in life, demonstrating a lack of integrity, receives God’s disapprobation.NOTES 3
3.1 God who remains ever faithful to his people is worthy of their reverence.
Deviations from the model judge’s account—the Othniel story—point to the less than stellar nature of the second judge, Ehud. Both leader and people evidence a lack of reverence for Yahweh.
In the Othniel and Ehud stories, there is, in each case, a single enemy king (Cushan-rishathaim and Eglon, respectively), though in the first account, Cushan-rishathaim is never the subject of a verb and so does not act, at least not literarily. Eglon, on the other hand, is active and vocal in this pericope, symbolic of his active oppression of the Israelites (3:14, 17, 19)—an oppression they deserved as punishment from God for their infidelities and evildoing. Things are quickly beginning to slip and slide away from the relative perfection of the Othniel account.171
Right at the start, we are told twice that Israel “did evil in the sight of Yahweh” (3:12). Indeed, in its first iteration in that verse, the text declares: “And the sons of Israel continued to do evil in the sight of Yahweh”—they had never stopped doing evil, it seems, after they first engaged in it in 3:7. And unlike the preceding Othniel narrative, in the Ehud account there is no mention of the Israelites being “sold” into the hands of the enemy; instead we are told that Yahweh “strengthened” (qzx, khzq) Eglon, the king of Moab, against Israel (3:12). The verb occurs in the exodus stories, to describe God “hardening” (qzx) Pharaoh’s heart (Exod 4:21; 9:12; 10:20, 27; 11:10; 14:4, 8) and that of the Egyptians (14:17). That is, of course, not a good sign.
The result of Yahweh “strengthening” the hand of the king of Moab was that Moabites “took possession” (vry, yrsh) of the city of the palm trees (Jdg 3:13).172 Once Yahweh had prohibited the Israelites from infringing upon Moabite territory, land he had given those peoples (Deut 2:9). Now the Moabites were encroaching upon land allotted to the Israelites, and with Yahweh himself behind that invasion. Evildoing has its consequences. “Taking possession” (or “driving out,” also vry), was exactly what the Israelites were supposed to do, and at which they had failed (see vry in Jdg 1:19, 20, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33; and 2:6, 21, 23).173 Countering his own “strengthening” of the hand of the Moabite oppressor, Eglon (3:12), Yahweh then “raises up” an Israelite deliverer, Ehud (3:15). But quite surprisingly, for the rest of the pericope, Yahweh does not seem at all involved with the goings on. We are not told that Yahweh “was with the judge” (as the paradigm had it, 2:18), or that his Spirit came upon that individual (as with Othniel, 3:10). And the final victory won by the Israelites is not attributed by the narrator to any work of Yahweh, either (3:29–30).
This virtual absence of Yahweh in the story also raises suspicions about how his people, in particular his leader, regarded him. While one assumes that God’s commissioning a deliverer and endowing that judge with the Spirit is a guarantee of the individual’s upright behavior and exemplary life, that is not necessarily so: from Othniel to Samson, several of the judges are empowered by God and endued by the Spirit, yet there is a progressive and inexorable deterioration of behavior and morality despite this special divine intervention and/or connection. So too, here, with Ehud; his being “raised up” by Yahweh does not necessarily imply that all his actions were scrupulous and virtuous. Rather, Yahweh’s curious absence from the main event of Eglon’s assassination (3:16–25), as well as from the dénouement of the story, the routing of the Moabites (3:26–30), give the reader pause and raise suspicions.
In the case of Othniel’s victory over Cushan-rishathaim, at the onset of Israel’s military engagement with the enemy, the narrator asserted that Yahweh “gave” the enemy king into Othniel’s hand (3:10). Here, however, things are more indirect: Yahweh’s role in the pericope (for the only time after 3:15) is described in Ehud’s voice and not by the narrator, and that as part of Ehud’s exhortation to his troops after the assassination of the enemy king (3:28).174 Both in Othniel’s story and in Barak’s, God’s role in the military victory is explicitly noted by the narrator (3:10; 4:23). Here, in Ehud’s story, Moab is merely the subject of a passive verb: “Moab was subdued . . . under the hand of Israel” (3:30). So, outside of Ehud’s declaration in 3:28, there is no sign of Yahweh or his activity. As we will see, Ehud’s self-interest, self-reliance, and duplicity preclude any involvement by deity. Apparently God is not needed in those precincts.
