Hank Smith: 00:00:01 Welcome to Follow Him. A weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come, Follow Me study. I’m Hank Smith.

John Bytheway: 00:00:09 And I’m John Bytheway.

Hank Smith: 00:00:10 We love to learn.

John Bytheway: 00:00:11 We love to laugh.

Hank Smith: 00:00:13 We want to learn and laugh with you.

John Bytheway: 00:00:15 As together, we Follow Him.

Hank Smith: 00:00:19 Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of FollowHIM. My name is Hank Smith. I’m your host. I’m here with my mighty man of valor, co-host John Bytheway. Welcome, John Bytheway, to FollowHIM, another episode.

John Bytheway: 00:00:35 Only you would say that. The audience is laughing with us as they look at me and try to make those adjectives fit.

Hank Smith: 00:00:43 John, you are a mighty man of valor that comes from Judges 6:12, because we’re going to be spending our time in the book of Judges today, talking about what happens to the Kingdom of Israel after the death of Joshua. So we needed a great mind to help us make sense of all this, John. So who is with us today?

John Bytheway: 00:01:04 Yes, we are grateful to have Dr. Dana M. Pike, and this is a face and a voice that I’m familiar with, because I love watching those round table discussions. Dana M. Pike is an Emeritus Professor of Ancient Scripture and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Brigham University. He received his Bachelor’s in Near Eastern Archeology and Anthropology from Brigham University and his PhD in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. And after seven years as the coordinator for the Interdepartmental Ancient Near Eastern Studies Major, and four years as an Associate Dean of Religious Education, he served three years as the chair of the Department of Ancient Scripture. And I know, Hank, you’ve told me he’s done a lot of work on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Hank Smith: 00:01:55 Definitely. I would say the best mind in the church on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

John Bytheway: 00:01:58 Wow.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:01:59 I’ll deny that.

John Bytheway: 00:01:59 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 00:02:00 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 00:02:01 He and his wife, Jane, have three children and eight grandchildren. Our listeners might have heard us talk about the Sperry Symposium they have every year and they usually compile a book. He wrote a chapter called The Poor and the Needy in the book of Isaiah. That’s in one of the Sperry Symposium compilations called The Covenant of Compassion. He’s also a contributing author to a book we’ve mentioned here before From Creation to Sinai. You wrote about the Book of Numbers in that one. Also, there’s a book, I know I’ve got it, Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament, where he was one of the editors. So we’re just thrilled to have such a great mind with a perfect background for what we want to talk about today with us. So thanks for joining us.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:02:41 Thank you for inviting me. It’s nice to be here.

Hank Smith: 00:02:43 Dana, we are in the Book of Judges today and, I don’t know, give us a bit of a preview here. Joshua dies, and it sounds to me that things go downhill.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:02:54 In many ways, they are presented as going downhill for sure. I listened to Hank, a comment that you made at the beginning of the video cast on Deuteronomy. And you said something like, “I don’t usually wake up and think, I’m going to turn to the book of Deuteronomy for inspiration.” And I thought to myself, first, I thought, “How could that be? There’s some great stuff in Deuteronomy.”

Hank Smith: 00:03:17 That’s true.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:03:17 And number two, wait till we get to Judges. It’s a challenging book. It’s an important book in a series of books that overview Israelite activity in the land of Canaan following Joshua and Israelites entering into Canaan. And there’s some dramatic stories, people know Samson, people know Deborah and Gideon. There’s some real challenging and troubling things here, and we’re not used to the violence and the immorality and other things that are presented here. And I think one of the great questions to always ask when we’re studying scripture, no matter what it is, why is this here? I mean, what is it supposed to be doing? What is it supposed to be telling us? Or where is it leading us? There’s some good lessons along the way. I hope we can find a little inspiration as we go along here.

