Judges 2:13 Komentář

In this chapter we have, I. A particular message which God sent to Israel by an angel, and the impression it made upon them (Jdg 2:1-5). II. A general idea of the state of Israel during the government of the judges, in which observe, 1. Their adherence to God while Joshua and the elders lived (Jdg 2:6-10). 2. Their revolt afterwards to idolatry (Jdg 2:11-13). 3. God's displeasure against them, and his judgments upon them for it (Jdg 2:14, Jdg 2:15). 4. His pity towards them, shown in raising them up deliverers (Jdg 2:16-18). 5. Their relapse into idolatry after the judgment was over (Jdg 2:17-19). 6. The full stop God in anger put to their successes (Jdg 2:20-23). These are the contents, not only of this chapter, but of the whole book.

INTRODUCTION TO JUDGES 2 This chapter gives an account of an angel of the Lord appearing and rebuking the children of Israel for their present misconduct, Jdg 2:1; of their good behaviour under Joshua, and the elders that outlived him, Jdg 2:6; and of their idolatries they fell into afterwards, which greatly provoked the Lord to anger, Jdg 2:11; and of the goodness of God to them nevertheless, in raising up judges to deliver them out of the hands of their enemies, of which there are many instances in the following chapter, Jdg 2:16; and yet that how, upon the demise of such persons, they relapsed into idolatry which caused the anger of God to be hot against them, and to determine not to drive out the Canaanites utterly from them, but to leave them among them to try them, Jdg 2:19.

And they forsook the Lord,.... The worship of the Lord, as the Targum; this is repeated to observe the heinous sin they were guilty of, and how displeasing it was to God: and served Baal and Ashtaroth; two images, as the Arabic version adds; Baal, from whence Baalim, may signify the he deities of the Gentiles, as Jupiter, Hercules, &c. and Ashtaroth their female deities, as Juno, Venus, Diana, &c. the word is plural, and used for flocks of sheep, so called because they make the owners of them rich; and Kimchi and Ben Melech say these were images in the form of female sheep. Perhaps, as Baal may signify the sun, so Ashtaroth the moon, and the stars like flocks of sheep about her. Ashtaroth was the goddess of the Zidonians, Kg1 11:5; the same with Astarte, the wife of Cronus or Ham, said to be the Phoenician or Syrian Venus. So Lucian says (r) there was a temple in Phoenicia, belonging to the Sidonians, which they say is the temple of Astarte; and, says he, I think that Astarte is the moon; and Astarte is both by the Phoenicians (s) and Grecians (t) said to be Venus, and was worshipped by the Syrians also, as Minutius Felix (u) and Tertullian (w) affirm; the same with Eostre, or Aestar, the Saxon goddess; hence to this day we call the passover Easter (x), being in Eoster-month; and with Andraste, a goddess of the ancient Britains (y). There were four of them, and therefore the Septuagint here uses the plural number Astartes; so called either from Asher, being reckoned "blessed" ones, or from Asheroth, the groves they were worshipped in; or from "Ash", and "Tor", the constellation Taurus or the bull; so Astarte by Sanchoniatho is said to put upon her head the head of a bull, as the token of her sovereignty; See Gill on Gen 14:5. (r) De Dea Syria. (s) Sanchoniatho apud Euseb. Evangel. Praepar. l. 1. p. 38. (t) Suidas in voce (u) In Octavio, p. 6. (w) Apolog. c. 24. (x) Vid. Owen. Theologoumen, l. 3. c. 4. p. 192. (y) lb. c. 11. p. 244.

After the death of Joshua the son of Nave [Nun] they forsook the God of their fathers and served idols, Baalim and Ashtaroth; and the Lord in anger delivered them up to the hands of plunderers, and they continued to be plundered by them and to be sold to their adversaries, and [they] could not at all stand before their enemies. Wherever they went forth, his hand was upon them for evil, and they were greatly distressed. And after this God sets judges, the same as our censors, over them. But not even these did they continue steadfastly to obey. So soon as one of the judges died, they proceeded to transgress more than their fathers had done by going after the gods of others and serving and worshiping them. Therefore the Lord was angry. “Since, indeed,” he says, “this nation has transgressed my covenant which I established with their fathers and has not hearkened to my voice, I will not remove from them any of the nations which Joshua left at his death.” And thus, throughout almost all the annals of the judges and of the kings who succeeded them, while the strength of the surrounding nations was preserved, he meted wrath out to Israel by war and captivity and a foreign yoke, as often as they turned aside from him, especially to idolatry.

As long as a people serves God, they are not "delivered into the hands of plunderers." But when they "abandon the Lord" and begin to serve their own passions, then it is said of them that "God gave them over to shameful passions" and, again, "He gave them over to a reprobate mind, that they would do unsuitable things." Why? Because, he says, "they were filled with every iniquity, wickedness, fornication, greed" and all other evils. It was because "they served and worshiped Baal and Ashtaroth" that "God delivered them into the hands of plunderers and handed them over to their enemies." This, as I have often said before, the Jews read as though it were merely a record of past events. We, however, "for whose sake this was written," it is said, ought to know that if we sin against the Lord and against our own souls by indulging the desires of the flesh as though we were worshiping our God, we also betray ourselves and concede our apostolic authority into the hands of Zebulun. Listen, then, to [Paul] speaking about one who sins: "I delivered this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit might be saved." You can see, therefore, that it was not only through his apostles that God "delivered" sinners "over to their enemies," but even now, through those who govern the church and have the power not only of releasing but also of binding, sinners "are delivered for the destruction of the flesh" when they are separated from the body of Christ for their crimes.

