40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Judges: Introduction and Chapter 1 (Episode 198)

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Chad and Daniel start the book of Judges in this episode. What is behind the name of the book? How do the tribes of Isreal begin to set themselves up for failure? And a king has his thumbs and big toes cut off. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network Houston City Event Las Vegas City Event Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are over there. And while you're over there, go to that events page, because we've got events coming up in 2020 this year. We have city events in Houston and Las Vegas. In Houston, we'll be talking about what happens when people encounter Jesus

at St. Mark's Houston. That's where we're going to be. That's Matt Popovich's church. He'll be speaking along with Chad, myself, Gretchen Ronovic, Loso, and Scott Keith. You can register for free. You can go there, or you can just go down to the show notes and click on the link, Houston City Event, and register and show up. That's all you got to do. Also, in March, we will be in Las Vegas doing a city event on the

Book of Galatians, the whole thing. I'll be there. Eric Sorensen, Scott Keith, Adam Francisco, Blake Flatley, and Cindy Koch. If you would like to register for that, same process. Register for free, sign up, show up. That's how it works. So we would love to have you sign up, though, so we know how many people to expect. All the information in the show notes or just go over the events page over at the 1517 site chad are you excited to be starting a new book yeah i've i've like been living in judges here for for uh for the last few days so yeah it's a i mean it's gonna be fun there's there's there's a little bit of everything in judges i mean we got some got some uh anti-hero stories we got some riddles we got some battles and then you know we got some

sections toward the toward the end where i don't know if anybody like listens to these with their with their kids but this set we might need a little peachy 13 r rating especially toward the end of the book i mean it gets pretty gnarly toward uh those last few chapters i mean there's of course there's bad stuff all in there but man i think the end of judges is just about the darkest chapters in the whole bible yeah well i mean i mean people are probably not judges is not a book that people are overly familiar with i find uh they're they're kind of familiar with one thing about judges they're like isn't that where samson is samson judges right and uh and indeed this is this is where samson is this is true yeah this is where samson's at and i do find that that samson

story also much darker than the the felt boards lead you to believe it's i mean it's a gnarly story so we will get there we will get to samson so excited about that one of the darkest types of christ ever but we're not there yet it's going to be a minute yeah yeah he's he's of course one of the one of the later judges that uh is described in the book and there are 12 and all by the way uh you almost could have guessed that how many judges are i bet there's 12 it's a good biblical number 740 or 12 yeah yeah so we'll have uh 12 of those and of course they're they're usually classified, major and minor, not because necessarily of their importance, but just because it's kind of like the major and minor prophets. Why are Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel the major

prophets, but Hosea and Zephaniah and Malachi are the minor prophets? It has nothing to do with their importance. It has everything to do with just how much space is devoted to them. So it's kind of like this in the book of Judges as well. So we have major and minor, or as some people call them primary and secondary, but it's just all about how much space in the story itself is devoted to each of these judges. So some of them, you know, we hear about with two or three verses, some of them, several like Samson, several chapters are devoted to their story. So anyway, but that's not, we're really not going to get started with the individuals that we call judges until chapter three, where we're going to, we're going to actually encounter the name of the first

judge in chapter one, but his actual period of judging Israel is not going to come up until chapter three. So we will get there. The first chapter is going to be about, it's going to intersect with what we've been talking about in Joshua, except look at things from a little bit different perspective. We're going to hear about how the tribes did or did not conquer some of their territories. But before we actually jump into chapter one, there's two or three items that I think are worth talking about, some of the bigger issues that have to do with the book of Judges. One, and I think this is probably the most important thing to say up front, is that when you hear the name of the book, it's very hard to not immediately have a misconception about what the

book is about. Because when, in English, we hear the word judges, the image that immediately comes to mind, according to judges in our society, is, I won't say entirely, but almost entirely wrong when it comes to what the biblical book of Judges is talking about. For instance, so the Hebrew The Hebrew noun judge, which is shofet, so to judge, the verb is shafat, and the noun is shofet. So that is not, that noun, shofet, is not applied to any of the 12 so-called judges, which automatically ought to tell us, hmm, all right, well, something's up here. Now, the verb to judge, shafat, is used to describe some of the activities of these individuals. But here's the key.

