Week 13 Judges
The person who wrote the book of the Judges left a couple of questions unanswered.
For one he identified Twelve Judges. Which means I tend to think that there were twelve judges – just twelve. But I guess there could have been more. Judges might be a selective history.
For two it’s pretty normal to think that the Twelve appeared one-after-the-other in the order I’m reading. But it’s possible that some of them could have overlapped. They look more like local-&-tribal judges dealing with local-&-tribal problems – not necessarily helping all of Israel.
Anyway the main thing I was thinking about was that there are two main groups of judges. There are Six Major Judges. And Six Minor Judges.
The Six Minor Judges are Shamgar Tola Jair Ibzan Elon & Abdon and the main reason they are Minor is because none of them gets more than three verses of text – maximum. (The average number of words that each of the Six Minors get is 38.3-words (Ibzan gets the most with 55-words)). I don’t think number-of-words is a hard-and-fast rule about importance. I don’t think the rule is: More Words = More Importance. For instance I was thinking about Enoch in Genesis. He only gets ~57-words of text…but he’s pretty important.
Anyway I think I’ll take some extra time to look at the Six Minors a bit more carefully.
Note: the Six Minors are Shamgar 3:31 Tola 10:1-2 Jair 10:3-5 Ibzan 12:8-10 Elon 12:11-12 Abdon 12:13-15. Enoch is in Genesis 5:21-24.