I’m currently rereading the book of Judges and I have been fascinated by the cycles of peace and violence that played out as Israelites started settling the Promised Land.
The parallels between Ancient Israelites living in the early Iron Age (circa 1200 – 1000 BCE) and people living in current times are plain as day to Christians. Like the Israelites, we all have the tendency to remember God when things are hard, but at the slightest hint of consistent calm, we forget Him and indulge ourselves in every pleasure we can imagine – until we run into trouble again. The lesson is clear: Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. (Proverbs 3:5-6)
But what effect was God’s spiritual instructions having at a physical, sociomaterial level that translated into seasons of peace for the Israelites living during the period of Judges?
We can hypothesize.
Long before the Saul-David-Solomon timeline, ancient Israel was a collection of tribes that were more or less individually autonomous. People identified more closely with their tribes or clans than with Israel as a state.
From a material perspective, God’s laws were a unifying force for the Israelites. Whenever His spiritual instructions were kept salient in their minds, through sacrifices, rituals, and reciting the Torah, the Israelites saw themselves as a covenated people who were the objects of God’s affection, while others were strangers to Him. This identity would have been vital in coordinating the activities of a dozen or so tribes towards taking over the Promised Land.
As the Israelite tribes settled in the Promised Land, they would have been competing with the local Canaanites for scarce resources, such as farmable lands, accessible water sources and maybe trade networks. And for their part as older settlers, the local Canaanites had one advantage. They did not have any covenant with God but, over generations, they would have accumulated knowledge about the local region, such as its seasonal patterns or mineral deposits. There’s also a good chance that the Canaanites would have encoded this knowledge into their religious practices (e.g., Baal worship).
In times of peace, the temptation is always there to get comfortable and, perhaps, not take steps to reinforce cultural memories. If the Israelites did this, God’s spiritual instructions would have stopped being salient in the minds of each succeeding generation of Israelites. This would have dissolved the perceptions they had of themselves as God’s covenanted people, while also weakening the unity between the tribes that could have facilitated coordinated political and military action. And when Israelites started intermarrying the local Canaanites and assimilating their cultural practices, there would have been a palpable shift in allegiance away from the God of the unified Israelite tribes and towards the local idols.
One refrain in the book of Judges I find fascinating is the idea that “every man did what seemed right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6. 21:5). This means that when the external shocks inevitably came (e.g., war, famine, drought, etc.), it was hard for the Israelites to coordinate themselves ideologically, religiously, politically and militarily to withstand these pressures. Some local power would have taken advantage of the situation and subjected the Israelite tribes to heavy taxation and forced labor – until God raises someone to coordinate the Israelites to resist the oppression, negotiates peace and then the cycle repeats itself….
