Syncretism at work

Gideon and Joash showed some awareness of YHWH and his cult (see 6:7, 13) but obviously combined those beliefs and practices with those of the surrounding Canaanites. Joash’s challenge to Baal and his followers after Gideon’s destruction of Baal’s altar (6:31) may have signaled a turning point in their religious loyalties but did not necessarily erase the influence of years of syncretistic worship. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume that even though Gideon’s moment of self-discovery has shown him that he has been appropriating the honor and loyalty due to YHWH alone, he would misguidedly and pathetically try to restore that honor to God by making a golden ephod for use in his worship.—Judging the Judges, 145

<idle musing>
Sounds only too familiar, doesn't it? Only difference is that the modern version substitutes a political party or cultural stance (right or left, doesn't matter). The end is still an attempt to "misguidedly and pathetically try to restore that honor to God."

Good book by the way. I finished it over the weekend (I'd been wanting to read it for a couple of years) and learned a good bit. The 150(!) pages of tables at the end are really interesting. I wonder if anyone else will use her model on other narratives?
</idle musing>

The flashy and powerful

Like the Israelites who showed a preference for leaders like Jephthah and the later Gideon who used excessive force to battle the external enemies, we demonstrate a preference for the flashy and powerful leadership qualities that our culture prizes, rather than the courageous, servant leadership of the early Gideon who exposed and dismantled the enemy within the gates. If there’s one thing we learn from Gideon it is that messing with people’s idols is an unpopular and potentially life-threatening business! Are our leaders inspiring and equipping us toward a more faithful, undivided witness to the power of the gospel, or are they inadvertently setting up idols in our midst that all of God’s people “whore after” (8:27, 33) or themselves sacrificing family and other God-given gifts to further their own ends (11:39).—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

Not an even exchange

Israel’s rejection of Yahweh’s rule is not fundamentally an exchange of one divine rule (the rule of Yahweh) for another divine rule (the rule of one Canaanite god or another); rather, their allegiance to the foreign deities (and thus disloyalty to Yahweh) exposes their fundamental drive to chart their own course, realize their own destiny, and set the standard for their own conduct apart from God. Idolatry and autonomy, thus, are intricately intertwined, two sides of the same coin.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

Violence!

Our time and culture are no less violent than those of ancient Israel. On the one hand, we live in a culture that celebrates and consumes violence in film, video games, and sport. On the other hand, we lament the violence that plagues our city streets, hides behind the closed doors of our homes, enters our schools and claims our children, feeds on racism and other forms of prejudice, wreaks havoc on the global political stage, and dominates our media coverage. Violence breads violence and creates a culture of fear and anxiety; the cycle seems unbreakable. As valuable and worthwhile as they are, anger management seminars, violence awareness, counseling, and diplomatic peace talks cannot eradicate the violence that plagues a society like ours in which everyone does what is right in their own eyes. And like Israel in the settlement period, any hope for change must begin with the people of God, radically committed to the divine king and unswervingly motivated to live out his kingdom principles.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

It's not just personal, it's structural

In this fallen world, allegiance to God and King Jesus does not guarantee life and flourishing this side of eternity, but disloyalty that breeds sin will only in the long run produce disharmony, fear, oppression, misery, death—all those things that are opposed to life and flourishing. Accordingly, Judge’s full-orbed instruction on sin also implies something about the doctrine of salvation. Along with the thrust of the biblical story, Judges communicates (albeit as a subtext) a longing for deliverance that extends as wide and as deep as the pervasive spread of sin. Judges provides a stark and sobering picture of sin and its consequences, and thus stands as a vital source for a multidimensional doctrine of sin, but also implies a cosmic redemption that heals the ills of human immorality, institutional corruption, economic oppression, and societal breakdown—thus, it stands as a vital source for a multidimensional doctrine of salvation.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

The root of sin

At its root, then, sin is a disposition in the hearts of the people of God, and not specific acts that transgress a moral code. That is not to say that actions and behavior are irrelevant. In fact, this disposition of disloyalty to Yahweh manifests itself in actions that transgress Yahweh’s will.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming) (emphasis original)

The real cancer

The stranglehold of sin not only creates a context of widespread immorality, but also produces an environment of uncertainty, division, oppression (economic and other), fear, suspicion, false hospitality, cowardice, and familial and social brokenness. Sin is like a cancer that literally sucks the life out of its host. Not content to be confined or limited, sin, once taken root, spreads in such a way that it saps the energy and life that feeds cells and organs. The result is that the cancer (sin) thrives and grows while the host environment of the cancer deteriorates and eventually dies.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

Right in the eyes of whom?

