Judges 9-12

The judges over Israel seem to get worse as we go along. Gideon was not half bad, but his son Abimelech, who also rules as a judge after his father, is much worse. Abimelech kills his seventy brothers. Talk about sibling rivalry! Abimelech rules over Israel for three years, but God does not let him get away with evil for very long. In the end, Abimelech dies in battle when a woman drops a millstone from a tower and crushes his skull with it. Still, Abimelech is proud enough that he does not want to die at the hand of a woman so as he is gasping for his last breath he asks his young armor-bearer to run him through with the sword.

It is interesting how evil children sometimes come from good parents. Just because a parent is a good person that does not guarantee their children will be good. Everyone must make his or her own choices. In this regard, Abimelech is a preview of what is to come in the time of the kings of Israel. Many of the wicked kings, unfortunately, come from fathers who are very good men.

This principle applies in less extreme cases as well. I know Christian parents who often wonder why their children make seemingly less than Christian choices in life. Again, the key word is "choice". Many parents beat themselves up, wondering what they could have done different with their children that would have kept them from "going wrong". In reality, what our children choose may have little or nothing to do with how we parented them. The best we can do is to be there for our children when they need us, to provide an encouraging, non-judgmental voice, and most of all--to pray.

After Abimelech, we have some transitional judges whom we are not told very much about: Tola and Jair. After their service, the Israelites again do what is evil in the eyes of the Lord and so God hands his people over to the Philistines and the Ammonites to do what they want with Israel. (The Philistines are a group of seafaring people who have arrived in Canaan from Crete. After their arrival, the land of Canaan begins to be called Palestine.) Eventually, the Israelites cry out to the Lord for help and we read that the Lord can no longer bear to see Israel suffer (Judges 10:16).

C. S. Lewis has an interesting comment in this regard:

It is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up “our own” when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is “nothing better” now to be had. The same humility is shown by all those Divine appeals to our fears which trouble high-minded readers of Scripture. It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it “unmindful of His glory’s diminution.”[1]

In Judges 11 and 12, we once again read of another judge over Israel who is far from perfect. His name is Jephthah and he gathers around himself a group of outlaws. Jephthah makes a rash vow to the Lord that if God will deliver the Ammonites into his hand then when he returns home victorious he will give as a burnt offering the first thing that comes out of his door to greet him. Apparently, Jephthah expects the first thing to be an animal of some sort. However, it is his only daughter, who is also a virgin. The daughter, amazingly, urges her father to keep his vow but to allow her two months to wander the mountains with her friends and bewail her virginity.

It is a strange story. Furthermore, it is unclear whether Jephthah, in the end, sacrifices his daughter as a burnt offering to the Lord, something which we know from God’s law is unacceptable, something that the Israelites believed the Ammonites offered to their gods. Does Jephthah offer a human sacrifice, or does he merely offer his daughter as a virgin in the Lord’s service for the rest of her life? We do not really know the answer because the Scripture does not make it clear.

We have more on Jephthah in Judges 12, including the origin of the word “Shibboleth”. The Gileadites determine who the Ephraimites are by asking them to say this word which, by the way, means “an ear of corn”. The Ephraimites all say “Sibboleth” instead of “Shibboleth” and thus cannot hide their true identity. The Gileadites end up killing 42,000 Ephraimites due to the “Shibboleth” test.

So now, the next time you hear the word "Shibboleth," you will know where it came from, and hopefully you will know how to pronounce it too. After all, there's no sense losing your head over an ear of corn.

[1] The Problem of Pain

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