RDean Judges Lesson 40
Divine Grace and Faithfulness – Judges 10:1-9
Judges 10, and we begin a new section of Judges; a new segment as it were. For the last several months we have been in the episode, really the Gideon narrative because even though chapter 9 deals with his son, Abimelech, that’s all part of the Gideon narrative from about chapter 6-9. Starting in Judge 10 we get into the Jephthah narrative and the introduction to that and it just seems to get more and more bizarre. And the reason it gets more and more bizarre is because the nation has gone so deep into spiritual apostasy, they’ve rejected God, they’ve adopted so much of the thinking and the lifestyle of the Canaanite culture that surrounds them, that they’re virtually now indistinguishable from the Canaanites. Their leaders are indistinguishable from the Canaanites and so all of the things that are going on just seem to be extremely strange and odd to us. But this signifies how dangerous human viewpoint thinking and pagan thinking really is and the effect that it can have on a culture, whether that culture is a broad national culture or local culture, subculture, family culture, work culture, whatever it is, when human viewpoint dominates the result is always going to be fragmentation and disruption.
Let’s pick up the overall theme of Judges. Remember that the key verse is, “There was no king in the land, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” That emphasized two principles. First of all, they had no physical king but the emphasis is not on the fact that there is no monarchy. That’s the standard interpretation of that passage, it’s written later, during the first monarchy of Saul or maybe even later under David, and they’re just emphasizing the absence of a physical king or absence of a monarchy. But under the theocratic rule of law set forth in the Mosaic Law God was viewed as the executive branch, so it’s a theocracy, God is the king. But they’re rejecting God as king. Once you reject God as the ultimate source of absolutes in a culture, that creates a vacuum; something is going to get sucked into that vacuum and what gets sucked into that vacuum is going to be human viewpoint standards. And depending on how consistently they match up with the establishment principles of the Mosaic Law you’re going to have different degrees of disruption, disorder, instability in a society.
Remember establishment principles, or the laws, the moral code, the ethics code that is grounded or founded in the Mosaic Law, that is applicable to believe and unbeliever alike so that believer and unbeliever alike can apply certain principles and go to a certain level but beyond that only believers can go. You look at the Ten Commandments, those were for believer and unbeliever alike, prohibitions against murder, false witness, adultery, were designed to protect individual rights and individual freedoms and to protect private ownership of property. The first section of the Ten Commandments focused on the spiritual dimension and their allegiance to God and excluding, even though the individuals in the culture might not have been believers, the obedience to the first five commandments applied nationally and was designed to exclude idolatry. Once idolatry would come in nationally and individually it would open the nation up to slavery to false doctrine, false teaching, which the New Testament reveals is ultimately doctrines of demons and what it calls worldliness is the thinking of demons in James 3:13-15. So all false teaching comes under the category of worldliness, cosmic thinking, which is the thinking of demons, doctrines of demons, or human viewpoint. It ultimately boils down to the same thing. Those are roughly synonymous terms, just looking at those same ideas from different vantage points.
So Israel succumbs in the book of Judges to the pressure of idolatry; they go negative to God, they reject doctrine and idolatry comes in, and as a result of violating the first two commandments of the Ten Commandments, and their adoption of idolatry, the nation becomes enslaved to false gods and false thinking, and as they become slaves in their soul they become slaves eventually, either economically or militarily to foreign powers.
As we look at Judges there’s a cycle that takes place. There’s disobedience to God and then God brings divine discipline on the nation and then there is a deliverance. The cycle of Judges goes from disobedience to divine discipline and then they cry out for deliverance and God delivers them but it doesn’t stay; there’s a lack of positive volition across the board culturally. While they may go through a generation after the deliverance it’s not long before they’re back in disobedience rejecting God and they just go through this cycle again and again. As time goes by through the period of the Judges the cycles get worse, so that the culture as a whole deteriorates; it’s in decline, the first judge is Othniel, nothing is said negative about Othniel, everything said about him is positive. And then with each successive judge there’s more and more indications and hints that they have succumbed to the thinking of the culture around them. And as a result of that they reflect the human viewpoint and there’s further and further deterioration.
