A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Judges

Front matter

THE INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL COMMENTARY

A

CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL COMMENTARY

Preface

PREFACE

The interest and importance of the Book of Judges lie chiefly in the knowledge which it gives us of the state of society and religion in Israel in the early centuries of its settlement in Palestine, for which Judges and Samuel are our only sources. In addition to this, parts of the book are of preëminent historical value: in particular, ch. 1, which contains by far the oldest and most trustworthy account of the invasion of Canaan; and ch. 5, the Song of Deborah, the only contemporary monument of Israelitish history before the Kingdom. In the following commentary matters of history, antiquities, and especially the social and religious life of the people in this period, are properly given the largest place; not only for their intrinsic interest, but because the knowledge of these things is indispensable to any right understanding of the history of Israel and of its religion. The work of the prophets can only be comprehended in its relation to the national religion of Israel. But before there was a national religion, there was a common religion of the Israelite tribes which was one of the most potent forces in the making of the nation. What this religion was, which they brought with them into Canaan, and what changes it underwent in contact with Canaanite civilization and the religions of the land, we learn in no small part from the Book of Judges; while here and there, as in the Song of Deborah, we have glimpses of a remoter past, the adoption of the religion of Yahweh by the tribes at Horeb, the work of Moses.

To make such a use of the book, it is necessary to distinguish carefully between the work of the principal author, who wrote in the 6th century B.C., separated from the times of the judges by as many centuries as lie between us and the crusades, and the much older sources from which the stories of the judges themselves are derived. We must also, as far as possible, define the age and character of these sources, which are not all of the same antiquity or historical value. Nor is it solely on historical grounds that this is required. The difficulties which the interpreter finds in the book are in considerable part of a kind for which exegesis and textual criticism have no solution. They have arisen from the changes and additions which the author made in transcribing his sources, or from the attempt to combine and harmonize two parallel but slightly different versions of the same story, and can be cleared up only by ascertaining how this was done. Criticism is thus not only obligatory upon the historian, it is an essential part of the work of the exegete. That the task is delicate and difficult, and in the nature of the case largely conjectural, cannot exempt the commentator from trying to solve these knotty questions. At the worst, the uncertainties of criticism are infinitely preferable to the exegetical violence which is the only alternative. In the commentary, especially in the introductions to the several stories, I have discussed the particular problems of criticism with such fulness as they seemed to demand; in the Introduction (§ 3–6) the reader will find set forth the general results to which these investigations lead.

The Hebrew text of Judges, with the exception of part of ch. 5, is comparatively well preserved; but in very many places the ancient versions have a better reading, or a variant which may not be neglected. The Greek translations of this book are of peculiar interest, and perhaps nowhere in the Old Testament can the difficult problems which this version presents be approached with more hope of illuminating results. I trust that the somewhat full registration of the readings of in this commentary may not be unwelcome to students of the Greek as well as of the Hebrew Bible. An edition of the Hebrew text, with critical apparatus, is in preparation, and will shortly appear in "The Sacred Books of the Old Testament," edited by Professor Paul Haupt.

In the philological notes, I have been mindful of the fact that it is the commentator's duty, not to follow the lexicographer and the grammarian, but to precede them; and have investigated afresh, and as far as possible exhaustively, all questions of etymology, usage, and construction which seemed to require it. If, in many cases, I cannot flatter myself that these investigations have added much light, they have often performed at least the negative service of showing that commonly accepted interpretations are unsound. In the hope that the commentary may be used to some extent by students, for whose reading the Book of Judges is peculiarly well suited, some notes of a more elementary character on the forms of words and on grammatical points have been added.

In conformity with the general plan of the series, all matters of textual criticism and Hebrew philology, together with more detailed and technical discussions of points of criticism, antiquities, and topography, have been kept apart from the body of the commentary, and will be found in smaller type at the end of the paragraphs. It is one of the evils of this arrangement that the grounds of an interpretation must often be sought in another place from the interpretation itself, while in other instances some repetition is unavoidable. It is believed, however, that the separation will prove convenient to many who may use the commentary; and I have endeavoured to diminish its disadvantages by cross-references and full indexes.

