Clough Judges Lesson 2

Judges 1:1-36

I’d like to start by reviewing briefly where Judges fits into the overall scheme. We said last time that we have Deuteronomy establishing the framework for the kingdom; that is the constitution. Think of Deuteronomy as the United States Constitution and that way it’ll communicate to you what it is. Think of Joshua as the establishment of the colonies; Joshua simply is the establishing or erection of the theocracy. It is the holy war; by the time you finish Joshua the kingdom or the theocracy has already come into function because remember Deuteronomy is written in a future tense. It is written when you get into the land then do this, when you get into the land. However, they aren’t in the land in the book of Deuteronomy yet so it’s all future. Joshua provides the base; now we take Joshua and Deuteronomy together and we have Judges.

Judges is the first historical analysis ever done in the history of the human race of man. That’s just simply stated, it’s a fact, it’s an objective fact. Never before the book of Judges did you ever have any historian write with the objective of understanding better man. So this book is a historic first, and therefore if you are sharp enough you should remember this and the next time a history course comes up in school you should say why don’t we start with the book of Judges, that was the first history book written. In other words dig in the fact that Christianity alone provides the base for history; you have no history until you have Israel functioning. There was no history in the ancient world. History was an untaught subject, never taught in the ancient world except in one place: Israel. And there’s a reason for it, because you cannot teach history until you have a framework to teach it with. So we then have the problem with history.

Now just to compare the different reasons behind history from the Greeks and from the Bible I’m going to read a statement from Herodotus who supposedly was one of the earliest historians, 5^th century BC. Herodotus made this statement, now listen carefully because this is the Greek mentality thinking, this is your Greek historian telling you why he wants a historical analysis. (Quote) “These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus which he publishes in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful achievements of the Greek and Oriental world from losing their due need of glory.” In other words, he does not want the memory of man to fade from history. So Herodotus writes with the idea in mind, let my book be a monument and a memorial to the works of man.

But he also had another reason, as did the other Greek historians and that was to preserve their own generation. They wrote with a specific objective; they wanted to find out mistakes that their predecessors had done hoping that they could avoid these mistakes. But notice what is lacking in Herodotus’ definition or his view of history. Nothing about an overall purpose in history; it’s rather I banged my finger with a hammer last night, I don’t want to do it again so please teach me how to hammer nails. Now that’s basically what the Greek approach is toward history; it’s to study history so you can bang nails better without banging your fingers, and this is idealistically what they worked with.

Now if you go to Romans 3:19 you have Christian historiography and why the Christians, operating from the Old Testament base, as did the Old Testament prophets, wrote their history. In Romans 3:19, Paul speaks of the law here, but this law is the framework of history as far as the Old Testament prophets too so verse 19 also applies to the Christian historian as well as the Old Testament historian. Here’s your purpose; think back to what Herodotus, that I just want to preserve the memory of man and I don’t want the glories of present day Greece to go down; we want to learn from the past. But in Romans 3:19 Christian history has an entirely different function. “Now we know that whatever things the law says, it says to them who were under the law,” now the phrase “under the law” means people who in history operated under the kingdom of God. The Law was the way God ruled the nation and so those who were “under the law” were those who were within the process of the history of Israel. In other words, they’re involved in the historical process. So “those who are under the law,” those who are involved in God’s dealing in space/time history, “that every mouth,” here’s your purpose for Christian historiography, “that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.”

At first glance you say what a pessimistic reason or rationale for Christian history. Nevertheless, notice that this is the basic reason for history, to understand the glory of God and to understand the sinfulness of man. That is the goal of Christian historiography. All other goals are subordinate to that goal. Now is there one here who would say that history as it is now taught in the schools is neutral? Huh-un. It can’t be neutral; it’s either taught in the Christian framework or it’s not taught in the Christian framework. If it is not taught with the objective of verse 19 in mind it is against the Christian position. So any history that is written without this objective is written outside of the Christian framework.

We come back to the book of Judges which is the first history book ever written. Last time we placed the workings of the book of Judges in the stream of history so you could see for yourself the importance of what we’re going to study in this book. If we have a time line we can say that in the first stage of history Egypt and Mesopotamia had kingships. And these kingships were founded in a mythological framework in which you had nature over man; man was the victim of nature or natural forces. Man, therefore, worshiped the natural forces, man worshiped the sun, man worshiped these other things and these nature forces personified into a polytheistic pantheon.

So you have nature over man and you have the whole area of a totalitarian society develop and the leaders in this society, both Pharaoh and the Mesopotamian kings are not just politicians. Now remember, don’t read into that word, “kingship,” thinking of say Queen Elizabeth or somebody like that who functions today in a very, very weak form. By putting kingship on the board I mean to show that kingship is an absolute total messianic function. These kings were priests, prophets, and kings all in one person. And that was the normal form of government and you had very little freedom. As we said, one of the most despotic regimes of all history was the nation Egypt and it was so successful, Pharaoh was so successful that he never had to face a major insurrection for thousands of years. It shows you how tremendously brainwashed the entire Egyptian culture was. He had everybody brainwashed; he was God, you don’t kick God in the face, so you don’t revolt, even though thousands and thousands of Egyptians lost their lives transporting huge stones across the Sinai Peninsula, how they lost their lives as these stones would be hauled up these long inclined plains to make the giant pyramids and so on. Nevertheless you had a perfect totalitarian system.

Then stage three is the Greek stage; we said here you have the emphasis on the polis, the city state, and the word polis is taken in the Greek to mean not just the city state in the concrete sense but the polis also means the whole intellectual framework, and here therefore you have man over nature. And this marks off the rise of philosophy, when man now pits his brain against the world and reduces the world, he thinks, into some rational order by his own brain power. And it’s to the genius of the Greeks to have developed some of the greatest systems of systematic thought that man has ever seen. So the Greeks are great except they have made a few bad presuppositions here and though they have developed systematic thought as a tool they also had systematic thought as a philosophy and there’s a difference. So you have the polis.

