Clough Judges Lesson 4

Judges 3:7 – 11

In this book you notice that certain sections can be dealt with quite rapidly. The reason for this is that we encounter areas of historical movement and to get the overview we have to cover a lot of ground. This is a different kind of exegesis than the kind that you get in the New Testament, but in Judges 3 we begin a new section. This section starts with Judges 3:6 and continues to the end of chapter 16. The whole argument behind the book of Judges is an analysis, from chapter 3 through chapter 16, of leadership. Remember the point here is that God is going to analyze the role and the function of an upper class in a society. For those of you who have been raised in the public school system where the goal has always been the least common denominator and everybody is leveled out to equal status, this will come as a shock to you to realize that God always looks upon society in terms of upper and lower classes. All societies have a low class of ignoramuses and all societies in healthy form have an upper class of shrewd people who can lead.

In order for any society to exist it must have an upper class. There’s no such thing as a totally democratic society, never has been and never will be. The only way you get a totally equal society is to lower everyone to the lowest function, which is a moron and if you want a society of 100% morons that’s the way to get it, but that is the only way you can have a perfectly equal society. But in God’s sight this never occurred. Always you have an upper class. These upper class people are generally distinguished because of certain things. One of the things that always makes an upper class is that they have a sense of purpose that exceeds just their own individual lives. We can criticize some of the sense of purpose by saying that it’s groundless, it has no base, but this does characterize an upper class. The problem in our country today is a gradual loss of our upper class. The upper class in our country is being systematically destroyed by the socialists. Socialism is always against the upper class because socialism cannot exist with an upper class. An upper class is always needed in every society to lead and when you lose this leading upper class you lose the form of the society. Socialism functions on ignoramuses in high offices and that’s what called otherwise as bureaucracy. But apart from that, where you have a relative degree of freedom and we emphasize the word relative, you have emerge to the surface quite naturally an upper class.

What are some of the manifestations of an upper class? One of the things is they make money; an upper class is usually a wealthy group of people, not always however. Oftentimes you can have a group of people that are wealthy who are low class and the reason they’ve gotten it is because they’ve got onto some get rich quick scheme, they’ve been able to cheat somebody out of their money or something like that. But generally speaking the upper class is wealth. The upper class has gained their wealth by their own shrewdness and showing forth the fact that they can use people efficiently and effectively toward certain ends. Some of these ends may be bad but still it is a function and a sign of leadership that they have been able to gather wealth. This is one sign of an upper class. Another sign of the upper class is that generally they promote education and the arts and this is done because again of the high standards of an upper class segment of the population. Today you can see the interesting correlation. The upper class is always a component of every society and where you have this upper class systematically destroyed or repressed you are asking for trouble for that society. In our nation we do everything we can to stop people from making money. We tax them, etc. to pay for the poor, etc. Graduated income tax is another device to destroy the upper class. All of these things are dreams of the socialists who would level people down to one group and this is contrary to the Bible, contrary to history, contrary to common sense, with the result it always leads to disaster.

The upper class always performs the core of your military leadership. You look down through history your great men have been upper class individuals, men of the caliber of Robert E. Lee, George Washington and so on, were not low classed people that we suddenly drafted into the service. They were upper class before they got into the military and they were upper class all the time they were in the military. So you see, an upper class is very, very important to have and it’s the upper class that’s being destroyed in our day and it’s the upper class that’s being analyzed in the book of Judges.

The judges are upper class individuals that God sovereignly picks out from the mass. Now God distinguishes some of these people, they’re not going to be very pretty people if you look at them from the standpoint of morals. Some of them perform some of the most grotesque things that you can image yet every one of these people have the potential before God to be a great leader. These are the patriots, the so-called judges. They are the people that God, in His grace, provides for a society. And in the cycle that we saw in Judges 2, let’s review for a moment, verses 11-19 give you the three-fold cycle of this period of history.

From Judges 2:11 on down through verse 13 you have the cycle start in apostasy. In other words, in this apostasy again the society largely become low class, low class because in looking upon the immediate things, the immediate environment and not upon the long range. And then in Judges 2:14-15 you have God chastening that society. God is whipping them, we’ll not use the word discipline because of reasons I covered this morning. God chastens them; this is because of their sin. And God lowers the boom on a low class type of society. And then in Judges 2:16-19 we have God’s provision and the provision takes the form of an aristocracy; the provision takes the form of men who are called to lead the nation in the crisis hour. Always notice God is creating the aristocracy throughout the period of Judges. From this we can learn many things about how our country should work in the cycle of apostasy, chastening and deliverance.

Notice that though the judges were able, in Judges 2:18, “the LORD raised them up judges, then the LORD was with the judge,” notice God did not raise up masses of individuals, he raised up certain lone individuals; He did not deal with the masses, He dealt with individuals in the mass and He raised these up and He “delivered them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge,” notice emphasis on the singular individual, the upper class leader, “for it repented the LORD because of their groanings by reason of them that oppressed them and vexed them.” But please notice also Judges 2:19, “And it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they returned, and corrupted themselves more than their fathers, in following other gods to serve them,” in other words, the mass throughout the book of Judges is always pictured as apostate.

