* Judges ii. 15-19.

The Israelites, when transplanted into the promised land, did not immediately lose the nomadic habits they had acquired in the desert.  They retained the customs and prejudices they had inherited from their fathers, and for many years treated the peasantry, whose fields they had devastated, with the same disdain that the Bedawin of our own day, living in the saddle, lance in hand, shows towards the fellahin who till the soil and bend patiently over the plough.  The clans, as of old, were impatient of all regular authority; each tribe tended towards an isolated autonomy, a state of affairs which merited reprisals from the natives and encouraged hatred of the intruders, and it was only when the Canaanite oppression became unendurable that those who suffered most from it united themselves to make a common effort, and rallied for a moment round the chief who was ready to lead them.  Many of these liberators must have acquired an ephemeral popularity, and then have sunk into oblivion together with the two or three generations who had known them; those whose memory remained green among their kinsmen were known by posterity as the judges of Israel.*

* The word “judges,” which has been adopted to designate these rulers, is somewhat misleading, as it suggests the idea of an organized civil magistracy.  The word “shophet,” the same that we meet with in classical times under the form suffetes, had indeed that sense, but its primary meaning denotes a man invested with an absolute authority, regular or otherwise; it would be better translated chief, prince, captain.

These judges were not magistrates invested with official powers and approved by the whole nation, or rulers of a highly organised republic, chosen directly by God or by those inspired by Him.  They were merely local chiefs, heroes to their own immediate tribe, well known in their particular surroundings, but often despised by those only at a short distance from them.  Some of them have left only a name behind them, such as Shamgar, Ibzan, Tola, Elon, and Abdon; indeed, some scholars have thrown doubts on the personality of a few of them, as, for instance, Jair, whom they affirm to have personified a Gileadite clan, and Othniel, who is said to represent one of the Kenite families associated with the children of Israel.* Others, again, have come down to us through an atmosphere of popular tradition, the elements of which modern criticism has tried in vain to analyse.  Of such unsettled and turbulent times we cannot expect an uninterrupted history:** some salient episodes alone remain, spread over a period of nearly two centuries, and from these we can gather some idea of the progress made by the Israelites, and observe their stages of transition from a cluster of semi-barbarous hordes to a settled nation ripe for monarchy.

     * The name Tola occurs as that of one of the clans of
     Issachar (Gen. xlvi. 13; Numb. xxvi. 23); Elon was one of
     the clans of Zebulon (Gen. xlvi. 14; Numb. xxvi. 26)