211. Joshua 19:47 and Judges 1:1-10, 1:17-19, 1:34 – 2:5, and 2:11 – 3:6

IV. continued

C. The Age of Ruth

1) The Failure of the Conquest (Joshua 19:47 and Judges 1:1-10, 1:17-19, 1:34 – 2:5, and 2:11 – 3:6)

The book of Judges is one of the more confusing books to read. For one thing there is a dearth of spiritual heroes in this book, men like Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and Joshua – men who have a close connection to God. Except for Deborah, the judges that we will encounter between Joshua and Samuel seem to be chosen for their flaws more than their strengths or spirituality. We will discuss this lack of heroes eventually, but the lack of such spiritual giants hinders many readers from considering the book properly. We are a generation, and the descendants of generations, trained to attend to celebrities and we scarcely know what to do with more ordinary people. We demand our leaders and our heroes to be unlike us, or at least not seem to be like us.

Another difficulty with the book of Judges is that it does not present events in a chronological order and does not try to correlate the various events that occurred at the same time. It is difficult to be sure of the dates or sequences of the various events. Israel was not closely knit during this period and occasionally there was more than one judge functioning at the same time, one judge in the north and another in the south; the book does not make it easy to notice this, however. The book gives the impression of a jumble of events, a kind of narrative chaos, a series of vignettes which are somewhat unrelated and which are mainly rather depressing. It is like an anthology of related short stories rather than a novel. The narrative chaos does serve a purpose however: it reflects the actual chaos that overwhelmed Israel periodically through this time and that characterized three centuries of their history. Reading the book of Judges straight through does not give an orderly account of the history but it does give a vivid and truthful picture of the times and life in Israel during those days.

The time described in the book of Judges was not a period of new revelation, and that fact alone accounts for the peculiar feel it has. It is the part of God’s revelation about people living without a lot of revelation. To be sure, there are miracles, divine appearances and interventions, but these are sporadic and brief. This was not the first such time. During the period of their sojourn and slavery in Egypt Israel endured centuries in which God seemed to be elsewhere and silent. Abraham himself had endured thirteen years of silence from God before Isaac was born. God habitually puts His people into a realm of quiet and then invites them to wait for Him to speak, and this can be a serious circumstance, going on for generations, so that for some it lasts their lifetime. After the death of Joshua, the time of silence lasted three centuries, but it was only a relative silence, relative to the loquacity of God to Moses. This time there were at least judges who, while they did not bring new revelation, did bring the word of God to Israel as well as His deliverance.

The first few verses of Judges describe events after Joshua’s death but also summarize what had been done during Joshua’s retirement; the details from different decades are mixed together but reading Judges together with Joshua helps to sort out which thing happened when. From the book of Joshua we can see that Caleb acted as the leader of Judah’s occupation of their inheritance before Joshua died, and that it was probably after Joshua died that the lots were cast and fell to Judah to make the next major move against the Canaanites. Why did they take turns? Why did they still hesitate after four decades of doing so little? Perhaps Joshua’s military campaign had been too successful. Perhaps the Canaanite power in the land was so broken that the people of Israel felt safe and preferred to relax a while rather than push their advantage.

After Joshua and Caleb died there were both some victories and some defeats as well. Most of the tribes took some of their inheritance but also left some Canaanites undefeated. Judah and Simeon joined forces and seem to have fared the best, taking much of their inheritance. In chapter 1 the first Canaanite king mentioned was Adoni-bezek. When he was captured he was not executed, but in the custom of the Canaanites his thumbs and big toes were cut off and he was allowed to live as a harmless cripple. He had done the same to seventy other kings, or so he claimed, and so the sentence against him was not unjust. Just though it may have been, it was a disquieting sign that even in this custom governing how a defeated king was treated, the people of Israel were adopting Canaanite ways. Adoni-bezek was taken to Jerusalem where he lived as a beggar until he died. It is not clear to me that the Canaanite practice was more gentle than the Israelite practice of executing kings: letting a former king live only to beg and then die in the street is not a mark of mercy.

There is some confusion in the accounts of the Jebusites living in Jerusalem, however. Their king had been defeated by Joshua, but the city had not been captured. At this point Judah captured and burned Jerusalem, and yet somehow the Jebusites living there were not destroyed. It seems that what Israel had destroyed was the outer circle of the city, but that there was an inner citadel that Israel was unable to occupy, the citadel later referred to as Zion. In this way the Jebusites persisted in the land but their power was broken. Afterward Benjamin failed to defeat the Jebusites as well.