AN ANGEL SENT TO REBUKE THE PEOPLE AT BOCHIM. (Jdg 2:1-10) an angel . . . came from Gilgal to Bochim--We are inclined to think, from the authoritative tone of his language, that he was the Angel of the Covenant (Exo 23:20; Jos 5:14); the same who appeared in human form and announced himself captain of the Lord's host. His coming from Gilgal had a peculiar significance, for there the Israelites made a solemn dedication of themselves to God on their entrance into the promised land [Jos 4:1-9]; and the memory of that religious engagement, which the angel's arrival from Gilgal awakened, gave emphatic force to his rebuke of their apostasy. Bochim--"the weepers," was a name bestowed evidently in allusion to this incident or the place, which was at or near Shiloh. I said, I will never break my covenant with you . . . but ye have not obeyed my voice--The burden of the angel's remonstrance was that God would inviolably keep His promise; but they, by their flagrant and repeated breaches of their covenant with Him, had forfeited all claim to the stipulated benefits. Having disobeyed the will of God by voluntarily courting the society of idolaters and placing themselves in the way of temptation, He left them to suffer the punishment of their misdeeds.

Ashtaroth--Also a plural word, denoting all the female divinities, whose rites were celebrated by the most gross and revolting impurities.

Thus they forsook Jehovah, and served Baal and the Asthartes. In this case the singular Baal is connected with the plural Ashtaroth, because the male deities of all the Canaanitish nations, and those that bordered upon Canaan, were in their nature one and the same deity, viz., Baal, a sun-god, and as such the vehicle and source of physical life, and of the generative and reproductive power of nature, which was regarded as an effluence from its own being (see Movers, Relig. der Phnizier, pp. 184ff., and J. G. Mller in Herzog's Cyclopaedia). "Ashtaroth, from the singular Ashtoreth, which only occurs again in Kg1 11:5, Kg1 11:33, and Kg2 23:13, in connection with the Sidonian Astharte, was the general name used to denote the leading female deity of the Canaanitish tribes, a moon-goddess, who was worshipped as the feminine principle of nature embodied in the pure moon-light, and its influence upon terrestrial life. It corresponded to the Greek Aphrodite, whose celebrated temple at Askalon is described in Herod. i. 105. In Jdg 3:7, Asheroth is used as equivalent to Ashtaroth, which is used here, Jdg 10:6; Sa1 7:4; Sa1 12:10. The name Asheroth (Note: Rendered groves in the English version. - Tr.) was transferred to the deity itself from the idols of this goddess, which generally consisted of wooden columns, and are called Asherim in Exo 34:13; Deu 7:5; Deu 12:3; Deu 16:21. On the other hand, the word Ashtoreth is without any traceable etymology in the Semitic dialects, and was probably derived from Upper Asia, being connected with a Persian word signifying a star, and synonymous with Ἀστροάρχη, the star-queen of Sabaeism (see Ges. Thes. pp. 1083-4; Movers, p. 606; and Mller, ut sup.). With regard to the nature of the Baal and Astharte worship, into which the Israelites fell not long after the death of Joshua, and in which they continued henceforth to sink deeper and deeper, it is evident form the more precise allusions contained in the history of Gideon, that it did not consist of direct opposition to the worship of Jehovah, or involve any formal rejection of Jehovah, but that it was simply an admixture of the worship of Jehovah with the heathen or Canaanitish nature-worship. Not only was the ephod which Gideon caused to be made in his native town of Ophrah, and after which all Israel went a whoring (Jdg 8:27), an imitation of the high priest's ephod in the worship of Jehovah; but the worship of Baal-berith at Shechem, after which the Israelites went a whoring again when Gideon was dead (Jdg 8:33), was simply a corruption of the worship of Jehovah, in which Baal was put in the place of Jehovah and worshipped in a similar way, as we may clearly see from Jdg 9:27. The worship of Jehovah could even be outwardly continued in connection with this idolatrous worship. Just as in the case of these nations in the midst of which the Israelites lived, the mutual recognition of their different deities and religions was manifested in the fact that they all called their supreme deity by the same name, Baal, and simply adopted some other epithet by which to define the distinctive peculiarities of each; so the Israelites also imagined that they could worship the Baals of the powerful nations round about them along with Jehovah their covenant God, especially if they worshipped them in the same manner as their covenant God. This will serve to explain the rapid and constantly repeated falling away of the Israelites from Jehovah into Baal-worship, at the very time when the worship of Jehovah was stedfastly continued at the tabernacle in accordance with the commands of the law. The Israelites simply followed the lead and example of their heathen neighbours. Just as the heathen were tolerant with regard to the recognition of the deities of other nations, and did not refuse to extend this recognition even to Jehovah the God of Israel, so the Israelites were also tolerant towards the Baals of the neighbouring nations, whose sensuous nature-worship was more grateful to the corrupt heart of man than the spiritual Jehovah-religion, with its solemn demands for sanctification of life. But this syncretism, which was not only reconcilable with polytheism, but actually rooted in its very nature, was altogether irreconcilable with the nature of true religion. For if Jehovah is the only true God, and there are no other gods besides or beside Him, then the purity and holiness of His nature is not only disturbed, but altogether distorted, by any admixture of His worship with the worship of idols or of the objects of nature, the true God being turned into an idol, and Jehovah degraded into Baal. Looking closely into the matter, therefore, the mixture of the Canaanitish worship of Baal with the worship of Jehovah was actually forsaking Jehovah and serving other gods, as the prophetic author of this book pronounces it. It was just the same with the worship of Baal in the kingdom of the ten tribes, which was condemned by the prophets Hosea and Amos (see Hengstenberg, Christology, i. pp. 168ff., Eng. trans.).