And the people answered and said: God forbid we should leave the Lord, and serve strange gods!”
“Josue therefore on that day made a covenant, and set before the people commandments and judgments in Sichem. And he wrote all these things in the volume of the law of the Lord: and he took a great stone, and set it under the oak that was in the sanctuary of the Lord” (xxiv. 14–26).
The power to serve the Lord freely or freely to turn their backs on Him, so clearly set forth in this striking passage of Holy Writ, was, as Josue foresaw and foretold, to be time and again most shockingly abused. How often was this same lovely vale to witness the dreadful retribution brought down on Israel by its incurable fickleness and ingratitude, till He whose Name Josue bore and honored by his glorious life came Himself to make another and an everlasting Covenant with mankind! On that same spot, seated, footsore and weary, at noontide by the side of Jacob’s well, the Good Shepherd was one day to address to the Samaritan Woman—the type of erring humanity—the creative words that were to renew her soul and to renew the face of the earth as well.
THE BOOK OF JUDGES.—The engraving on page 10 is but too eloquent an illustration of the sad fate of those who, chosen to be God’s children and His privileged instruments for good, forget Him, are shorn of all their glory, and become the thralls and playthings of His enemies. Behold one of the Judges of Israel, the mighty Samson, condemned to do the work of a brute beast and grind corn in a mill!
But what and who were the Judges of Israel? They were men raised up from time to time, during a period of about three hundred and forty years, to deliver the recreant Hebrews from the foreign oppression brought on them by their own sins, and to rule the land under the immediate direction of the Most High. Under Moses and Josue, and till the election of Saul, the Hebrew commonwealth was a theocracy, or a republic with God as its real head, and chosen leaders under Him to rule the people and secure the execution of His laws. Of these deliverers and rulers, called Judges, however, only a few are mentioned in Scripture. In ordinary times, and when no foreign yoke weighed on the whole people, they were governed by their tribal princes, elders, and chief-priests.
Thus we see Josue before his death (xxiv. 1) calling together “the ancients, and the princes, and the judges, and the masters.” He chose no one to succeed to his office; nor did God appoint any one to be his successor. Of the people, after his death, it is said (Judges ii. 7–14): . . . “They served the Lord all his (Josue’s) days, and the days of the ancients that lived a long time after him, and who knew all the works of the Lord, which He had done for Israel . . . And all that generation was gathered to their fathers: and there arose others that knew not the Lord, and the works which He had done for Israel. And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and they served Baalim. . . . And the Lord being angry against Israel, delivered them into the hands of plunderers, who took them and sold them to their enemies that dwelt round about.”
The first chapters in the book clearly account for this state of things. Thus, in chap. i., we see the joint efforts made by the neighboring tribes of Juda and Simeon, who held an extreme position in the south, to exterminate or expel the Chanaanites. Each of the two tribes acts as sovereign within its own territory, and invokes the aid of the other as that of a co-sovereign power. They gave no quarter to their foes and made no truce with them
Not so with the other tribes mentioned in the sequel of the chapter. “The sons of Benjamin did not destroy the Jebusites that inhabited Jerusalem.” “Manasses also . . . And the Chanaanites began to dwell with them.” So with the other tribes on both sides of the Jordan. Even in Egypt the seductions of idolatry amid the splendors of a superior civilization had been too much for the early Hebrews, the immediate progeny of the twelve patriarchs. It required the hardships of slavery and all the wrongs of the most pitiless oppression to make the poor victims hate the gods as well as the persons of their oppressors.
But in the enchanted land of Palestine, with its lovely climate and its teeming soil, there were in the pleasant lives of the heathen population a thousand things capable of turning the brain and perverting the heart. God had made there the earth a paradise; and God’s capital Enemy, the Devil, had turned it into a scene of perpetual riotousness and debauchery.
The bitter waters of the Dead Sea only covered up a few of the more guilty cities: others not less sinning against God and nature flaunted their iniquity all over the land. Even modern scholars do not dare to fathom the dark depths of this idolatry, or care to reveal the hateful mysteries of what they have fathomed. No wonder that He who is the Creator of man, and the lover of the soul and its purity, should have decreed the extermination of this gigantic wickedness and forbidden all intercourse with neighbors whose very breath was contamination.
Of the thirteen Judges whose names are mentioned in this book, the record is as follows: Othoniel, a younger brother of the great Caleb, chap. iii. 7–11; Aod and Samgar, iii. 12–31; Debbora and Barac, iv. and v.; Gedeon, vi.–ix; Abimelech, son of Gedeon, ix.; Thola and Jair, x. 1–5; Jephte, x. 6–18; xii 7; Abesan, Ahialon, and Abdon, xii. 8–15; finally, Samson, xiii.–xvi.
The remaining five chapters are a fearful story of the degeneracy of the tribe of Dan—the open practice of idolatry under the cover of the name of the true God beginning with one house and then adopted by the whole tribe; fast upon the heels of this apostasy comes a terrible outrage committed by the inhabitants of one Benjamite city, Gabaa, of which the entire tribe of Benjamin assume the responsibility, and which leads to a war of extermination waged against the offenders by the other tribes.
Some portions of this record of three centuries and a half are deserving of a close study. The deliverance wrought by Debbora, and the glorious hymn in which she pours forth her feelings of thanksgiving and triumph, recall the dark days of Egyptian servitude and the heroic part played by Mary, the sister and saviour of Moses. Then we come upon Gedeon and his chosen band of warriors—men who could refuse to drink even their fill of water from the brook; examples of heroic temperance in an age when unbridled sensuality reigned supreme over their own countrymen; men worthy to achieve the liberation of their people from the twofold slavery of vice and idol-worship; what a lesson for all future time!
More forcible still is the lesson taught by Samson in his incomparable strength and resistless prowess while faithful to his Nazarite vows and observant of the divine law, as well as by the extremity of his weakness when yielding to pleasure and preferring self-indulgence to the heroic abstemiousness and unwearying zeal demanded of God’s representative and the champion of Israel. The lively image of Christ who fought single-handed the battle of our salvation and triumphed by his infinite self-abasement over Lucifer and all the hosts of pride—Samson, by his single arm, defeated the embattled Philistines, and, blind and degraded, brought down destruction on his oppressors, triumphing in death over the enemies of his God and of his people.
“Samson hath quit himself
Like Samson, and heroically hath finished
A life heroic, . . .
To Israel
Honor hath left and freedom, . . .
To himself and father’s house eternal fame;
And, which is best and happiest yet, all this
With God not parted from him, as was feared,
But favoring and assisting to the end.”