Here you have the kingship, here you have the polis. The kingship is nature over man and you have people perpetually in bondage to find out the will of God expressed through nature. Here men are again in bondage but it is to their fellowman because the polis, if you could draw a circle around the word polis and pretend the city is inside that circle, the polis would not accept an authority outside of the polis. In other words, all moral value would be of the community, by the community, for the community, of the community. Every moral value would stem and spring forth from the community. Now it doesn’t take a genius to see that this is exactly where we are.

All social studies in the school follow the Greek system of the polis. You can pick up any of your children’s social studies or history book and look in the front, in the preface or introduction and see how many times value and community come out…value and community. Just count the number of those times those words are there; the whole school system is functioning on this principle, the polis, there is no authority outside of the community. Think about that for a minute, no authority outside the community. That would mean therefore that a cannibalistic society is okay. Right? Sure it is, because in a cannibalistic society everybody eats people, that’s part of the community, the community value system and since there’s no outside value outside of the cannibalistic society therefore it’s all right to eat people. You could go to any other society; German was alight in the 1930s when they decided to burn Jews in the gas chambers, after all the German community willed it, it was part of the community values, there’s nothing wrong with it. So you see than people who insist that values come only from the community have a problem. The next question is: which community. And they never can solve that problem.

Now we have the second state and here’s the Biblical state and this is the book of Judges. It is neither the first nor the third but in between, and has a tremendous system of freedom. We call it the amphyictyonic period. The amphyictyonic period, the amphictyony is simply a Greek word which means people who dwell around, and it means that you have a sacred sanctuary that unites the community and you have man organizing himself around God. So here’s God and you have all the tribes organize themselves around God at the center. So now the values do not come from the community of men; the community of men in turn surrounds God and God becomes the source of value. Outside here you have nature so if we were to draw the three words we’d have, God, man and nature. This is the Biblical order; you have three words.

Notice here in early paganism you have nature over man; the Jews perform a revolution by making man over nature but they do it by putting God over man. Then the Greeks come along, drop out God and they are left with man over nature. You can see the whole stream of history here, about two or three thousand years of history wrapped up in these words.

Now we come to the book of Judges. The book of Judges is going to deal with this problem. When God rules men, who then in turn should rule nature, the problem becomes that we have sinful men, so if we have sinful men then it must mean that God is going to have to use force or eliminate sinful man. Since God does not eliminate sinful man the only other option is that God must use force, and thus we saw last time a theme, a motif that runs through this whole book is “every man did that which was right in his own eyes, because there was no king.” In other words, this book is going to argue that you cannot have a perfect society with sinful man. Man is a sinner and since man is a sinner you must have force.

This book is going to be a justification for armed force. So if there are any pacifists among you, I’m sorry, you have no place whatever in Biblical Christianity. There’s no place in Biblical Christianity for pacifism, there’s no place in Biblical Christianity for anarchy and violation of duly constituted authority. There’s absolutely no place whatever for this thing; it can’t be justified whatever. And this book is going to show why, the Bible isn’t just being mean when it says we have to have the soldier who is trained to blow the guts out of his enemy. The Bible says there’s a reason why you have to train to kill. The military is to defend the existence of the national entity by force and by killing if necessary. So therefore the Christian should be armed with Bible doctrine and he goes into the service and his objective in the service is to do his job effectively and if that means killing and shooting, kill as many people as possible for the Lord. That’s a brutal way of putting it but that is your job; anything less than that means that you are a traitor.

Some of the greatest men in history have been Christian soldiers; look at the people in the Gospels who first received Christ. Isn’t it interesting, they were all soldiers. Who was the first Gentile that looked at Christ on the cross and accepted Him? He was a command officer in the Roman army. Who was the man in Acts 10 that was one of the first Gentiles to receive Christ in the apostolic evangelistic attempt to control the eastern end of the Mediterranean? It was a believer, the person became a believer, he was saved, Acts 11, and after he received Christ he was a Christian soldier. Where do you read in the narrative, you know Cornelius, this business of being a soldier is bad, you should take that two-edged sword of yours, you know you could get hurt on that thing, and you should put that away, you shouldn’t be in the service because you might kill somebody, etc. This is the anti-military spirit and it’s because people have no concept of what judgment means. In the book of Judges you’re going to see some blood and guts and people are going to get slaughtered all over the place so when you finish the book of Judges you will know where the Christian stands in the area of military service

The outline of Judges: we start off the first section; 1:1-3:6 is the introduction to the book and this gives you the mechanics of the entire book, the overview and so on. In fact, to get the spiritual lesson from the book of Judges you don’t really have to go beyond the 6^th verse of chapter 3; by that time you’ve really covered the whole ground. The rest of the book is simply developing the specifics. So from 3:7 on through 16:31 we have an analysis of the leadership of a society. It’s going to be a breakdown of the aristocracy, or the problem that every national entity faces, the problem of the leaders of that national entity. So this is an analysis of the leadership performance. And then finally the closing chapters get very gross; in chapters 17-21 you have all of the analysis of the grass roots. You see the first part of the book deals with the upper level, the aristocracy, what they are doing. In chapters 17-21 you have an analysis of the grassroots and what they are doing. And when you get through you see it’s neither the citizen nor his leader, it is both. This book lays the blame equally on leadership and equally on the normal everyday citizen. So you can’t blame the leaders for everything, and chapters 17-21 show this.

Now let’s look at the first section. The first section, Judges 1:1-3:6, can be broken down into two subsections. 1:1-36 deals with a continuity, this first chapter basically establishes the continuity of the book of Judges with the book of Joshua; it’s the coupling between the two books. Then Judges 2:1-3:6 deals with the overview of the entire period. Let’s look beginning at Judges 1.

