LAST THINGS FIRST

In those days there was no king in Israel; each person did what they thought to be right.

(Judges 21:25)

Perhaps you have heard of the major American novelist John Irving. (Or maybe you have absolutely no idea who he is.) Whether you've heard of him or not, he has written several carefully crafted, multi-layered, and frequently hilarious novels. Many of them were eventually turned into movies; The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules are two examples. A third movie, Simon Birch, was based on John Irving's novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Even if you haven't read those books, or any of the others John Irving wrote, perhaps you have seen the movies or at least heard of them. He's a brilliant author whose fiction is at the same time entertaining and compelling.

Here's why I'm telling you about John Irving. He composes his books with a very peculiar process: he writes the last sentence first. Irving figures that if he knows the ending, he can put together the story that leads up to it. Knowing the final words helps him to develop his characters and twist his plots. For instance, here's the last line of A Prayer for Owen Meany, which is about a boy with a "wrecked voice" who becomes convinced that God has a destiny for him:

"O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You."

Knowing that final line, and the paragraphs leading up to it, enabled Irving to craft the whole story about the boy Owen Meany and his relationship with the narrator — how Owen's life, perspective, and heroic sacrifice led to the narrator's faith in God.

It's an interesting way of writing, isn't it? Last sentence first. Now, I know you're probably thankful for this bit of trivia. You're better prepared for a future English class you might take. And if you ever go on Jeopardy and get an "American Authors" category, well, you'll be just a little more confident. And yet, I'm sure you are still wondering, "What in the world does this have to do with things like the Bible, Jesus, God, the Book of Judges, and the first chapter of this book?!" I'm glad you asked because the answer is everything.

You see, the Book of Judges, one of the more obscure books in the Old Testament, is a work of patterned history told with a novelist's flair and skill. And it's somewhat like a John Irving novel in that the final sentence sheds clarifying perspective on the whole book. The last sentence helps make sense of the tragic, terrible, and perplexing series of stories found in Judges, especially toward the end. In fact, I can imagine that the unknown author of Judges, operating under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and laying out material to compile into the book, realized in a flash of inspiration: "Ah! Let me write the last sentence first! Everything else in the book will lead up to that (or down to that)." And so, because that last sentence is so important in the Book of Judges, we are going to begin our study with it. Last things first. Doing so will help us get a perspective on the whole book, to set the stage for the stories we will study in our remaining chapters.

So what is it? What is this final sentence that is the lens through which everything else in Judges makes sense? "In those days there was no king in Israel; each person did what they thought to be right" (Judges 21:25). Or as another translation reads, "all the people did what was right in their own eyes" (NRSV).

Everything in the Book of Judges has been arranged in such a way that you arrive at the end and encounter the statement "each person did what they thought to be right." This statement also appears in Judges 17:6, so it actually bookends the final five chapters of Judges. These chapters paint a clear picture of chaos, anarchy, and violence. In other words, in the last five chapters of Judges, we see everybody inventing their own individual version of morality, and bedlam is the result. It's one of the unhappiest endings in the entire library of Scripture. And the rest of the book before that is not much better. The Israelites in Judges are like crash test dummies who, for twenty-one chapters, have been doing the same dumb things over and over. And now, in the final chapters, they arrive at a place where they are the dumbest. What a delightful way for us to begin!

Just what were these dumb things? We won't survey the whole book now — there's plenty of opportunity to do that in the chapters that follow — but here's the story behind the story. It's a period of ancient Israelite history when they have just begun to emerge as a people in the land of Canaan. It takes place between about 1200 and 1050 BC. The Israelites have come out of Egypt, wandered in the wilderness, and begun to conquer the Promised Land under Joshua's leadership. Now Joshua has died, and the people are residing in the land as a confederation of tribes and local groups without centralized leadership over all of Israel. This is highlighted by the repeated phrase, "In those days there was no king in Israel" (Judges 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25). In many ways, the picture of this era in Judges resembles the Wild West of the United States: a lawless frontier, a weak central government, and only the strong — or the clever — survive.

Judges attributes this lawlessness to the Israelites' relentless tendency to worship other gods. God's people, the Israelites, have created this chaotic world for themselves after the deaths of Moses and Joshua by refusing to follow God's laws and seeking other deities. They break their covenant with God over and over again. What results is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the book, an ongoing cycle of sin, oppression, deliverance, and falling right back into sin. Here is the pattern:

1. The Israelites break God's covenant by worshiping other gods.

2. Foreign enemies oppress the Israelites.

3. The Israelites cry out to God for help.

4. God raises up a deliverer (a judge) to save the people.

5. The judge delivers the people and leads them back to the covenant.

6. The people remain faithful to God throughout the judge's lifetime.

7. The judge dies, and the Israelites begin to worship other gods.

And so the cycle repeats itself. We see this pattern in the many stories of the leaders in the Book of Judges — it's the framework that holds the stories together. There is even a short description of the whole pattern near the beginning of the book:

11 Then the Israelites did things that the Lord saw as evil: They served the Baals; 12 and they went away from the Lord, their ancestors' God, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods from among the surrounding peoples, they worshipped them, and they angered the Lord.13 They went away from the Lord and served Baal and the Astartes. 14 So the Lord became angry with Israel, and he handed them over to raiders who plundered them. He let them be defeated by their enemies around them, so that they were no longer...