The Bible: Judges Chapter 17

In this video listen to Judges 17 read by David Alley, followed by comments and prayer.In Judges 17 we are now in the so called appendix of Judges. The last five chapters of Judges don’t cover any more actual judges, but they do provide a window into what life was actually like during the time of the Judges. If you needed examples of how corrupt Israel was becoming, here they are. This part of the Judges does not continue chronologically from the previous chapter. We are jumping back from Sampson to much earlier.According to Josephus this story took place during the reign of the very first Judge Othniel, the nephew of Caleb. We are now quite likely about 300 years earlier than Sampson. This whole chapter represents what seems like sincere behaviour toward God combined with very little understanding of what God actually requires. The woman for example praises Yahweh and then commissions an idol. The author says “there was no king” as an explanation of the behaviour.This is both a statement which gives a window into the author’s mind, theology and dating of authorship. Some have tried to use this to prove that these examples were arguing for the need for a king, and were written by later authors in the time of King Josiah. However, that's odd given that they would be arguing about the need for a king, while already having had a king for many hundreds of years.Also the author here thinks that having a king would avoid these problems, but if it was written in the time of Josiah, it would be obvious that many kings still allowed idolatry. Samuel is the author and he lived and wrote during the time of King Saul, the first of the kings. He was writing about this time explaining why things were the way they were politically and spiritually.Israel had no king, either a man, or God. People didn’t have a man to follow, and neither did they do what God wanted. We must assume that most people had no idea of what God actually required. They didn’t have a bible to read, and most people were probably illiterate anyway.They were sincere in doing things God didn’t approve of. A big lesson here has to do with assuming that our way of loving and serving God is the right one.