Week 12 Judges
Now that I know what to look for I wonder how I ever missed it – the repeated pattern in Judges.
The pattern looks like this (I can fill-in-the-blanks with different names and numbers, but the basic pattern stays the same):
The people of Israel turned against the Lord, and so the Lord let them be conquered by king _____, and king _____ oppressed Israel for ___ years. Then Israel prayed to the Lord for help, and the Lord sent _____ to help them out, and _____ defeated king _____. And so Israel had peace and rest for ___ years.
The formula is not too concerned with ground-level-type explanations. For example, the author doesn’t say: the people of Israel had a flawed battle strategy against the Hivites and so they were defeated and subjugated. That might be true, but the writer is more interested in a different type of explanation, a reason that is a different kind of reason, a reason that plays out on a different plane. He’s saying: Israel did evil, and so this happened.
Note: the pattern is spelled out pretty clearly in 2:11-23, and then it’s repeated in chapters 3, 4, 6, 10, 13. It doesn’t describe every judge. All we know about Tola, Jair, Ibzan, Elon, and Abdon is that they lived, they judged, and they died – a couple of verses each. But the pattern does apply to all the marquee judges.