When they're described in this way, the other verb that's almost always used to describe their activity, what these guys do, is yashah, and yashah means to save. So when the Lord raises up these judges, which in Hebrew is Shofatim, that's the title of the book in Hebrew, Shofatim. When the Lord raises up these Shofatim, what they do primarily is they Yashah, that is to say, they save or rescue or deliver Israel. and if you're a long time listener of the show you probably can hear it uh if you're if you really if you kind of were paying attention when we talked about joshua's name you'll hear yasha as part of joshua's name which of course is also the root of jesus name so jesus means the lord saves yahushua and that is the same verbal uh description of what these judges do so all that to say that if I could rename this book, I would change it from judges to saviors or deliverers or

rescuers or something like that, because that's what these people were doing. Yes, there may have been some sort of judicial activity that took place with some of them, but predominantly what these people did is they were warriors. They were out there engaging in battle with the enemy, just like Joshua did. And they were rescuing Israel from their oppressors. So when you see the name judges, you have to make this shift in your mind and not really think of judging, at least in the way that we think of judging. But you have to think of it in a biblical sense, because very often judging in the scriptures has to do with rescuing or saving or delivering. So this is the book of the Shofa team, which literally means judges, but we're going to think of them as saviors or

or deliver first yeah well i've always thought of it kind of as um these people are not judging israel they are actually judging god's enemies uh so judges and if you kind of think of it as the judgment of god on those who are enemies of israel they're not judges as much as their judgment yeah and i think that's a good way to think about it because that actually accords with a whole lot of what we see through the rest of the scriptures very often when when god acts as a judge there is a judgment and sometimes it's against israel but very often it's against egypt or assyria or or somebody else and joined with that judgment is a rescue of israel so you have both of them going on you have when god judges the enemies of israel he's rescuing israel

so you can't have like you can't have one one without the other and i mean it's it's it's very much like this when we confess christ as our judge well christ yeah he's as we say in the Creed is going to come to judge the quick and the dead, the living and the dead. Well, that is our salvation. So when we think of Christ as our judge, that's good news, because that means that he's come to rescue us. He's come to save us. Yes, he's going to pronounce a judgment, but that judgment is actually our salvation. So in Christ as our judge is good news in the sense that he's coming to pronounce his final verdict of justification upon those who are part of his kingdom. Yeah, well, I mean, a judge doesn't only find people guilty. A judge can vindicate you as well.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's how Christ is judged, and that's kind of part of what's going on here in the book itself. Now, if you're familiar with the book of Judges, you know that one of, well, I won't even say one of the main themes. I guess you could call it the main theme of the book, is how with each successive generation, in a variety of ways, Israel was forgetting God and then going whoring after other gods, to use the King James language. So, and in fact, seven times in the book, some variation of this phrase is used. They did evil in the eyes of the Lord. They forgot the Lord and they served the Baals and the Asherahs. It's about seven different times, beginning in chapter two, continuing all the way through chapter 13,

seven times we hear some variation of that phrase. So the whole book, I like the way one scholar, Daniel Block, has described kind of the theme of the book. He says that Judges is all about one thing, that what he calls the canonization of Israelite society during the period of the settlement. So this is Israel moving into the land, settling the land, and partially conquering the land under the leadership of Joshua. But then after the death of Joshua, what happens is instead of the conquest continuing, and the Israelites fulfilling God's word to basically clear the land of all these inhabitants. Instead, they either can't defeat them, and so sometimes they

turn into their slaves, or they basically just say, yeah, well, we can't defeat you, so we're just going to live alongside you. And every time that happens, the impact is not from Israel to the Canaanites, but the influence is from the Canaanites to Israel. So instead of Israel turning the Canaanites into Orthodox worshipers of Yahweh, it works the opposite. The Canaanites turn the Israelites into worshipers of Baal or Asherah or any of the other gods that form part of their pantheon. So that's one of the reasons Judges is such a dark book, because what you see here is the devolving of Israel theologically and ritually. So you don't have Israel returning to that one central site where the tabernacle is located and serving God there. Instead, you have