In the context of the sins of Micah and the Danites, of the atrocity of Gibeah and the resulting disasters (chs. 17–21), the refrain “doing evil in the eyes of Yahweh” gives way to people “doing right in their own eyes.” The moral standard has shifted from divine to human, and the resulting moral relativism leads to chaos. As I have argued throughout this commentary, the people (individually and collectively) doing what seems good in their own eyes is bound up with their rejection of Yahweh as king (“There was no king in Israel”), so again these narratives underscore the connection between divine allegiance and sin.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

He exists—but what does that mean?

It is worth clarifying that we never encounter Israelites (individually or collectively) denying his [Yahweh] existence or alternatively acknowledging his existence but then consciously rejecting his divine authority. Instead, we have plenty of examples of a syncretistic blending of Israelite and Canaanite “religion.” This religious syncretism is quite evident at a number of places, not least in the example of Gideon’s patriarchal household and in Gideon himself. Gideon’s father maintained a shrine to Baal and Ashtoreth (6:25–32), and yet his father must have passed down something of the tradition and history of Israel because Gideon recalls some of them (6:13). Gideon himself rightly acknowledges the rule of Yahweh but then immediately fashions an idol and sets up a shrine that “all Israel whored after” and that “became a snare to Gideon and to his family.” When it comes to dividing divine loyalties, like father, like son. Indeed, according to the pervasive polytheistic cognitive environment of the ancient Near East, paying homage to Yahweh and also serving the local deities would be the most natural thing for the Israelites to do. And yet, Yahweh was unique among the gods of the nations and by virtue of his special relationship with them and his redemptive and preserving deeds on their behalf, Israel was called to be a unique people. Accordingly, there was to be no division of loyalties—service to foreign gods is implicitly a rejection of Yahweh.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

The gift of the Spirit

Gideon and Jephthah demonstrate that the endowment of Yahweh’s Spirit to achieve salvation can produce an enduring confidence that is self-serving and opposed to God’s will.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

All gone astray, everyone…

Besides the bizarre nature of the events of chapters 19–21, another curiosity of these narratives is worth noting. With one notable exception, not a single individual in this long complex of stories is named. This anonymity serves a number of purposes, but most importantly it universalizes the experience and actions of the characters: “What better way to portray that every Levite, every father-in-law, every host, every single man with that society committed such barbaric atrocities ‘from Dan to Beersheba’ (20:1) than by allowing every perpetrator in the narrative to exist nameless?” [Hudson, “Living in a Land of Epithets,” 59] The one man doing right in his own eyes represents everyman doing right in his own eyes. [footnote: My use of “man” here is deliberate, as the events in chs. 19–21 portray men perpetrated death and destruction, specifically at the expense of women.]—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

And the conclusion of the matter is that

The series of Spirit-endowed judges concludes with Jephthah and Samson whose lives and behavior mirror the collapse of Israel. Despite their charismatic endowments, these judges are unable to control the wandering passions of Israel; in fact, they cannot even control themselves. At the end of Judges we are confronted with human frailty, and we are forced to cry out only to God for salvation, because, in the words of James Crenshaw, “he alone can deliver Israel once and for all time, for he does not sleep on Delilah’s knee” [Crenshaw, Samson, 135].—Lee Roy Martin, “Power to Save!? The Role of the Spirit of the Lord in the Book of Judges,” JPT 16 (2008): 50