And so in these chapters, Judges 3-16, we are going to study a series of events that occur between the upper and lower classes of the society of Israel. These people are going to try and lead; these men who are sovereignly chosen by God, the judges, these men rise up and they constitute a leadership type of aristocracy for the crisis and they tried to lead the nation, but please notice verse 19, the nation will not be led. And the argument from verses 3-16 is that when you have an apostate society, when you have the majority of individuals on negative volition toward God and His Word, whether they have received Christ or not, when you have a mass of people of this sort, then even charismatic leaders, charismatic being grace leaders, leaders of grace, these leaders of grace cannot lead that society and the overall argument of the book of Judges is that in such a situation you must lose your freedom and go to centralized forms of government. Freedom goes out the window and you replace it with a strong central government. A strong central government is always a sign that you do not have proper government leaders. You can go back and study the history of the American Revolution and you will notice that it was the upper class in certain areas who saw to it…in fact we had the struggle between Jefferson and Hamilton and so on, but all these struggles on both sides of the issues you had upper class orientation. You just have to read some of their writings to know that they were upper class.

So you have freedom lost in the book of Judges and the argument is that you must, in this case, move from a relative free society in which you have certain charismatic leaders come to the fore to lead the society in crisis. This is not sufficient to hold that society together, therefore as a result of apostasy and negative volition freedom is lost. And this freedom will be lost and replaced by a centralized kingship beginning in 1 Samuel 8. So all the book of Judges is basically preparation for the 8^th chapter of Samuel. By the way, those of you interested in government and theory, I Samuel 8 combined with certain passages in Deuteronomy gives you the philosophy of the Bible as it concerns centralized power. It’s all contained in there.

So in Judges 3 we begin this analysis of the upper class, an analysis of the judges of this nation. And the first judge we’re going to study in Judges 3:6-11 is Othniel. We have met Othniel before; he is the cousin of Caleb. Word of God on a time scale, if this represents Moses, this represents Joshua and Caleb in their generation, Othniel represents the next generation. In other words, in this interval we do not know exactly how long, we have the first chapter of Judges that bridges the gap from Moses to Joshua to Othniel. Now Othniel is raised up as the first judge.

Judges 3:7, “And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD,” there’s your cycle related to the outline that was given in Judges 2:11-19, there’s your divine outline of history throughout this period of time in this nation. So beginning in verse 7, “the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and forgot the LORD their God, and they served Baalim and the groves [idols].” You will notice something about the word “forget,” the whole generation came about that was cut off from something. What was it they were cut off from? We covered this in Judges 2:7, it says “And the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders that outlived Joshua, who ahd seen all the great works of the LORD, that He did for Israel.” That would be this interval of time, Othniel is an exception, he was one of the last you might say, he was actually not an elder, he was a young boy when all this was going on.

Joshua 2:8, “And Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the LORD, died,” and then in verse 10, “And also that generation was gathered to their fathers; and there arose another generation after them,” that’s this generation we’re studying tonight, “there arose another generation” and this generation is characterized by two things. Notice please, a whole generation. This means something else in history. It means that you can have a generation gap spiritually and you can have the Holy Spirit actually operate in two different ways from generation to generation, almost as though an entire generation, now just families, but the entire generation of a national entity can be characterized spiritually. And here we have this generation rising up that is just blanketly categorized as “knowing not the LORD, nor yet the works which He had done for Israel.”

So what is the characteristic of this generation that starts at this time? They are cut off from the empirical evidences of God; notice “the works” of God in verse 10. And then you come to Judges 3:7 and you see they “forgot the LORD their God,” means that they have been cut off or have voluntarily cut themselves off, from history. This should also arouse in you a certain inkling that another feature of an upper class is they are history conscious. A low class people are not history conscious. So when you begin to see the school system downgrade history you can just write it down, that school system is going into a low class configuration. Any time you have history relegated to second place you have the rise of the low class. So one of the features of an upper class or aristocracy is they know history. They may be personally crude individuals, you may not like certain of their personal idiosyncrasies but nevertheless, they know history. That is a feature of the upper class and here you see the rise of the low class that do not understand history; they don’t learn, they’re dumb. People who do not know history are bound to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors.

And so history is a very important subject. In fact, I’m convinced from the Christian point of view this is the number one subject; no other subject takes precedence to history in my opinion as far as the Biblical Christian is concerned. That is the number one subject and that is the one that should be emphasized in Christian education; history first, everything second. That includes literature, art, music, and everything else. History is the basic core. The reason why history is so important is because history is the arena in which God works and moves and speaks and so history is the source of our knowledge of God. And this was the source that had been cut off for this generation.

In Judges 3 they forgot God. Why did they forget God? Because they were anti-history. They had completely forgotten a lesson that had just been learned two generations or less than 100 years ago. It would be like us living in the days of 1970s and we had completely forgotten the lessons of the 1870s. Now that’s not hard to realize because most people have; the whole issue of the Civil War and state’s rights has been lost today, the whole thing. Nobody learns from that, it isn’t even mentioned, it isn’t even discussed. The issue of the Civil War is always branded as slavery or something so the whole concept of the Civil War is being lost and that’s just 100 years so you can see how easy it is for a generation to lose the lessons of history, and the lessons of the evils of centralized power in this case.

So here in Judges 3:7, when the people forget, please remember the verb forget means they cut themselves off from history. God had acted in the past and they weren’t interested. And the result, they turned to two things, it’s translated in your Bibles the “Baalim,” these are these male deities. They have male and female deities in pagan religions and in pagan religion we are going to have the male deities labeled as the Baals, or the “im” is just the Hebrew ending, and the female is Ashtaroth, or Astarte, husband and wife team. You see this again and again throughout the deities of the ancient world, always together. Notice the unique difference that Bible Christianity has that sex does not extend into the Godhead. God is always pictured in masculine terms; angels are always pictured in masculine terms, and everything above man is essentially beyond the area of sexual differentiation. However, polytheism always places god as having sex and so you have the male and the female. You have, in other words, the division and now there is no longer unity and this represents one of the problems of religion.

