Today, I am reading and commenting on  Judges 20-21.

When the Israelites mustered to punish the men of Gibeah, who were part of the tribe of Benjamin, the Benjamites rallied to their defense.  The Israelite army initially only asked of God who should take the lead in their assault on the men of Benjamin defending Gibeah.  After a terrible loss on the first day, they asked God if they should continue their assault.  God answered that they should.  After terrible losses on the second day of battle, they once more requested direction from God.  After receiving support a positive answer once more, they returned to battle on the third day with a new tactic.  This time they were victorious.  The army of Israel, excluding the Benjamites, numbered approximately 400,000.  Of those, 10 percent were killed in the first two days of battle.  In the entire battle, over 25,000 Benjamites were killed.  This ended up being a tragedy for all of Israel.  The failure of the people of Israel to address the problem of Gibeah when it was a small issue led to this tragedy.  We need to hold people accountable before the problem gets out of hand.  We need to offer ourselves up for accountability before we get too far from doing the right thing.  Otherwise, tragedy will eventually ensue.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Judges 17-19.

These two stories come at the end of the Book of Judges, but it is clear that they did not occur at the end of the time period that the book covers.  The first story about Micah and the tribe of Dan would have taken place shortly after the death of Joshua.  All of the characters in the story seem  to have questionable morals (except possibly Micah’s mother).  Micah stole a sizable amount of money from his mother and only returned it when he heard her declare a curse on the thief.  Then when she gave him an image, he made it into an idol which he worshiped.  Initially, he had one of his sons act as priest to this idol, but when opportunity arose, he hired a Levite to be his family priest.  Neither he nor the Levite he hired recognized the need to be held accountable by the larger body of the people of God.  Later, when the Danites offered him a better position, the Levite left Micah and blessed the Danites theft from him.  The Danites thought they gained God’s favor by stealing Micah’s idol and acquiring his priest to serve them.  Again, they failed to see the benefit that came from being held accountable to the larger body of God’s people.  If we look closely at the story of settlement by the Israelites, the Danites were travelling through the area where Micah lived because they had been unable to conquer the area Joshua had chosen for them by lot, and the larger body of Israel failed to come to their aid.  In the same way, the larger body of Israel had ignored the misbehavior of the men of Gibeah from the second story in today’s passage, until an incident which was over the top came to their attention.  These two stories relay how we need to place ourselves in fellowship with our fellow members of the Body of Christ and how we need to both offer support for our fellows struggles and hold them accountable for misbehavior.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Judges 14-16.

I usually write about the lessons we can learn from Samson.  However, today I want to point out why God was so harsh in his judgements against the people of Canaan whom the Israelites displaced, as illustrated by the Philistines.  When Samson challenged the Philistine men chosen to be his companions at his wedding feast, they could have refused it.  However, they accepted it because they thought that he was not smart enough to come up with a riddle they couldn’t solve.  But that’s not the key thing about them from this story.  When they could not solve his riddle, rather than accept their loss and pay him their wager, they threatened his wife and her family.  Specifically, they threatened to burn her and her entire family to death.  Samson’s in-laws were Philistines from the same town as those who threatened them.  Further, we know it was not an empty threat because they later did just that after Samson burned their fields.  What kind of people burn their neighbors to death?  The answer is, very evil people.  The way the story presents it, Samson’s wife fully believed the men chosen as Samson’s wedding companions would have burned her entire family to death if she did not tell them the answer to Samson’s riddle.  That suggests that they had done something like that before.  These were the type of people whom God commanded the Israelites to drive out of the land or destroy.  They considered burning a family to death over the answer to a riddle to be routine.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Judges 11-13.

OK, I’m not sure what I am going to write today, but I’m starting here.  I have been looking at various articles which talk about dating when Exodus, and the subsequent events in the Bible up until the time of King Solomon building the temple happened.  Many of them refer to the story of Jephthah happening 340 years after the Exodus (300 years from the defeat of Sihon plus 40 years that the Israelites spent in the wilderness).  I have a problem with this, a problem which I run into elsewhere in interpretation of Scripture.  I will start by saying that I am not taking a position on whether or not it was 300 years from the defeat of Sihon until Jephthah.  No, the point which I think it is important to note here is that the passage does not actually SAY that it was 300 years from the defeat of Sihon until Jephthah confronted the Ammonites.  The passage says that Jephthah sent a message to the king of the Ammonites saying that it had been 300 years.  It is important that we learn to distinguish between where the Bible says “Such and such happened” and where it says “Person A said that such and such happened.”  Where the Bible says that a particular thing happened I am inclined to believe that it did indeed happen when and where the Bible says that it did.  On the other hand, where the Bible says that a particular person said that a particular thing happened, I consider how likely it was that the person being quoted knew what they were talking about, and, even if they likely knew what they were talking about, how interested were they in being accurate about what they were saying.

Let’s look at this case where Jephthah said it had been 300 years since the Israelites defeated King Sihon.  It is certainly possible that Jephthah knew how long it had been since the Israelites defeated King Sihon.  It even seems likely that he knew approximately how long it had been.  The key being “approximately”.  I think it probable that Jephthah had only general idea of how long it had been: as in he would have known that it happened “300 years ago, give or take 50 years.”  The second question is, how important was it to Jephthah that he got how long ago it was exactly right?  Here, it seems to me that Jephthah would have thought it important to be approximately correct.  That is, he would have wanted to quote a time which was within the margin of error of any records kept by the Ammonite king with whom he was communicating.  Which, to my way of thinking means he would have wanted to be accurate to within about 50 years, plus or minus.  Actually, as I think about it, he may have wished to be off by enough for the Ammonite king to question his claim.  If the Ammonite king came back with, “You lie.  Israel only defeated King Sihon 225 years ago.” it would have nevertheless meant that the Ammonite king was acknowledging Jephthah’s claim that Israel had taken the land by conquering people who were not Ammonites.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Judges 9-10.

The story of Abimelek, one of Gideon’s sons, is interesting.  Abimelek convinced the people of Shechem to support him as king over Israel.  In particular, he convinced them that it was better for them to have just him, whose mother was one of them, as ruler than to have Gideon’s seventy other sons all exercising some level of authority.  They agreed with his argument and gave him money to hire a fighting force.  Abimelek used that force to kill all of his brothers, although one of them escaped.  Previously reading this I thought that he did this without the people of Shechem realizing what he planned. but today I realized that his argument was that they should give him money to hire men to kill his brothers.  The people of Shechem knew what they were paying for when they gave money to Abimelek and proclaimed him their ruler.  The other thing I had not noticed has to do with Shechem’s rebellion against Abimelek.  I did not make the connection between the people of Shechem robbing travelers nearby with Gaal son of Ebed gaining the confidence of the people.  I always thought that Abimelek was a bad ruler and that was why Shechem rebelled against him.  Instead, it appears that the people of Shechem were not particularly good people and chose banditry as a shortcut to wealth.  God used Abimelek to punish the people of Shechem for their sins, and he used Abimelek’s campaign against the bandits associated with Shechem to punish Abimelek for murdering his brothers.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.