In Judges 1:1 we read, “After the death of Joshua, it came to pass that the children of Israel asked the LORD, saying, Who shall go up for us against the Canaanites first, to fight against them.” Now we have to stop right here, with the phrase, “after the death of Joshua,” then the children asked of the LORD, because this chapter, Judges 1, has become one of the fighting battlegrounds for higher criticism. Normally I do not stop and go into the details of higher criticism. However, it is my policy in these series of historic studies, since we are putting this on tape and we will have people who are concerned about some of these questions that are raised by the higher critics, we have some people engaged in evangelistic ministries and they sometimes get these questions thrown to them, we have others who are parents and all of a sudden their kid comes home from school and says look what it says about the Bible here, what do we answer about this. And so we want to, when it comes in a crucial area at least, review the problem of higher criticism and the Old Testament. And with Judges 1 we want to show you what the problem is in this chapter and why it has become a battleground between the conservatives and the higher critics.

First, let’s look at the overall problem of a higher critic. What is higher criticism? Higher criticism is also known as literary criticism so if you’re reading you might watch for both of these words, they mean much the same thing—higher criticism or literary criticism. Higher criticism’s goal is to find out how the Bible came to be written. There’s nothing wrong with the goal. How did the Bible come about? It obviously didn’t drop from the moon, it came from somewhere and there were people involved in writing and there were editors and there were people that revised the text, and now, and in every generation to keep it contemporary. So what is the study of this situation? It’s called higher criticism. There’s something else called lower criticism and lower criticism deals with what is the original form of the text. There are two different questions; higher criticism is how did the text come t be; lower criticism is what is the original text. For example, the end of the Lord’s Prayer is not in some of the best manuscripts, “Thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever.” That’s not in…it’s a quotation from 1 Chronicles 29, and it has been used in church liturgy and so it got mixed into the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6. So you have to understand the original text and we have many, many godly men who engage in lower criticism. Basically lower criticism is more, if you can say this, it’s more neutral. It’s not exactly neutral, there’s still presuppositions that play a role but they play less of a role here than higher criticism.

But when we get into higher criticism and now we’re getting into grounds that can be very, very touchy. How did the Bible come to be? Let’s look at the basis of higher criticism; we’ve told you what it is. Higher criticism is trying to answer the question, how did the Bible come to be. Now let’s suppose we put ourselves in the position of the higher critic. Here’s the higher critic, he starts out and he’s trying to analyze the Bible. Now what does he have to do if he’s going to analyze the Bible. Just look at this a moment. If you can see this principle you don’t even have to worry about all the specifics. You can forget even the specifics if you just master this one simple principle and once you master this one simply principle you’ll never have trouble dealing with this problem of higher criticism. Here it is.

The higher critic must start from himself and move out; in other words, he has to expand his knowledge out from himself by his own investigation, so he begins to enlarge his area of knowledge. The trouble is that the higher critic is a finite man and he has limitations on his knowledge. Since he has limitations, let’s say that he lives for 70 years. If he lives 70 years let’s suppose that after 70 years or scholarly work he finally knows this much. Is that total knowledge? No. What is out here? The higher critic does not know this. What is out here? The higher critic does not know this. What is out here? He does not know it, he does not know it, he does not know it. In other words, there’s far more he doesn’t know than what he does know. His knowledge is limited. Every man’s knowledge must be limited. But, if he is going to say what must have happened, watch the phrase, what must have happened, to make that statement he needs an absolute. To make the statement that this must have been this way and could not have been this way would imply that he must have total knowledge. You can’t make a “must” statement without total knowledge. Therefore you need an absolute, and we’re back with the same problem on a human viewpoint basis, man cannot erect an absolute; if he can’t erect an absolute he cannot make “must” statements… he cannot make “must” statements. You can only erect an absolute if you’re a Christian and God gives the absolute to you. We Christians are the only people in the world that have a right to the absolutes because we have God who is there and He verbally reveals Himself in propositions and thus we have the absolutes. But operating out from ourselves we would never have access to any kind of an absolute and therefore we are lost.

So what the critic is doing is this; he starts here and now he has what we would call finite or limited knowledge. Let’s draw a box around that; he has finite limited knowledge. It is out of this knowledge that he says what must have happened or could have happened or could not have happened. Now he pits this against the historical report. Why do I say “historical report?” Because isn’t the New Testament reporting something, it’s reporting a man rose from the dead isn’t it? Doesn’t Joshua 10 report the sun stood still? In other words, the Bible is presenting a report of an event that happened. Now faced with this situation the non-Christian dissolves the historical report in favor of his finite limited knowledge. Do you see how illogical this is? On his basic all he should do is add this to his system. In other words, he has this much knowledge and I came up with a report that the sun stood still according to Joshua 10, that is a historic fact, it’s a report of what happened. So on a non-Christian basis the most logical thing to do is drop that fact into the hopper to expand my knowledge even further. But what happens? The non-Christian pleases, and refuses, to accept this report into his hopper. And so now he begins to pick the “must” statements for which he has no basis against the reports that come to him from history.

This is the dilemma of the non-Christian and if you’re a smart Christian you should see this and pick it immediately; no Christian who knows anything should spend two seconds dealing with anybody that says miracles are impossible, without pointing this out. On a limited basis you can’t say something is impossible, you can’t even say that Martians do now use Colgate toothpaste because you’re not sure that the Martians are there and you’re not sure that Colgate isn’t on the moon. You’re not sure of it. Now theoretically someday you could probably find this out but you can’t make a dogmatic statement. Nor can you make the dogmatic statement that the sun never stopped. What basis do you have for making that dogmatic statement when people report something happened? In other words the non-Christian critic here is faced with the classic dilemma, my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts. This basically is the whole thrust of higher criticism; my mind is made up so don’t confuse me with all these historical reports of miracles, I’ve already decided it can’t happen so I’m not going to listen to you when you tell me they did. Now you can obviously see that any science erected on this basis isn’t going too far and that’s why higher criticism hasn’t gone too far, as we’ll see in a moment.