Now notice what happens, first history is lost and result: apostate religion. This is always the case. In the studies I am doing this is the interesting thing; the generation that came out of the flood, came out of the flood with a tremendous sense of history, obviously, they lived up to that time what was the greatest climactic thing that the history of man had ever seen, the great flood and the judgment and wrath of God. They lived through that and these fathers communicated that to their sons, and you have three sons coming out of that flood generation. You have Japheth, Shem and Ham. Ham comes out first, generally speaking, in the society, the Hamitic societies of the Indians, the Hamitic societies of the Etruscans, and various other societies in both North and South American continents in Europe. The Sumerians were Hamitics and the Egyptians are Hamitics. They are always, every time you study a civilization your most primitive first form civilizations are always Hamitic. And they are usually succeeded by the European Japhetics. The Japehtics usually conquer Hamitic civilizations in history. I don’t know why, it just seems to be this way. You see, for example, the Spaniards who are Japhetic, conquering the Aztecs and Incas who are Hamitic. You see the same thing repeated in India when the Arians crossed the Himalayans, they come down into the Indian subcontinent and there again you have Japhetics replacing Hamitics. And this pattern just fits all of history all over the world, generally speaking.

So you have this interplay down through history of these three sons. There were ten generations from the flood to Abraham. By the time of Abraham’s day history had been totally suppressed. And these people were ahistorical. So in Abraham’s day you had a generation again of low class individuals. You had no sense of history; history was something that you just didn’t pay any attention to. So there was a big flood back there, I don’t remember what happened, maybe the gods had a party, and this is reflected in the epic of Gilgamesh and so on, their thinking ten generations later completely ahistorical and you always have this movement, if you study human thought. History goes to myth, never the other way around. Myth never produces history; myth is always the distortion of history. Myth is the imposition of the low class on the historical record. And this is exactly, of course, what we are having today.

In our Wednesday night class we are studying one of the great myths of our time, pantheism, and the “God is dead” theology of Thomas J. Altizer, and here we see the Protestant under the guise of men like Altizer, we see the Catholic and the Hindu and others all going to the same goal, one big fat impersonal process in history. And you see this again, it’s reversing back to something, cut off from the data of God’s revelation to the human race, the human race automatically degenerates backward, just like the times of the judges. So you see that as a result apostate religion, in verse 7, follows the loss of history. It’s always this way; you must first lose your historical base and once you’ve lost that then you wallow around and come up with all sorts of religion. This is why I have insisted over and over from this pulpit that when the gospel is presented that you be careful that you present Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure and as one who actually lived; that the cross is not something that you sit there and look at somebody’s painting of the crucifixion or something and get a little inner urge and an emotional experience out of it. This is not the way to present the gospel, you present the gospel as historic fact. This may sound cold and dry to you but that’s the proper way. Then you produce correct faith, because faith by definition is trust in that which is known to be true and if you do not have the historical facts you never can be sure it’s true. So these people didn’t have faith and they turned to apostate faith with the Baals and the Ashtaroth.

Now in Judges 3:8 we have the second stage of the apostasy, the chastening of the Lord. “Therefore the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and He sold them into the hand of Cushan-rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia; and the children of Israel served Cushan-rishathaim eight years. [9] And when the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, the LORD raised up a deliverer,” there’s your third cycle, deliverance, “to the children of Israel, who delivered them, even Othniel, the son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother. [10] And the Spirit of the LORD came upon him, and he judged Israel, and he went out to war; and the LORD delivered Cushan-rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia, into his hand; and his hand prevailed against Cushan-rishathaim.”

Now this man, both Othniel and this Cush-baby have a problem. We’re going to look at this because I just spend about 6-8 hours figuring out where this man came from. I thought we would finish chapter 3 tonight and find out we are hung up on verses 7-11. And out of this we get a very, very wonderful principle. First, let me show you the problem in this. The problem is something else. First of all we have one problem and that is the man’s name, not how to pronounce it but what it’s saying. Cush, or Ch in the original, this “Cush,” the first segment of his name, would tend to indicate from the Biblical data that he comes form the south, he is of Arabian extraction. Now watch your geography here, we’ve got a problem. Notice where he’s coming from, he’s of Arabian extraction and he’s coming out of Mesopotamia to the northeast of Israel. Again, if we take another map of this area, notice that to the northeast we have the Mesopotamian valley, the Tigris-Euphrates valley and this is known as the land or Aram of the two rivers. It’s translated in your English Bibles as Mesopotamia but in the Hebrew it’s Aram of the two rivers. And this means this area up here; this is largely the area of Aram of the two rivers. It’s a place where Abraham sent his servant to get a girlfriend for Isaac. So besides having good girls up there evidently they had some Arabs. Now we have Cushan coming out of this area to the northeast and it’s hard to justify why he’s coming out of this place and not coming out of the Arabian Peninsula. He should be coming out of the southeast, not out of the northeast. This is one problem.

