The Role of the Judges in Israel

The Role of the Judges in Israel

  • Submitted By: sholcomb28
  • Date Submitted: 08/08/2009 6:48 AM
  • Category: Religion
  • Words: 1372
  • Page: 6
  • Views: 3

The biblical book of Judges tells about how twelve judges held leadership over the loosely organized Tribal Confederacy. Besides their military leadership, these judges also functioned as those handled legal disputes and arbitration among their people. When the legal dispute went beyond a particular tribe, usually these judges also have their authority extended to other tribes as well. Their authority was generally recognized within the territory of the Tribal Confederacy.
There were at least twelve judges, some whom were contemporaries, and they ministered until the midst of the eleventh century. Their principal task seemed to be that of arbiter and governor but they also had the responsibility of acting as military leader when the need arose. One essential prerequisite was that the judge must be charismatic. The judge would neither be elected by the people nor succeeded his predecessor by family inheritance or appointment. The judges had to be chosen by God, and the proof of divine selection was his being empowered by the Spirit to perform deeds otherwise impossible for mere men. When there were no enemies there were probably no judges, or at least none mentioned in the Bible (Merrill, 1991).
The book of Judges presents quite a different picture of Israel. As the book opens, the tribes are not at all unified, are barely holding onto small pieces of land independently of other tribes, and are continually at risk from surrounding people. There were echoes of this in Joshua, but there the negative elements were subsumed under the goal of presenting the settlement in the land as a reward for faithfulness to God. The book of Judges is structured around a well defined theological premise, that the problems Israel had in securing the land were directly related to their ongoing love affair with Ba’al worship. The book is organized around a series of failures that occur in cycles reported in a specific literary patter: oppression by surrounding peoples, repentance,...

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