them, well, maybe worshiping Yahweh where they're at, sacrificing there, but more often what you have is them adopting either part or the entirety of the whole Canaanite theological system, where they begin to worship Baal, or they'll kind of, you know, mix together a little bit of Baal worship and a little bit of Yahweh worship. So this, which was what we call, of course, syncretism, this kind of mixing, mixing together. You know, I was thinking, as I was getting ready for this chapter in particular, it's, it's, when we think about, when we think about worship in the Old Testament, there's a big difference. I don't think we always appreciate. So for most of the religions of the ancient Near East, their gods did not expect

the worshipers to have a monogamous relationship with them. So if you worship Baal, in that theological system, Baal was fine with you worshiping other gods or goddesses, as long as you also had an allegiance to him. And Asherah, the goddess, the fertility goddess, well, she was fine with you worshiping her and Baal and El and whoever else, as long as you also paid some attention to her. So there was no, in this society of polytheism, there was no sense in which you had to have a monogamous relationship with one particular god.

So you could have, to use the language we use today, like you can have an open relationship, open theological relationship with a multiplicity of gods and goddesses. Then you get to Israel, you get to Yahweh, and the situation is completely different. So he's the one who insists on not sharing you with anybody else. He's the one who insists on a monogamous theological relationship so that he's not fine with you worshiping him mostly, but also Baal on the side, that he demands complete and full allegiance to him in this monogamous sort of way. So I don't know if that's something that we always appreciate when we're reading through these narratives. And most of the people in the ancient Near East, this is kind of

the theological assumptions that they have. They wouldn't have understood. I mean, monotheism would have seemed so weird to them, this idea that there's only one God, or even it still would have seemed weird to them that you're only supposed to worship one God, which is something called monolatry, so worship of one. That would have seemed really odd to them. And that's one of the shifts we have to make in our thinking, because most people today, even if they're not very religious, if they believe in a God, they believe in one God. That would have been the complete opposite of what was happening in ancient Near East. Most people believed in the multiplicity of gods. They worshiped multiple gods, and they understood those gods as fine with that. So when

Israel comes along, a monotheistic religion, demanding worship of only one God, that would have set Israel apart as extremely strange theologically to them. Yeah, I think I've mentioned this before, but if you go and try to do some evangelism to a Hindu, you will run into this. If you go talk with someone from Thailand or something like that, and you start talking to them about Jesus, you'll think you're doing a really bang-up job because they're totally interested and uh and then you say yeah this is what happened and you know died for your sins and all you have to do is believe in him and you can have all the all the bad things you've done forgiven they're like great sounds great yeah yeah sign me up yeah and then you realize what's

going on is that they they're happy to hear about another god that does another thing and add him to the collection uh this is this is still this is prevalent uh and so you then that if you start talking about like no no but the thing is that he's the only god and you can and you only worship then that's they're like what yeah that doesn't make any it makes no it's a it's a it is a very weird conversation to have it it does they don't that is completely foreign to them that's just that idea and and in that way they would be very much like canaanite society yeah right i mean most a Western society today is, yeah, I mean, more or less monotheistic. At least that's our heritage. But yeah, when you get into places like India, of course, that is much more in tune with the

society that surrounded Israel. So you got to keep that in mind when you're trying to understand exactly what's going on theologically with Israel. What they were doing is they were, yeah, they were trying to be like the other nations because all the other nations had several different gods in their pocket and they were fine with adding another one what they weren't fine with is complete allegiance to only to only one god that would have that would have seemed extremely strange to them okay uh i think the only other the only thing i want to mention before we actually dig in is something that's probably if you've looked at judges at all you know that there's a there's basically a cycle that we're going to go through uh and people have you know set this up

