Shepherdless Sheep

We now enter into the final section of the book of Judges. Having concluded the history of the deliverers whom God raised up from time to time for the purpose of freeing His people from oppression, the author now turns his attention to a pair of narratives that illustrate the depth of depravity to which the people of God have plunged. Here we see, vividly, the Israelites’ unfaithfulness to God’s covenant.

Judges 17:6 both sets the stage for this section and gives a basic explanation for the events that occur within it: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” These phrases crop up repeatedly in these final chapters (18:1; 19:1; 21:25). The author is saying that the Israelites find themselves in a period when Joshua has passed from the scene and no king has yet been enthroned. Thus, the people lack a godly human leader to model righteous living for them and to call them to account when they yield to temptation. They are not, however, without a sovereign, for their God still reigns and His covenant is still in force. But in their sin, they turn away from Him and do what seems right in their own eyes. They forget the covenant stipulations laid down by God, the Ten Commandments and other laws He gave them at Sinai. This willful self-reliance leads Israel into all sorts of miseries. As Dale Ralph Davis puts it in his Judges commentary, Such a Great Salvation (Baker Books): “Here is Israel wallowing in her own religious and moral mess. Here the problem is not the enemy without but the cancer within.” In other words, what we see in these chapters are sheep who wander away from the sheepfold—and who have no shepherd to lead them back to safety.

Many commentators, including Matthew Henry, believe that the events of these chapters occur quite early in the Judges period. “All agree that what is related in this and the rest of the chapters to the end of this book was not done, as the narrative occurs, after Samson, but long before, even soon after the death of Joshua, in the days of Phinehas the son of Eleazar, ch. 20:28,” he writes. “But it is cast here into the latter part of the book that it might not interrupt the history of the judges. That it might appeal how happy the nation was in the judges it is here shown how unhappy they were when there was none.”