I have tried to make good use of all that has been done hitherto for the criticism and interpretation of the book. The commentators whom I have chiefly consulted are named in the Introduction, § 9, the critics at the end of § 6; other works are referred to in the foot-notes of the commentary. It is not improbable that, in this extensive and scattered literature, I may have overlooked some things of importance; I have not intentionally ignored any. Several books of great value have appeared during the printing of this volume, so that I have, to my regret and loss, been able to use them only in the later chapters; among these I may name particularly Benzinger, Hebräische Archäologie, 1894; Nowack, Lehrbuch der Hebräischen Archäologie, 1894; G. A. Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 1894; and the 12th edition of Gesenius' Handwörterbuch, thoroughly revised by Buhl, 1895.

A list of the principal abbreviations employed will be found on p. 474. They conform, by the editors' desire, to those used in the new Hebrew Lexicon, in course of publication under the editorship of Professors Brown, Driver, and Briggs. The references in the commentary have been carefully verified, and will, I trust, be found accurate. In the few instances in which I have not been able to consult a book which is cited, the fact is indicated by a (°) affixed to the title. The citations of Scripture in the body of the commentary follow the chapter and verse numeration of the Authorized Version as given in the Queen's Printer's Bible; in the critical notes the verses are those of the Hebrew Bible (Van der Hooght's ed., 1705).

It is a pleasant duty to acknowledge the assistance which I have received in the preparation of this volume from my colleague and friend, Dr. Charles C. Torrey, Instructor in the Semitic Languages in Andover Theological Seminary, who has read nearly all the proofs, and to whom I am indebted for some valuable suggestions and corrections.

G. F. M.

July, 1895.

Introduction

INTRODUCTION.

§ 1. Title. Place of the Book in the Canon.

The title, Judges, or, The Book of Judges, which the book bears in the Jewish and Christian Bibles, is given to it because it relates the exploits of a succession of Israelite leaders and champions who, in the book itself as well as in other parts of the Old Testament, are called Judges. The signification of the Hebrew word is, however, much wider than that of the Greek κριτής, the Latin judex, or the English 'judge.' The verb shåphaţ is not only judicare, but vindicare, both in the sense of 'defend, deliver,' and in that of 'avenge, punish.' The participle shōpheţ is not only judex, but vindex, and is not infrequently synonymous with 'deliverer.' Again, as the administration of justice was, in times of peace, the most important function of the chieftain or king, the noun is sometimes equivalent to 'ruler,' and the verb signifies, 'rule, govern.' In this sense it is most natural to take it in the lists of Minor Judges, where we read, for example of Tola: He judged Israel twenty-three years.... And after him arose Jair, the Gileadite, and judged Israel twenty-two years. It is clear that the writer regarded these judges as a succession of chiefs, who arose in different parts of the land, ruling with an authority which was personal and not hereditary. The same conception is probably to be recognized in 217, the Israelites would not obey their judges. The word 'judge' is not used of Ehud, Barak, or Gideon, and seems not to have been found in the oldest of the author's sources. The title, Book of Judges, was in all probability meant by those who prefixed it to the book to correspond to that of the Book of Kings; the judges were the succession of rulers and defenders of Israel before the hereditary monarchy, as the kings were afterwards.

In the Hebrew Bible the Book of Judges stands in the first division of the Prophets, the Prophetic Histories (Jos., Jud., Sam., Kings), which narrate continuously the history of Israel from the invasion of Canaan to the fall of Jerusalem (586 B.C.). In the Greek Bible, Ruth is appended to it, sometimes under one title (κριταί), sometimes under its own name; and in manuscripts, the Pentateuch, together with Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, frequently forms a codex (Octateuch). In the history of Israel before the exile, Judges covers the time from the close of the period of conquest and occupation with the death of Joshua to the beginning of the struggle with the Philistines in the days of Eli. A better division, from our point of view, would have been the establishment of the kingdom of Saul, and there is some evidence that, in one at least of the older histories which our author had before him, Eli and Samuel were reckoned among the judges; but as Samuel is the central figure in the story of the founding of the kingdom, it was not unnatural to begin a new book with his birth. The character of the two works shows conclusively that Judges was not composed by the author of Samuel; the peculiar religious interpretation of the history which is impressed so strongly on Judges is almost entirely lacking in Samuel.