But out of this higher criticism, starting from this with a naturalistic base, this is the way they say the Old Testament came about. This is one story; this has gobs of modifications in it. Originally they had what we call the JEDP theory. So we have JEDP, the four sources behind the Old Testament. These are not considered any longer to be any one individual, it’s made up of a whole collection of people, but let me show you the rough outline for this. The idea was that J and E were the first strata that wrote in the Pentateuch and some scholars believe Joshua and Judges, they no longer believe this, it’s modified as I say. But notice J and E, why do they call these men or whoever they were J and E? Because this man, “J”, always called God by the name Je or Jehovah, and that’s why they called this source J, it’s a narrative source. And “E” was another source of the Old Testament Scripture and he always called God by Elohim, the Hebrew word for God. In other words, these four simple minds couldn’t think of more than one name to call God. One guy said I think I’ll call God Jehovah, and the other guy said I think I’ll call God Elohim. So they both wrote their histories, one with “J” and one with “E”. This is early, the primitive strata.

And then along about 621 BC we have someone else come along in the prophetic school, “D” and they write the book of Deuteronomy. Now obviously if you’re thinking you should say there’s something wrong because Moses didn’t live in 621 BC, he lived in 1440 BC but nevertheless they say it was 8 centuries later that the book of Deuteronomy was really written and it was put together because by this time Israel’s religion had evolved into a higher plain. See the evolution creep in here and you see these early primitive stories had now begun to coalesce and now you had slowly the concept of a monotheism begin to develop and now they first thought in terms of one sovereign God who would be the Lord of history, and they didn’t think of this until 621 BC, not remembering of course the Egyptians had the concept of monotheism in 1600 BC but….

So we have “D” and then we have “P” after this, “P” as the priests and they filled in all the genealogical lists, “P” wrote Genesis 1, Genesis 1 is actually one of the last pieces of the Bible ever to be written according to this schema. So you have the progression from J, E, D and P. You have this over thrust like this. That’s basically what they’re doing, and they always love to find conflicting documents. Here’s what they do; they go through the Bible and they say look for a difference in vocabulary, they look for a difference in style, and they look for a difference in order, there three criteria are used to divide the Bible up. In seminary we used to call this a scissor and paste job. This is how you study the Bible if you’re in a liberal seminary, you cut it with a razor blade and you paste it… now you literally don’t do this but effectively you could, just buy a couple of Bibles at the beginning of the semester and cut up the pieces where J writes and cut out all the E things, collect them together, and then you have four different Bibles, JEDP.

Nevertheless, out of all this comes a big fight over Judges. Why is the fight over Judges? Because basically they see these differences. If you compare Joshua with Judges, let’s do this, here’s Joshua, here’s judges. If you were with me in the Joshua series you’ll understand this, if you weren’t here in the Joshua series you’ll just have to check this out for yourself. Joshua pictured an idealized war; in other words, you have almost the perfect war in Joshua they say, but in Judges you don’t. In Judges you have sort of a ragtag kind of think it’s a very tattered form, a very disorganized type of war going on, and see, they say this is a conflict between what Judges is saying and what Joshua is saying.

The second thing they say is that you only in the book of Joshua have one war; remember Joshua 1-10, one basic war and here you have many wars. Then they look and you say they had the nation in unison and over here you have tribes fighting, so you have these differences between Joshua and Judges. And they would say that the similarities are enough, for example if you look in Judges 1 verse 10 and 11 and 12, just read those, “And Judah went against the Canaanites who dwell in Hebron….” Verse 11, “And from there he went against the inhabitants of Debir….” Verse 12, “And Caleb said, He who smites Kiriath-sepher, and takes it, to him will I give Achsah, my daughter to wife.” Now turn back to Joshua and look at Joshua 15:16, “And Caleb said, He that smiteth Kiriath-sepher, and taketh it, to him will I give Achsah, my daughter, to wife.” See they say, aha, see what Judges is doing, Judges is reporting a historic event that happens after the death of Joshua, Caleb’s doing it but you read it in Joshua and it’s happening during the lifetime of Joshua and it’s part of the great war. So they say there’s a conflict between Judges 1 and Joshua. So they begin to divide, and the higher critic would then explain Judges coming from one source, Joshua coming from another source, conflicting and therefore contradictory.

Now why do we make bones about this? First of all if we believe the Word of God is the Word of God then we have a problem because God does not speak illogically. God speaks logically and any violation of His logic suggests that He is not speaking truth to us. So what is Judges 1?

I will go through Judges 1 just very briefly in a summary fashion and then we’re going to go through and pick up the verses so I’m going to go through it twice, the first time very quickly just to defend it against the attacks of the higher critics. I will give you four reasons why Judges occurs not at the same time of Joshua but after Joshua. They are not conflicting accounts; they are sequential accounts of different wars and a different period of history.

The first reason, Judges 1:1 says so, it says “After the death of Joshua,” and therefore you must accept the prima fascia value of any historical document until you can prove that it’s otherwise unreliable, since we have not yet proved that this document is otherwise unreliable therefore we accept it at prima fascia value. So the first reason is verse 1:1 says so, it says “After the death of Joshua.”

The second reason, in Judges 1:1 notice what the children of Israel are doing? They are asking “the LORD, saying, Who shall go up for us against the Canaanites first,” now this is a new method. Before they would come to Moses, before they would come to Joshua. From this point on in the Bible they come to seek the Lord’s will at the holy place, the tabernacle, from the high priest. So this methodology of asking in verse 1 is new and does not fit with the way they used to do it in Joshua’s day. So my second reason for saying that Judges 1 follows Joshua is that the methodology of operation is different.

The third reason is again found in Judges 1:1, notice the word first, “Who shall go up for us against the Canaanites first, to fight against them.” The word “first” means first in time and therefore this suggests tribal war, not national war. Remember how Joshua always used to fight, he had his men in one camp. Here was his camp, all the tribes were in here except the two and a half that were holding the beachhead on the east side of Jordan. On the west side at Gilgal Joshua always moved in unison; he never moved one tribe at a time, everything was kept together. So in verse 1, my third reason that the word “first” indicates a breaking up so that the individual tribes now begin to fight, no longer on a unified basis but on a divided basis.

