servant” (Exod 24:13; Num 11:28; Josh 1:1), one attested by Yahweh as having his Spirit (Num 27:18; also Deut 34:9), and who followed Yahweh fully as his servant (Num 32:12; Jdg 2:8). Now Joshua had died. Who would be the next godly servant to lead Israel? Yahweh’s choice of a tribe, Judah, rather than an individual, is surprising. But then again, the Israelites did not ask him for a leader, only for a tribe to lead the battle. Indeed, a note of hesitancy is introduced into the Israelites’ question in Jdg 1:1 that literally reads: “Who will go up for us, against the Canaanites, first, to battle them?” Did Israel need to know who would go up? And why “first,” which has the limited sense of a beginning—“Who will . . . start to battle”? “Victory is relativised from scratch,” only a commencement of operations is envisaged by the Israelites.79 Commitment and confidence is thereby shown to be shaky. This, when the divine utterance is unambiguous: “Behold! I have given [perfect tense in Hebrew] the land into his [Judah’s] hand” (1:2). Though Judah conducts the most successful military exercises in this pericope, no longer in Judges will Judah appear in a leadership role before 20:18. There, Judah leads an utterly failed enterprise that becomes the conflagration of a civil war.
And why did Judah decide to include Simeon (1:3)?80 The specificity of God’s assurance that he had given the land into Judah’s hands (1:2) is consistently maintained in the narrative, despite Judah’s unilateral co-opting of Simeon into its martial endeavors: Judah conquers peoples and lands (1:4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 18, 19), but Judah + Simeon conquers only peoples (1:17)—and besides, even in this particular battle against the Canaanites of Zephath/Hormah, Simeon is not described as doing any fighting.81 All this renders Judah’s initial forays suspect.
Judah’s ascent in 1:3–7 (“going up,” 1:3, 4) and descent in 1:9–18 (“going down,” 1:9) bookend its efficacious exploits in Jerusalem (1:8), making its engagements a stark contrast with the failed project of Benjamin (1:21). But that is not to say Judah was entirely successful—they were not, presumably because their foes had “iron chariots” (1:19). If Yahweh was with Judah as 1:19 claimed he was, why were iron chariots too hard to defeat? The nine hundred iron chariots of Jabin, king of Canaan, would turn out not to be a problem for deity (4:3, 13, 15; see Pericope 4).82 Besides, Joshua had declared that iron chariots would not create obstacles for the Israelite conquest (Josh 17:16–18). Even in the literary structure of Jdg 1:19 and 1:20, Judah’s attenuated “successes” are underlined, with the failure of Judah contrasted with the success of one Judahite, Caleb; the paronomasia is obviously disparaging of the tribe’s endeavors.
The contrast between 1:20 and 21 also vividly portrays another failure83:
In keeping with Moses’s promise (Josh 14:6–15), Caleb was successful in “driving out” the Anakites and capturing Hebron.84 However, though Jerusalem was in territory allocated to Benjamin (Josh 15:8; 18:28), they were unsuccessful in “driving out” the Jebusites who lived there; in fact, these peoples lived there with the Benjaminites “to this day.”85
The remainder of the account (Jdg 1:22–36) describes the continuing failure of the Joseph league: the two Joseph tribes proper, Manasseh (1:27–28) and Ephraim (1:29), then Zebulun (1:30), Asher (1:31–32), Naphtali (1:33), and finally Dan (1:34–35).86 Perhaps these continued failures were the result of the precedent set at Bethel (1:22–26). In any case, the tribes do not evict the land’s inhabitants (1:26–35), but cohabit with them, even subjecting them to slavery and feudalism (“forced labor,” 1:28, 30, 33, 35).87 The inability to “drive out” the inhabitants of various parts of the Promised Land is repeatedly noted (1:19, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33). Indeed, the Amorites, in a climactic paragraph at the end of Judges 1, begin to “oppress” (cxl, lkhts) the Israelites instead (1:34), an ominous development and a foreshadowing of what would happen with recurring and tragic frequency: 2:18; 4:3; 6:9; 10:12 (all have the root cxl). And moreover, the only nation whose borders are mentioned is that of these Amorites (1:36)—it is not the attacking nation that is expanding its borders: “a final sardonic comment on the chapter as a whole!”88
Interestingly, while 1:27 states that Manasseh “did not drive out” the Canaanites, Josh 17:12 notes that Manasseh “was not able to drive out” these inhabitants (17:18 mentions their iron chariots, too). The theological purpose of the narrator of Judges is to suggest that this failure was inexcusable, more due to lack of desire than lack of ability.89
Naphtali’s failure to “drive out” the inhabitants of Beth-shemesh and Beth-anath (Jdg 1:33), is particularly poignant: those towns were named after Canaanite deities, Shemesh and Anath. Pagan religiosity and culture remained completely untouched by the Israelite campaigns. In any case, the absence of any mention of Yahweh in the later military undertakings of this pericope, unlike in Jdg 1:2, 4, 19, 22, is also telling.
The relatively minor failures of Judah’s campaign thus led into the major failures of the operations of the house of Joseph. Our curiosity is aroused about the cause of all these failures—only one such adversity was given a reason (1:19), leading one to suspect an intentional and widespread abrogation of responsibility, rather than any external cause thereof. We find the real answer only in 2:1–5—there was a spiritual reason for the Israelites’ lack of military success. These failures, we are told there, stemmed from an illicit covenanting with the inhabitants of Canaan, noted in 1:22–26. Despite the assured presence of Yahweh as the house of Joseph went against Bethel, the campaign was a failure—not only did a Hittite family go free (1:25), the destroyed city was also rebuilt as Luz (1:26): the people and their culture had rebounded (see below). This was clear disobedience to divine will that no covenant be made with the local peoples: Israel was to destroy them utterly (Jdg 2:2; Deut 7:1–2, 16). This covenantal failure, snowballing over generations, would ultimately result in an abandonment of Yahweh for the gods of the land (Jdg 2:2; 10:6–14; also see Deut 7:4–5, 25–26).
Compromise and disobedience are always disastrous. In sum, the degradation of the nation had begun immediately after the demise of Joshua. This pericope begins with the most positive of the tribes (Judah) and ends with the most negative (Dan). Almost the same sequence of tribes is followed in the sections on individual judges (Jdg 3:7—16:31), with this progressive dissolution expressly detailed.
1.2 Faithfulness to God involves behavior distinct from that of unbelievers, maintenance of godly traditional values, and abandonment of reliance on human strategies for success.
There are three anecdotal interpolations in what is otherwise the account of a military campaign: 1:5–7 (featuring Adoni-bezek); 1:12–15 (featuring Achsah); and 1:23–26 (featuring the house of Joseph and Bethel). This section will examine these further, along with the summarizing indictment of the Israelites in 2:1–5.
Adoni-bezek is the first individual Canaanite mentioned in Judges; in fact, he is the first named leader we encounter in the book. It is significant that this defeated foe recognizes the truth that actions have consequences, something the Israelites fail to see time and again, as the rest of Judges will describe. Upon reading 1:4–7, one might be justified in wondering how Israelites
