Josh, Judges and Ruthie

Okay, I would like to explore that a little more because I think that would be difficult to defend. Fine I'd be interested to see the evidence for an event that has been exaggerated. Just be careful not to allocate someone else's history to Israel. Sure, what about, instead of addressing a few issues at the same time we focus on whether or not some Judges ruled concurrently?Brian.

do you mean trying to decide who was rulling at the same time? If so, then no, I have no evidence will establish any chronology.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

What makes you think some were concurrent?Is there a problem with consecutive judgeships?Brian.

Sure. For one thing it is the viewpoint of an outside person desscibing something that is seen as a unit, Israel, when it doesn't seem from the stories there was ever such an identity.Reading Judges I see no indication, fo example, that any decisions were applicable to all of the tribes. Instead, it looks far more like separate and unrelated tales. There is no mention of a method of determining which tribe will hold the Judgeship, or that one Judge held any authority over other tribes beyond short term aliances for a given strategic objective.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Reading Judges 2:16-19 it seems that there was only one Judge at a time:Then the LORD raised up judges, who saved them out of the hands of these raiders. Yet they would not listen to their judges but prostituted themselves to other gods and worshiped them. Unlike their fathers, they quickly turned from the way in which their fathers had walked, the way of obedience to the LORD's commands. Whenever the LORD raised up a judge for them, he was with the judge and saved them out of the hands of their enemies as long as the judge lived; for the LORD had compassion on them as they groaned under those who oppressed and afflicted them. But when the judge died, the people returned to ways even more corrupt than those of their fathers, following other gods and serving and worshiping them. They refused to give up their evil practices and stubborn ways. It talks about 'judge' singular, and when a judge died the people returned to their wicked ways. But, if there were concurrent judges then when was there no judge?Also, for the later editor to treat the period of the judges with Israel as a single unit is not surprising given that Israel would be a unit when the tales were written down. But the Book of Judges frequently claims that the Israelites did evil, it doesn't identify individual tribes, again it is down to this corporate guilt. It appears that God's wrath applied to all Israel. I agree with this, the stories are rather disjointed and are poolry 'linked'. Didn't God decide who the judge would be? There is a 'judgeship' formula in the early chapters of Judges.The people turn from God.
God allows them to be oppressed.
The people cry out to God.
He raises up a judge to deliver them.
The judge frees Israel.
The judge dies.
Israel turns from God again.
Then the cycle is repeated.But when they cried out to the LORD, he raised up for them a deliverer, Othniel son of Kenaz.Again the Israelites cried out to the LORD, and he gave them a deliverer”Ehud. What about Deborah?It appears that we cannot determine if any judges were concurrent, although it is possible, so we should probably move on and maybe come back to this.Maybe we should look at your next statement: This suggests that you have an idea what "actually happened", could you give a brief outline?Brian.

Briefly, and hopefully as a basis for further dicussion. The twelve tribes or families were pretty much each an autonomous unit with loose and often vague relationsships with others not living immediately adjacent. They were primarily rural, outside the major cities, and lacking the one thing really needed to build a poswer base at that time.Iron smelting and working.The Cities were held by more technologically advanced peoples and pretty much invulnerable to more than raids by the Israelites.Different tribes were lead by local leaders, Judges. These Judges may have been religious, but most were probably local strongmen or brigands. Some, such as Samson were definitely just warlords.This message has been edited by jar, 04-12-2006 10:30 PM

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Isn't it amazinghow contradictory Judges 1 is in comparison to Joshua's 'seeping' victory?But, what I am getting at, is apart from the Bible, what evidence do you have for this version? All I can see is that you are accepting one mythical version over another because the Judges version looks more plausible. The Bible doesn't give enough information to support this, there are not enough Judges mentioned to come to this conclusion. Certainly the major Judges were potrayed as charasmatic. He is certainly portrayed this way, but Samson strikes me as a fictional character, granted it could be the old 'historical character with added myths' routine, but there is too much of the supernatural attached to Samson for me to take it seriously. EVen the length of reign arouses suspicion.So, now that you have outlined your position, are we now just talkng about Bible versus Bible, Joshua versus Judges, or is external evidence going to be considered?Brian.