Irony abounds

The irony here is astounding: Israel’s would-be deliverer is bound by the people he is meant to deliver, and they deliver him over to the oppressors from whom he is meant to deliver them. The hand motif emerges in 15:13, and it reinforces the sense of irony. Elsewhere in the book either Yahweh gives the Israelites into the hand of foreign enemies or gives foreign enemies into the hand of Israelite armies or often the judge/deliverer. Here the men of Judah express twice that they intend to bind Samson and give him “into the hands of the Philistines” (vv. 12a and 13a). Here in the final cycle is the first and only time in the book that Israelites deliver a fellow Israelite (let alone their chosen deliverer) into the hands of their enemies. Moreover, the Judahites’ assertion that the Philistines are ruling Israel should not come as a shock at this point, as the narrator expressed this in 14:4 using almost the exact phrasing as in 15:11. However, that Judah is so willing to accept this reality and will go so far as to deliver Samson to the Philistines to maintain Philistine rule is unthinkable and marks an all-time low in the book of Judges.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

About those fleeces that you put out…

The need for two signs of the fleece may point to Gideon’s ineptitude. According to the natural order of things, the wool fleece would have absorbed the moisture from the dew so that when the morning came the sun would have dried the ground, but the fleece would have naturally remained damp. No doubt realizing his blunder, Gideon requests a second sign that would require a miracle. Things are not boding well for Israel’s new leader. All of these subtleties of the text and the broader context should probably give contemporary readers pause before drawing in the fleecing test as a paradigm for discovering God’s will today.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

Be careful what you sing

I cannot help but agree with Gregory Wong that the role of Yahweh [in the Song of Deborah in Judges 5], although present, is indeed eclipsed by the role of the human agents. Is this the kind of identity-forming song that would arouse unswerving commitment to Yahweh and his covenant, or would it simply reinforce the ambivalence of God’s people to be the people he was calling them to be? If the rest of the book [of Judges] is any indication, we might be inclined to conclude that this song was of the latter kind. There may be enduring instruction here for contemporary people of faith about the kinds of worship songs we sing—are they theocentric songs that inspire commitment to God and a more faithful witness to him or are they anthropocentric songs that celebrate human achievement and leave us comfortable with the status quo?—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

What we expect vs. what we see

The kind of society that we expect Israel to develop would, for example, care for the most vulnerable (widows, orphans, and foreigners), prize justice and mercy, cultivate and care for the land in sustainable ways, encourage equitable and responsible economic practice, promote hard work and revitalizing rest, and so on—all of these as tangible manifestations of Yahweh’s kingdom and his royal character. The result and ultimate aim of such a society would be blessing: the blessing of God’s people, the blessing of the land, and even the blessing of the foreign nations.

The reality on the ground, or more appropriately in the promised land, is something altogether different.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

<idle musing>
And that is also true of those who claim to be Christians. The biggest difference being that Christians have the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit to make it happen. We are therefore "without excuse" for not making it happen : (
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Zombie nation?

Three generations from those foundational, identity-forming events of the Exodus from Egypt and the Sinai covenant, God’s people are in crisis. They have arrived in the promised land and are emerging as a nation, but the seeds of idolatry and injustice are in full bloom, strangling the image-bearing quality of the covenant people. The response to failure does not result in rooting out idolatry and injustice—in fact the people wrongly diagnose the problem (i.e., unstable political governance) and consequently propose the wrong solution (i.e., strong, perpetual leadership). We witness a seemingly unending cycle, in which the people of God are not dead, but they are by no means thriving and flourishing. Israel is a zombie nation!

In this way, Judges stands as a prophetic clarion call for the people of God today. To what extent have the seeds of idolatry taken root and choked out our call to bear the image of Christ in the context of the twenty-first century? Is our commitment to the idols of our day compromising our calling to be faithful witnesses to Jesus and his countercultural kingdom for the sake of the flourishing of all people? Are we looking for solutions in all the wrong places, retreating into pietistic isolationism, or putting our trust in the wrong things (e.g., authoritarian government)? It is possible that the church has become a community of zombies?—from the introduction of David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)