After Joshua · Ehud and the King of Moab

In context

Judges opens, “After the death of Joshua” (Judges 1:1). Judah went up first and took Hebron and Debir, and Achsah’s request to her father Caleb for springs is told again (1:1–15; Joshua 15:16–19). But tribe after tribe “didn’t drive out” the Canaanites (1:21–33). At Bochim, which means “weepers,” the Lord’s angel told the people they had not listened, and they wept (2:1–5).

After Joshua’s generation died (2:10), a pattern begins that the book repeats: Israel served the Baals, the Lord handed them over to raiders, and when they groaned he “raised up judges, who saved them,” but after each judge died they turned back (2:11–19). A judge here is a leader the Lord raises up to rescue Israel.

The first judge was “Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother,” who freed Israel after eight years under a king of Mesopotamia; then the land had rest forty years (3:8–11). Next Eglon, king of Moab, ruled Israel eighteen years and took “the city of palm trees,” Jericho (3:12–14; Deuteronomy 34:3). This is a hard reading: Judah caught Adoni-Bezek and cut off his thumbs and big toes (1:6–7); Ehud, a left-handed man of Benjamin, killed Eglon with a hidden sword; and Israel killed about ten thousand Moabites (3:15–29). The land had rest eighty years, and after Ehud, Shamgar saved Israel too (3:30–31).