The second problem with this whole account, I point this out to you because this is where the liberals are hitting us, is Othniel. In verse 9 Othniel is said to be the judge that is raised up by God. But the interesting thing is that Othniel is in the tribe down here. He is down in Judah around Hebron, he is the southernmost tribe and so we have a problem. First of all we have an Arab coming out of the north and he’s opposed by a judge in the most southern extremity of the nation Israel. This has been used by the liberals to discredit this narrative at this point; this couldn’t be, it’d be stupid for God to call a judge out of the south when the tribes occupy all the land up here, why not call a judge out of the northern tribes, it was the northern tribes that would be threatened by a man from the north.

Then there’s the problem of how come he’s coming out of the north if he’s an Arab; the Assyrians are up here, he’s got the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then you’ve got the wrong judge in the wrong place at the wrong time. So it seems on the surface we have a problem. But if we do as I always say, when we hit these problems just stop a minute and say to yourself if this is the Word of God there isn’t a problem here; the problem is we don’t understand it. And so instead of panicking and saying that this text is historically unreliable, the best thing to do is sit and study and study and study until you unravel the thing. And when you unravel it you see it has a most interesting solution.

First let’s deal with this man Cushan, and let’s look at his genealogy and where he comes from, in this area just to the north of Israel. The Cushan problem: this man and the incident related here fortunately occurs again; it’s referred to in Habakkuk 3:7. We want to establish a link with Cushan. Cushan is used in parallel with Midian. Now this is poetry and in poetry you have a parallelism. This is one of the tools which Hebrew scholars use to define words. You go to a poetic section of Scripture, find your parallelism and if you’re not sure what a vocabulary word looks like, you check it out. Notice, “I say the tents of Cushan in affliction; and the curtains of the land of Midian did tremble.” So now we’ve established a link. Cushan tends to be linked with Midian. I could show you other references but these are the key ones. Turn back to Numbers 12:1. Oftentimes to obtain a blessing from the Word of God you have to do a little detective work. It involves a little exercise of the intellect.

I Numbers 12:1 we have a remark made about Moses’ wife, the reason is because in this particular section there’s some section as to whether this is a black woman as he married, shocking as that may seem to some of you it’s not shocking to the Word of God. “And Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Ethiopian [Cushite] woman he had married, for he had married an Ethiopian woman [a woman of Cush].” You can just see them, if they had telephones Miriam and Aaron would say Moses, you are out of the will of God. I haven’t got time to show you what happened but God has a very effective way of shutting their big fat mouth so Miriam and Aaron get theirs for butting in. It’s none of their business who Moses married, he can marry who he wants to marry and he doesn’t need their advice. So that’s essentially the way the Word of God pictures it in the rest of this chapter.

But I want you to notice, the word “Ethiopian” is the word “Cush.” That’s the word throughout Scripture that’s used. She’s known in this situation as one from Cush. Now apparently Moses met this woman somewhere in the area where he obtained his first wife, for various historical reasons which we can’t get into. Now where did he meet his first wife? Turn to Exodus 2:16, Moses has killed or murdered an Egyptian. He leaves Egypt and Pharaoh is looking for him, he sends his police out, but in verse 15, “Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh, and dwelt in the land of Midian; and he sat down by a well. [16] Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters; and they came and drew water,” in other words, the area where Moses tended to operate, since he wouldn’t operate in Egypt, was down in the land of Midian. Now where is the land of Midian? The land of Midian is disputed. We don’t know exactly where the land of Midian is. Some say it’s down in the southwest corner or Arabia, some say it’s in the southeast corner. We can be safe to say it’s down in this Arabian Peninsula; somewhere down here you have the land of Midian.

Now this is the area that seems to be associated throughout history with Cush because the people go down here and then you have the Ethiopians right across on the continent opposite them, right across the Arabian Peninsula, these two are very closely related. So it seems that this king that we’re studying comes out of Arabia. The name of the king actually is not his true name. Cushan-rishathaim simply means the Cushite double evil; rishathaim is the Hebrew word for wickedness and evil with a dual ending on it, it means double wickedness, and it’s a name or a label of his character, it is not his personal name. So he is called a Cushite who is doubly wicked. Whether this person is black or not we do not know, but nevertheless, he is a king who comes out of this area of Arabia.

Now we’ve got to study something else before we can tackle the passage and that is God’s method of chastening. Remember we encountered the apostasy cycle, the first step. Remember the three steps: apostasy, chastening, deliverance. We’ve seen the apostasy; they forgot history and what happened? They went off into a mythological religion. It always happens, it’s happening before our eyes today. The second step after apostasy is God begins to chasten. Now the thing that we want to notice is how God chastens the nation Israel, and when we start studying how God chastens the nation of Israel during the period of the Judges we encounter a very interesting thing.

Turn to Judges 3:13, here is the second judge, we’re in the second cycle beginning in verse 12, and we have Eglon, the king of Moab, and Eglon “gathered unto him the children of Ammon and Amalek,” now keep an eye on this word Amalek because this is a very important word and we’re going to see how this ties it together and by understanding this you can also have a fringe benefit, a most marvelous fringe benefit because if you understand this, then not only will you understand some of the history of the period but you will also have under your belt the concept of God’s grace versus the sin nature in the life of the believer so that what you see here will not just be history but it will also be a great illustration of the spiritual life of the Christian. But to see this you’ve got to hold your eye on the word “Amalek.” Watch how he gets involved here. The primary force in verse 12 is Moab; Moab is just across Jordan, on the east side of the Dead Sea. That’s one of the kings that is coming against Israel, but notice who he brings; he gets in league with Amalek.