The Title.—שפטים, Baba bathra 14b; Σαφατειμ, Orig.; Sophtim, Jerome. Κριταί, Melito, Orig., titles in AB al.; ἡ τῶν κριτῶν βίβλος, τῶν κριτῶν, Greek Ff. generally. Philo (de confus. lingg. c. 26, i. p. 424 ed. Mangey), ἡ τῶν κριμάτων ἀναγραφομένη βίβλος; cf. Βασιλειῶν, Regnorum, for Kings. Liber Judicum, Judicum, in the Latin Church. In Syriac, Sephar dayyånē (dabnai Israīl), Book of Judges ( PLOH); another, and perhaps older title is, Pårōqē dabnai Israīl, The Deliverers of the Israelites ( A); cf. Ephrem, i. p. 308. The book was also known by its Hebrew title, Shåphţe or Shåpheţē ( PLH, BO. iii. 1. p. 5, 62, 71, &c), which was early corrupted to Shabhţē, as if from שֵנֶט, tribe; so in A, see Ephrem, l. s. c.—Sufetes, qui summus Poenis est magistratus (Liv., xxviii. 37); quod velut consulare imperium apud eos erat (ib. xxx. 7, of Carthage; cf. xxxiv. 61). In Latin inscriptions from Africa we learn of the sufetes of a number of cities (CIL. viii. No. 7, 765, 10525); sometimes two are named (ib. No. 797, 5306). שפט occurs frequently in inscriptions, but it is in most cases uncertain whether ordinary judges or chief magistrates are meant. In Spain and Sardinia (Cagliari), the governors and petty kings were in the Middle Ages called judices (Ducange, s.v.), in which we may be disposed to see a survival from the times of the Phoenician rule. The sufetes of Carthage and the Punic colonies were a regular magistracy, and belong to a much more highly organized political society than the shōphetīm of the O.T. We might rather compare the δικασταί who held the supreme power at Tyre for brief periods during an interregnum in the 6th cent. B.C. (Fl. Jos., c. Ap. i. 21 § 157).

§ 2. Contents.

The Book of Judges consists of three parts: 11–25, 26–1631, 17–21.

(1) 11–25. A brief account of the conquests and settlements of the Israelite tribes in Canaan. 11–21. The southern tribes; Judah, Caleb, the Kenites, Simeon, Benjamin. 122–29. The central tribes; Joseph (Manasseh, Ephraim). 130–33. The northern tribes; Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali. 134–35. Dan's settlements in the west. 136. The southern border. 21–5. The Angel of Yahweh reproves the Israelites for sparing the inhabitants of the land, and foretells the consequences.

(2) 26–1631. The history of Israel in the days of the Judges. 26–36. Introduction: The religious interpretation and judgement of the whole period as a recurring cycle of defection from Yahweh, subjugation, and deliverance.—The nations which Yahweh left in Palestine. 36–l631. The stories of the Judges and their heroic deeds. 37–11. Othniel delivers Israel from Cushan-rishathaim, King of Aram-naharaim. 312–30. Ehud kills Eglon, King of Moab, and liberates Israel. 331. Shamgar kills six hundred Philistines. 4. Deborah and Barak deliver Israel from the Canaanites; the defeat and death of Sisera. 5. Triumphal ode, celebrating this victory. 6–8. Gideon rids Israel of the Midianites. 9. Abimelech, the son of Gideon, King of Shechem. 101–5. Tola; Jair. 106–18. The moral of the history repeated and enforced; preface to a new period of oppression. 111–127. Jephthah delivers Gilead from the Ammonites; he punishes the Ephraimites. 128–15. Ibzan, Elon, Abdon. 13–16. The adventures of Samson, and the mischief he does the Philistines.

