Here come the judges
Judges 2:6 – Chapter 3 Read it here
People, it seems, have a short attention span.
A familiar pattern re-emerges of Israel falling into crisis, calling out to God, God saving them, Israel having a brief period of righteousness and peace, then drifting back into idol worship, followed by crisis. Sadly, the pattern isn’t just familiar because we’ve seen it in the Bible: we’ve also seen it on the news, in our history books and, all too often, in our own lives.
This time God raises up leaders on a seemingly as-needed basis to respond when the people get into so much trouble they cry out to him after military defeat. “Then the Lord raised up judges , who saved them out of the hands of these raiders.”
The periods of righteousness and peace would be short-lived. “But when the judges died, the people returned to ways even more corrupt than those of their ancestors, following other gods and serving and worshiping them.”
These judges aren’t what we picture judges as being; they were military as well as civil leaders, unafraid to enter the fray.
In Ehud, we see one of the judges using deception to personally assassinate an enemy king in a story that is both gory and amusing, with its obese king and embarrassed servants.