When they had once abandoned their ancient faith, political unity was not long preserved. War broke out between one tribe and another; the stronger allowed the weaker to be oppressed by the heathen, and were themselves often powerless to retain their independence. In spite of the thousands of men among them, all able to bear arms, they fell an easy prey to the first comer; the Amorites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, and the Philistines, all oppressed them in turn, and repaid with usury the ills which Joshua had inflicted on the Canaanites. “Whithersoever they went out, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil, as the Lord had spoken, and as the Lord had sworn unto them: and they were sore distressed. And the Lord raised up judges, which saved them out of the hand of those that spoiled them. And yet they hearkened not unto their judges, for they went a-whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves down unto them: they turned aside quickly out of the way wherein their fathers walked obeying the commandments of the Lord; but they did not so. And when the Lord raised them up judges, then the Lord was with the judge, and saved them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge: for it repented the Lord because of their groaning by reason of them that oppressed them and vexed them. But it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they turned back, and dealt more corruptly than their fathers, in following other gods to serve them, and to bow down unto them; they ceased not from their doings, nor from their stubborn way.” * The history of this period lacks the unity and precision with which we are at first tempted to credit it.
* Judges ii. 15-19.
The Israelites, when transplanted into the promised land, did not immediately lose the nomadic habits they had acquired in the desert. They retained the customs and prejudices they had inherited from their fathers, and for many years treated the peasantry, whose fields they had devastated, with the same disdain that the Bedawin of our own day, living in the saddle, lance in hand, shows towards the fellahîn who till the soil and bend patiently over the plough. The clans, as of old, were impatient of all regular authority; each tribe tended towards an isolated autonomy, a state of affairs which merited reprisals from the natives and encouraged hatred of the intruders, and it was only when the Canaanite oppression became unendurable that those who suffered most from it united themselves to make a common effort, and rallied for a moment round the chief who was ready to lead them. Many of these liberators must have acquired an ephemeral popularity, and then have sunk into oblivion together with the two or three generations who had known them; those whose memory remained green among their kinsmen were known by posterity as the judges of Israel.*
* The word “judges,” which has been adopted to designate
these rulers, is somewhat misleading, as it suggests the
idea of an organized civil magistracy. The word “shophet,”
the same that we meet with in classical times under the form
suffetes, had indeed that sense, but its primary meaning
denotes a man invested with an absolute authority, regular
or otherwise; it would be better translated chief, prince,
captain.
These judges were not magistrates invested with official powers and approved by the whole nation, or rulers of a highly organised republic, chosen directly by God or by those inspired by Him. They were merely local chiefs, heroes to their own immediate tribe, well known in their particular surroundings, but often despised by those only at a short distance from them. Some of them have left only a name behind them, such as Shamgar, Ibzan, Tola, Elon, and Abdon; indeed, some scholars have thrown doubts on the personality of a few of them, as, for instance, Jair, whom they affirm to have personified a Gileadite clan, and Othnîel, who is said to represent one of the Kenite families associated with the children of Israel.* Others, again, have come down to us through an atmosphere of popular tradition, the elements of which modern criticism has tried in vain to analyse. Of such unsettled and turbulent times we cannot expect an uninterrupted history:** some salient episodes alone remain, spread over a period of nearly two centuries, and from these we can gather some idea of the progress made by the Israelites, and observe their stages of transition from a cluster of semi-barbarous hordes to a settled nation ripe for monarchy.
* The name Tola occurs as that of one of the clans of
Issachar (Gen. xlvi. 13; Numb. xxvi. 23); Elon was one of
the clans of Zebulon (Gen. xlvi. 14; Numb. xxvi. 26)
** Renan, however, believes that the judges “formed an
almost continuous line, and that there merely lacks a
descent from father to son to make of them an actual
dynasty.” The chronology of the Book of Judges appears to
cover more than four centuries, from Othnîel to Samson, but
this computation cannot be relied on, as “forty
years” represents an indefinite space of time. We must
probably limit this early period of Hebrew history to about
a century and a half, from cir. 1200 to 1050 B.C.
The first of these episodes deals merely with a part, and that the least important, of the tribes settled in Central Canaan.* The destruction of the Amorite kingdoms of Heshbon and Bashan had been as profitable to the kinsmen of the Israelites, Ammon and Moab, as it had been to the Israelites themselves.
* The episode of Othnîel and Cushan-rishathaim, placed at
the beginning of the history of this period (Judges iii. 8-
11), is, by general consent, regarded as resting on a
worthless tradition.
The Moabites had followed in the wake of the Hebrews through all the surrounding regions of the Dead Sea; they had pushed on from the banks of the Arnon to those of the Jabbok, and at the time of the Judges were no longer content with harassing merely Reuben and Gad.
They were a fine race of warlike, well-armed Beda-wins. Jericho had fallen into their hands, and their King Eglon had successfully scoured the entire hill-country of Ephraim,* so that those who wished to escape being pillaged had to safeguard themselves by the payment of an annual tribute.