Today’s passage: Judges 21:1-25

Helpful thoughts:

• Two oaths were taken and then later manipulated to serve new desires which sprang up after the end of the battles against the tribe of Benjamin.
  • Any Israelites who did not come to participate earlier were to be killed for not joining against Benjamin.
  • None of the participating families were to give their daughters to any remaining men from Benjamin as wives.
• In order to have a sense of having kept their rash vows:
  • They slaughtered everyone in Jabesh-gilead except for the 400 eligible young ladies.
  • They encouraged the remaining single men from Benjamin to capture women at a specific place and at a specific time…so that the fathers would not technically have given them their daughters in marriage.
• The final verse is not a commendation of Israel.  Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.
  • Hosea 6:6 – “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

Questions to consider:

1. How do you think the surviving women of Jabesh-gilead felt about their new assigned husbands?  How loving do you think those marriages would have been?  How has Israel’s treatment of these women been different from how the men of Gibeah valued the Levite’s concubine in the first place?
2. If everyone heard of the plan to provide women for the remaining 200 Benjamite men, who would have gone dancing at Shiloh?  What would have motivated the fathers (and mothers!) to allow their daughters to go dancing during this “Hunting season”?
3. In what ways do the offerings and attempts at worship not coincide with Israel’s relationship with God?  How could your feelings about your relationship with God mislead you? How would you correctly evaluate your walk with the Lord?

Today’s passage: Judges 20:19-48

Helpful thoughts:

• The tribe of Benjamin had sided with the sinful city of Gibeah, and now believed, after two days of unnaturally successful battle, they would have the upper hand against the rest of Israel.
• Israel would eventually rout the Benjamites, but not without great loss and not without crying out to the LORD.
• The tribe of Benjamin was nearly entirely destroyed.

Questions to consider:

1. After all of the battles and struggles of the book of Judges, who now appears to be Israel’s worst enemy?
2. Were the Benjamites the only people to suffer consequences for their sin?  Do we get to control or limit the extent of the consequences of our sin?

Today’s passage: Judges 20:1-18

Helpful thoughts:

• All the leaders of the tribes of Israel, 400,000 soldiers and whoever else would have come along gathered together in the wake of these dismembered body parts being sent all over Israel.  They met in Mizpah, not more than a couple miles away from Gibeah.  One tribe was missing however, Benjamin.
• The original intent of Israel was to focus its attention on Gibeah alone.  But the tribe of Benjamin came to their defense!
• For the first time in a long time, Israel has come together for a single purpose, to battle against and punish its own people.  Instead of defeating and removing the wickedness of the Canaanites, they are fighting their own.

Questions to consider:

1. What actions in this passage seem encouraging?
2. What components make this passage sad?
3. Why was the tribe of Benjamin in trouble?  What were they doing wrong?  Where did it all start and what had they forgotten?

Today’s passage: Judges 19:22-30

Helpful thoughts:

• The dark events of Sodom are repeated here in Gibeah…in Israel!  Except this time, there were no angels to save anyone.
• The host offered his own daughter in place of allowing the men of the city to abuse his male guest.
• The woman who was thrown out (By her husband!) into this unbelievable terror went from being a concubine, to having a husband who would speak kindly to her, to having a master who had given her up in order to save himself.  All this with the same man.
  • He did not go to get her until he awoke in the morning!  He slept through the night and didn’t expect to see her back in the night!
  • She died.
• All Israel was amazed and shocked into action.

Questions to consider:

1. What should have happened here?  What condition would this city have to be in for this kind of event to take place without any interference?
2. Are we supposed to think the Levite is innocent in all this?  Why does he seem to care so little for the loss of his “wife”?  Why did he even travel to her father’s house to get her back?  What had he wanted from her in the first place?
3. What condition is Israel in?  What is their general ethical guideline?  What are we supposed to notice in this correlation with the events of Sodom, whom God judged by completely wiping from off the face the earth?
4. How are men to treat their wives? (Ephesians 5:25)  Why should women be respected and treated with dignity? (Genesis 1:27)

Today’s passage: Judges 19:1-21

Helpful thoughts:

• The use of the word “Concubine” styles this marriage differently than God’s purpose for the unity of husband and wife.  This was a second class kind of marriage, perhaps similar to what Samson desired with the Timnite woman.
• The unfaithfulness of the woman should not automatically be assumed as sexual.  She may have simply not wanted to remain with the Levite, for whatever reason, and left him.
• The repetitive hospitality of her father toward the Levite seems strange but was quite hospitable.  It might seem stranger when we see the rest of the context tomorrow.
• The Levite rejects the idea of spending the night in Jebus because he didn’t expect to receive hospitality there…not like the hospitality he would expect to receive from his own countrymen.

Questions to consider:

1. What have you come to expect when you see the opening line, “In those days, when there was no king in Israel…”?  What should we be expecting to see in this narrative?
2. What kind of hospitality did the Levite and his party receive in Gibeah?  Who ended up actually helping them?
3. How do verses 16-21 compare to what happened in Genesis 19:1-4?  Why might this comparison give us cause for concern?