Now in Judge 5:14, this is a psalm, believe it or not. Exodus 15 is one of the great hymns and Judges 5 is a great hymn sung by Deborah, it’s the song of Deborah. Most of the modern translations handle this as poetry; it should be translated as poetry. In the middle of the song of Deborah, as she sings of the great victory, she says, verse 13, “Then he made him who remains have dominion over the nobles among the people; the LORD made me have dominion over the mighty.” Now the “mighty” are the mighty ones against whom she fights in Judges 4-5, which is a topic for another evening. She has kind of a mouse of a military man in the area called Balak and she say look Balak, let’s just get out there and clobber the Canaanites, they’re all there and they’re ready to get zapped. And he says well Deborah, I don’t want to go up alone, if you go with me then I’ll go.

So God has a way of dealing with him, He says all right, you’re so afraid of the Canaanites that you want to a woman to go along with you to protect you, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have that military commander killed on the other side. There’s a woman called Jael, and she’s going to invite this guy on the other side into her tent and while she slips him some milk, whether she puts a sleeping pill in it or not we don’t know but she gets him to sleep in her tent and while he sleeps there she takes a tent pole and he’s lying down on his bed and she just gently taps it right through his temple and knocks his head off. So the other side, the man on the other side is murdered by a woman, and this is poetic justice for the fact that this man, one of the brave feats of the ancient world was for one commander to kill the other one, and so God in this way deals with this man who was always worried about Deborah and so He says if you’re so worried about Deborah we’ll just have a woman go kill the other person. It’s a lesson for the place of the man.

But in the middle of this, notice he says in Judges 5:13, He “… has made me,” a woman, Deborah, “have dominion over the mighty ones,” and the mighty ones are the Canaanites. Remember this chart of these three enclaves of the Canaanites, the Canaanite enclave is up to the north. Here we have the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, and right up in here was that third enclave. The Philistine pentapolis is the first enclave; we had the coastal enclave all the way up to Sidon and Tyre, that was the second enclave. And the third enclave was up north in this area. Now it’s out of that area that come these Canaanite hordes; please notice the location. They are coming out of the same area that this king is coming out of. You want to see the connection.

Now Deborah is singing about the victory and in the middle of her song when she says that “the Lord has made me have dominion over the mighty,” then in verse 14 she slips in this phrase, “Out of Ephraim was there a root of them against Amalek.” That’s all wrong in the original. What it means is that Amalek is the root of them, not against Amalek. In other words, the point is that the Canaanites, called Canaanites here for a strange reason, they apparently are Canaanites, but she says in this song their base of support, their root was actually in Ephraim. Now on a larger scale we have the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, and Ephraim is located here. Now the battle occurred up here. Notice this; here’s your third enclave and what she is saying that their root, or the base of their military operations was south in the hills of Ephraim. And who is it that’s in the south of the hills of Ephraim at this point? It is Amalek. Notice the connection.

Turn to Judges 7:12, this is in the Gideon cycle, when we have the days of Gideon; Gideon goes against the host and in verse 12 what do we find. “And the Midianites and the Amalekites and all the children of the east lay along in the valley like grasshoppers for multitude.” So we have then, apparently, this affiliation of the Amalekites, they seem to occur with the Midianites, they occur with the Moabites, they occur with the Canaanites, everywhere you have these independent nations somewhere Amalek is involved.

Go to 1 Samuel 14:47, this speaks of Saul, “So Saul took the kingdom over Israel, and fought against all his enemies on every side,” and then he lists them, “against Moab, and against the children of Ammon, and against Edom and against the kings of Zobah, and against the Philistines; and wherever he turned himself, he vexed [defeated] them.” And then as presented in the final culmination [48] “he gathered an host, and smote the Amalekites, and delivered Israel out of the hands of them that spoiled them.” The implication being the deliverance could not happen until Amalek was removed.

One more verse in the chain, Psalm 83:7, notice the listing, verse 6, “The tabernacles of Edom, and the Ishmaelites; of Moab, and the Hagarenes, [7] Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; the Philistines with the inhabitants of Tyre.” They are presented as a confederacy against the land. This thing has to be seen for what it is. Israel is not fighting; this is the impression you’re going to get as we skip from judge to judge so I’m stopping here at the beginning to destroy this danger. The danger as we hope from judge to judge is that you’re going to get your eyes on the trees and not on the forest. You have the nation Israel here and the nation Israel fights against Moab. Here’s Moab, here’s Ammon, here’s Edom, the Canaanites are up in the north, the Philistines are down here, all of these national entities and the tendency to think of is they first fight them, then they fight them, then they fight them, and so on, in other words, they pick them off one by one. But if you study these verses that I’ve given you and you study the context of them, you will see that that these nations have a united, not necessarily in perfect teamwork, that’s not the kind of union I’m talking about, but they are united by one thing—hatred for the nation Israel. And it appears that Amalek is one of those that is involved in creating the anti-Semitic attitudes on the part of these various national entities.

Now this goes back to something else. This anti-Semitic attitude seems to show up earlier. Go back to Exodus 17:8, again our map; Israel is coming out from the Exodus down here. Notice what happens, she doesn’t even get into the peninsula; there’s been no geographical movement of the army here, it’s moving eastward across the Red Sea and immediately on the other side, after they get into the wilderness of Sin, verse 1, and “pitched in Rephidim” then comes Amalek, verse 8, “Then came Amalek, and fought with Israel in Rephidim.” And you have hordes of the Amalekites charge. Now the interesting thing about this is that the Amalekites are so powerful that they are putting fear into the hearts of the Jewish soldiers. Now by traditional scholarship this should never be because the Amalekites are usually considered just a harmless tribe of Bedouins. What is it about this strange group of Amalekites that puts fear into the heart of Israel when we know by count that she has nearly half a million troops. There must be hordes of these people called the Amalekites.