My fourth reason for saying that the book of Judges follows Joshua, or at least this chapter follows Joshua, remember, we’re fighting this chapter, not the whole book, this chapter is the battleground. Judges 1 follows Joshua because in verse 3, notice what Judah says to his brother, “Judah said unto Simeon, his brother, Come up with me into my lot [allotment],” now this would presuppose that the lot had already been given to the tribe. But in the book of Joshua the tribes fight the land first, after they finish fighting then you have the lots given. Remember the structure of Joshua, the first 10 chapters dealt with holy war and after that, chapters 11 and following you had the allotment. But this verse, verse 3, presupposes the tribe already has its allotment, therefore it must follow and be a different war than that in the book of Joshua.

Now those are my four reasons. I’m going to have to encounter some difficulties. There are two difficulties with this view and let me answer these difficulties. The one difficulty is, to quote one higher critic, is we require at least some reference to the revolution by which all the results of Joshua’s wars were lost. In other words, the high priest said look, if Joshua conquered the whole land why is it necessary to conquer it again, isn’t this kind of dumb. Joshua went through, he burned, he killed, he destroyed all over the place, and now in the book of Judges we’re right back with the same thing, the Canaanites in the land, what happened to the results of Joshua’s war?

Well, all it requires is some careful study of the book of Joshua. So let’s go back to Joshua 13 and let’s see what the situation was after the great war, after the great holy war that lasted seven years. What does the book of Joshua itself tell us about that period? Is it really true what the higher critic says, that as a result of Joshua’s conquest you have a total annihilation of the Canaanites, the Israelites are in total control of the land? No, because when you read Joshua 13:2 what does it say? “This is the land that yet remains, all the borders of the Philistines,” and then he begins to list. Remember I did a map about these different areas when we went through Joshua. We said there are at least three areas here on this chart. There was one area that was left, Philistia. This is the pentapolis here along the coast; we had a whole area controlled by Sidon and Tyre of the Canaanites along the coast. We had a whole area in the north, the Syrian area, Damascus and so on, all this area remained under the control of the Canaanites. So the book of Joshua does not picture us with a completed conquest, it pictures us with a partial conquest. So this is completely misunderstanding the book of Joshua. So my reply to the first objection, that the book of Joshua presents us with a picture that’s incompatible with the beginning of Judges is simply to say just read Joshua more carefully. Joshua, the book of Joshua itself does not present us with a totally finished conquest.

The second objection and that is the one I just showed you; how do you reconcile then… move over to Joshua 15:13, and with your other hand turn to Judges 1. We are comparing Judges 1 with Joshua 15 and we’ve got a problem here, we’ve got to handle it. In Judges 1:1 it starts out, “After the death of Joshua” and it then goes on to relate a series of historical acts. One of these is the taking of “Kiriath-sepher” in verse 11 and then after that, [12] “Caleb said, He who smites Kiriath-sepher, and takes it, to him I will give Achsah, my daughter,” and so on. So you have verses 11 and following in Judges 1, verses 9-15 basically form a unit. How do you reconcile this unit, the action of Caleb at this place that occurs after the death of Joshua to what it says in Joshua 15 when it appears that Joshua is alive, because if you turn back to Joshua 14:6 what does it say? “Then the children of Judah came unto Joshua in Gilgal; and Caleb, the son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite, said unto him,” unto Joshua. So Caleb is alive and Joshua is alive. Then you come over to Joshua 15:13 and it talks about Caleb taking this land. Now if you’ve been following this you should begin to see what’s happening. What do you do about this?

What you do about this is to go back to the principle we’ve had so many times. It’s been a long time since we’ve been in Deuteronomy and through a narrative. But how did we handle the problems back there? Simple rule of interpretation of Hebrew narrative. Hebrew narrative is not always chronological. Most of the time it is not, it is not chronological, it is logical. I can show you 25 evidences of this in the book of Deuteronomy alone. In other words, the men who write the literature are not giving it to you by the calendar day. They’re not saying this happened on Tuesday, this happened on Wednesday, this happened on Thursday, this happened on Friday. They will start with a topic, then they trace the topic all down to the logical conclusion and then they go back again. The trouble is we are used to reading this as though an oriental or westerner wrote the history because we write our history on a chronological basis. The Jew did not, he wrote it on a topical basis. Time was not the important thing for the Jew. The important thing for the Jew was that regardless of the time it took God’s purposes would be fulfilled. That was the thing to him. So the time difference between the time God promised something and the time it came to pass was not the crucial issue with him; he wasn’t counting the days. He was simply concerned that God promised here, did it ever come to pass.

So when we read in Joshua 14 about Caleb coming to Joshua, this is true, but what is said in Joshua 14 is not that Caleb at that time got his inheritance. All that is said in Joshua 14 is that Caleb got his lot, that’s all that’s said. In other words, he received the right to the property; he did not receive the property. That’s all that’s said in Joshua 14. Now after chapter 14, notice how chapter 15 begins, “This was the lot of the tribe of the children of Judah,” and the rest of chapter 15 dealt with what Judah did. And then it says in Joshua 15:13, “And unto Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, he gave a part among the children of Judah, according to the commandment of the LORD to Joshua…. [14] And Caleb drove,” watch this now, “And Caleb drove,” now if you’re reading this through western eyes you’re going to think that the verb of verse 14 follows immediately the day after Caleb received the right to the property, he automatically went in there and got it. In other words, what you’re going is you’re taking verse 13 on Monday and you’re putting verse 14 on Tuesday. You’re putting them I a tight chronological sequence for which you have no right to do so if you know Hebrew narrative. All verses 13 and 14 are doing is connecting something. Verse 13 gives you an event, verse 14 gives you an event in the same chain but no mention is made about time.

In other words, the historian who wrote Joshua is simply saying this: he wants to show you that all came out well with Caleb, and so therefore he’s not going to give you the whole history, he’s just going to simply say this, Joshua when he was alive gave Caleb the right to the property and here incidentally is the evidence that Caleb finally got the property. And he brings this in simply to complete it, otherwise you have Caleb dangling. See, if he wrote it in a strict chronological thing Caleb would be hanging; Caleb got the right to the property but did he ever get the property? That would be a question in your mind when you finish the book of Joshua. So to stop that question the author gives you this. This is a common thing.