Judah was also credited with capturing Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ekron. It would seem that Judah captured these cities while they were Canaanite, but that the Philistines later took them away from Judah; within perhaps only a few decades, all of these cities were under Philistine control and became centers of power for them. It could be that 1:19 refers to some of the earliest Philistines, that these are the people who had chariots of iron. Even so, that they had iron chariots was not a good reason to fail to displace the peoples of the plains. If God could defeat the Egyptians then why could He not defeat the iron chariots of the Philistines? It was a reason for their failure but it could not have been the cause of their failure.

None of the tribes had complete success in taking their allotted land, but this failure by the tribe of Dan was the worst failure. They had been given land that belonged to Amorites along the coast of the Mediterranean, but were driven back into the hills. and they were unable to take any of their land. Many, but not all, of the tribe of Dan move to the far north of the Promised Land and took the city of Leshem. The Amorites who resisted Dan were subdued to some extent by Ephraim and Manasseh.

Judges 2:11-3:6 summarizes the state of Israel not long after Joshua’s death, and it summarizes the flow of history for the next three centuries. First, the people of Israel failed to drive out the Canaanites; second, the people of Israel intermarried with the Canaanites and began to worship their gods; and third, God determined that He would no longer drive out the Canaanites but that He would leave some of them in the land to “test” Israel. From these the cycle of disobedience, repentance, and deliverance was begun and was chronicled in the rest of the book.

But which came first, the failure to drive out the Canaanites or the lure into idolatry? It is easy to get the impression that the Israelites had a failure of will to drive out the Canaanites, and then they had a further failure of will to keep separate from the Canaanite gods. A closer inspection of the text suggests a different interpretation, however. In Joshua’s farewell, he was already exhorting the people to put away their idols. This was still during the time in which Israel was serving the Lord, during Joshua’s life and the generation that came after his, who had wandered in the desert. Even when the people of Israel were ostensibly faithful to Yahweh they had begun to keep idols. Joshua tried to warn them, that the seeds of disaster were already planted, but they did not listen.

It was after Joshua’s death, perhaps after the death of the next generation, that the angel arose from Gilgal and rebuked the people for their flirtation with idols and departed from Israel. I believe the angel of the Lord referred to here is the pillar of cloud and fire that had stood before the Tabernacle since it was built at Mt. Sinai. Yahweh’s visible sign had stayed with them the rest of Joshua’s life and for some time after he died. But as Israel failed to drive out the Canaanites, and lost the will to drive them out, the cloud departed from them. It was a symbolic way of saying what the angel said aloud, that God would no longer drive out the Canaanites. It did not mean that He was no longer present in Israel, for His dwelling was in the Most Holy Place, not in the cloud. The cloud symbolized His protection, and that was being removed. He had fought for them and given them victory and helped them but now they were ceasing to fight against the Canaanites and in response He also ceased to fight them.

The pillar of cloud, the angel, had stayed with the Tabernacle, and the Tabernacle had been moved to Shiloh but the angel arose from Gilgal. Either the angel no longer stayed with the Tabernacle or else the Tabernacle had been moved back to Gilgal at some point, or else the departure of the angel occurred just as Joshua was retiring and before they moved the Tabernacle to Shiloh. None of these options is entirely satisfactory but I will have to go with the second one if I have to choose. The Tabernacle eventually did settle down at Shiloh during the period of the judges, but perhaps early on in this time it was moved to various places in a rotation – Shiloh, Shechem, Gilgal.

The departure of the angel would have been a sharp rebuke to the people but it did not stop them from their slide into idolatry. If this occurred after the death of the generation after Joshua, as Judges 2:7 suggests, then we are in about the year 1320 b.c. and the cloud had been with the tabernacle for about one hundred years. Judges 2:10 explains that “there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel”. It was the grand-children of the people who had wandered in the desert who did not know Him, and just that quickly Yahweh was abandoned by Israel. No other god in history has been so easily forgotten, so easy to abandon, as Yahweh. Yahweh could not have been the product of man’s imagination and the religion of Israel could not have been invented by men. They would not have been able to remember it long enough to have invented it.