different ways i learned it as the five r's we have rebellion retribution repentance rescue and rest uh that's just a handy way to remember it but the cycle is basically at at the death of every judge at the death of every deliverer then israel apostatizes they they go and serve other gods and then that is followed by some sort of divine discipline which usually takes a form of god selling them to some other nation letting another nation the moabites or the ammonites or whoever it might be, come in and oppress Israel, which then leads to the third act where Israel will cry out. They will repent. They will call upon God to save them. And then he will act. He will raise up another shofet, another deliverer. And then you'll have a period of rest, maybe one

generation, maybe two generations. And then the cycle starts all over again. So we'll see this repeatedly as we go through the various judges. But that's kind of the overall cycle that we see repeated over and over in the in the book yeah it's basically just our life yeah that's basically the way our life still goes yeah yeah if you can like step back from from your from your life and especially if you've lived say 30 40 50 years or more and uh and and and look look for patterns well you know the the book of judges might seem a little familiar to you yeah because it does seem to go that way doesn't it i mean it's like it's just a the book of judges is a a narrative description of ancient israel that describes the the daily cycles that are that our lives go through

with sin and with repentance and death and absolution and resurrection it's it's baptismal and that in that particular nature where god is constantly putting us to death in order to raise us to to life again yeah this is sort of like you're it's sort of you're weak i mean like it It ends with you going to church on Sunday and confessing, like, I'm in need of saving again. Got to repent. Got to confess. Got to hear the absolution because, you know, turned out I went full judges again this week. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, unbeknownst to us, we're living the book of Judges every week. We've gone through this. All right, so let's jump in. And I mean, that's enough of a kind of a introductory discussion about some of the matters here. So chapter one begins this way. And if you remember Joshua, this might sound a little familiar to you. This is just verse one. Now, it came about after the death of Joshua that the sons of Israel inquired of the Lord, saying,

Who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites to fight against them? Now, the reason that ought to sound familiar to you is that those opening words are almost verbatim, the same way that the book of Joshua begins. So, Judges begins this way. Now, it came about after the death of Joshua. Joshua begins this way. Now, it came about after the death of Moses. So, now it came about after the death of blank. First Moses in the book of Joshua, and then Joshua in the book of Judges.

so joshua and judges are understood and you can see this uh this throughout these books they're understood to be sort of companion volumes they're not really i mean there is a continuation because of course this is the this is the continuation of the historical narrative but more than that they're understood to be companion volumes so they're they're telling a story in sort of similar ways and yet the content of those stories is going to it's going to be it's going to be very different because we have Israel acting in different sorts of ways. And we see this already in the first chapter. So the way the first chapter is divided is quite interesting. It shows you how highly structured the book of Judges is. So what we're going to have in the first chapter is

a description of how various tribes, beginning with Judah and Simeon, went out to conquer or not conquer various of the territories. And we begin in the south with Judah and with Simeon. and as the chapter progresses, we go, so Judah, Simeon, and then Benjamin, and the tribes of Joseph, and then we get to Zebulun, and Asher, and Naphtali, and Dan, so that's the progression of each of these tribes, and the description of what they did, but as we do, we're moving from south to north, so we go from Judah, Simeon, all the way up to Dan in the north, and what's interesting structurally is this particular progression from one tribe to the other actually follows follows pretty much the same order of the judges themselves so we're going to be we're going to

begin with a southern judge and we're going to end when we get to Samson with a northern judge so it starts out with our first judge is Othniel and he's connected with the tribe of Judah and then we're finally going to get to Samson, and he's connected with the tribe of Dan. So the first chapter is implicitly laying out the structure of the rest of the book, at least through chapter 13. So we're going to hear about these tribes, and then these tribes are going to correspond later on to our shofatim, to our deliverers. And it starts out here, at least the first 20 verses all about Judah and Simeon. Judah is given, I mean, over half the chapter is devoted just to description of what they were able to accomplish. So let's get into it. So they say,

they inquire of the Lord, probably using the priestly Urim and Thummim, who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites to fight against them. And the Lord says, well, Judah, Judah shall go up. And he says, behold, I've given the land into his hand. Well, Judah decides he's not going to do this alone. He's going to do this with his full brother, Simeon. So Judah and Simeon, you remember that the 12 tribes, the 12 patriarchs, they came from four different mothers, the four different wives and co-wives of Jacob. And so many of them were half brothers, but Judah and Simeon are full brothers. They're both the sons of Leah. And Simeon, I think one of the reasons they form a partnership here is because Judah probably feels sorry for Simeon.

