Lessons from Israel in Canaan
God’s promise to his people Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai that they would be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” and a “special possession out of all the peoples” was given legal and constitutional form with the giving of the Law to Moses. As the Lawgiver, God declared himself to be the founder of the nation of Israel. Having delivered them from Egypt’s oppression, he was also their savior. In promising deliverance, God had instructed Moses to tell the Hebrew people that “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” (Exodus 6:7). Throughout the wanderings in the wilderness, God demonstrated his provision and protection of his people. Thus, by the time Israel stands on the edge of Transjordan ready to enter and conquer Canaan, God has revealed himself to be Israel’s deliverer, lawgiver, provider, warrior—a more powerful and faithful God than any Egyptian deity. In short, he is their divine king.
A Confederacy of Brothers
Israel’s conquest of Canaan was not the beginning of their nationhood, but it was a further completion of God’s promise to and covenant with Abraham. God had, of course, promised to Abraham that his descendants would inherit the land of Canaan as an “everlasting possession” (Genesis 12:7; 15:7; 17:8). What God did not tell Abraham was that God himself would go forth as a mighty warrior to miraculously defeat the Canaanites on Israel’s behalf: first at Jericho, then at Ai (after the incident of Achan’s sin), and then in victory over Adoni-zedek the king of Jerusalem and his allies (when the sun stood still). It is well-known that Israel was commanded to completely exterminate the Canaanites, and yet they failed to do this; while the Canaanites were militarily defeated, many of them remained in the land years after the conquest and subsequently posed temptations for intermarriage and idolatry.
After the defeat of the last Canaanite kings, the land is apportioned to the twelve tribes (Judges 13-19). The regime that emerges is a tribal confederacy of brothers, equal under the Law of Moses but proportionally represented by the different land allotments. It is often assumed by political theorists that Israel at this juncture in its history was a theocracy where God ruled over the people directly. Yet a theocracy is the rule by priests who do so in the name of God. It is important that in Israel’s settlement of Canaan, the priestly tribe of Levi was not given a portion of the land for its possession as a tribe; instead, they were allowed to live in certain cities and pasturelands from among all the tribes (Joshua 21). In Egypt, as in most imperial states of the ancient world, the priestly class was the most powerful not only because of their access to the divine via sacrifice and divination, but also because they often owned more property than any other group. By dispersing the Levites among the rest of the tribes, and by denying them a special tribal allotment, God was signaling that Israel was to be different: all of the tribes of Israel, all of the Hebrews, were to worship God as one people through the priestly work of their Levitical brothers who lived among them. There would be no elite, wealthy, and powerful priestly class in Israel that would rise to political power and prominence.
While it is assumed that the God who delivered Israel from Egypt and helped them conquer the Promised Land is over all the tribes as a divine king, when Joshua renews the covenant at Shechem (Joshua 24), he must appeal to each tribe independently to swear that they will obey and serve God: “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the regions beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:14-15).
Thankfully, the people respond as one that they will all serve the Lord, but this event highlights the difficulties faced by political confederacies, namely, the imperative for harmony and unanimity, and the difficulty of attaining and maintaining that harmony among independent tribes, city-states, or sovereign republics. The end of the book of Joshua foreshadows future tribal conflict and division, when the eastern tribes of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh return to their homes beyond the Jordan (Transjordan) and there erect an altar by the Jordan River (Joshua 22:10-34). The rest of the tribes muster and confront the two-and-a-half tribes about their supposed breach of faith—are these Transjordanian tribes so quickly abandoning the covenant? The people of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh swiftly assure the other ten tribes that this is not idolatry or rebellion. While the text leaves us with a question about their sincerity, for the time being, conflict is avoided. Yet even still, this incident hints at what is to come in the period of the judges.
Heroic Judges and the Need for Kingship
The book of Judges is about many things, but its primary political teaching is that without kingship and central government, a pure confederacy is an unstable political form, prone to conflict, anarchy, religious apostasy, and conquest by foreign enemies. The book of Joshua ends on a high note: the Israelites have taken possession of the Promised Land, they have conquered and subdued the Canaanites, they have justly divided the land among the tribes, and they have unanimously renewed the covenant among themselves and with their God. God’s promises to Abraham of a land, seed, and blessing hundreds of years prior have finally been fulfilled. If there was ever a time when Israel would prosper and live in a stable and righteous commonwealth, this would be it. Yet the moment of greatest promise is in fact the moment Israel begins her decline into chaos and civil war.
Judges begins with Israel’s continuing conquest of Canaan, an odd thing for readers attuned to the fact that the conquest should have already been completed. Indeed, Israel’s failure to complete the conquest becomes the source of her faithlessness, apostasy, idolatry, and enslavement to others. Judges recounts a series of thirteen judges over a 300-350-year period who periodically save the people from cycles of faithlessness and conquest. These judges, however, are not merely cyclical; there is a downward spiral, from Othniel to Samson, with only a brief renewal with Deborah and Gideon.
