Continuing our look at what the Bible has to say about war, we come to the time of the judges.

As we mentioned, the Conquest had been incomplete. As horrified as we may be at the instructions God gave the Israelites, we should be just as horrified at the cost of their not following those instructions. The Promised Land did not become what it was meant to be, because the Israelites spared some of the people that were living there and because they failed to destroy the idols of those people.

During most of the period of the judges, Israel was a nation only in the loosest sense of the word. The best description is “the twelve tribes of Israel,” for this was basically a loose confederation of tribes. The Law established no government, and, as the writer of Judges describes it, “there was king over Israel and each man did what was right in his own eyes.” It wasn’t meant to be that way, of course. As Gideon rightly recognized, God was intended to be the ruler of Israel, and each man should have done what was right in God’s eyes. But that didn’t happen.

They were basically polytheistic, with brief moments of revival and turning to God. During most of this time, they were oppressed by other peoples. God would raise up judges, deliverers of his people who would fight the enemy and free Israel from this foreign domination. At times the judges basically acted alone, like Samson. At other times, they led the entire nation, like Ehud. Most of the time, they directed a few of the twelve tribes, leading them to military victories.

Most of the fighting in the book of Judges is defensive, trying to expel foreign invaders. Some of it, particularly at the beginning of the book, is a continuation of the Conquest. That can be said for almost all of the fighting we see in the Old Testament.