We have gone through the cycles of Othniel, Ehud, Deborah, and Gideon, the first four judges and now we come to the sixth judge, Jephthah. As we approach the study of Jephthah we’re going to see one of the most bizarre episodes; I can’t find a word more extreme than that, it’s the only incident of its kind in all of the Old Testament and all of Scripture and it’s hard to even find a parallel to this in the ancient world. And then the final cycle is that of the judgeship of Samson and Jephthah and Samson’s judgeships must almost be understood simultaneously. They do indeed overlap, and they indicate the stages of reversionism that the nation has gone through. We’ve studied the eight stages of reversionism; a believer is in spiritual advance and then for one reason or another begins to turn away from God. The Scripture in Judges 10 and Judges 2 use words like abandoned, forsake, forget, and they emphasize not just some sort of passive ignoring of God but whenever God is taken out of your life and your positive volition is reversed to negative volition it is an active decision on the part of the believer.
We may come up with all sorts of rationalizations and excuses for it, I’m too busy, too many things are going on in our life, whatever it might be, but it is still emphasized in Scripture, it’s a conscious decision to reject doctrine. It begins with reaction and distraction and that emphasizes the fact that some event happens in life; sometimes it may involve an increased demand at work, sometimes it may involve increased demands at home, sometimes it might involve health problems, whatever it might be, sometimes there’s reaction to a personality, a pastor or somebody else in the congregation. You get mad, you get angry at somebody, or you react to some behavior and all of a sudden that becomes an issue rather than doctrine. And so there’s a reaction and a distraction away from doctrine and suddenly doctrine is no longer the number one priority.
As you stay in that stage and you start forgetting doctrine and focusing more on the human viewpoint concepts that are not influencing your soul, you begin to look somewhere else for happiness, for meaning, for purpose in life. That leads to soul poverty. The Scripture says, referring to the Jews, that God gave them what they asked for but He sent leanness to their soul… leanness to their soul! And that emphasized the fact that as you search for happiness in all the details of life it comes up empty and there is further and further frustration and dissatisfaction with life. This, then, leads to emotionalism. People feed on emotion, on emotional hype, trying to find real happiness, confusing the happiness God provides with emotion, and so then they begin to run their life based on emotion. Now this can happen culturally and often happens as a result of mysticism and the influence of mysticism and subjectivism in a culture. That’s where we see ourselves nationally right now; emotion is the number one criteria for anything in life, just about. And even the questions listed, sometimes through the correspondence, the news reporters and the questions they ask the people they’re interviewing and how much they emphasize on how you feel about something, how did that cause you to feel and that sort of thing. It just goes on and on to the point of making us somewhat bilious.
Then this intensifies into a more ingrained
negative volition which leads to a complete darkness in the soul because
doctrine is no longer there and that eventually hardens the heart, the
Scripture says, what we call scar tissue in the soul, and that leads, finally,
to cosmic degeneracy, full-blown paganism, rejection of God, rejection of
doctrine, atheism, idolatry, and everything that goes along with it. This is the pattern that we have seen
culturally in
Let’s look at Judges 10:1, “After Abimelech there arose to save Israel Tola the son of
Puah, the son of Dodo, a man of Issachar;” arose to save
Now when we look at
something like that there’s more that’s…obviously a lot more that’s left out
than we’re told about. So we can make a
few points about Tola, but we can’t say a whole lot because we’re not told a
whole lot. One of t he first things that
we should notice as we get into this section is that it begins in 10:1 and
extends down through Judges
What is interesting is
just from a literary standpoint is that you have these five minor judges, two
and three, two at the very beginning of the Jephthah episode and three at the
end that sort or frame it. And they’re
going to tell us something about…the reason the author has included that is
just to emphasize a couple of points about what’s happening among the
leadership in Israel at this time. One
of the points in terms of looking at this entire scheme is that these men are
not raised up by God. Nothing is said
about God raising these men up; nothing is said about their devotion to God;
nothing is said about their spiritual life at all or their judgeships being
related to God at all, but they do deliver
Only Tola, this first
minor judge, is given a record in history that seems to emphasize something
positive about him, though little is said.
