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Our idea of a judge is someone who wears a black robe, sits behind a huge paneled desk, adjudicates disputes and bangs a gavel to control a courtroom. If we project the concept back into Old Testament times, we picture elders sitting on stone benches at the city gate, listening to and resolving conflicts.
In the Old Testament account of the “judges” of Israel, however, only one judge—Deborah—in only one reference, judges in a legal sense: “She used to sit under the palm tree of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim; and the sons of Israel came up to her for judgment” (Judges 4:5).
The primary function of the 12 “judges” in the Book of Judges appears to be quite different. Othniel, Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah and Samson are called “major judges,” since most of the book describes their activities; Shamgar, Tola, Jair, Ibzan, Elon and Abdon are known as the “minor judges.” Though all but 3 of the 12 judges are described by a standard formula—as one who “judged” (Hebrew verb shaphat) Israela—the primary function of all of them appears to be the same, “to deliver” Israel from oppression (Judges 2:16, 18).
Around 1200 B.C. the Israelite tribes, newly arrived in Canaan, struggled to unite against hostile neighbors who resented their presence. Their God, Yahweh, working through their leader, Joshua, had given them the land. But after Joshua’s death, the Israelites “forsook the Lord” and served pagan gods. As a result, God sent plunderers against them and sold them into the hands of their enemies (Judges 2:14). But God also, in the language of most English Bible versions, “raised up judges [Hebrew noun shophet] who delivered [Hebrew verb yasha] them” (2:16). (Yasha can also be translated as “to save.”)
Each “judge” arose in a time of military crisis, when suddenly a gift of power described as the 042“Spirit of Yahweh” took possession of them (Judges 6:34). This charismatic authority helped make them acceptable to the community. Thus, a “judge” was recognized by his peers as a leader, as was the case with Gideon, to whom the “men of Israel” said, “Rule over us—you, your son, and your grandson as well” (8:22). A “judge” could issue orders to two tribes, as Ehud appeared to do (3:15, 27–28), or to a larger coalition of tribes, as Deborah did (4:6). The list of oppressors these extraordinary military leaders vanquished reads like a Who’s Who of nearby ancient Near East peoples at that time: Ammonites, Canaanites, Moabites, Midianites, Philistines and Mesopotamians.
So it seems far more apt to describe the “judges” as would-be rulers or leaders. James Crenshaw, professor of Old Testament at Duke University Divinity School, is right on target with his appropriate designation of the “judges” as “warrior rulers.”1
The tradition of the inappropriate English translation of shophet as “judge” appears to have started with the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible called the Septuagint. The part of the Septuagint that includes our text probably existed by around the mid-second century B.C., and there the word krites replaces shophet and is used as the first title of the book. A plural form, kritai, began to be used as the title of the book. But krites in its noun and verbal forms does not lend itself to a translation of “ruler” or “governor.” It had a narrow meaning of “judge,” “arbiter” or “discerner.” From chapter 2, verse 16, the use of the word kritas to describe these military heroes made it unlikely that English translators of the Greek would interpret the word as anything but “judges.”
The Vulgate, Jerome’s Latin Bible translation of around 400 A.D., further cemented this misreading. In translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew, Jerome gave the book the title Judicum, a plural noun referring specifically to a “judge,” an “umpire” or “one who chooses or decides.” In chapter 2, verse 16, he called the leaders judices.
The earliest English translation followed suit. John Wycliffe and his followers first translated the whole Bible into English sometime between 1330 to 1384. Their translation repeated the Latin designation in their introduction to the book, “Here bigynneth the bok of Judicum,” and they called God’s appointed saviors “iugis”—judges.
Printed English Bibles kept this translation. Myles Coverdale prefaced the book in the first complete printed English Bible (1535), “The boke of the Judges, called, Judicum,” and continued to call its principal characters “iudges.”
Most English Bible translations today still, unhappily, keep this tradition, which obscures the major mission of these leaders and creates a faulty picture that can skew sound interpretation of the role of the “judges.” But this tradition should be broken and the translation changed to match the many instances in both the Old Testament and cognate languages of the ancient Near East where shaphat and its derivatives are translated in the sense of “to rule” and “ruler.”