Now if you go back to Judges 1 we’ll go through this very quickly. We’ve dealt with the higher criticism; we’ve dealt with the problem of synchronization and not let me go through it. Let me read a brief statement about higher criticism that goes along with what I just showed you. What has been my thrust the last five minutes? I’ve simply tried to show you that if you understand Hebrew narrative as logical but not chronological you won’t get in these hang-ups. And it’s significant; do you know where the attacks are coming against the higher critics in our day? The most devastating attacks against higher criticism are not coming from the evangelical scholars. The most devastating attacks against the higher critics are coming from the Jewish scholars themselves who are not believers, who are not defending the Bible because they believe in Christ, who simply know Jewish literature. Who knows Jewish literature better than the Jew?

And so the Jewish scholars themselves are ripping the Gentile higher critics. See, higher criticism is a product of the Gentile who does not understand Jewish thought and Jewish literature. And so two of the great men, and those of you who are interested in this might take these names down, two of the men who have been most effective in attacking higher criticism in our time are Umberto Cassuto, Doctor Cassuto, he’s written a book called The Documentary Hypothesis and he just shreds it on the pure basis of the fact that whoever did the documentary series just didn’t know Jewish literature. The other man is Professor Kaufmann, from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and he also has attacked higher criticism. Both of these are Jewish scholars who simply read Jewish literature the way it should be read. He says this is ridiculous, postulating all this; you guys just don’t understand how a Jesus Christ writes history. And he wrote this, and I want to quote this because it’s very interesting.

These are the words of Professor Kaufmann and he’s talking about Judges 1; this is his section where he deals with Judges 1. This is his section when he deals with Judges 1. “Scholars follow the well-trodden paths and continue the tradition; they base their examination of the Biblical text on the rules of Latin composition. They start with the assumption that the true and original text must be consistent and if it is not consistent it must be corrected by scissors and paste work. The Biblical story teller must have had a schema; he must keep a sequence. He is not allowed to repeat himself; he is forbidden to retrace his steps, etc. Scholars discover everywhere duplications, contradictions, derangement of sequence and they amend. According to them, the text has been tampered with by the first, second and third hands of redactors and expanders, most of whom were complete fools or botchers. It does not occur to the scholars that the Biblical author wrote in an entirely different way and no according to the schema of a Latin composition.”

Now if you follow that he’s just simply saying there’s two different kinds of literature. Learn to read it the right way and you won’t have trouble; don’t try to read it through the eyes of a westerner and you won’t have the trouble. And by the way, there’s a little sub point here in all this fight about Hebrew literature being logical and not chronological that has a spiritual application to us as believers. Do you know what it is? Do you see the link between history written logically and, why this is more beneficially than history written sheerly on a chronological basis? Do you see why? Suppose we take the history of our nation, and suppose you learn it the way we usually learn it in the west, chronological. At the beginning of the semester you start of with 1776 and then you’re in the 1900s at the end of the semester. You’ve learned your history sequentially in time, haven’t you? There’s only one problem; when you finish what have you got? You’ve got a set of facts, piles of facts just jammed together in a historical sequence, chronological sequence but suppose instead of that method of study you would redo the whole course and start out in 1776 with one theme, say the theme of law and the Constitution, and you trace that one theme first from 1776 into the 1900s, you might spend a whole month doing that. Then the next month you go back to 1776 and you trace another theme through. Then you would be studying history logically and you would see the connections and interrelationships far better.

This is why the Jew in his history always studied history logically. He wanted to see where things led. If God promised something over here, then did it ever come to pass, I want to know and I don’t want to plow through five centuries of data before I get to the answer. I want to see, did God honor His promise. If God promised, in an analogous way, suppose God promised in an analogous way, supposed God promised something to the United States in 1776, you don’t want two centuries of historical material until you find out whether it came true or not, you want to find out immediately, did God’s promise come to pass or not. Yes it did. Well then we can thank God for it, so you can see why the Jew studied his history logically, because he was he was interested in the promise of God. You, as a believer should be interested in the promises of God. God has made a lot of promises to you and the key question in your life as a believer is are you claiming the promises of God and are they coming true in your life. That’s the whole issue, and so you have to understand this history is written so that you’ll get the blessing from it and see how God’s promises come to pass.

Let’s look at Judges 1:1, “Now after the death of Joshua it came to pass, that the children of Israel asked the LORD, saying, Who shall go up for us against the Canaanites first, to fight against them?” A parallel passage to this is Judges 20:18 and 27, it shows you the mechanics if you’re interested. The question is asked of the high priest, which tribe shall go first. Judah is selected in verse 2 primarily because of the background I gave in the book of Joshua on Judah; Judah was the key tribe that was to receive the blessing and take over the leadership, and Judah was the largest tribe, 75,000 people. [2 “And the LORD said, Judah shall go up: behold, I have delivered the land into his hand.]

Notice in verse 2 something, you see where it says “the LORD said, Judah shall go up,” and now look what he says, “shall go” is future, “behold, I have delivered,” see, there’s your promise of God. “I have delivered,” the Hebrew language has a perfect tense, not like the perfect tense in other languages, it just simply means completed action, it’s all in the view of the beholder. The perfect tense is all before the person who’s looking there. So what is he saying: God says I have delivered it, that’s just like when God says to you Christians I have given you perfect peace, “the peace of God passes all understanding” and that is your possession as a born again believer in Christ. In other words, no matter what the situation, no matter what comes into your life by way of crisis, discord or disharmony and so on, God has promised. The promise is as good as completed and so in the Hebrew when they wanted to indicate that the promise was as good as completed they’d use this perfect tense. This perfect tense is used to show this promise is as good as cash, right here, “I have delivered.” There’s you sovereign declaration.