We know from the last census that Simeon far, far undernumbers every single one of the other tribes. I mean, they are so small that I think within a generation or so, they're actually going to be just, they're sort of going to disappear as an independent tribe. They're just going to be absorbed into the other tribes. So Simeon doesn't have a lot of fighting men. And so Judah and Simeon team up and everything starts out pretty well uh they they go up and it says the Lord gave the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hands they defeat 10,000 men at Bezek and then right away I mean we're not like five verses into the chapter or uh seven verses of the chapter for we we kind of get a feel for just how down and dirty the book of Judges is going to become

because listen what happened. So they defeat Bezek. All right. So far, so good. It says they found Adonai Bezek. So he's like the king. It's probably not his name. That's probably his title because Adonai Bezek just means like Lord of Bezek. So he'd be like, I guess the mayor of the city or something like that. He's the leader anyway of the city. So they found him and they fought against him and they defeat the Canaanites and the Perizzites. And this Adonai Bezek, he takes off he hightails it and they chase him and they catch him but they don't just catch him i mean what are they supposed to do verse six uh is is where we're at so we we know from the torah and joshua in particular later we know that what are they supposed to do well they're supposed to

to to war against these tribes and to to kill them that basically what what they're what the program of operation is going to be. But they don't kill Adonai Bezik. It says they catch him, verse 6, and they cut off his thumbs and big toes. It gets even weirder, though. So Adonai Bezik, now thumbless and toeless, makes a sort of, this is so strange, makes sort of a theological statement so after this mutilation adonai bezic says this he says well you know 70 kings with their thumbs and their big toes cut off used to gather up scraps under my table as i have done so god has repaid me yeah yeah i mean this is just so we're already we're not even we're not even 10 verses in things have gotten weird in this particular book uh Adonai Bezek is

is basically saying well you know I guess what comes around what goes around comes around you know I've I used to have like I did that oh I did that to 70 kings I treated them like dogs you know they had to like rummage around without their thumbs or big toes under my table and well now Israel has done it to me I guess God is I guess God has repaid me yeah you have to wonder like yeah you don't know you just don't know like is this a thing that people did to kings when they captured them because this is you know it's it's very demeaning did israel know i mean did judah know that this guy when they invade the city did they find like all these kings with no thumbs and no toes and so they they thought this was what was just that

okay well this is what's going to happen to you one thing that you think can't be is it just a coincidence right right right yeah it can't be a coincidence and and i wonder this this is my own opinion i think that already here we have a hint that things are not going to go well in this book because judah didn't do judah and and benjamin didn't do what i mean simeon what they were supposed to do i mean the torah never says and when you capture a king of the canaanites cut off his thumbs and big toes yeah or kill him or even do to him what he did to other people yeah i mean it's supposed to be an execution and and nothing more and it goes it gets a little bit stranger too because they didn't execute him they brought him to jerusalem and he died there

It doesn't say that they killed him. They took him to Jerusalem, or somebody took him to Jerusalem anyway, and that's where he died. So it's almost as if already you can see that Judah, by doing this, is imitating the Canaanites. I mean, so they did what a pagan king had done. This is what he did to his enemies, and so Israel turns around and they imitate that behavior. They, in turn, cut off his thumbs and his and his big toes uh i mean it's it's a hint there and uh i mean it's it's something that i'm not completely sure about but it does it is suggestive anyway that already here we see that judah is acting in a way which is unbecoming which is not in accordance with the with the torah i know this if this guy doesn't say this that he did this to 70 other people

you would feel really bad for him you'd be like gosh man that is brutal like why why are you doing that and then he says like i did this to 70 guys you're like oh wow feel a little less bad for you now yeah it's hard it's pretty hard to be merciful to someone who's done that to 70 other people so anyway that's uh that's the seventh first seven verses we already kind of got a feel for what the book of judges is going to be like and then verse eight says that uh that the tribe of judah they they fought against jerusalem they capture it struck it with the edge of the sword and set the city on fire now there's a little bit of a problem here because that's verse eight so they captured Jerusalem. They strike it with the edge of the sword. They burn it, but then

