trending down

Week 10 Judges

It’s a bit of a relief to finish reading Judges.
Judges has two trends happening. One is the up-&-down ping-pong pattern through the book that looks like this: Israel follows the Lord > Israel starts following other gods > disaster strikes > Israel prays for help > the Lord sends a judge. Up-&-down like that.
Then the second pattern is just basically down. It’s like if I draw a line on a page from the upper left to the lower right. From left to right along that line I can draw a saw-toothed bunch of ups-&-downs. There are ups for sure, but over time the ups are all trending down.
So it’s no surprise that Judges ends with two unpleasant stories – well, the second-last story is grim; the last one is distressingly terrible.
In the second-last story a Levite became a priest-for-hire for a private household. Then he traded up to become the idol-worshipping priest for the whole tribe of Dan.
The second story is about another Levite. It’s as gruesome as any story you’ll find in the bible. The outcome is civil war. Benjamin’s tribe almost joins the pterosaurs.
The 37-page Book of Judges shows a lot of Israel descending from good to bad to dysfunctionally ghastly. A kind of broken-down, pretender-federation of states that did – as Judges says – whatever seemed right in their own eyes.
Which in their case was wrong.

Note: one Levite story is Judges 17-18; the other is in 19-22. Quote from Judges 21:25 (NLT)