While the judges are providential deliverers—God raises them up sequentially when the people of Israel cry out to God and repent of their sins—we should not idolize them. They represent something pagan: instead of Israel being faithful to God and their covenant, and looking to the Lord for deliverance from their enemies, the judges are an archetype of the pagan hero—Achilles-type warlords who glory in blood and superhuman feats of conquest and victory. As Israel’s confederacy comes apart at the seams and descends into an anarchic state of nature, these pagan heroes are necessary to impose order and dominance on the chaos that emerges when everyone does what is right in their own eyes and abandons God’s covenant.
Yet at the same time, God uses the judges to teach the Hebrew people the art of war. This is necessary for the final, climactic, heroic clash between Samson and the Philistines. Joshua and Judges refer to the Canaanites as “the peoples of the land,” but the Philistines are never spoken of in this way. They were a separate and foreign people who had invaded Canaan from the sea; they were, in fact, seafaring Greeks, descended from the pre-Homeric Greek peoples. These Greeks were known for their heroic paganism and feats of bravery. As such, only a commensurate heroic figure from among the Hebrews could defeat Greeks like this. That man was Samson.
After all the Canaanites are subdued, the Philistines continue to be a threat to Israel and an unconquered foe. Samson is not only God’s answer to the Philistines (at least for the time being), but he also represents a fully pagan (yet still Hebrew) hero who believes in God. Samson was from the tribe of Dan in the south, which was dominated by the Philistines who lived on the Mediterranean coast. Samson’s birth is both an echo of Abraham and Sarah (Sarah was without children, yet visited by angels and promised a child), and his miraculous conception by a barren woman and his Nazirite vow mark him as being exceptional. The text and the preceding stories of Samson’s remarkable strength and feats of deliverance push the reader to wonder, is Samson a kind of demigod?
Samson is not a model of a righteous man after God’s own heart. He pursues Philistine women, demanding of his parents that they get one of the Philistine daughters for him (Judges 14:1-3). Samson sleeps with prostitutes and fools around with Delilah; he is constantly mingling among the Philistines, alternatively chasing their women and killing their men. When the spirit of God comes upon him, the text literally reads that God’s spirit began to “pound him,” beating and stirring Samson up to slay Israel’s enemies. This is a shocking image of a Hebrew possessing God’s spirit in a way utterly distinct from how the spirit of God came upon Moses or Joshua. It is fitting for Samson’s violent, pagan nature. In these texts, we find a critique of the pagan hero: he may conquer men by shedding blood, but he is sexually crass and weak around women; God might accomplish his will through him, but only by pounding him with wild spiritual possession. God uses the heroic judges to deliver Israel from her enemies, but this is not God’s ideal for his people.
Judges 13:5 tells us that Samson, the last judge, “beg[a]n to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines.” Despite Samson sacrificing his own life and killing more of the Philistines in his final act of heroic victory than he ever had before (Judges 16:23-31), we find out later that the Philistines are not yet conquered. Their final defeat would not occur until God raised up a new kind of hero in King David, a hero after God’s own heart.
Civil War and Despair
The final chapters of the book of Judges tell a depressing and dark story, that of the Levite and his concubine. This story is a retelling of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18-19), except this time Israel is Sodom and she must destroy one of her own tribes (Benjamin) in a civil war. The story is well known. A certain Levite’s concubine runs away from him, and when he goes to retrieve her, on his way home, he stops at Gibeah of the tribe of Benjamin, where a man from the hill country of Ephraim offers him hospitality for the night. The men of the city surround the home and beat on the door, demanding to have sex with the Levite. In his stead, the host gives the Levite’s concubine to the men to rape and abuse all night (which they do). She is left for dead (although it is unclear if she is dead!), and when the Levite finds her in the morning, he takes her home, cuts her up into pieces, and sends a piece to each of the remaining tribes as a testimony to the wickedness at Gibeah.
The rest of the Israelites are horrified and gather for war. They demand that the tribe of Benjamin turn over the men who have done this wicked deed to be judged. When the Benjaminites refuse and muster their fighting men to defend their own—a silent critique of how tribalism can elevate love of one’s own over righteousness and justice—civil war breaks out. The result is that Benjamin is defeated after three days of fighting, and only 600 of their men remain alive. Almost an entire tribe of Israel has been wiped out. In order to save the tribe, further violence is necessary: the men of Jabish-Gilead, who failed to muster for war, are killed and their wives taken for some of the Benjaminites; and for the remaining 200 men of Benjamin, they are permitted to kidnap the daughters of Shiloah and make them their wives (Judges 21).
In this story, the characters remain nameless, for there are no godly heroes and no one worth remembering. The Israelites have descended into moral degeneracy like that of Sodom, political anarchy, civil war, the bloodshed of brothers, and the kidnapping of women. Without a righteous leader, prophet, or judge like Moses or Joshua, confederacy and tribalism cannot last.
Conclusion
The book of Judges ends with the foreboding proclamation that “in those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). The refrain that “in those days there was no king in Israel” begins in chapter 18 and is repeated again in chapter 19 and then in chapter 21—three times before, during, and after the story of the Levite and his concubine. The text is teaching us that without godly leaders, each person and each tribe will do what is right in their own eyes, resulting in idolatry, enslavement, wickedness, bloodshed, hostility among brothers, and civil war. The solution to confederate anarchy will be the appointment of a king and the establishment of monarchy in Israel.