Let’s look at what is said. “Now
after Abimelech died,” so immediately the author wants us to contrast this
judge with Abimelech, “there arose to save Israel,” according to both the New
King James and the New American Standard, the Hebrew word translated to save is
yasha‘ from which we get Jesus’ name,
Yeshua, meaning to save or to
deliver; it is the Old Testament counterpart to sozo, and it doesn’t mean simply to save in terms of saving someone
from eternity in the lake of fire; it also has the connotation of to deliver or
to rescue. So you always have to look at
the context to find out what you’re being delivered from or rescued from and
obviously they’re being delivered or rescued from foreign powers, disorder,
from instability in the nation, and this is a man who is going to provide leadership. So it should best be translated “to deliver
“After Abimelech there
arose to deliver Israel, Tola, the son of Puah, the son of Dodo,” now we don’t
know who Puah and Dodo were, Issachar was one of the sons of Jacob and one of
the tribes of Jacob, so he is an Issacharite who is living down in the central
part of Israel, “in the hill country of Ephraim.” We don’t know who Puah or Dodo were, but the
writer is emphasizing the fact that this is a real historical individual. If you were a Jew reading this about the time
in which it was written you probably knew who those people were. So this is an indication this is not just
some mythical figure somebody made up but this is a person who is located in
space/time history and he has a specific genealogy. Now it tells us that he “arose to save
Notice the verbs, he
saved
So the writer wants us
to notice certain things in contrast to what has been going on before us, that
God has raised up a judge, this is the first judge since Gideon, and he brings
a level of stability to the nation. And
that’s about all that we can say about Tola.
Then we have a second
judge, a second judge who is called Jair, and he is a Gileadite. His name, Jair, means “may God
enlighten.” And he is a descendant of
Manasseh; the tribe of Manasseh has settled across the
Judges 10:3, “And after
him, Jair, the Gileadite arose, and judged
So we are told, Judges
10:4, “he had thirty sons who rode on thirty donkeys, and they had thirty
cities in the
What we see here is
that the writer of Judges is emphasizing the spiritual decadence of the nation,
so the absence of any indication that God raises them up, the absence of any
words that carry a positive connotation to them tells us something—that there
was nothing positive to say and the absence of a positive statement really says
a lot about these particular judges.
There wasn’t a lot positive to say about them and the only thing he
wants us to notice, because of his emphasis on the thirty sons and the thirty
donkeys in the thirty cities is he’s establishing a bit of a dynasty, it seems,
and he’s building his own power base.
And this is what becomes indicative of any kind of pagan society. We studied this under the doctrine of tyranny
when we were studying Abimelech, is that when God is removed as the absolute
authority then man seeks to move into that vacuum, he creates his own standards,
and then some institution in the human realm seeks to move in to be that
absolute controlling authoritative force, and usually it is the state under
some form of dictatorial tyranny.
And this is exemplified
in the ancient world because if you went out from Israel, all over the ancient world,
whether you went south, west to Egypt, whether you went towards the east in
Syria, Babylonia, those nations, whether you went to the Hittites, what you saw
is men rising to power who either claim to be deity in the case of the
Egyptians or the mouthpiece of the gods in the case of the Mesopotamian nations
and they exercised a form of authority and tyranny that would put anything that
we are familiar with in modern times to shame. They were absolute dictators in
their time. Not even the greatest dictators
of our time, for example, Saddam Hussein or going back a little bit to Hitler
or Stalin, or Lenin, none exercised the kind of absolute authority these
ancient leaders exercised. So what we
see here is that the influence of paganism on the concepts of leadership and
authority in the nation are fairly profound.
So these leaders are operating on these pagan concepts and they’re not
seeking to really serve the nation.