later in the chapter, we're told that the tribe of Benjamin were not able to drive out the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem, and it says the Jebusites have lived with the sons of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day. So was Jerusalem destroyed, or was it not destroyed? It's probably a case where part of the city was destroyed i mean we know that there were different sections of the city of jerusalem uh a lower and an upper part so i suspect what's described in verse eight is that judah yeah they attacked jerusalem and they were able to destroy part of it but part of the city also remained that the tribe of benjamin was going to attack later on well you can think about it i mean what is it back in the day when uh london was burning just massive fires everywhere and

they'd say yeah london burned and that day well i mean right the whole city didn't burn down but a substantial part of it was on fire yeah yeah exactly i think that's i mean it's just we use that kind of language all the time we we make it sound as if something is complete but everybody understands we're saying yeah i mean it it wasn't the entire thing but it almost was it was just like it was yeah we were so we were we were kind of using this language earlier chad when we said australia is on fire like before that we started recording we were talking about this and uh everyone would understand as we're saying this that australia is burning right now like the whole thing well no not not the whole thing but enough of it that you would say that

it is appropriate to say australia is on fire yeah yeah and that's just a typical way that we that we speak uh we're all we're kind of exaggerating things uh making something sound if it's a totality, when everybody kind of understands the way the language works, that it's only a description of a part of it. Okay, so moving on from there, what happens with the rest of the battles that Judah engages in?

Well, some of this we've actually already heard about. In the next few verses, we have almost verbatim what we encountered back in the 15th chapter of Joshua. So the tribe of Judah, they go down to fight against the Canaanites in the hill country, and the Negev, and they fight against the Canaanites who are in Hebron, and they strike three of their kings, Sheshai, Ahimon, and Ptolemy. We heard about that in Joshua 15. And then we have the story of Caleb, and this is almost exactly what we encountered back in that

chapter in Joshua. So Caleb wants to attack this place called Kiriath Sefer, and he says, the guy that does it i'm going to reward him with my daughter oxa and lo and behold off neil who was the nephew of caleb says i got this so that's what he does he's the so he's the son of caleb's brother and he goes and he captures it and so he gets oxa as as his wife but we're told and and this is the story that we covered it wasn't very many podcasts ago that you know oxa is is wanting some, not just some land from her father, but she also wants land with springs of water because it's a, whatever land, whatever acres that Caleb gave them, it's a pretty dry place. And so she approaches her father and asks him for some springs of water. And he gives those

to her. So this is the story that we talked about not very long ago in Joshua 15. Now what's interesting and i want to point this out uh and i hinted at it earlier othniel this this this guy here so the nephew of caleb now the nephew and the son-in-law one of those strange family things back in the old testament he is our first judge so when we get to chapter three we're going to count our very first judge and this guy is going to be othniel so he's already we already know him We already know his military prowess from chapter one. And so it's no big surprise when God raises up the first deliverer for Israel, it's going to be someone like him.

He has a proven track record in military conquest, and he has that connection to one of the chief leaders of Israel back in the day, to Caleb. So he's going to be our first judge. We'll get to him eventually. well the chapter goes on to describe a few more of the the battles that the simeonites engaged in with judah so this has been mainly judah fighting with simeon alongside him now we're gonna in the last few verses of that section we have simeon fighting with judah alongside him and we get to the first suggestion of how bad things are going to be because it says they took verse 19 they took

possession of the hill country, but they couldn't drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had iron chariots. And this inability to drive out certain of these peoples is going to be what we hear repeatedly in the rest of the book. So the first 20 verses are about Judah and Simeon. Verse 21 is about Benjamin. The Benjaminites, they tried to capture Jerusalem, the rest of the city, but they couldn't. So the Jebusites have lived with the sons of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day. And then verses 22 through 29 take us to the two tribes of Joseph. So it says they went up against Bethel, and they were able to capture the city of Bethel. We sort of have a, it's almost like a parallel story to uh to what happened with Rahab so the the tribe of Joseph they

