The Cycle Starts - Judges 2

Israel is struggling to defeat the Canaanite inhabitants of the land that the Lord commanded them to remove, and many didn’t even try to remove them at all. Many tribes defeated them enough to make them indentured to Israel but wouldn’t finish the job, and some other tribes didn’t even bother trying. After Joshua died, and all that generation, the people began to worship the gods of the Canaanites instead, or at minimum, in addition to Jehovah, and He is not pleased. God sends an angel “up from Gilgal to Bochim,” to condemn the people. TB notes that it’s possible that instead of an actual supernatural angel, this could just be an unidentified prophet of some sort, that’s why he’s described as coming from Gilgal to Bochim because an angel could just arrive there. Anyway, this angel reminds Israel that God delivered them from Egypt and gave them this promised land, and promised “I will never break my covenant with you.” But if Israel breaks their covenant with God by worshipping other gods or being disobedient, then they are the ones who broke the covenants, not God. The angel reminds the people that God commanded them to drive out the Canaanites, and destroy their pagan altars, but they did not do that and because they did not do that, the Canaanites and “their gods shall be a snare unto you.”

The people did not take the rebuke well and “the people lifted up their voice, and wept. And the called the name of that place Bochim: and they sacrificed there unto the Lord.” Their weeping clearly wasn’t enough to persuade them to obey God because they quickly “did evil in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim,” which Baalim is the plural for Baal, meaning the Baal type of gods. They started bowing themselves to them, and sacrificing to them. I think it’s important to mention here that I don’t think it’s just that the Israelite people bowed down to other gods that was the main problem. Like yes, that it idolatry but why would a people turn away from a God that had performed so many miracles for them and start bending knees for a stone or metal object, like that doesn’t make sense, what do they get out of it. I am not an expert but I don’t think the people actually thought that the statute had any real power or was actually anything besides an inanimate object, I think they knew that. It’s possible that they might have bowed down to it because they thought that it represented a god with actual power, but even then, like what did they gain from that. It’s possible they were hedging their bets, hoping that by worshipping many gods, they would be blessed by them. But honestly, what I think it was is that “worshipping” these other gods was just so much easier. They were bound by no rules, in fact as far as I’m aware, most of these “religious” events were highly sexual in nature, so not only did they not have to obey the rules of the Israelite God but they got to show up to these other pagan rituals and have wild sex and they could live however they wanted. I mean, if you thought that God provided no value in your life, why wouldn’t people want to worship these other gods? These gods required very little from their worshippers and provided them with the opportunities to escape from their responsibilities and do whatever they wanted.

This started the same cycles that we see in the Book of Mormon, the people turn away from God by worshipping false gods, so God allows them to “fall into the hands of their enemies.” Prophets, or in this case Judges, are raised up, the people “repent” at least a little bit, and God “hearkened because of their groanings by reason of them that oppressed them and vexed them.” The people are delivered by the hand of God, then the people fall back into iniquity and the cycle repeats. We see this throughout all the scriptures. In the case of ancient Israel at this time, the delivers raised up by God are these “judges.” The IM notes that these judges are not so much judicial arbiters like we know that word to mean but it more indicates a military leader, or “to govern.” The IM notes, “Mose of the ‘judging’ done in this period was a matter of giving advise and rendering decisions… In fact, the most common function they are seen to perform is that of military leadership.” It’s also important to note from the IM, “The judges did not reign over all of unified Israel during their period of leadership. The chronicler of these stories likely took the choicest of the heroes from each of the tribes during this generally apostate period and combined into one book their righteous achievements and their moral lessons for Israel.” So Israel disobeyed God, God removed His protection from them, they fell into their enemies hands, they cried to God for deliverance, then God sent a judge to deliver the people, and as soon as that judge died, the people fell away again and this happened repeatedly for the space of 400 years that the book of Judges covers.