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.
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