And we find that in extra-Biblical tradition they were indeed a vast group of people. They were moving westward when Israel was moving eastward and they collided at this point, Rephidim, and there’s a whole history involved behind the Amalekites, but nevertheless, they collided at this point, and they were kind of dirty fighters because all they did, they picked off all the stragglers. So we have a sentence pronounced upon Amalek in Deuteronomy 25:17. This is one of the great sentences of history, that this people were to have a unique kind of judgment. The judgment was that they were to be eliminated from the scene of history. “Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt. [18] How he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, when thou was feeble behind thee, when thou was faint and weary; and he feared not God. [19] Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God has given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God gives thee for an inheritance, to possess, that you will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.” Now this is never given to any other nation on earth except Amalek.

Who are the Amalekites? Here we are involved in the middle of a great controversy in history. The Amalekites are said by Arab legend to be a vast horde of people. If you have a map in your Bible the Arabian Peninsula is something like this, a vast mass of people that lived in the Arabian Peninsula. We don’t understand what happened but at one time in history through a natural catastrophe these people began to mass move, sort of like the hordes out of Asia, and they began to sweep northwestward until they moved up here and the tradition has it that the Amalekites sat on the throne of Egypt. The Amalekites went over into Egypt and took over the Pharaohship and the Pharaoh’s were Amalekites. Now this is strange and most historians discount this as a lot of Arabian tales.

However, it is interesting that when you study Egyptian history you find a very interesting thing. Egyptian history can be divided into three kingdoms, the old kingdom, the middle kingdom and the new kingdom. In between the middle kingdom of dynasties in Egypt and the new kingdom there were a group of foreign Pharaoh’s that sat on the throne and they were known as Amu or the Hyksos. Traditionally the Hyksos reigned for 215 years between the middle kingdom and the new kingdom. This reign was accomplished sometime when Israel was there, according to Egyptian chronology. But recently a scholar by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky has challenged the chronology of history and he says isn’t it interesting that if we bring the end of the middle kingdom down to 1400 making the Exodus the termination of the middle kingdom, that when God destroyed Egypt, He literally did, terminating the middle kingdom, then we have immediately on the throne a group of foreigners that come from the east called Arabs. He says isn’t this interesting because this matches the Arabian tales of the men who left the Arabian Peninsula heading west. Put the two together, and then he makes the equation the Amalekites become the Hyksos. Again this is a hotly debated situation; we don’t propose this as the solution but it certainly fits a lot of things we’re going to see in the book of Judges.

If this hypothesis is correct, that the Amalekites are the Hyksos, then it explains a lot of things that are going to happen here for the Hyksos are a group of people that are unknown in history for any kind of contribution to civilization. Their only contribution to civilization is terror and cruelty. Their garrisons… one of the garrisons is the word Avaris, and you can draw the conclusion from the vocabulary of the word. Avaris is an unknown area, we don’t know exactly where it is but they had a great Hyksos garrison at Avaris. They had hundreds and hundreds of troops based in this area. And we now know from archeological studies of other cites that the stories told of Avaris are true; that this great garrison of the Hyksos is more than a garrison of soldiers, it was a torture chamber where they would bring people and they could cut off their limbs. The Assyrians used to skin people alive; the Hyksos had a method of chopping you up in pieces and so in the areas of the Hyksos where they have inhabited regions the archeologists will find pieces of fingers, pieces of feet, and they will bodies that have been totally dismembered. So the Hyksos are known for their great cruelty. This would certainly fit with the Amalekites. The Hyksos are also known as people who ruled, all up in this whole area; not only did they rule in Egypt but they controlled a place called Syria, just northeast, the same place where we have this king coming from in this time. The Hyksos were known to make treaties with the nations.

It appears then, that this hypothesis is correct, that actually for several centuries, five centuries to be exact, from about 1400 on down to the time of Saul and David you have emerge over the entire Middle East a dark age, a horrible dark age when the light of freedom had been completely erased. And the only place where the light of freedom is upheld were by these judges in the lone nation of Israel. Egypt was prostrate; Egyptian civilization had come to a halt; the Assyrians to the north were not strong enough to assert their domain over the Hyksos and you had this entire dead time in history of 400 years when there was nothing except terror and darkness, blackness and slavery. And this certainly pictures this period of the judges.

Before we come back to the Judges, turn to Genesis 36 to pick up a point about these names so we can relate this before we go back to the chapter. In Genesis 36 we have Amalek’s genealogy. In Genesis 36:9 we have Esau. Esau has one wife called Adah; Adah has several sons listed in Genesis 36:9 and following. “These are the names of Esau’s sons: Eliphaz, the son of Adah, the wife of Esau, Reuel, the son of Basemath, the wife of Esau. [11] And the sons of Eliphaz” and so on, and it goes on down. But the thing to notice is in verse 11, “the sons of Eliphaz,” who is a descendent of Esau, turn out to be “Teman, Omar, Zepho, and Gatam, and” a man by the name of “Kenaz.” Why is his name important? Because it gives us a clue to the historical problem that we face. Kenaz is the man from whom comes Caleb and also the man from whom comes Othniel. Watch this; Othniel is related here to Esau. Notice who else is related to Esau, verse 12, “And Timna was concubine to Eliphaz, Esau’s son; and she bore to Eliphaz Amalek,” notice, it’s the same family, and the man’s name is Amalek, and there’s the origin of Amalek.