Judges 1:3, “And Judah said unto Simeon his brother,” notice the tribes are designated as though they are individuals. If you are not familiar with Old Testament history, Judah died about four centuries ago, the man Judah is not speaking here, it’s the tribe. But down through the Jewish narratives nations are called by the founder. I’ve often thought wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had somebody trained in history that had the time, that had the sources to go back and figure out the lineage from Genesis 10 to every nation on earth. This has been done in part. It would make a fascinating study. Think of how you could work with your children on this. If they’re working with Russia or something you could say well here we have Gog and here we have Magog and here we have these other places, and you see where they fit back in Genesis 10 and then you could start to discuss an international situation with your children, in terms of Russia versus the Germans, it wouldn’t be Russia in terms of the Germans, it would be the founder, way back in Genesis 10 of the Russians versus the founder of the whole Indo-Germanic peoples. And you could see then, you could place the whole international crisis into a Biblical framework by simply treating the nations as coming forth from this.

Like for example, suppose you are discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict. In this light you would say, if you wanted to talk like an ancient Jew would talk to their children, you wouldn’t talk about the Israelis versus the Arabs. You would talk about Jacob versus Ishmael, and you see the moment you phrase the whole international picture into that terminology immediately what have you done? You’ve set it inside of a Biblical framework and now you can begin to control the discussion and you can begin to move with it and really come to something instead of just trading off opinions here and there. So this is a [can’t understand word] of handling history and please notice this is the way they always do it in the Old Testament.

“And Judah said unto Simeon,” now as a matter of fact these are tribes, not individuals, but they are pictured as they are founded, “Come up with me into my lot, that we may fight against the Canaanites; and I likewise will go with thee into thy lot. So Simeon went with him.” So we have the teamwork of the early stages of Judges. This is going to break apart later. Briefly said here is the land; down in this part you have Judah, down south of here you have Simeon. Each tribe has their allotment but each tribe does not fully possess its allotment; it only partially possesses it. So Judah says look, I’ve got a pocket of Canaanites here, I’ve got a pocket here, I’ve got a pocket here, and we’ve just got to go clean these people out of here. Much like the Vietnam War; we’ve got enclaves of VC in our region and we have to flush them out. And that’s what Judah is asking. God has given us this land so let’s move in and flush out these enclaves of Canaanites; let’s get them out of here. And this is why he’s saying this lot business in verse 3. It refers back to an inheritance.

An analogy with you as a believer, God at the point of salvation has given you all the assets you will ever need to live the Christian life, but God has placed you in the middle of an angelic conflict and therefore your brain looks like the land of Israel, and your brain has certain levels and enclaves of human viewpoint in it, all over it. You can’t help it, this is the way you’re born again, you come into the Christian life with enclaves of entrenched human viewpoint in your brain and your Christian growth and your Christian strength increases as you begin to deal with these human viewpoint enclaves in your mind. And the whole Christian life could be seen as one war of flushing out the human viewpoint enclaves inside your own mentality, to get it purer and purer and purer so that you think almost automatically in Scriptural terminology and you can move into every area of life and think in terms of divine viewpoint. That should be an ideal. No Christian should be satisfied until this is done. We’re not saying that everybody in the outside world is going to believe it or everybody outside is going to go along with what we say. All we’re saying is at least we know where we stand in every area. This goes for music, art, whatever, so keep the analogy in mind between the land and your own mind.

Judges 1:4-7 deals with the early battles, they went to a place called Bezek, and they found Adoni-bezek which means the Lord of Bezek and they fought against them and they slew him and they had a very interesting system of disarmament in verse 7. [4 “And Judah went up; and the LORD delivered the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand: and they slew of them in Bezek ten thousand men. [55 And they found Adoni-bezek in Bezek: and they fought against him, and they slew the Canaanites and the Perizzites. [6] But Adoni-bezek fled; and they pursued after him, and caught him, and cut off his thumbs and his great toes.]

Judges 1:7, “And Adoni-bezek said, Threescore and ten kings, having their thumbs and their great toes cut off, gathered their meat under my table: as I have done, so God hath requited me. And they brought him to Jerusalem, and there he died.” In other words, they went in there and this king was a troublemaker, and the way of handling troublemakers in this war was they took their thumbs and they took their big toes and they cut both of them off. They cut both the thumbs off and both the big toes off the foot. Why did they do this? Because no man can handle a sword or a spear without the thumb, and so this was a system of disarming the people and they saw very clearly in order to hold an area you must have a population disarmed and this is what they used. By the way, just one comment, this is why a lot of people want gun legislation in the United States; they want to take the guns out of the homes of citizens under the guise register your firearms. Can’t you just see Jimmy Hoffa and all the boys running down to the nearest corner store so they can register their guns, and can’t you see all the Mafia lining up downtown to register their guns. This is a bunch of bologna; you know who’s going to register their guns and get them taken away is the law-abiding citizens, so we’ll wind up putting guns in the hands of the crooks and the citizens get faked out as always. So the book of Judges shows this principle of disarmament in verses 6-7.

Now Judges 1:9 and 15 mention the Caleb incident. This is where it happened in time. Joshua gave you this narrative out of the time context to simply show you that Caleb finally did get his inheritance. Now here is where it actually occurred, after Joshua died we have Caleb doing this thing. “And afterward the children of Judah went down to fight against the Canaanites, that dwelt in the mountain, and in the south, and in the valley. [11] “And from thence he went against the inhabitants of Debir…. [12] And Caleb said, He that smiteth Kirjath-sepher,” and you have a complete parallel with Joshua.

In Judges 1:17, “And Judah went with Simeon his brother,” after they flushed out many of the enclaves in Judah’s territory he went down here, dropped back over to Simeon’s territory and said look, you helped me so I’m going to help you. And so Simeon had some problem with enclaves in his territory and so he went down and worked with them. Verse 19, “And the LORD was with Judah” so you have a divine viewpoint analysis of what happened, “the LORD was with Judah and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.” Now verses 18-19 are said to be in conflict by the higher critics because they say if you read carefully in verse 18 what does it say? “Ashkelon and Ekron,” those were cities on the level valley, they were taken it says in verse 18, but in verse 19 they couldn’t keep them, and this is two verbs, there’s no conflict here. They wiped out these towns, part of the Philistine pentapolis, down in this part of the land. They went down and raided these areas and they won.