Another structural element underscores the disdain of Yahweh in the story. The mention of “idols” (from lysip', pasil) in 3:19 and 3:26 brackets the heart of the pericope—the story of Eglon’s killing. These religious objects were manmade cult images; and Ehud passes by them on his way in to kill, and again as he leaves from his kill. The noun is derived from the verb ls;p' (pasal) meaning to “hew/carve” (Deut 10:1, 3); in the OT lysp/lsp always indicates hewn/carved idols.175 Obviously these are anti-Yahwistic: Jdg 2:2, 11–13, 17, 19. Judges 3:6 had already warned of the Israelites’ predilection for Canaanite gods and, indeed, 3:12 asserts that such evildoing had “continued’ into the time of this narrative. “[T]he twin references to the pēsîlîm articulate the decisive and dramatic core of the adventure. Everything that precedes 3:19–26 is preliminary; everything which follows is anticlimactic.”176 Bookending the critical core of the Ehud story (3:19, 26), one wonders why these idols are markers for the narrative. Where did they come from and what was Ehud doing in relation to them? “Cultic indolence,” O’Connell, called it:
The predominant deuteronomic concern, that of cultic disloyalty, remains implicit in Ehud’s failure to remove from the land the twice-mentioned idols that frame the portrayal of Eglon’s assassination (3:19aab and 3:26b). This failure to remove the idols characterizes negatively both Ehud (as microcosm) and the tribe whom he delivers (as macrocosm) and ostensibly leads to the religious apostasy that begins the following deliverer account (cf. 4:1).177
Even if they were Moabite installations, it would certainly have been a lot easier to sabotage these idols than to assassinate the highest-ranking Moabite official. After all, the command to the Israelites to destroy them was unambiguous (lysp in Deut 7:5, 25; 12:3; lsp in Deut 4:16, 23, 25; 5:8; 27:15).178 If Ehud accomplished the murder of the king with relative ease, surely he could have done something about the idols.
But, despite this disdain for Yahweh, all is not lost. One must remember that this is only the account of the second judge, the one who immediately follows the paradigmatic model of the first judge, Othniel. So not everything has gone awry yet. Ehud, we will see, “escapes” (3:26 [×2]) after his daring single-(left)handed assassination of Eglon; but, following the attack of the Israelites, none of the Moabites “escapes” (3:29). And as the pericope concludes, Israel succeeds in overthrowing the yoke of the oppressor: though the Moabites “smite” (hkn, nkh) Israel at the beginning of the narrative (3:13), in the end they are the ones who are “smitten” (3:29). And, finally, the land is said to enjoy rest for eighty years, an unusually long period, the longest span of rest in Judges (the next closest is forty: 3:11; 5:31: 8:28).
All that to say, evidently Yahweh was at work, even though he seems to have been (literarily) absent: there are fingerprints of providence all along.
3.2 Unilateral, self-reliant strategies show a lack of dependence upon deity.
Right at the start of the Ehud story we get a sense that something is not right. Yahweh raises up Ehud, “the Benjaminite, a left-handed man” (3:15). There is an assonant repetition of ynIymiy>, ymini, in ynIymiy>h;-!B, (ben-haymini, “the Benjaminite,” literally “son of the right [hand]”) and in Anymiy>-dy: rJeai (’itter yad-ymino, “bound in his right hand”), both relatively rare terms. The first, the gentilic or demonymous form of the tribal affiliation, ynymyh-!b, is unusual and used only in about a dozen out of seventy references to Benjaminites in the OT; elsewhere it is the collective !miy"n>bi
