God’s call for Israel to diligently teach their children the Torah (Dt 6:7) is an instruction Israel
failed to heed. The reason for this commandment is simple: the land that Israel is
to possess is full
of foreigners with a very different view of God and the world. If Israel’s children are not grounded
in the truth of the Torah, they will turn to the worship of foreign deities, sexual immorality, child
sacrifice, and the many other sins that so often characterize pagan religious worship. Our own
contemporary culture worships many false gods, and if our children are to avoid the sin and
bondage that results from such worship, we must heed God’s instruction and
diligently train our
children to “know” the Lord and live in the freedom and joy of Christ.
p 128
Without faith, the next generation had no
identity as the people of God, and
so they adopted the identity of the pagan world around them: they “did what was evil in
the sight of the L
ORD
and served the Baals; and they forsook the L
ORD
, the God of their
fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Jgs 2:11). Instead of “serving”
the Lord, Israel serves false idols. The Lord, in return, “sold them
into the power of their
enemies round about” (Jgs 2:14). Exodus describes God as “redeeming” (buying back)
Israel and setting her free. The image of “selling” Israel evokes the reversal of the Exodus,
for only slaves are bought and sold.
Judges 2:11–23 describes the terrible cycle characterizing this period. Israel’s
sin leads
them into
servitude, from which they cry out in
supplication to God, who raises up a judge
to deliver them, but this
salvation is soon forgotten and responded to with
silence—as
Israel fails to serve the Lord. This cycle is repeated throughout Judges, and with each
repetition Israel finds herself in a deeper plight. Israel is in a spiral into darkness.
Israel’s Judges
In this period of much darkness, the tribe
of Judah is the only light, as they have the
most success in taking the land assigned to them. Judges 1 gives a simple summary of the
twelve tribes’ attempts to settle the land, beginning with Judah in the south and moving
northward to the
northernmost tribe of Dan and, finally, the land held by the Amorites
(who are foreigners). The book of Judges will follow this progression when it orders the
various stories of the twelve judges, beginning with a judge from Judah and ending with
a judge from Dan. The lesson
p 129
this geographical ordering imparts is that the further
one
moves from Judah, the worse Israel’s sin and idolatry becomes. This ordering also
prepares the reader for the next period, in which a shepherd boy from Judah will become
king.
The listing of the tribes and their land possessions in Judges 1 ends with an odd twist.
The last tribe of people whose borders are described is not one of the twelve tribes of
Israel but rather the Amorites, indicating just how far Israel is from controlling the land.
Back in Numbers, as Israel crossed the wilderness, she fought and defeated the Amorites,
as well as the Amalekites, Moabites, and Midianites. The fact that
Israel must fight them
again—and lose—shows how far Israel has slipped from where she was under Moses and
Joshua.
Israel’s plight is rooted in one thing: idolatry. Judges tells us that Israel “played the
harlot after other gods and bowed down to them” (Jgs 2:17). The metaphor of the harlot
can be said to be the controlling image of Judges, summing up its theme
of covenant
infidelity. Two of the judges even seem to have been born of harlots, another breaks his
sacred vows to pursue harlots, and Judges ends with a tragic civil war ignited by the brutal
treatment of a harlot.
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