LAST THINGS FIRST

In those days there was no king in Israel; each person did what they thought to be right.

(Judges 21:25)

Perhaps you have heard of the major American novelist John Irving. (Or maybe you have absolutely no idea who he is.) Whether you've heard of him or not, he has written several carefully crafted, multi-layered, and frequently hilarious novels. Many of them were eventually turned into movies; The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules are two examples. A third movie, Simon Birch, was based on John Irving's novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Even if you haven't read those books, or any of the others John Irving wrote, perhaps you have seen the movies or at least heard of them. He's a brilliant author whose fiction is at the same time entertaining and compelling.

Here's why I'm telling you about John Irving. He composes his books with a very peculiar process: he writes the last sentence first. Irving figures that if he knows the ending, he can put together the story that leads up to it. Knowing the final words helps him to develop his characters and twist his plots. For instance, here's the last line of A Prayer for Owen Meany, which is about a boy with a "wrecked voice" who becomes convinced that God has a destiny for him:

"O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You."

Knowing that final line, and the paragraphs leading up to it, enabled Irving to craft the whole story about the boy Owen Meany and his relationship with the narrator — how Owen's life, perspective, and heroic sacrifice led to the narrator's faith in God.

It's an interesting way of writing, isn't it? Last sentence first. Now, I know you're probably thankful for this bit of trivia. You're better prepared for a future English class you might take. And if you ever go on Jeopardy and get an "American Authors" category, well, you'll be just a little more confident. And yet, I'm sure you are still wondering, "What in the world does this have to do with things like the Bible, Jesus, God, the Book of Judges, and the first chapter of this book?!" I'm glad you asked because the answer is everything.

You see, the Book of Judges, one of the more obscure books in the Old Testament, is a work of patterned history told with a novelist's flair and skill. And it's somewhat like a John Irving novel in that the final sentence sheds clarifying perspective on the whole book. The last sentence helps make sense of the tragic, terrible, and perplexing series of stories found in Judges, especially toward the end. In fact, I can imagine that the unknown author of Judges, operating under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and laying out material to compile into the book, realized in a flash of inspiration: "Ah! Let me write the last sentence first! Everything else in the book will lead up to that (or down to that)." And so, because that last sentence is so important in the Book of Judges, we are going to begin our study with it. Last things first. Doing so will help us get a perspective on the whole book, to set the stage for the stories we will study in our remaining chapters.

So what is it? What is this final sentence that is the lens through which everything else in Judges makes sense? "In those days there was no king in Israel; each person did what they thought to be right" (Judges 21:25). Or as another translation reads, "all the people did what was right in their own eyes" (NRSV).

Everything in the Book of Judges has been arranged in such a way that you arrive at the end and encounter the statement "each person did what they thought to be right." This statement also appears in Judges 17:6, so it actually bookends the final five chapters of Judges. These chapters paint a clear picture of chaos, anarchy, and violence. In other words, in the last five chapters of Judges, we see everybody inventing their own individual version of morality, and bedlam is the result. It's one of the unhappiest endings in the entire library of Scripture. And the rest of the book before that is not much better. The Israelites in Judges are like crash test dummies who, for twenty-one chapters, have been doing the same dumb things over and over. And now, in the final chapters, they arrive at a place where they are the dumbest. What a delightful way for us to begin!

Just what were these dumb things? We won't survey the whole book now — there's plenty of opportunity to do that in the chapters that follow — but here's the story behind the story. It's a period of ancient Israelite history when they have just begun to emerge as a people in the land of Canaan. It takes place between about 1200 and 1050 BC. The Israelites have come out of Egypt, wandered in the wilderness, and begun to conquer the Promised Land under Joshua's leadership. Now Joshua has died, and the people are residing in the land as a confederation of tribes and local groups without centralized leadership over all of Israel. This is highlighted by the repeated phrase, "In those days there was no king in Israel" (Judges 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25). In many ways, the picture of this era in Judges resembles the Wild West of the United States: a lawless frontier, a weak central government, and only the strong — or the clever — survive.

Judges attributes this lawlessness to the Israelites' relentless tendency to worship other gods. God's people, the Israelites, have created this chaotic world for themselves after the deaths of Moses and Joshua by refusing to follow God's laws and seeking other deities. They break their covenant with God over and over again. What results is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the book, an ongoing cycle of sin, oppression, deliverance, and falling right back into sin. Here is the pattern:

1. The Israelites break God's covenant by worshiping other gods.

2. Foreign enemies oppress the Israelites.

3. The Israelites cry out to God for help.

4. God raises up a deliverer (a judge) to save the people.

5. The judge delivers the people and leads them back to the covenant.

6. The people remain faithful to God throughout the judge's lifetime.

7. The judge dies, and the Israelites begin to worship other gods.

And so the cycle repeats itself. We see this pattern in the many stories of the leaders in the Book of Judges — it's the framework that holds the stories together. There is even a short description of the whole pattern near the beginning of the book:

11 Then the Israelites did things that the Lord saw as evil: They served the Baals; 12 and they went away from the Lord, their ancestors' God, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods from among the surrounding peoples, they worshipped them, and they angered the Lord.13 They went away from the Lord and served Baal and the Astartes. 14 So the Lord became angry with Israel, and he handed them over to raiders who plundered them. He let them be defeated by their enemies around them, so that they were no longer able to stand up to them. 15 Whenever the Israelites marched out, the Lord's power worked against them, just as the Lord had warned them. And they were very distressed.

16 Then the Lord raised up leaders to rescue them from the power of these raiders. 17 But they wouldn't even obey their own leaders because they were unfaithful, following other gods and worshipping them. They quickly deviated from the way of their ancestors, who had obeyed the Lord's commands, and didn't follow their example.

18 The Lord was moved by Israel's groaning under those who oppressed and crushed them. So the Lord would raise up leaders for them, and the Lord would be with the leader, and he would rescue Israel from the power of their enemies as long as that leader lived.

19 But then when the leader died, they would once again act in ways that weren't as good as their ancestors', going after other gods, to serve them and to worship them. They wouldn't drop their bad practices or hardheaded ways.

(Judges 2:11-19)

The cycle of sin, oppression, deliverance, and right back into sin occurs over and over and over. Even the few characters in this book we've been conditioned to think are heroes — like Gideon and Samson — aren't all that heroic. When we read their stories in Judges, we find deeply flawed individuals with dramatic downfalls. And as Judges moves from beginning to end, we find things getting worse. Everything spins out of control. Throughout the twenty-one chapters, the cycles become more characterized by sin, violence, and people following their own morality. The crash test dummies get dumber. And it reaches its apex — or rock bottom — in Judges 21.

It comes at the end of a bizarre and grotesque series of events that spans Judges 19–21. You're welcome to read these chapters on your own, though I don't recommend reading them with young children for family devotions. To summarize briefly, a Levite's concubine runs away from his home, and he travels to her father's house to bring her back. On the journey home, the two of them stop in a town called Gibeah, where the men of the town attempt to rape the Levite. Though his host offers protection, the Levite sees that things are getting dangerous, so he sends his concubine out to the men. They rape and abuse her all night, and she dies. The next day the Levite takes her home, dismembers her body, and sends the parts to the Israelite tribes, calling them to war and revenge. The Israelites attack the city of Gibeah, but the people of Benjamin — one of the tribes of Israel — come to the city's defense because it's in their territory. The result is a civil war, in which the Israelites defeat the tribe of Benjamin and kill almost all of its men. There are only a few hundred survivors out of the whole tribe.

At the end of this civil war, the people of Israel are shocked. It's as if they have collective PTSD, civil war style. They have won, but they have also wiped out an entire tribe of their own people. They are victims and villains. Sinners and saints. Liars and misfits. Warriors and warred upon. And they have a change of heart.

They realize that one of their tribes, Benjamin, is now lacking in women because of the civil war. Never mind that this is because they've massacred all the Benjaminites, including women, children, and even animals, going so far as to burn down "every city they came across" (Judges 20:48). For the ancient Israelites, having no women available to be wives for the men (the few that are left of the tribe of Benjamin) meant that tribe would die out. There would be no childbearing, and therefore no future. And what's more, all the Israelites had vowed not to give their daughters as wives for the Benjaminites (Judges 21:1). The Israelites are suddenly concerned that the whole tribe of Benjamin might cease to exist as a result of their violence and rash vow.

And in the aftermath of that nobody-wins civil war, they ask this question of God at the beginning of Judges 21: "'Lord, God of Israel,' they said, 'why has this happened among us that as of today one tribe will be missing from Israel?' And the next day, the people got up early and built an altar there. They offered entirely burned offerings and well-being sacrifices" (Judges 21:3-4).