Today’s passage: Judges 18:14-31

Helpful thoughts:

• With the mentions of the “gods” that had been made, we have confirmation that the worship of Yahweh had become a polytheistic practice in the minds of all these Israelites.
• This narrative was written in such a way to give us a shocking ending.  The unnamed Levite who had become Micah’s priest for hire, and then happily left him for a better job…was a descendant of Moses.
• In this chapter, we are introduced not to an individual who had abandoned the Lord, but an entire tribe.

Questions to consider:

1. How would this passage contrast with the idea that success is always a sign of blessing and right actions/motives?
2. In what way should we be alarmed by the way the Tribe of Dan and Moses’ descendant seemed to have no idea they were in the wrong?  How do I know that the things I think and do are right?  How can I rightly (Righteously) measure that?
3. Was Jonathan the Levite automatically a godly man because he was from Moses’ lineage?  Am I a Christian because my parents are Christians?  What must I do to be saved?

Today’s passage: Judges 18:1-13

Helpful thoughts:

• The people of Dan felt as though they had no inheritance in the land but that was simply not true.
  • They had been given an inheritance (Joshua 19:40-48).
  • They failed to ever take possession of it (Judges 1:34-36).
• The leaders of Dan inquired from God from a Levite who was serving in an illegitimate ministry with no hesitation.
  • That hired Levite gave an immediate vague response that was entirely open to interpretation under the name of Yahweh.
• Compared to the thousands and ten-thousands of men the other tribes have mustered up for battles over the last couple hundred years in Israel, the Danites put together an army of 600.

Questions to consider:

1. Why didn’t the Danites have more land for their possession in the first place?  Did God fail them?  Did the rest of Israel fail them?
2. How many ways could the Levite’s response have been interpreted?  For example, if you were looking for a fight, how might you interpret, “Go in peace?”
3. What was motivating the Danites to prepare to fight?  How does this motivation compare to the motivation from Joshua 23:1-13?  How can God’s promises to His people, Christ’s victory over death, and His love for you motivate you to live today?

Today’s passage: Judges 17:1-13

Helpful thoughts:

• “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
• Micah returned the huge amount of money he had stolen from his own mother to avoid a curse.
  • When she realizes it was her son, she tried to invoke blessing to undo the curse.
  • She tried to buy the blessing from the Lord by giving 200 pieces of the silver to make… an idol!
• Micah made more idols and got himself a couple of priests (One of his own sons and a Levite!) for his new version of religion which was going under the name of Yahweh worship.
• “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

Questions to consider:

1. How many wrong practices/ideas can you find in this narrative?
2. What had to be true of Micah and his family’s knowledge of the Word, their knowledge about Yahweh Himself, and their view of religion in general that would have allowed them to think they could just invent all of these features of Yahweh worship?
3. In what ways might we (Christians) mimic these characteristics of self-styled worship today?

Today’s passage: Judges 16:23-31

Helpful thoughts:

• The Philistines praised their god for giving them victory over Samson.  By default, it was also a taunting of the God of Israel.
• Samson never refers to Israel in his prayer for strength.
• God’s plan was not limited or inhibited by Samson’s Philistine lifestyle and death.

Questions to consider:

1. Why did Samson want to knock over the pillars?  What was his motivation?  How was his motivation similar to his previous actions against the Philistines?
2. How do you know Dagon the god of the Philistines did not give Samson into their hands? (Hint: He doesn’t exist!)  Who did and for what purpose? (Judges 13:5)
3. In what way could the ability of the nations surrounding Israel to “faithfully” worship their gods, and the inability of Israel to remain faithful to the true LORD, give us more reason to believe that our God is the true God?  Why is it so easy for people groups around the world to follow false religions and so “hard” for people to accept the truth of Jesus Christ?  What is the nature of those gods?  What is the basis of those systems of belief?  How are they all different from Biblical Christianity?

Today’s passage: Judges 16:1-22

Helpful thoughts:

• Samson carried the massive city gate 40 miles uphill, while the men of the city were waiting to capture him.  Not much detail is given in the first three verses in this narrative, but something amazing had to have happened to make all this possible.
  • Yet, the Lord is never mentioned.
  • We do get to see that Samson has become not only a regional, but a national enemy of the Philistines.
• Samson could unhinge and carry city gates, but he couldn’t say no to a woman, even after her repeated and blatant attempts to destroy him.
• Samson knew the account of how he had received his strength and the purpose of it.  What he may not have realized is just how much of his strength was God-given.
  • Samson either didn’t realize his hair had been shaved, or he didn’t realize that losing it would even matter.  Every other time he violated the Nazarite vow, he had “gotten away with it.”

Questions to consider:

1. Other than the calling that God had given Samson before his birth, how have we seen him living for the Lord?  What fights has he fought for Israel and not for himself?
2. Why did Samson continue to go to the Philistines, and particularly the women, and particularly when they were aggressively trying to hurt him?
3. Again, how does this part of the Samson narrative mirror the way Israel had been conducting herself as a nation in relation to the Lord?
4. What might you be turning to repeatedly that does nothing but hurt you and those you should be loving?  How does Christ provide the way of escape, repentance, redemption and victory?