In 1 Samuel (set in the latter part of the period of the “judges” in the 11th century B.C.), the elders of Israel ask Samuel to “appoint for us a king to govern [shaphat] us, like other nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). The sense is obviously “to rule,” not “to judge,” because the king is described as one who will appoint officials, levy taxes and go to war for the people (8:11–20).
In Psalm 2:10—“Now therefore, O kings, be wise;/Be warned, O rulers of the earth”—the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translates shophet as “rulers” because it stands in poetic parallel to “kings.”
And in extra-biblical sources from 1800 B.C. to the second century A.D., the cognate shaphat and its derivatives are clearly used to mean “to rule” or “to govern.” Around 1800 B.C. Rubum, the king of Eshnunna in northern Babylonia, writes about a disagreement he has with another king. Rubum quotes from a letter received from this king in which that monarch compares himself to Rubum: “He (Rubum) exercises authority, so I exercise authority in my city.” The Akkadian cognate here shapatum, obviously refers not to legal judging but to the function of ruling.
Another example of a nonjudicial use of the cognate shaphat and its derivatives comes from Ugaritic. Ugarit was a city-state on the northern Syrian coast whose large collection of myths and epics dates from around 1375 B.C. to the kingdom’s destruction in 1200 B.C. The usage in Ugaritic is especially important, as the latter days of Ugarit coincide with the emergence of the “judges” in Israel. In a poem exalting Baal, the storm/fertility god, for defeating his enemies and assuming kingship over gods and men, the goddess Anat states, “Our king is Aliyn Baal,/Our ruler, there is none like him.” Since the statement refers to the lordship of Baal, and the cognate word thapit is in poetic parallel with “king,” the nonjudicial translation is correct.
A Phoenician inscription dating from the period of the “judges” (11th century B.C.) marked the tomb of Ahiram, king of Byblos, a city on the central coast of what is now Lebanon. The inscription, carved on a decorated limestone coffin, places a curse upon anyone disturbing the remains: “May the scepter of his authority be torn away,/May the 043throne of his kingdom be overturned.” As in the Ugaritic phrase and Psalm 2:10, the cognate here, mishpat, stands in parallel with a term denoting leadership or governance, not judgeship.
The last example comes from Carthage, located on Africa’s northern coast in what is now Tunisia. There the Punic cognate suffet was a designation of the highest ruler, who was akin to a chief magistrate. Like the biblical “judges,” the Punic term also describes persons who perform a variety of nonjudicial functions, such as making vows to the deity, overseeing the cult and being an army scribe. One such suffet—in language reminiscent of the biblical “judges”—is apparently called “savior of the…people” in an inscription dated to 92 A.D.
When one considers this linguistic evidence and what the biblical “judges” actually do, it seems 047obvious that shaphat and its noun forms in English versions of the Book of Judges are, in the words of one scholar, “uniformly and erroneously translated.”2 Nevertheless, the vast majority of English Bible versions continue to translate shaphat as “to judge” and shophet as “judge.”
Using Judges 2:16 and 3:10 as test verses, I checked 13 major Bible versions. Only three of these—Moffat (1934), Today’s English Version (1976) and the Jewish Publication Society’s version (1985)—translate shophet in 2:16 into the more appropriate titles “heroes,” “leaders” or “chieftains” instead of “judges.” These same three also translate the verb in Judges 3:10 as “avenged,” “became…leader” and “became…chieftain” instead of “judging.” Of the rest, even the newer versions I surveyed—the New Revised English Bible (1989) and the New Revised Standard Version (1989)—keep the traditional translations of “judge” and “became judge” or “judged,” even though the verse describes Othniel’s military conquest.
A couple of versions—the New International Version (NIV) and the New Jerusalem Bible—refer to alternate translations in marginal notes. A few versions are simply inconsistent; the NIV, for example, translates shaphat as “became judge” in 3:10 and as “led” in 10:2 and elsewhere.
Let future translations correct these inconsistencies and mistranslations and call these great heroes by titles that more accurately reflect their leadership and military roles.
Our idea of a judge is someone who wears a black robe, sits behind a huge paneled desk, adjudicates disputes and bangs a gavel to control a courtroom. If we project the concept back into Old Testament times, we picture elders sitting on stone benches at the city gate, listening to and resolving conflicts. In the Old Testament account of the “judges” of Israel, however, only one judge—Deborah—in only one reference, judges in a legal sense: “She used to sit under the palm tree of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim; and the sons […]
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