The trouble was that the Philistines had a chariot force and they could drive out and outflank the infantry. The chariot was a superior military weapon of the time because as Israel would march in column formation or they would march abreast, whatever they would do, you march your infantry, the infantry slow. So if you have a chariot force there are two things you can do to hang up an infantry force. The first thing you can do is you have tremendous reconnaissance, you know exactly where the infantry is and the infantry has no idea where you are, so you first of all have a complete readout on where your infantry is. So if you have infantry down here and you have a roving chariot force they can rove all over the land and spot and tell you when the infantry is going to hit so you never have to worry about an ambush. This is one way a chariot was used. Another way a chariot was used would be flanking maneuvers, where they would come in in the back of the infantry, you’d engage. Here you have one group of infantry, say the Philistines, and you have another group of infantry, say the Israelis and they would be locked in combat and what the Philistine commanders would so is run their chariot force around in back and start chewing up the Jewish ranks from the back. And so the chariot was a formidable weapon. And down in the lower valleys they could not handle themselves, as this verse says. And it was purely because of a weapons problem. And it’s very interesting that the Jewish people never used a chariot until the time of Solomon. They were behind, their weapon technology was inferior yet they won wars because of the superiority of the mental attitude of their soldiers. Even with an inferior weapons technology they won.

Now here the statement is made that they pulled back into the highlands. If we were to draw a geographical map you’d have the lowlands here and up here you’d have the highlands. And the Jewish people after raiding these areas would quickly pull back into the highlands and stay there, and this is what it means, “they drove out the inhabitants of the mountain,” they dispossessed means they were able to occupy the mountain ridges but they could not keep occupied in the valleys, they’d get cut up by the Canaanite chariot forces. So we have an obstacle.

Now I want you to notice “the LORD was with Judah” in verse 19 and there’s no condemnation here and this is a spiritual lesson. These believers faced a real obstacle. They faced an obstacle that was tremendous and it was very real and was genuine, and they were stopped, and God did not blame them for being stopped by the chariot force. Later on God is going to blame them because when they got strong enough to do something about it they didn’t do anything about it. But God never asks you, me or any other believer to do what we cannot do. He never asks…if God tells you to do something you can lay a thousand to one odds you can do it if you want to. You may not think so but you can do it if God asks you to do it. If you couldn’t He would never have asked you. It’s the same thing here. God does not blame them for not being able to drive the chariots out at this point.

And it goes on and describes various things. In verses 22-29 we have the second area, the tribe of Joseph. Again looking at our chart, we have Judah here and we have the tribe of Joseph here, these are the two main tribes; I described this to you in the book of Joshua. But as you read down you’ll see the paragraph gets smaller and smaller as you read down, and you’ll see more and more pessimism appear. In Judges 1:29, “Ephraim did not drive out the Canaanites who dwelt in Gezer.” Verse 31, “Asher did not drive out the inhabitants of Acco…. [32] But the Asherites dwelt among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land, for they did not drive them out.” Verse 33, “Neither did Naphtali drive out the inhabitants of Bethshemesh, nor the inhabitants of Bethanath…. Verse 34, “And the Amorites,” it’s so bad by the time you get to verse 34 that the Amorites who are Canaanites, “forced the children of Dan into the mountain: for they would not suffer them to come down to the valley, “so as you read down the situation of Israel doesn’t get too rosy.

It starts off with promise with Judah but the rest of the tribes are not able to hack the course and you find out the Amorite, in verse 35, it says it very innocuously, but the original is quite forceful, “But the Amorites would dwell,” now doesn’t that sound pretty, “the Amorites would dwell,” now what that means in the original is the Amorites determined they were not going to be dispossessed and it indicates a resolve of their mental attitude. You’re not shoving me off this land Mr. period! And Dan was like a lot of believers, the first time they meet some non-Christian that says well I’m not going to buy your story, oh, gee, I’m sorry, and they back off. And Dan was just like that, the weak believers that will always take no for an answer, and the moment somebody threatens him, and the moment someone intimidates him he backs off. No, the war is just beginning. When the non-Christian threatens you, rejoice, you’ve really touched him, you’ve hurt him, he’s bleeding, so go in for the kill and when you find someone reacting this way just enjoy yourself; this is the beginning of battle, this is holy war. And so when you have a non-Christian in this position, as the Amorites are, it means that you’re right up against it and you should thank the Lord, He’s given you a wonderful opportunity to clobber him. And Dan rejected this opportunity and backed off.

And finally we have this closing note, Judges 1:36, it’s so bad that by the end the author of this has a little sense of humor after all and he says, “And the coast of the Amorites was from the going up to Akrabbim, from the rock, and upward.” In other words, he got so sick by the time he gets to verse 36 he’s not even describing the boundaries of Israel, he’s describing the boundaries of the Canaanites.

Judges 1 shows you what happens; chapter 1 shows you the failure of these tribes to aggressively pursue the finished work of Moses and Joshua. And in closing we might make this application to each one of our lives as believers. Jesus Christ died on the cross and He rose from the dead, and when we become believers we are in union with Christ. Christ has done a finished work, but like the finished work of Joshua it still means there’s work for us to do in our individual spheres of responsibility. Before you can enjoy the Christian life you have to fight for it. Now I’m against this trivialized sentimentalized devotional. Oh, the Christian life is just gently floating down the stream kind of thing; that’s a bunch of bologna. The Christian life is a battle and what joys you have you will always notice something; the joys that you secure in your Christian life always come because at some point you were challenged and you trusted the promise of God in the face of pressure, and therefore you had your joy. But the joy follows the fight, it doesn’t come before it. So you have to give up your American human viewpoint that somebody owes you something, including God, in the Christian life and that you have no responsibility and you’re just sitting there waiting for God to spoon feed you joy, joy, joy. It doesn’t work that way. You have to carve out your territory, just like these tribes and if you are a miserable Christian and you are engaged in self-induced misery and self-pity and you are sour grapes all the time, and the Christian doesn’t work for me and all the believers pick on me and they don’t shake my hand when I come to church and they don’t even pray for me, and all of this stuff, you are like the tribe of Dan, you’re running away into the mountains, you’re afraid to come out and fight, with all that God has given you.