegean islands. Pig bones are far more common in their early towns than in the villages of the hills.⁹ The Bible keeps calling them the uncircumcised, as if it were their name (Judges 14:3; 15:18). In 2019, scientists who studied ancient DNA from burials at Ashkelon found that people buried there in the 1100s BC had some southern European ancestry that the earlier inhabitants lacked. Within two centuries it had faded into the local population. The newcomers had married in.¹⁰

In 1972, archaeologists digging at Tell Qasile, inside the modern city of Tel Aviv, found the first Philistine temple ever discovered. Its roof had rested on two pillars set on stone bases near the center of the hall, about two meters apart.¹¹ Readers soon noticed how well that fits the story of Samson, who took hold of the two middle pillars on which the house rested (Judges 16:29). It does not prove the story. It does suggest that the picture of a temple held up by two central pillars is true to what Philistine temples looked like.

The worst story in the Bible

The last chapters of Judges are almost unreadable.

In Judges 19, a Levite and his concubine stop for the night in the town of Gibeah, in Israel. The men of the town surround the house and demand the man, just as the men of Sodom did. To save himself, the Levite pushes his concubine out the door. The men abuse her all night. In the morning she is lying at the door with her hands on the threshold. He tells her to get up. She does not answer.

He takes her body home and cuts it into twelve pieces, and sends a piece to each tribe of Israel.

What follows is a civil war that nearly wipes out one tribe. Then, to find wives for the survivors, the other tribes massacre a town and seize its young women. When that is not enough, they tell the remaining men to hide in the vineyards at a festival and snatch girls who come out to dance (Judges 21:19–23).

A scholar once called stories like these texts of terror, and asked that the women in them at least be remembered.¹² The woman in Judges 19 is never named either.

No king in Israel

Four times, as the book falls apart, the writer reminds you that there was no king in Israel. The last time, it is the last sentence of the book. In the World English Bible, it reads:

In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25; see 17:6; 18:1; 19:1).

The book is making an argument. Without a king, this is what happens. The people need order.

And then you turn the page into Samuel and Kings, and you get the kings. Saul goes mad. David takes another man’s wife and has him killed. Solomon works his people like slaves. The kingdom splits, and both halves fall.

The scriptures I grew up on did not settle the question. One book argues that the people need a king. The next books show what the kings did. And Gideon’s words are still there in the middle: The LORD shall rule over you.

That is the kingdom I talked about.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Judges 9:7–15.

You will find: a parable in which the useful trees refuse to rule and the thornbush accepts.

Then read Judges 8:22–23 and compare it with Judges 21:25.

The Short Version

• Judges is the story of the time before the kings, told as a repeating cycle that gets worse each turn.
• Its first great story is about Deborah, a woman who led Israel, and the old Song of Deborah.
• Gideon refused to be king, and his son’s brother told the first parable against kings, the bramble.
• Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to keep a vow, and the book ends with horrors against women.
• It argues that Israel needed a king, and the books that follow show what the kings did.