they want to capture Bethel but they they don't know how and so they find this guy who's willing to serve as a spy for them and to show them the entrance into the city now it's a little bit unclear maybe there was like some sort of secret entrance into the city and they needed this guy to show them the way into it we're we're not told enough to be able to to know for sure but anyway they they get this guy to agree to help them and so he shows him the entrance to the city they get in and they they kill everybody in the city just like the israelites killed everybody in jericho but they let this guy go except here's the difference what happened with rahab well rahab was was adopted into israel that was her reward if you will she was brought into the tribes of

this guy they just let him and his family go and he moves into the land of the hittites and he really and he rebuilds the city so again this is one of those like why didn't you just incorporate him into into the family of Israel like you did with Rahab instead you let him move away to the land of the hittites and continue to engage in whatever pagan practices he was engaged in before and then it goes on to say that they didn't conquer certain certain cities and so the canaanites continue living into the land sometimes they put them to forced labor sometimes they didn't so that's the tribes of joseph verse 30 we get to the tribe of zebulun and it says they the canaanites continued to live among them and yes when they were able to they put them to forced labor verse

31 and 32 is the is the the tribe of asher and it says that the asteroids lived among the canaanites because they couldn't drive them out you get to naphtali and the same thing once more it says they they lived among the canaanites and sometimes they put them into forced labor sometimes they didn't and i hate to say it but dan your tribe has failed again verse 34 my my my bible has these headings and it says the failure of dan it's just so disappointing but my my my bible starts with that it's like the beginning that's what this whole book is about the failure of that yeah so we're in the north now uh the northern tribe and it says the amorites forced the the danites into the hill country they didn't allow them to come down to the valley and uh so they they live where

they could and that's where the chapter ends so with verse 36 so wait this wasn't a description of all of the tribes but at least a significant number of them we have judah and simeon we have asher and nathalie and dan and the sons of joseph and we and we find the same thing theme occurring over and over but yeah i mean there was there was somewhat of a of a conquest but a lot of this chapter is basically an unconquest. They weren't able to. At best, they were able sometimes to put the Canaanites to forced labor, but most of the time, they just settled right alongside the Canaanites. And we'll hear at the beginning of chapter three, chapter two, rather, how God pronounces his verdict against that. But we already know from the book of Joshua how this is going to

go right. We already know that anytime, we know it from Joshua's closing speech, that anytime that there's going to be any kind of compromise between the Israelites and the Canaanites, that it's not going to go well for Israel. You know, it's just that for the book of Judges, anytime that there's some sort of cohabitation between Israel and Canaan, it's always the Canaanite influence that impacts the Israelites. And so it's always a negative influence. Well, you can't help but have Joshua's words when Israel says, we will serve the Lord, and he says, you will not be able to. Because what they're saying is, we will not be idolaters,

and Joshua says, you will not be able to not be idolaters. And chapter one of Judges, you're like, you guys are setting yourself up for some rank idolatry. Joshua knows this at the end. He's like, you will not be able to not mess this up. well he has his he has his pulse on israel i mean he's an old guy right i mean he he's 110 when he dies and he saw everything i mean he was there in egypt which in which they served idols even down there he was there when the golden calf thing happened i mean he was he was there during

the 40 years of the wilderness so he knows what the people of israel are like he he understands human nature and so uh yeah his his words are ringing true yeah joshua's got that low anthropology he does he does he's got that low anthropology and the book of judges is a lot of low anthropology so yeah yeah we can just retitle instead of judges we'll just retitle it low at the examples of low anthropology exactly well guys that's it that's the first chapter that's the first episode in judges uh hope you stick around as we have the first judge named probably next week. I imagine we'll get there. We'll see. But if you would like to support the podcast as we do this, you could do so by going over to 1517.org or the donate page. You can become a contributor.

Thank you so much to those of you who do that. Chad, I'll see you next week for chapter two. All right. We'll see you then.