(3) 17–21. Two additional stories of the times of the Judges. 17, 18. Micah's idols; the migration of the Danites, and foundation of the sanctuary at Dan. 19–21. The outrage committed by the inhabitants of Gibeah upon the Levite's concubine. The vengeance of the Israelites, ending in the almost complete extermination of the tribe of Benjamin.

Chapters 26–1631 constitute the body of the work, to which alone the title, Book of Judges, in strictness applies. Ch. 17–21 is an appendix, relating two important events of the period preceding the establishment of the kingdom. As we find in these chapters no trace of the distinctive historical theories, or the strongly marked style, of the author of 26–1631, we may confidently infer that these two stories were not appended to his book by himself, but by some later hand. Ch. 1, as interpreted by 21–5, forms a fitting introduction to the present book, showing how the old inhabitants were left in possession of the chief cities of Canaan. Their religion became a snare to the invaders; and thus the culpable failure to extirpate people and gods together was the prime cause of all the evils that befell Israel in the following generations. But although, in this light, 11–25 is a very good beginning for the book, it cannot have been prefixed by the author of 26–331, whose own extended introduction (26–36) not only takes no notice of 11–25, but by its connexion with Jos. formally excludes it. Like the appendix, 17–21, therefore, 11–25 must have been introduced by a compiler or editor later than the author of 26–1631.

§ 3. The History of the Judges, ii. 6–xvi. 31. Character and age.

In the Introduction (26–36), the author gives a comprehensive survey of the history of the entire period. The generation which had seen all the great work of Yahweh, in Egypt, in the desert, and in the conquest of Canaan (27), remained true to him; but after the death of Joshua and his contemporaries, Israel fell away from Yahweh, the God of their fathers, and worshipped the Baals and Astartes, the gods of the nations about them. Indignant at this unfaithfulness, Yahweh gave them into the power of their enemies, who subjugated and oppressed them. Moved by their distress, Yahweh repeatedly raised up leaders (judges) who de them from their foes. But they persisted in the worship of other gods, or relapsed into it when the judge was dead; each generation was worse than those before it. Neither punishment nor deliverance wrought any lasting amendment. The history of each of the judges begins with a few sentences telling us how the Israelites offended Yahweh; how he gave them into the power of this or that hostile people for a number of years; and how he at last raised up a deliverer. The introductions to the stories of Gideon (61–10) and Jephthah (106–16) are longer, and the moral is enforced in the words of a prophet, or of Yahweh himself, upbraiding the Israelites for their disobedience and ingratitude. The history of all these successive oppressions and deliverances thus exemplifies and confirms the representation of the whole period which is given in the introduction. Temporibus … judicum, sicut se habebant et peccata populi et misericordia Dei, alternaverunt prospera et adversa bellorum.

It is clear that in all this the author's purpose is not merely to interpret the history, and explain upon religious principles why such evils befell Israel in the days of the judges, but to impress upon his readers the lesson that unfaithfulness to Yahweh is always punished; that whenever Israel falls away from him, he withdraws his protection and leaves it defenceless before its foes. By historical examples he would warn his contemporaries against a like apostasy. His motive and aim are thus not historical, but religious. In a different, but not less effective way, he inculcates the same truth which all the prophets preached; Yahweh is Israel's God, and the religion of Israel is to keep itself to him alone.

The author's motive, the lesson he enforces, and the way in which he makes the history teach it, are almost the only data at our command to ascertain the age in which he lived. Indefinite as such criteria may seem, they are, when the character of the work is sufficiently marked, among the most conclusive; and in this case they enable us to determine, beyond reasonable doubt, the period and circle in which the book was written.

That the history of Israel is a divine discipline, righteous, wise, and good, is the great idea of the prophets. In old Israel, as among other nations, defeat in battle, foreign invasion and conquest, were indeed ascribed to the anger of the national god, whom his people, or members of it, had in some way offended. But that Yahweh's anger as well as his favour is moral, and that therefore his dealing with his people is to be understood upon moral premises, was first distinctly taught by the prophets of the 8th century. This principle was naturally applied by them in the first place to the present and the immediate future. But the evils of the present have their roots in the past; and Hosea, looking back over the history of Israel from the time of the settlement in Canaan, sees in it one long, dark chapter of defection from Yahweh, of heathenish worship and heathenish wickedness. It is Hosea, also, who represents unfaithfulness to Yahweh as the one great sin from which all others spring, and who, with a figure drawn from his own unhappy home, brands this unfaithfulness with the name 'prostitution,' by which later writers so often characterize it.