Well, in the midst of
this, of course it doesn’t surprise us that once again
Judges 10:6, “Then the
children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the LORD,” now too often when
we see a passage like that we think, well what’s evil, and we think of whatever
our favorite sins are and that’s what they must have been doing. But if you do a study in the Old Testament of
this phrase, and you find it again and again and again and again and again and
again; you find it with all the negative kings, all the kings in the northern
kingdom, that so and so did evil in the sight of the Lord. And you always find the same statements, they
committed the sins, when it deals with the kings in the northern kingdom it
says they followed the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, and what did he
do? He set up a golden calf up in
We find the same
emphasis here, they “again did evil in the sight of the LORD,” the word “again”
emphasizes the repetitiveness of
So, “again they did
evil in the sight of the LORD, and they served the Baals and the Ashtaroths,”
now that is particularly indicative of the Canaanite culture. Baal was the chief male god related to
fertility and the Ashtaroth, the “oth” is a plural form of the word, various
goddesses that came together, known as the Ashtaroth and that was the female
counterpart to Baal and the female goddess of fertility. So they enslaved themselves, the word for
“served” is the Hebrew word ‘abad
which means to work, to worship, but it also has that idea to be enslaved to or
to serve and what the emphasis here is that whenever we’re under the control of
the sin nature Romans 6 says we become slaves of unrighteousness, and this is
the foundation of all the problems in Israel.
The problems that they have are not the result of bad leadership,
they’re not the result of a bad legal system, they’re not the result of any
other factor in their environment, they’re the result of a spiritual rejection
of God. Now all those other things, the
bad leadership, the bad administration, poor military, bad economics, all of
that were the consequences, ultimately, of a spiritual rejection of God.
So, “they served the
Baals and the Ashtaroths,” and then there’s a listing of the gods they go into. Now this is important to understand the
dynamics here, “the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon,” that was Tyre and Sidon,
the Phoenicians up on the Mediterranean coast northwest of Israel, “the gods of
Moab, the gods of the sons of Ammon,” Moab and Ammon were the sons of Lot; Lot
was Abram’s nephew; Lot departed from Abram, lived for a while in Sodom and
Gomorrah, after he left there, at the time of the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah, he left, his wife was turned to salt so he’s left with his two
daughters who got him drunk one night and they committed incest with him and
they each got pregnant, one had a son named Moab and the other had a son named
Ammon, and God had promised to protect them because of their relationship with
Abraham, the consequence of the blessing of the Abrahamic Covenant, and they
were given land that was theirs that was to be to the south east of
Israel. If you look at the map it’s down
in this area. Here’s
So they worship all of
these various gods, but what can we learn about these gods. The writer before has not said this, in fact
this passage is very similar to one earlier in the book; in Judges
Now I want to come back
to that word but we have the word “distressed” there and we find that same word
back in our passage, Judges 10. We look
at these gods that are mentioned here, “the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon,
the gods of Moab, the gods of the sons of Ammon, and the gods of the
Philistines,” and we need to study a little bit about these gods. Now we don’t know a lot about the various
gods that some of these people worshiped. We do, of course, the gods of
One of the interesting
thigns that we know about Chemosh is that he was worshiped sometimes; he was
similar to Moloch, these are almost interchangeable gods at times, and in both
cases they were worshiped at times with child sacrifice and human
sacrifice. So this is not a foreign
concept. Now this plays a major role in
understanding what’s going to happen in Judges 11, that they are influenced now
by these gods, the Canaanite gods, where human sacrifice was practiced and the
thing was that you would make a bargain with God and if you were extremely
serious in your intent then that would be backed up by offering the life of
your child. It wasn’t an every day
thing; we’re not talking about the kind of human sacrifice that characterized
the worship of Quetzalcoatl
in Mexico where at one time
they were dedicating the temple to him in Mexico City and they sacrificed
between twenty and forty thousand humans within a period of days so that the
blood flowed knee deep, as you were walking up the steps to the top of the
temple and the whole city reeked from just the blood that was shed during that
time and there was just one sacrifice after another where they would bring one
prisoner in and they would put him on the altar and they would cut his throat,
and it was like an assembly line, just one sacrifice after another, it went on
24 hours a day for several weeks as they were dedicating the temple.