It’s interesting then that we have Amalek and Othniel traced back to the same family. Now we are prepared to go to Judges 3. In Judges 3 we have this strange king from the north. Apparently he forms a league with the Amalekites. The Amalekites are able to control this whole geographical area and along with these other kings he shares the anti-Semitic attitude. This is the dark ages and everywhere the light of freedom must be blown out, and Israel has freedom so therefore Israel will fall. So Cushan, this man, actually an Arab, probably involved in the Arabian Amalekite activities in this whole area, rishathaim simply must refer to his military career. He is doubly cruel. And as an Arab he has control over Syria because at this time Amalek extended his influence even that far northward to control Syria and the headwaters of the Tigris-Euphrates valley. So you have then this thing going on in Mesopotamia. This enemy, though he comes from the northeast, is the same basic enemy you will encounter over and over and over again in the book of Judges. Just because the enemies come from different directions they are basically the same enemy; they are involved in this Amalekite confederacy.

Now what does this have to say about us as believers? Right here we can make an analogy that will become very valuable for us throughout the rest of the study of Judges. In the bottom circle we have the fact that the Christian can be in fellowship with Christ or out of fellowship at any given moment. If you will visualize in your mind the map of the land of Israel as the bottom circle, what we have in effect presented in the book of Judges is the struggle with the flesh. If you make the equation, this is an analogy now, so you have the flesh and you make an equation here with Amalek, watch how neatly it fits together. Amalek is in consorts with the many attacks that come. These attacks are… again in our analogy these kings would be satanic influences, to keep the typology clear. These kings would be the satanic influences and so the satanic influences may come from this direction, this direction, this direction or this direction but in every case they are involved with the flesh. This is taught as a doctrine in Ephesians 3:1-3 where it specifically states, Paul says that Satan utilizes the sin nature to test believers. So no matter what the direction is from which the assault comes, basically it comes through the flesh. What we are going to see then is a nation go down under the attacks. This would be analogous to a believer out of the top circle, falling prey to satanic pressure through lust patterns and so on.

Now let’s go through Judges 3:8-11 having surveyed these principles. In verse 8 you begin to have the servitude. This would be analogous to a believer who was out of fellowship. It says they “served Cushan-rishathaim eight years.” This would be analogous to a believer who is out of fellowship. Who is this man? It is a satanic influence, it may be human viewpoint, it may be some lust pattern, it may be something that Satan has engineered to knock you out of fellowship and keep you out of fellowship. Apparently, judging from this man’s name, Amalek is involved in some way, it’s an Arabian type of confederacy, so we can say that the old sin nature is involved. So we have a believer out of fellowship, as it were, for a time period. Here in history a nation was out of it, under slavery for eight years; they had lost their freedom, just as believers lose their freedom when they are out of fellowship.

Judges 3:9, “And when the children of Israel cried to the LORD,” finally the believer becomes sick of his carnality and so then he cries to the Lord. Notice again the principle of grace. The nation at this point, being low class, has to call for deliverance for something outside themselves, just as the believer who is out of the bottom circle can’t get back in the circle of fellowship unless he is restored by grace. And therefore we confess our sins, “He is faithful and just to forgive us,” notice who does the forgiving, we don’t do it, all we do is confess and He forgives and He restores. And you have the same grace principle here in verse 9, they cried, not to the [can’t understand word], and they don’t try operation bootstrap. Probably for eight years in verse 8 they tried, futile attempts to throw off the yoke of this bondage but they were all futile. Their efforts never panned out until finally in verse 9 they get the spiritual issue straightened out and when the spiritual issue was straightened out they cried to the Lord, then “the LORD raised up a deliverer,” and so we have the picture of the fact that they must appeal.

Now you understand something else about this; why did they cry to Yahweh in a political situation? Because who is the king of Israel? It is Jehovah; Jehovah, king of Israel. And so they must cry to their king so that He will lead them into battle against this other king. And so against the satanic effort the believer must cry to his risen Savior who sits at the Father’s right hand, who has dominion and power over all the angels and principalities and he cries to Him and Jesus Christ gives deliverance. And it is the same thing here. Othniel is the means that God uses and so in Judges 3:10, “And the Spirit of the LORD came upon him,” notice God’s grace all the way, “the Spirit of the LORD came upon him, and he judged Israel.” Now we said the word “judged,” the verb throughout this can be two things, domestic things in the court or external leadership, this is external leadership. “The Spirit of the LORD came upon him, and he judged Israel, and went out to war.” Notice something else, that it’s going to take some time for restoration.

Now we have to explain that analogy if we’re going to have a proper spiritual analogy to this historical incident. Where’s the counterpart to this in the Christian life. Aren’t we immediately forgiven when we use 1 John 1:9; doesn’t God immediately forgive? Yes He does, but God doesn’t immediately erase some of the damage and some of the other things that we have picked up in our period of carnality. Out here in carnality we may have picked up some human viewpoint that has to be cleaned out, and that is going to take a war to do it, a war in your area of thought life where you have to battle and with God’s grace the human viewpoint will be removed, but notice here the deliverance is not instantaneous. It involves an active war, the difference being, of course, that the victory is given by God, but there involves means. Another thing, a person might pick up some –R learned behavior patterns, in other words, he gets certain habits developed out of the carnality and these things become programmed responses and so now you confess your sin, you’re going on in fellowship with the Lord, you’re still going to have a battle with these things, even though you are in fellowship, you have damage that’s been done. So there’s a war that goes on and finally through the Lord the land, in verse 11, has deliverance, and it rests forty years.