The prophets of the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 6th century judge Judah in the same way in which Hosea, in the last years of the Northern Kingdom, had judged Israel. In the long reign of Manasseh, foreign gods and foreign cults were introduced in Judah on a scale never before witnessed; the principle of exclusiveness which was native in the religion of Yahweh, and which the prophets had proclaimed with ever increasing absoluteness, was recklessly trampled under foot. This was, as Jeremiah constantly declared, the unpardonable sin which nothing short of the destruction of the nation could expiate. Ezekiel represents the exile as the punishment of the sins of Israel in its whole past: in Egypt, in the wilderness, in Canaan, it had always been a rebellious people, ever falling away from Yahweh into heathenism and idolatry.

The signal fulfilment of the prophets' predictions in the fall of Judah, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the deportation of its inhabitants, set the seal of God's truth not only on their religious teaching, but upon their judgement of the past of Israel. In the light of this judgement, disciples of the prophets wrote the history of the two kingdoms, using and adapting the old records to illustrate and enforce the great lessons which prophecy had taught. The same ruling ideas, the same practical motives, permeate the Book of Deuteronomy, especially the opening and closing chapters, and are indeed so prominent in it that the historical pragmatism of which we have been speaking is frequently, and not inappropriately, called Deuteronomic, and the writers whose work it characterizes, the Deuteronomic school.

To this school the author of Jud. 26–1631 manifestly belongs. What others had done for the history of the Kingdom, he does for the centuries between the invasion and the days of Samuel. From the very first generation after the settlement in Canaan, Israel had left Yahweh, to run after other gods and prostitute itself to them; and in this course it persisted through the whole period, in spite of all warnings and chastisements. The part of the book which we are now considering can, therefore, hardly have been written before the beginning of the 6th century.

Other considerations might incline us to put it some decades later. It is antecedently probable that the new school of historians applied themselves first to the history of the Kingdom, where the prophets had gone before them, and in which the moral was more impressive because nearer at hand. From that they would naturally go back to the earlier period. The same inference may perhaps be drawn from the fact that the judgement of Israel's past in our book is more severe than in the Kings. In the latter, the sin of the people is in no small part the worship on the high places, a heathenish form of worship, forbidden by the law, but still a worship of Yahweh. In Judges the apostasy is complete; the people abandons Yahweh for the Baals and Astartes.

The conclusions to which an examination of the contents of the book leads are confirmed by the evidence of its vocabulary and style, in which the affinity to the literature of the end of the 7th century is unmistakable. In the commentary these parallels are noted, and they need not be repeated here.

§ 4. The Sources of Judges ii. 6-xvi. 31.

The characteristics which have been discussed in the last section appear chiefly in the introduction (26–36) and at the beginning of the histories of the several judges. The stories themselves, with the exception of that of Othniel (37–11), show few traces of the author's distinctive conceptions or expressions. Some of them—for instance, Samson's adventures among the Philistines—have little or no relation to the purpose of the book; others relate of the judges things which must have been offensive to the author, such as Gideon's setting up the ephōd and the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter; in all, the religious ideas, the language, and style, are entirely unlike his own. It is plain therefore, that the author of Jud. 26–1631 did not write these stories himself, but took them from older sources.

These sources cannot have been oral tradition, or unwritten popular legends, for, apart from the difficulty of supposing that oral tradition had transmitted to so late a time such lifelike and truthful pictures of a state of society that had passed away cen before, in reducing oral tradition to writing, the author would inevitably have left the impress of his own style upon the stories far more deeply than is the case; the Deuteronomic peculiarities we have noted above would not be confined to the beginning and end of the tales. The greater or less unevenness of which we are always aware in passing from the introduction to the story which follows, is clearly the joint by which an older written source is united to the Deuteronomic preface.