Unfortunately, if my reading of Judges is correct, it's highly unlikely that we will ever find much outside corroborating evidence. We may, as in the case of the Joshuah tales be able to find outside evidence that refutes some of the stories, but if the Judges period does refere to semi-nomadic non city tribal history, we most likely won't find much that would confirm it.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Joshua, Judges and Ruth are all part of the deuteronomist redactor.Why do you think this school would have include two books with very different verions of Israel's settlement in Palestine?Remember that the Joshua conquest took 5-7 years and the whole of Palestine was conquered, yet a few years later Judges has most of Palestine in the hands of the Canaanites who were allegedly slaughtered by Josh.AbE:Perhaps the way forward is to try and place Judges into a chronological framework?Brian.This message has been edited by Brian, Sunday, 16-04-2006 06:56 AM

I think they included both stories through tradition and political need. you could ask the same question about Gen 1 & Gen2-3. Why include both tales? Or about the Flood stories where not only are multiple tales told, they are mixed up together. IMHO the stories were not meant as literal history. Instead they really are a collection of folk myths that had been used as a means of telling morality plays and political tracts. Small issues such as consistency really don't matter. That continues right through the OT. David searches for any members of the line of Saul, and finds only one, yet a few chapters later he has no problem rounding up a whole herd of them to try to kill the line off. That would be interesting. I frankly don't see a way to do it right now but welcome any suggestions.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Hi, I suggest that we critically analyse each judgeship to see if we can find any possible external chronologcial connections. Samson's escapades with the Philistines for example would give us a terminus a quo for his Judgeship.So, what if we take a different judge each day (starting with Othniel) until we are through them all and then see where we are?Brian.

The little I've read about it most of which came from "Who Wrote the Bible" by Friedman was that the redactor was very conservative and sought to preserve all the texts. The hypothesis being I believe that there were Northern and Southern Kingdom traditions and texts that were being put together.Would that be an acceptable explanation?lfen

What was the area and era like during the likely time of the Judges?The Phoenicians controlled the coast on the north. The Philistines controlled the coast on the south. The Canaanites controlled the cities inland.What was the situation in the North and South, in Egypt and Syria/Iraq?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

To know what the area was like we need to know what time period we are looking at. It is difficult to pin down the exact period, but the Bible tells us that the period of the Judges began at least forty years after the Israelites left Egypt. We cannot narrow this down anymore because the period of time that Joshua and the the Elders led Israel is not given.The period finishes with the beginning of the Israelite monarchy when Saul became king. The length of Saul's reign as given in the OT is hopelessly corrupted, but thr NT states forty years. If it was forty years, then we have a clue to the date of the end of the period of the Judges. Assyrianand Babylonian Kings' lists can be aligned with certain biblical characters that allows us to date David's reign to the first half of the 10th century bce. Therefore, the period of the Judges would end about 1040 bce.We have that infamous artificial number in 1 kings 6:1 of 480 years that places the Exodus at around 1446 bce, but I think we can discount that for various reasons. Firstly, it smacks of artificiality, with 480 being 12x40, involving two very symbolic numbers. Also, the el-Amarna letters give a great background to the first half of the 14th century bce, and they show that Palestine was still under Egyptian rule at the time they were written (c.1400-1350 bce ).So, I would say that we should be looking at roughly the period between about 1350-1040.Do you agree with this or not? I don't want to type up a lot of information if you think we should be looking at a different time frame.Brian.

I think we can probably narrow it down slightly more. We know that it has to be earlier than about 1050 or so. But can we narrow down the earlier date, the beginning date. What is the state of the Northern Powers at the time?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion