17–The Foundation of the Judges Period

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We are now beginning to study the Book of Judges but there is more to where we are in our study of ancient Israel than just the Book of Judges. The Judges period isn’t just the Book of Judges. It is Judges, Ruth and part of 1st Samuel. The Judges period ends and the Kings period begins in chapter 9 of 1^st Samuel and 2^nd Samuel then continues the history of the second King of Israel, David.

The time period of the Judges is the continuation of Israelite life immediately after Joshua died. The first verse of Judges chapter 1 tells us this.

Judges 1:1  After the death of Joshua…

A reading of the chapter, which we will get to next week, clearly shows that the author of Judges intended us to understand that the writer intended no gap of years between Joshua’s death and the continuing saga of Israel. Chapters 1 and 2 has new information but also refers back to events and situations in Joshua as a segue to the Judges period.

The Judges period is important for us to study because it highlights the problem Israel has had with religion and idolatry for the last 3500 years in which YHVH’s people have been of 2 minds turning to Him and His Kingdom and then away from Him to religions and others gods and idols (images of other gods) and then back to Him and doing this repeatedly. This behavior did not start in the time of the Judges. It started in Egypt.

Israel’s continual wavering between YHVH and Baal began in the wilderness, stopped in the Joshua generation for 30 only years and then began again almost immediately after the death of Joshua. This wavering has continued in Israel ever since.

What does all this have to do with studying the time period of the Judges? It is part of the agenda of this study to understand Israel’s history and learn from it – what to do and what not to do so we can avoid the coming judgement. 2 Chronicles 7:14 says:

2 Chronicles 7:14  if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. 

To humble ourselves does not mean to be stooped over in the physical and letting ourselves be treated like doormats while we smile and take the abuse. Humbling means 1) accepting YHVH’s authority as King and keeping His commandments and 2) having a personal relationship with Him. And it starts with repentance. The ultimate goal of this study is to turn people’s hearts back to YHVH.

So the Judges period gives us dark examples of the treachery of ancient Israelites against YHVH and also shining examples of YHVH’s remnant which He has always had starting with Moses, Joshua and Caleb. Though not all the Judges were righteous people (Samson and Samuel’s own sons, for instance, were not), but most of them were.

There is one particular account during the early Judges period that shows us what righteousness looks like in a person’s life. This is found in the Book of Ruth. Ruth not only teaches us about the righteous behaviors of the remnant, it also shows us that YHVH accepts all who come to Him. But most important is that it lays the foundation for the coming of the Messiah.

The reason for the author writing Ruth was to show the genealogy of David whose descendant would be the Messiah of all Israel. We understand this from how the Book of Ruth ends.

Ruth 4:21  and Salmon became the father of Boaz, and Boaz became the father of Obed, 
Ruth 4:22  and Obed became the father of Jesse, and Jesse became the father of David.

The Gospel writers followed suit:

Mat 1:5  Salmon became the father of Boaz by Rahab. Boaz became the father of Obed by Ruth. Obed became the father of Jesse. 
Mat 1:6  Jesse became the father of King David.

The genealogy of Yeshua is paramount to us in the end of days as we face YHVH’s and our enemy, Satan, whose son of perdition will come in his own name and through the failed, defunct line of Solomon saying he is the Messiah. Yeshua came through the line of Nathan.

Samuel is the author of the Book of Ruth just as he is the author of Judges. Ruth’s life happened early in the Book of Judges chronology. The Book of Ruth is not just an add-in to the Bible canon. It is part of the account of the period of Judges. Ruth happened while Boaz, the son of Salmon and Rahab, was still alive even though he was an old man when they met. Salmon and Rahab may have been, and probably were, dead when Ruth and Boaz married. We will study Ruth in the chronology of the Book of Judges by inserting her account I where believe, and many scholars also believe it belongs.

Who Wrote The Book Of Judges

Now let’s examine a controversy over the authorship of the Book of Judges. Who was the author of the Book of Judges? I earlier stated is was Samuel, however, there are 2 theories about this. The first says Samuel is the author while the second says the author is unknown and that it was not written until after the captivity of the northern Kingdom in 722 BC. The Assyrian captivity of the northern House of Israel happened roughly 650 years after the conquest of Canaan by Israel during Joshua’s lifetime. The reason for people thinking this late date is possible is because of a statement made at the end of Judges 18.

Judges 18:30  The children of Dan set up for themselves the engraved image; and Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Moses, and his sons were priests to the tribe of the Danites until the day of the captivity of the land.

The phrase “until the captivity of the land” is the issue. The reasoning for this is that the late author of Judges was explaining the idolatry which led to the Assyrian captivity and that his statement verifies that the reason he wrote Judges after 722 BC was to highlight why the northern House was cut off from Israel. However, there is a statement in the Book of Judges which shows us that an earlier author, one living at the time of the Judges, wrote the book.

Let’s examine what Judges 1:21 says:

Judges 1:21  The children of Benjamin didn’t drive out the Jebusites who inhabited Jerusalem, but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day.

Let’s ask ourselves some pertinent questions. First, which was the timeframe when the Jebusites were dwelling with the tribe of Benjamin? From the time of Benjamin’s territorial allotment in the Book of Joshua. When did this situation finally end? Only when David took Jerusalem.

2 Samuel 5:6  The king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who spoke to David, saying, “The blind and the lame will keep you out of here;” thinking, “David can’t come in here.” 
2 Samuel 5:7  Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion. This is David’s city. 
2 Samuel 5:8  David said on that day, “Whoever strikes the Jebusites, let him go up to the watercourse and strike those lame and blind, who are hated by David’s soul.” Therefore they say, “The blind and the lame can’t come into the house.” 
2 Samuel 5:9  David lived in the stronghold, and called it David’s city. David built around from Millo and inward. 

During David’s lifetime, Jerusalem finally came into the hands of Israel as its capital. The author, whoever he was, stated “the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day”.

In this author’s lifetime in Judges 1:21, Jerusalem was still controlled by the Jebusites. When were the Jebusites driven out of Jerusalem? During King David’s reign. Who drove them out? King David. The author who wrote Judges 1:21 had firsthand knowledge of the situation in Jerusalem, that the Jebusites still controlled it.

Now, let’s address those who believe there was a later author for the Book of Judges. Let’s begin by asking the question of when was the Assyrian captivity upon which their premise relies? About 650 years after Israel conquered the Promised land. Judges 18:30 does mention a captivity. Most people looking back will see 2 captivities in Israel’s history – the Assyrian and the Babylonian. But might there have been another captivity in Israel, perhaps one during the time of Samuel which we don’t consider to be a captivity? It would have to be one that was so profound that it was like the whole land had been taken captive. Let’s turn to 1 Samuel 4.

1 Samuel 4:1  The word of Samuel came to all Israel. Now Israel went out against the Philistines to battle, and encamped beside Ebenezer; and the Philistines encamped in Aphek. 

Samuel was still young when his words which came from YHVH went out from Shiloh to the entire nation.

1 Samuel 3:1  The child Samuel ministered to Yahweh before Eli. Yahweh’s word was rare in those days. There were not many visions, then. 

So, Samuel was still a child when he began to prophesy against the corrupt priesthood under Eli and the rebellion of Israel. What happened very soon after YHVH opened Samuel’s eyes, ears and mouth?

1 Samuel 4:10  The Philistines fought, and Israel was defeated, and each man fled to his tent. There was a very great slaughter; for thirty thousand footmen of Israel fell. 
1 Samuel 4:11  God’s ark was taken; and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain. 

The ark was taken from Israel. YHVH’s abiding presence and glory was removed. The ark represents and does, indeed, hold His presence with Israel. When there is no ark of the covenant, there is no abiding presence of YHVh with Israel. Yes, His presence is still with His people but to a lesser degree and in a different way.

Also, His mighty hand of protection, driving out Israel’s enemies and provision was withdrawn. The Book of Ruth’s setting has to do with famine in the land which only happens because of disobedience to Israel’s King, YHVH.

The captivity of 722 BC was very different than the captivity of the entire land when YHVH let the Philistines remove Him from the Israelites. In 722 BC, the abominable people were removed! See? It is different when God is gone and when it is the people who are gone.

Three hundred fifty years earlier, toward the end of the Judges period, YHVH allowed His presence, glory, hand of protection and provision of food to be removed from Israel by the Philistines. YHVH got up and left. He walked out of His House using the Philistines to do it. It’s like a husband who gets so angry with his wife that he leaves the house and slams the door on the way out. Now suddenly, the wife doesn’t know if she will have a marriage! How will she be protected and fed?

YHVH’s unceremonious departure left Israel with nothing. They were no longer even like the nations around them who had gods! Their God and King just got up and walked out and went to the neighbor’s house! They were without a husband. Still married but separated, a prophecy of what would later come for the northern House.

The fear, then, among the Israelites was that YHVH would go to war against His own people using the Philistines to finally do what He had wanted to do since the golden calf incident at Mount Sinai and several times afterward in the wilderness – kill ‘em! National fear took over! Israel had nothing!

The late authorship of Judges after the year 722 BC does not stand up under this scrutiny. Who would be better qualified to write the Book of Judges? An unknown person 650 years after the Judges period began or one who lived during the time period, Samuel? Yes, Samuel wrote Judges. He also wrote the Book of Ruth to highlight the Messianic lineage of David which later became part of Yeshua’s genealogy.

By studying our ancient Israelite history, we get a different perspective not clouded by modern thinking. We can put ourselves in their place to identify with their circumstances and come away closer to the truth.

The study of Judges is not simply history but for us to learn who the ancient people were and what they did so we can learn from their mistakes and successes and not end up as did ancient Israel under YHVH’s judgement instead of YHVH’s protection.

Timing The Period of Judges

The question after discovering who is the author of the Book of Judges and the other books from this time period is to know how long this period was. The length of time for this period can impact the genealogy Samuel provided which causes some people to question its veracity.

Some say this period was from 1406 BC to 1051 BC on our Gregorian calendar. Bible Gateway has it as about 1200 BC to 1020 BC and only approximately 180 years. Another timeframe given is from 1400 BC to 1000 BC. I will show how all these are incorrect. These “squishy dates” are not usable because they are not Biblical and they rely on the false Gregorian calendar. We need a Biblical time frame, one that does not need to verify man’s Gregorian calendar, which is unreliable. We have one. We have a timeline that was given to us by King Solomon.

1 Kings 6:1  In the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel had come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build Yahweh’s house. 

This is only one sure record in scripture from which to figure out the length of time of the Judges period. This is from what King Solomon provided. I put the calculations in a spreadsheet below.

I had to figure this out on my own because so many other opinions are given on the internet. The majority opinion is that the Judges period lasted 325 years. My spreadsheet yielded 326 years. Now I will show you how this timeframe is reached.

Getting correct calculations for the length of time of the Judges period requires that we remove all the years from after the Judges up to King Solomon’s time and all the years from before the Judges when Israel came out of Egypt and was in the wilderness plus the time of Joshua. The Judges period began upon the death of Joshua. But when did it end? It ended when Samuel anointed King Saul. So we must also subtract the reigning years of Saul and David.

Here is what the calculations look like:

Starting first by subtracting the reigns of Saul and David from 480 years, plus subtracting the 4 years from Solomon’s reign before he began to build the Temple, we arrive at 396 years as the remainder.

Subtracting from 396 years the number of years of the Exodus before Joshua took Israel over the Jordan river and the number of years of Joshua’s life (30 years (Joshua was 80 when he led Israel into the Promised Land and 110 when he died)), we come to 326 years for the time of the Judges period – Judges, Ruth and part of 1 Samuel.

We now need to arrive at how old the 4 ancestors of David had to be, on average, when each of them begat sons. This is the sticking point for may historians and other scholars. The 4 ancestral fathers of David were Salmon, Boaz, Obed and Jesse. I divided 326 by 4 which arrived at an average of 81 years. In other words, each of them would have been pretty old when the begat the sons that show up in David’s line, and this creates a problem for some.

Salmon the Jericho spy, for instance, would have been roughly 81 years old when he begat Boaz by Rahab, the prostitute and convert to YHVH from Jericho. This means he was likely in his 60s when he spied on Jericho, and he married her some time after Jericho fell.

In an earlier teaching I said Rahab was a wise and probably old enough to still be an attractive prostitute and also a good businesswoman. Businesspeople learn good business through experience. But she also had to be young enough to be fruitful unless she had a miracle birth of Boaz at a later age. It is argued in the literature that one or more, or perhaps all of the mothers, had miracle births like Sarah. Certainly we may conclude that all the mothers were younger, and perhaps much younger, than their husbands. The birthing ages of the mothers are not necessary to know. It is the fathers with which we are concerned. Salmon could have married her while she was in her 30s at his age of 60 or later and they could still have had a late-in-life son before her fertility stopped.

On a side note, we don’t know how old Salmon was when he spied on Jericho, so we can’t know how old he was when he married Rahab or when he begat Boaz. All we have to go by is speculation regarding those who were under 20 years of age when YHVH pronounced that none of the wicked generation of 20 years and older would enter His land in Numbers 14:29.

Salmon was the son of Nahshon, the leader of the tribe of Judah at the time, who never saw the Promised Land. Was Salmon a baby, a toddler, a teen, a 19-year-old adult getting in just under the wire? We don’t know. But we do know that a younger age for him pushes the ages of the other male ancestors to be as much as 20 years older, meaning they would have begat their sons at the age of around 100. There is no way for us to know what their ages were. We can only know that the 4 ancestors of David begat sons in the timespan of 325/326 years.

Some have speculated that there were generations in between the ancestors that were skipped in the genealogy. This is because people overlay their own culture, situations and conditions over what the scripture says. We must be adamant about keeping to YHVH’s word – what He said and what He meant when He said. In our modern culture, fathers usually do not have children at the age of 80. Our modern children are born when the parents are much younger. We can’t go by the circumstances of our own culture to understand scripture. We must get inside the timeframe we are studying so we don’t make the mistake of thinking the Bible is incorrect. I don’t buy that there were intervening generations between the 4 ancestors of David.

Boaz, the son of Salmon and Rahab, likewise, was an old man when Ruth came to him and they bore Obed.

Ruth 3:10  He said, “You are blessed by Yahweh, my daughter. You have shown more kindness in the latter end than at the beginning, because you didn’t follow young men, whether poor or rich.

Boaz is telling us that he was considered an old man. Eighty years or more would be what we would expect given the assumed 80+ years of each ancestor’s begetting ages on the spreadsheet.

Ruth was still young when she bore Obed.

Ruth 4:12  Let your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, of the offspring which Yahweh will give you by this young woman.”

Ruth 4:17  The women, her neighbors, gave him a name, saying, “A son is born to Naomi”. They named him Obed. He is the father of Jesse, the father of David.

This is all the history we have of Obed, David’s grandfather. There is no other account for him as there is for Salmon, who spied Jericho, and Salmon’s son, Boaz, who married Ruth.

Jesse was an old man when David was born.

1 Samuel 17:12  Now David was the son of that Ephrathite of Bethlehem Judah, whose name was Jesse; and he had eight sons. The man was an elderly old man in the days of Saul. 

A side note about this is that David’s family and Samuel’s came from the same Ephrathite village – Ephrath which is another name for Bethlehem where Yeshua was born. Ephrath is where Rachel was buried (Genesis 35:16).

My research has not substantiated why Jesse’s age is given by scholars as 100 years when he begat David. They associate the long period of time of the Judges with the fathers of David being about 100 years old each because of Abraham begetting Isaac at 100 years of age. This is possible but not necessary since the length of time of the Judges is 325/326 years which, divided by the 4 fathers, comes to about 81 years for each one even though some may have been older or younger than this.

I hope this provides a good historical and Biblical foundation to begin our study and also that as we study you will see that as they were then we are now. If we can see it, we can correct it through YHVH’s grace and mercy.