The people turn to God to ask why this terrible thing has happened, when in reality, their own actions have brought it all about. The men of Gibeah acted wickedly; the Levite sent his concubine right out to them with no regard for her well-being; and the Israelites sought revenge. It escalated into an all-againstone civil war. And the people turn to God wondering why it all came about. Ha! Do you see the faulty logic and the deep irony? It's like the parents who were teaching their five-year-old about God.

"Who made the sun?" they asked.

"God," said the boy.

"Who made the rain?"

"God," said the boy.

"Who made you?"

"God," said the boy.

Right every time! A few days later, the mom walks into the boy's room and it's a disaster. So she asks, "Who made this mess?"

And without missing a beat, the boy says, "God."

That's what we do so often, isn't it? "Lord, why have you done this to me?" we ask, when deep down we know good and well that we did it to ourselves. Our own actions bring about bad results, and we turn to God as if it were somehow God's fault.

In Judges 21, God does not answer the Israelites' question. They raise up their voices and cry out before God "until evening" (Judges 21:2), and then the next day they get up early, build an altar, and offer sacrifices. And yet Scripture records no response from God at this point. God's silence in the wake of all their pleading is deafening. The silence is God's way of thundering, "You got into this mess all by yourselves." God didn't get the Israelites into a civil war and slaughter of an entire tribe. The people brought it about entirely on their own.

Once I spoke with a man who was having an extramarital affair. He wanted it to end, and he had been praying continuously for the Lord to get him out of it. He'd just kept praying for that, he told me, and he lamented that he'd received no answer from God. I remember thinking to myself, "Well, did you pray that God would get you into the affair in the first place?" Something tells me the guy found his way there all by his lonesome. And the same silence greeted his laments as that which greeted the Israelites in Judges 21.

Do you blame God — or Satan, or some other force beyond your control — for the messes you've made? Perhaps it's a mess with your money, or with your family, or with your church, or in some other area of your life. Do you blame God or something else for it? What would it mean to acknowledge and bear your own responsibility for things? Might God's silence be a challenge to you to accept your role in what's happened and begin to make changes for the better?

The Israelites don't make such a response. Instead, in the wake of that silence from God, they invent their way into a whole new kind of morality. They make up the rules as they go. They discover that one city, Jabesh-gilead, did not send any men to fight against the tribe of Benjamin. So they send warriors to attack Jabesh-gilead and kill all the men, children, and women who have slept with a man. They spare only the young women who have not yet slept with a man, so that they can give these to the remaining men of Benjamin as wives (Judges 21:714).

The violence continues. Confronted with God's silence, the people start to act in a way that seems right to them. But there's no real change. They just continue doing the very thing that got them there in the first place, attacking one of their own cities and killing most of its people. They use more bloodshed to try to right the wrong done by previous bloodshed. They are inventing their own morality, making up the rules as they go, and the result is violence on top of violence.

And it goes on. Four hundred women are captured from Jabeshgilead to be wives for the Benjaminites, but that isn't enough for each man to have a wife (Judges 21:12-14). So the Israelites come up with a second plan. There is a big religious festival coming up — think of something like a religious Woodstock or Bonnaroo — and they know there will be large numbers of females from all twelve tribes. So here's what they decide:

16 The community elders said, "What can we do to provide wives for the ones who are left, seeing that the Benjaminite women have been destroyed? 17 There must be a surviving line for those who remain from Benjamin," they continued, "so that a tribe won't be erased from Israel. 18 But we can't allow our daughters to marry them, for we Israelites have made this pledge: 'Let anyone who provides a wife for Benjamin be cursed!' 19 However," they said, "the annual festival of the Lord is under way in Shiloh, which is north of Bethel, east of the main road that goes up from Bethel to Shechem, and south of Lebonah." 20 So they instructed the Benjaminites, "Go and hide like an ambush in the vineyards 21 and watch. At the moment the women of Shiloh come out to participate in the dances, rush out from the vineyards. Each one of you, capture a wife for yourself from the women of Shiloh and go back to the land of Benjamin. 22 When their fathers or brothers come to us to object, we'll tell them, 'Do us a favor for their sake. We didn't capture enough women for every man during the battle, and this way you are not guilty because you didn't give them anything willingly.'" 23 And that is what the Benjaminites did. They took wives for their whole group from the dancers whom they abducted. They returned to their territory, rebuilt the cities, and lived in them.

(Judges 21:16-23)