Reading: Judges 9-12, Psalm 73
The death of Gideon brings on the closing cycle of judges. His son, Abimelech, isn’t really a proper judge, but his story will show us how Israel continues to deteriorate. The following judge, Jephthah, will show us that while God is still prepared to deliver his people if they return to him, the deliverers are getting much worse in quality. The story is nearing it’s lowest point, but we haven’t quite gotten there yet.
Usually following the death of a judge we simply move on to the next one. But in the case of Gideon we get a story about the next generation. Gideon had done many things right. He was obedient to God, he recognized where his victories came from, and he refused credit that did not belong to him. He had some shortcomings, too. He made an idol, he was pretty bloody minded. His son Abimelech has the negative qualities of his father with none of the positive.
Following his father’s death, Abimelech decides to make a play for power. He makes sure his mother’s family is on his side. They are from Shechem, which you may remember from Genesis 34, when Levi and Simeon slaughtered the men of the town. Not a great pedigree. Abimelech gets the leadership of Shechem to give him money from the temple of their god which he uses to hire bandits, then goes and murders all his siblings except one, who escapes. For this the local towns come together and make him king. Jotham, his youngest brother who escaped, climbs Mt. Gerizim, the mountain of blessing from Deuteronomy 11, and curses Abimelech and the city of Shechem.
Immediately after this, Shechem turns on Abimelech by raiding the trade routes in his new kingdom. Then they bring in another guy, Gaal, who gains their confidence by throwing parties in the temple of their god, and who has nothing good to say about Abimelech. This brings on a war. Abimelech displays all the impulsive bloody mindedness of his father, smiting multiple cities and torching them. Eventually in the middle of one of these battles a woman smashes his head in with a millstone. End of Abimelech’s story.
This is a pretty low point in Israel’s history. Previously foreign powers were oppressing them in between the judges God raised up to deliver them. But here the warfare is between cities in Israel, and the first man they try to make a king is really nothing more than a bandit lord. There are also a few minor judges mentioned in the chapter who have political trappings. Jair with his 30 sons who ruled 30 cities, and Ibzan with his political marriages. The judges are becoming less deliverers and more rulers, and if Abimelech is any indication, not particularly worthwhile ones.
The slide of Israel into being a land of warlords and bandit parties brings us to the next judge, a guy named Jephthah. Remember how Gideon was pretty good with some flaws? This guy is one ratchet further down. Sort of okay with a bunch of issues.
The start of the Jephthah narrative is fairly promising. The people of Israel, oppressed by the Ammonites, cry out to God, and he answers them. They obey his command to get rid of their foreign gods, and they gather to fight the Ammonites, as God has promised deliverance. But they make a hard downturn in their choice of a leader. Jephthah, we are told, is a mighty warrior, chased out of town by his family because he is a prostitute’s son. So he uses his warrior skills to gather a bunch of bandits and makes himself a bandit lord. When asked to lead Israel in battle against the Ammonites, he negotiates for power. Not a great start for Jephthah.
Now, to his credit he appears to know his history, and is able to argue against the Ammonite claim that Israel took anything from them. Bandit or not, he is leading Israel in this fight, and God uses him to smite the Ammonites, delivering the people of Israel from oppression as he promised. So Jephthah is now the ruler of Israel, as he was promised and God allowed to happen. But God did not choose this leader for them, they selected him themselves. They have gotten a leader after their own hearts.
Let’s deal with Jephthah’s stupid vow. Before the battle, the one God had already promised victory in, Jephthah makes a conditional vow. He tells God he will sacrifice whatever comes out of his house to greet him, if God will give him the victory. Jephthah is making a Canaanite style deal with God, manipulating God into doing what he wants in exchange for something. I’ve often heard this story told with the assumption Jephthah thought something worthless would come out of his house to greet him. I don’t think so. Canaanite worship involved a great deal of human sacrifice, and I think Jephthah knew what he was promising. He just thought that was how the God of Israel worked. After all, that was how all the other gods worked.
That he actually carries out his vow to sacrifice his daughter as a burnt offering demonstrates how little he understood the God of Israel. Deuteronomy 12 and 18 and Leviticus 18 leave no doubt that human sacrifice is utterly unacceptable to God. Leviticus 27 even gives a value equivalence table for dedicating people to God. There have been a quite a few attempts to explain away the unpleasantness of this incident by saying Jephthah merely dedicated his daughter to God’s service, which would forbid her to marry, but I think this basically ignores the text in favor of good feelings. The story tells us Jephthah sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering to the God of Israel, despite the fact that this is utterly contrary to the nature and desire of the God of Israel. The point isn’t that Jephthah was righteous by keeping his vow, it’s that Israel had gone so far off track they don’t know how to worship their own God.
The rest of the story of Jephthah continues the point of the author of Judges that the nation is falling apart. Just like Gideon, Jephthah gets into a spat with the tribe of Ephraim. But unlike Gideon, Jephthah is no diplomat, and his response leads to war. Jephthah wins out in the conflict by capturing the ford of the Jordan, where he uses an accent difference to identify people of Ephraim, who he then has killed as part of a mass slaughter of 42,000 people.
The stories the author of Judges has assembled are revealing a picture of a people who have fallen apart politically, lost even the most basic tenants of correct worship, and who continue to choose rotten leaders for themselves. Jephthah’s time as a judge sees Israel’s tribes killing one another and their leader engaging in practices that God detests, thinking he is doing the only thing he can. One might think the story has hit bottom. But not quite. For that we have to move on to the last judge of Israel in this book- Samson.