If the author employed written sources, our next inquiry is, whether he made his choice among single tales or different collections of tales, or whether he took them all from some one older book. This question cannot be answered with entire certainty; it is quite conceivable that the cycle of stories about Samson, for instance, may have existed separately; but it is demonstrable, I think, that the author had before him an older work in which the exploits of a considerable number of the Israelite heroes were narrated; and if this is true, it may very well be that this collection was his only source. It is easier to understand how a story like that of Samson should have been included in the Deuteronomic Book of Judges, if the author found it in the earlier work on which he based his own, than to imagine that he introduced it for himself from some other source.

A more minute examination of the introduction to the book (26–36), and of the setting of the several stories, especially those of Gideon (61–10) and Jephthah (106–16), brings out the fact that these parts of the work are not entirely homogeneous. The numerous repetitions and duplications, and the differences in point of view and phraseology, which, though slight, are unmistakable, show that more than one writer has had a hand in the composition. Of this fact, which is recognized by most recent critics, two explanations may be given. One is, that the author or editor of the present Book of Judges, in incorporating 26–1631 in his own work, dwelt upon and emphasized the moral lessons of the history which his predecessor had enforced; the lack of unity and consistency which the critics have observed would thus be due to interpolation. The alternative hypothesis is, that the author of 26–1631 used as the basis of his work an older collection of tales of the Israelite heroes, in which the varying fortunes of Israel in those troublous times were already made to point the moral that unfaithfulness to Yahweh was the prime cause of all the evils that befell the people,—a pre-Deuteronomic Book of the Histories of the Judges.

The considerations which incline the balance of probability to the second of these hypotheses are the following: (a) The elements which are admitted by all not to belong to the principal Deuteronomic stratum in the book do not seem to be superimposed upon it, but embedded in it; and they are more intimately united with their context than the additions by which later editors often try to heighten the effect of their text are wont to be. (b) If the author or editor of the present Book of Judges made all these additions in 26–1631, we should expect to find his mark upon ch. 17, 18, 19–21 also, which certainly invited a moral comment and application quite as much as some of the stories in the body of the work; but no trace of such an improvement is to be discovered in those chapters. (c) The language of the parts of the book in question is distinguished from that of the Deuteronomic writers and editors generally by a more marked affinity to one of the older sources of the Hexateuch (E). (d) Some of the tales, e.g. that of Gideon (ch. 6–8), are composite; two somewhat different versions of the story have been united by a third hand, which does not appear to be that of the author of the book, but of an earlier redactor. It is not a remote conjecture that this redactor is also the author of the non-Deuteronomic element in the introduction (26–36) and other parts of the book, (e) The Deuteronomic Book of Judges did not include ch. 17, 18, 19–21; the closing formula, 1520, may perhaps be taken as evidence that it did not contain ch. 16; 833–35 is an editorial substitute for ch. 9, which has obviously not passed through the hands of the Deuteronomic author. But ch. 17, 18, and the primary version of the story in ch. 19–21 are akin to the older narratives in 26–1631; ch. 16, the death of Samson, is unquestionably from the same source as ch. 13–15; ch. 9, itself composite, is too closely connected with ch. 6–8 to be of different origin. The simplest hypothesis is, that these chapters were contained in the earlier collection, but were omitted by the Deuteronomic author from his book, as unsuitable to his purpose.

The older book seems to have contained the histories of Ehud, Deborah and Barak, Gideon, Abimelech, Jephthah, and Samson; not improbably also the story of Micah's idols and the migration of the Danites, and the original form of that of the Levite and his concubine. In what order these stories stood, we cannot make out. Chapters 17, 18, and 19–21, if included in the book, would have their natural place near its beginning; they certainly cannot have stood where they now do, in the midst of the history of the "days of the Philistines," between Samson and Eli. Chapter 106–16, a formal and extended introduction resembling 26–21, can hardly have been designed to occupy its present position.

It is a question of more importance whether the pre-Deuteronomic Judges (to use this name for brevity) contained other histories not included in the canonical Book of Judges.