Now this is not that
level of human sacrifice. In the ancient
Near East it occurred only rarely but it was in times of personal or national
calamity or distress, when people were at, sort of the ends of their rope, and
they had to convince god with the most serious bargain they could think of and
then they would sacrifice a child in order to convince god to do what they
wanted him to do. It’s not the same
degree today but it’s the same kind of theology that characterizes much of what
is known as the health and wealth gospel, prosperity theology today, that
people are making bargains with God and the emphasis that you have in this
prosperity theology and all the emphasis in money that goes with it is that
God, I will give you X number of dollars and then You’ll give it back to me
ten-fold, and it’s the same idea of manipulation of God. And this is the underlying theme of this
whole episode in Judges 10 and 11, is the manipulativeness of the leadership here
and we’re going to see that specifically in the person of Jephthah. So the background here tells us that the Jews
are being influenced by the idolatry of these foreign nations, specifically the
Moabites; the Ammonites also worshiped a god where there was some human
sacrifice, and the gods of the Philistines.
Then it goes on to say,
Judges 10:6, “they forsook the LORD,” from the Hebrew ‘azab, they abandoned God, they willingly left Him, they abandoned
God “and did not serve Him.” This
emphasizes their intentional rejection of God, and the result is given in verse
7.
Judges 10:7, “So the anger of the LORD was hot against
Now why do I say God
doesn’t actually get angry? In the New
Testament you might say well, there’s all these passages about God’s anger,
God’s wrath, over and over again it talks about the wrath of God, the wrath of
God, the wrath of God, and wrath seems to indicate some intense emotion. And there’s the key word, it’s “intensity,”
that’s the thrust of this figure of speech is to emphasize the intensity of
God’s response to man’s sinfulness, but if you look at passages, the one…when
Pastor Quartez was teaching here he’s been going through Romans 1 the last couple
of times I was gone, and there you see the application of divine justice to
man’s rejection of Him in several stages of wrath; the wrath of God. The wrath of God is a primary term used in
the book of Romans to express God’s judicial action towards rebellious
mankind.
Now let me pose just a
good academic question here. Is it a
good thing, a beneficial thing, a wise thing to have a judge who makes His
decisions based on emotion? No it’s not. See, wrath of God, as it’s explained in the
New Testament, if the wrath of God which is always associated with the
application of His justice to man’s disobedience is emotional, then what we
have is a God in heaven who is operating judicially on the basis of
emotion. And that means He’s not
impartial, that would imply that He’s out of control, that would imply a number
of things that we cannot be comfortable with.
Wrath is used, the concept of wrath is used and anger is used because in
human experience this emphasizes an intensity, a strength of reaction to something. When something horrible takes place the most
extreme way in which we react is in terms of wrath. But God is responding from His justice. What the righteousness of God rejects the
justice of God must condemn and this is emphasizing the condemnation function
of the justice of God towards rebellious mankind and a phrase like this, an
anthropopathism like this, indicates the intensity and the extremity of God’s
response to Israel’s sinfulness. So it’s
not to be taken as an emotional reaction but as the intensity of God’s judicial
condemnation of the nation for their disobedience to His law and their
rejection of Him.
So we’re told in Judges
10:7, “So the anger of the LORD burned against
We go on to Judges
10:8, “And they afflicted and crushed,” extremely strong words, if you’re
reading that in the Hebrew there’s assonance there, they rhyme, and the double
use there just emphasizes the seriousness of what happens. “They are afflicted and crushed,” the word
“crushed” is rarely used in the Hebrew but it occurred in the previous passage
in Judges 10 when we were told that the upper millstone landed on Abimelech’s
head and crushed it. So there’s the
image of what is happening between these two pincher movements, so to speak,
God working strategically to bring
So these last two
judges in this book have lives and judgeships that not only overlap with each
other, but they also overlap with Samuel.
So what happens from this point on in the book of Judges is overlapping
time wise with what takes place at the beginning of the book of Samuel. There we have it…the Philistine oppression
ends at the battle of Mizpah, 1 Samuel 7:11 in 1084 BC.
Now the text goes on to
say that this went on for eighteen years, and then Judges 10:9, “Moreover the
people of Ammon crossed over the
So this tells us what
the problem is and gets up to verse 10 where we begin to see the nation Israel
respond by confessing their sin and then in verse 11 we see that God really
doesn’t want to accept it and He’s going to emphasize the fact that well, you
just keep crying out to me but there is no real change or spiritual change
among the people and we’ll look at what that means next time.