Day 093 (Judges 10-12) - Year 7

Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap. We're continuing our downward spiral of Israel's judges after yesterday's tragedy with Gideon's son Abimelech, and today we encounter six bad judges.
The first two barely get a mention. There was Tola from the tribe of Issachar, who lived among the tribe of Ephraim for some reason.
Then there was Jer the Gileadite. Gilead is a region in the Transjordan, so this is our first judge from across the Jordan River.
When you read the term Gileadite, just know that's a reference to an Israelite from the Transjordan, not one of their many enemies. Then we see that the people of Israel are falling into apostasy again.

In fact, we get seven groupings of other gods

that they're beginning to worship.

It looks like they'll worship anything.

They don't discriminate at all.

God grows angry with them

and sells them into the hands of two other people groups,

the Philistines and the Ammonites.

They oppress them for 18 years

on the east side of the Jordan River, and they also fight against them on the west side of the Jordan River. Finally, Israel sees the error of their ways and they repent.
But this time, God tells them that things are going to happen differently. He's not just going to raise up a judge to save them like he's done in the past.
He tells them to cry out to those other gods for help instead. Their response to him suggests that maybe they really do get it this time.
They agree that they don't deserve saving, and they accept his words while still begging him for mercy and help. They know he's their only hope.
Then they forsake their idols and worship Yahweh. Hooray! Then we cut to the Ammonites in the Transjordan, ready to go to war with Israel.
The Israelites try to rally a sergeant for their army so they can fight them, but instead of asking God for direction, they ask each other, and they hastily appoint a man named Jephthah, who bears a lot of resemblance to what we saw from Abimelech yesterday. For being an outlaw and an outcast, Jephthah is pretty reasonable when he tries to negotiate

with the Ammonite king.

The king is angry because he says Israel took some land from him at some point.

But Jephthah explains that's not what happened.

Yes, we took this land, but from someone else, not you, because you didn't own it at the

time we conquered it, which, by the way, was about 300 years ago.

And besides, Yahweh is the one who gave it to us anyway, so you can't have it. But the Ammonite king isn't interested in being reasoned with, and Jephthah knows he has a war on his hands.
God's spirit travels with Jephthah as he passes through the land, protecting him. This is interesting because even though he wasn't appointed by God as judge over his people, he is the judge over God's people nonetheless,

and God comes to help him. But Jephthah makes a really terrible wartime decision.

He's probably nervous and desperate, so he makes a hasty vow to God in an effort to win the war.

He promises that if God gives them victory, he will sacrifice whatever comes out of his house

first when he returns. Granted, he was probably thinking it would be an animal, but there were loads of things wrong with this vow regardless.
First, God has promised Israel victory if they keep his laws. That's the way to victory, not hasty vows.
God has already given him the game plan, but Jephthah disregards it. Second, when the Israelites win and Jephthah comes home and the first thing through the door is his daughter, that's the moment when he can cancel the vow and go offer a sin offering to God instead.
Leviticus 5 gives the option of revoking a vow that would result in sin, but it seems like Jephthah may not fully know the law he is called to uphold and lead others by. Third, and then I'll add a caveat to this third point as well, human sacrifice is strictly forbidden in at least four different places in the books of the law, including Deuteronomy 18.10.
Jephthah hastily makes a grand gesture in vowing to sacrifice anything, but when he says he can't take back his vow, he's wrong. This is just another example of why we have to weigh scripture against scripture.
What Jephthah says here is inconsistent with what God has said directly. My caveat to the third point is that

many people believe Jephthah didn't actually sacrifice his daughter, but that he just consigned

her to live as a single woman for the rest of her life. This would have saved him the agony of

murdering his daughter, but either way, there's one consequence that would have stuck with him

regardless. Whether she lives as a single woman or whether she dies, his name dies out with him because she's his only child.
And I also want to take a moment to point out a hard truth that we see in this passage here. Not everyone who wants to get married ends up getting married.
Regardless whether she died young and alone or old and alone, Jephthah's daughter laments her lot in life, and lament is okay. She even carves out time for it, and she does it in community.
As a single woman, I'm inspired by Jephthah's response. When we open chapter 12, we see that Ephraim's got FOMO again.
They're the scrappy little tribe always looking for a reason to break out their weapons, just like in chapter 8 yesterday. Today, they're mad that Jephthah didn't call them to fight with him, but he says he did call them and they must have just forgotten to check their voicemail.
They threatened to burn his house down, so he fights them and they get the fight they're looking for. Real nice, guys.
You're on the same team, remember? But they don't remember, apparently. They're hurling insults and trying to trick each other.
The men of Ephraim, for example, are trying to pose as Gileadites, those people who live east of the Jordan River, but they have different accents than the Gileadites and it gives them away. This would be like if I were posing as a Canadian and someone from Vancouver asked me to say the word about or the word aluminum.
My citizenship would be evident right away. As a result of all the

infighting, Ephraim loses 42,000 men. This is the first internal battle between the tribes of Israel, and it's a sign that things are going downhill quickly.
We wrapped up today with a quick shot on the three judges that came immediately after Jephthah, Ibzan, Elon, and Abdon. Tomorrow we pick up with possibly the worst judge in the whole book, Samson.
What was your God shot today? Mine was just a short little sentence about God in 1016. It says, he became impatient over the misery of Israel.
What a tender-hearted God. If you ever wonder if God likes seeing you suffer or is trying to punish you, know that he aches alongside you.
He wants what is best for you even more than you do. He certainly felt that way about the Israelites.
They kept choosing sin and he was doing the tough love thing at the time, letting them hit rock bottom, but all the while his heart was aching over their rebellion. He grieves when his kids are in misery, and he draws near.
I love how Psalm 34 18 puts it, the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. If you feel like the Israelites, miserable from your own rebellion, or if you feel like Jephthah's daughter, mourning your life circumstances, I'm praying today that you will feel the nearness of the Lord in your brokenhearted state, and that your spirit will somehow feel less crushed as you remember his great salvation.
He's with you, and he's where the joy is. Ever since we launched our TBR content for kids, we've been loving seeing your posts about it.
It's fun to see you doing the Bible Recap alongside your kids. Reading and understanding and loving the Bible is hard even for adults.
So we created the Bible Recap Kids Devotional. It's an activity book for kids ages 6 to 8.
And we've also created the Bible Recap for Kids, which is for kids ages 8 to 12. These books follow the same reading plan

you're on, and our prayer is that you and the kids in your life will read, understand, and love the

Bible together. And by the way, we found that most teens prefer the standard version of TBR.

But for the kids in your life, check out thebiblerecap.com forward slash kids,

or click the link in the show notes.