The book of Judges is a strange and sometimes disturbing portion of Scripture. Our Sunday school exposure to its more thrilling narratives, our excitement at Gideon’s victories, or our wonder at Samson’s feats of strength can cause us to lose sight of this and dull our apprehension of just how confounding a book it is. In place of heroes and villains, it gives us deeply flawed characters who achieve great things and do terrible things. In place of clear statements of right or wrong, it leaves us to navigate murky moral ambiguities, with little or no guidance from the narrator.
The book begins brightly. The first half of chapter one lulls us with a sense that all will be well and deepens the tragedy of the following chapters by demonstrating that all could have been well. But all too soon, the signs of incipient failure begin to appear: “could not drive them out” is followed by “did not drive them out,” and “did not drive them out” by “put them to tribute.” All too soon, we hear the Angel of the Lord denounce the disobedience of the people and we are introduced to the sickening downward spiral of disobedience, departure and despair, followed by deliverance, followed by yet more disobedience.
The narrator is anxious to convey not just the breadth but also the depth of Israel’s failure. This is the message of the four final chapters of the book. Among the darkest and most distressing portions of God’s Word, they bear witness to the rot that has permeated Israel to its core, both geographically and in the operation of the nation, religiously, legally and politically. Judah, who, in chapter 1, had gone first against the Canaanites, now goes first against the tribe of Benjamin, and a book that opened with one of the exemplary marriages of Scripture ends with the forced marriage of the daughters of Shiloh, a shabby and distressing end to a shabby and distressing story. Human failure is writ large on the pages of Judges.
In his recounting of these events, the narrator of Judges is not just interested in description; he is concerned with diagnosis too. And there is little room for doubt about what that diagnosis is. Four times over, in the closing chapters of the book, it is stated with stark clarity: “no king in Israel.” Those words crystalise the problem at the root of the nation’s condition. They also crystalise the canonical purpose of the Book of Judges. This, surely, is why the Holy Spirit has placed all of the failure and the fighting, the egotism and ambition in the record of Holy Scripture. As we read through Judges and realise more and more the pathology of the nation, we long more and more for something – or someone – to deliver God’s people from their downward spiral of departure. And, just at the darkest point, a glimmer of light breaks through. “No king in Israel,” “no king in Israel,” but the king is coming and things will not always be like this. As we, in our English Bibles, move from Judges to Ruth, we inch our way closer to his arrival, and by the time we reach the end of that book, which is in so many ways a sort of anti-Judges, we learn that he is only four generations distant. Deliverance is coming, because the king is coming.
Situating Judges in the wider structure of Scripture like this makes very obvious its relevance for today. We are still living in the days of the judges; there is still “no king in Israel,” no king in this world. “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (17:6; 21:25)1 is a description that might have been written specially for 2025. The rottenness of society in Judges is reproduced in the rottenness of the world in which we live. The institutions of our society are permeated with idolatry and injustice in a way very similar to those of Judges 17-21. Our predicament is that of Judges, written large. Thank God that our hope, too, is that of Judges written large. We are not looking merely for a king, but for the King, who will be David’s Son, and of whom David himself wrote. “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: the sceptre of thy kingdom is a right sceptre” (Psa 45:6). We rejoice that it will not always be like this.
The relevance of Judges for us goes beyond the big picture of its place in the narrative arc of Scripture. For all their failure, Israel is still God’s people, and God’s dealings with them have messages of warning and encouragement for us. For all their failure, the judges are still men raised up (for the most part) by God to lead His people. In their variegated life stories, we can find many lessons, both positive and negative, that are relevant for us all, but especially, and solemnly, for those who seek to lead the people of God today. Nor are the judges the only people from whom we can learn. The book numbers among its characters not just 12 judges (and one tyrant), but 12 women as well. Running the gamut from Achsah to Delilah, and from Samson’s mother to Micah, they are an assorted group, but offer examples to emulate or to avoid, and amply repay careful consideration.
In this series, however, we will look, Lord willing, not at individuals, but at families. That this is an important preoccupation of the book is signalled, not just by the number of families and households that appear, but by the appearance of families in both the opening and closing section of the book. The chapters at the beginning and end of the book, which sit outside of its main chronological section, frame the book and allow the narrator to underscore some of its key issues. In them, the importance of family is stressed, not just by the opening chapters’ emphasis on the succession of generations, but by the appearance of Caleb’s family – a father and a daughter, a husband and a wife. This is echoed at the end of the book by the story of Micah and his mother, a young man who becomes an old man’s father (17:10), and two narratives of marital disorder: the shameful story of the Levite and his concubine and the hardly less distressing story of the seizing of wives for Benjamin, with its repeated emphasis on marriage and offspring. Between those two poles, the ideal and the abysmal, we find an array of different families, all with important and salutary lessons to offer us.
The presence of families in the framing chapters alerts us to the importance of family life in the book of Judges, but the contrast between the order and spirituality of the first family and the disorder and carnality of those at the end of the book alerts us to an important aspect of this subject which we will see time and again in this series – the interrelationship between the condition of the nation and that of its marriages and its families. This is not a simple, monodirectional relationship. We will discover that national deterioration affects families and that failure in families has national consequences. That this remains true in society today is obvious. But, as even a cursory reading of the pastoral epistles will show, believers in this dispensation should be conscious, not just of the connection between family and society in the widest sense, but of the implications of family life for the corporate life of the people of God, not of the nation, but of the local assembly. This reality lends great relevance and considerable solemnity to our consideration of family life in the book of Judges.
1 Bible quotations in this article are from the KJV.