Notice, it rests. The war ends. Now this doesn’t mean an absolute end because they’re going to be fighting again but at this moment in your Christian experience you may have gotten out of fellowship, you get back in fellowship, there’s a battle to get rid of the human viewpoint and the learned behavior patterns and then finally the Lord gets you over that battle and there’s a relative rest. You don’t have to battle 24 hours a day, God in His grace gives a series of rests, in which we can regroup our forces and grow again spiritually. But notice the analogy, keep this analogy and it will make this history a lot more real.

One further note, notice the last part of verse 10, that under the fear of the Lord on Othniel, it says “his hand prevailed against Cushan-rishathaim.” Now that word “prevail” is used again in Judges 6:2 where you’ll see the flavor of the word. “And the hand of Midian,” notice the connotation of the verb “prevail.” “And the hand of Midian prevailed against Israel; and because of the Midianites, the children of Israel made themselves the dens,” bomb shelters, “which are in the mountains, and caves, and strongholds.” Do you see what’s happening? What does that verb “prevail” mean to you when you read it in that kind of a context? It doesn’t just mean that the Midianites attained victory; it means that the Midianites not only got victory but they were in control of the situation.

Now let’s go back to Judges 3; what does this verb “prevail” mean in verse 10? It means that Othniel not only won the battle against this king to the northeast, but evidently what this is implying is that in the battle Othniel, from the south…why is Othniel from the south? It’s simple, because God in His sovereignty has picked up a man who is out of the same family as Amalek and he is going to be the lead man in this war, even though he lives in the south we now have a reason why God picked a man in this area. Othniel comes directly in his lineage out of the family of Amalek. So Othniel comes north to lead Israel in battle. He moves north, he attains victory against the king and the verb “prevail” would suggest that he then reigns, at least momentarily, over this whole area. It doesn’t mean that he sets up a settlement; it just simply means that militarily he has the control of this whole vast region which we now call Syria. And that’s what the verb prevail means.

What does that mean to your Christian experience? It means that through the victory and the power of the Holy Spirit, when we have that bottom circle and we’re out of fellowship, and out of fellowship we have human viewpoint and we have –R learned behavior patterns, and we confess our sins, we have the filling of the Holy Spirit immediately, the filling of the Holy Spirit enables us just as the Spirit of God, same Spirit, verse 10, same Holy Spirit there that operated in the historical situation, that was able to drive out and smash a confederacy devoted to servitude as Satan’s confederacies always are to the believer, you have through the filling of the Holy Spirit the energization for the believer for the believer to wipe human viewpoint. So he may have pockets of human viewpoint that gave him trouble, he may have been deceived. A believer can believe a lie; Satan might have put a lie in your mind about a certain individual and gotten you out of fellowship because of it and you may lodge feelings of resentment and so on toward another believer and all it is is a satanic lie, he’s planted that thing in your mind and you dwell on it and you dwell on it, every time you’re around that person you’re out of fellowship and so on, and that’s a satanic attempt to knock you out. So what happens? Analogy was this Othniel situation, you have God the Holy Spirit in grace, the person is restored, he wakes up to this human viewpoint delusion, he wipes this out in, as it were, an ideological holy war, and then he has rest.

Not only does he have rest but in verse 10, that last verb, prevail, means that he even prevails, so in an analogy with this kind of a situation he would enjoy the fellowship of that other person. So you see this is real history that carries on the finished work of Moses and Joshua just as in our Christian life moment by moment we carry on the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

But the thing to remember about it all, what is the starting point? How did Israel get involved in the mess to begin with? Was it because they lost military power? No, it was because they had lost their sense of history and as a result apostacized from the faith. Every time you as a believer and I as a believer, every time we get out of fellowship it’s the same kind of [can’t understand word.] We may have trouble with the flesh, we may have trouble with the satanic illusions, but if you dig deep enough, down underneath, it was a decision to forsake the Lord in some area. And it was rebellion and the rebellion led to these other things, and you can be on negative volition toward the Lord in a certain area and never notice it until wham, some other area crops up and you say good night, how come I couldn’t handle that kind of temptation, how come I couldn’t handle that situation. It’s because over here in some other area you rebelled.

Again, going back to Judges 3, what would we say about this. This king comes from the northeast, I can imagine many, many Jews, hundreds of them saying to the Lord, Lord, I don’t understand this, how can this Arabian king come down from the northeast, what did we do to deserve that, and never be able to link their political oppression with the fact of their religious apostasy. And notice it was only when they made the link between their religious apostasy and their political oppression that the solution was solved. And so similarly, we in examining our own Christian life must make the link. Are we having problems spiritually? It could be because of the same mechanics, probably is because of the same mechanics, and that is that we are in an area of rebellion against the declared will of God in certain points and that’s the source of the trouble manifested in these other things, but the other things are just simply symptoms of a basic spiritual thought. The solution, “they cried unto the LORD to deliver them.” We don’t have to cry unto the Lord for deliverance because we have 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins,” and that is God’s grace.