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.