Hank Smith: 00:04:04 Did you say earlier when we were chatting that the book of Deuteronomy is kind of the lead up to the Book of Judges? Does the writer assume you know Deuteronomy?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:04:14 I would say so, yes. But let’s put it this way, in a thumbnail sketch, there are two kind of overviews of Israelite history that we have pros narrative accounts. One is first and second Chronicles. We don’t typically spend a whole lot of time with that. And that was produced probably in the 400s BC after the Babylonian exile returned from exile, rebuilding the temple and what have you. A priestly kind of an ideal sort of depiction of David and Solomon, and temple related things and the Kings of Judah. But the one that we typically deal with, the overview that we typically deal with is what we have in Deuteronomy through Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. This is an academic term, right? Scholars have made this up, it’s referred to as the Deuteronomistic History, and Deuteronomistic should just flow off your tongue, but it may not.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:05:13 The suffix -istic on the end is trying to tell you that it’s Deuteronomy like. The sense is that the teachings, the principles, the vocabulary even in the book of Deuteronomy were utilized in the redaction of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Now redaction is another word that church members may not use a lot, but a redactor, somebody who brings together various ancient sources, combines them, puts his or her own voice in, produces a new literary work. This is something that Latter-day Saints are very familiar with because Mormon in producing The Book of Mormon is the classic example of somebody who produces a redaction, right? He’s giving us a historical overview. He quotes from people. He utilizes a variety of records, but as we say, there was no Book of Alma before Mormon produced the Book of Alma. There was an Alma, there were records from Alma. Mormon had access to Alma’s material.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:06:15 But the Book of Alma is Mormon’s creation, not Alma’s creation. And typically these redactions are produced to make a point or to make some points. There’s an agenda. Mormon tells us, “I’m doing this to show what happened to the Lord’s people when they left the Lord, to bring people to Christ,” and what have you. In the Bible, we have a faceless redactor, right? We don’t have somebody saying, “I’m the person who put this together,” or, “We are the group of people.” And we don’t have them laying out specifically what their intent is, but they use Deuteronomy as a foundational text and orienting text. Here we are talking about Judges, the language, the theology, the doctrinal thinking and perspectives influence very heavily the book of Joshua, the Book of Judges, to a lesser extent Samuel and definitely Kings. And so that’s this historical overview.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:07:09 And when you get to Kings, you’ll have to talk about how somebody at the end of that historical period of centuries kind of looks back and says, “How does this all fit together?” So I’m giving you the standard academic approach. Whatever their early history was, they end up being put together in this lengthy overview in the late 600s, definitely into the middle 500s and Babylonian exile. And that’s kind of where the Book of Kings comes to an end. Judges is part of a bigger whole, W-H-O-L-E, right? It’s part of a bigger overview influenced by the book of Deuteronomy and the thinking, the teachings, the doctrine, but it fits. Now, I left out Ruth. I’m just going to mention, and that’s next week’s assignment, I know. But Ruth in the Hebrew Bible is not up with Joshua, Judges, Samuel. It’s in a separate section called The Writings.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:08:03 So that’s not typically included in what’s called the Deuteronomistic historical overview, but it depicts people who are said to be living in the time of the Judges. So that’s why in our Christian Bibles, it’s moved up to be with the Book of Judges. And you’ll get to all of that when you discuss Ruth. If we’re talking about the Book of Judges as a redaction, a work that’s been produced later, looking back and trying to make sense out of this. It’s clearly religious or theological history. And this principle shows up in the Book of Mormon multiple times as well.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:08:38 If we keep the covenant we’ve made with the Lord, if we keep the Lord’s commandments, he’ll bless and prosper us. If we don’t, then certain bad things are going to happen. Some of them are promised as curses in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy. If we violate our covenant with the Lord, this is what we can expect. We ought to just quickly say, in case folks don’t remember, “There’s one God, it’s Jehovah. The Israelites have made a covenant to love him and to serve only him, to be loyal to him, not to go chasing after other gods. That the Lord has chosen Israel to be his people, his representatives in the world.” And that shows up again and again, in this Deuteronomistic History or historical overview.

Hank Smith: 00:09:20 Dana, I think this is a critical skill here. I do this in the Book of Mormon all the time. As we read Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, I say, “Listen, we’re not getting a camcorder view of what happened. We’re getting a point of view from a future author, Mormon, hundreds of years in the future, looking back who is telling us a history, but also trying to teach us lessons.” You can analyze your narrator saying, “Oh, our narrator, our redactor you said wants us to learn this, wants us to do that.” And it seems like this skill is crucial in reading the Bible too. We’re not getting this as it happens. We’re getting a later author looking back, trying to teach their current audience some lessons from history.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:10:02 Again, we can use Mormon to help us out here even with the Bible study. He keeps saying, “I’m not giving you even 1% of what I could,” and the same is true in the Bible. Think of the Book of Judges, maybe it’s a couple of centuries of time. All kinds of things could have been included, but what was included was chosen to help fit the depiction that the redactors are trying to portray the lessons they’re trying to teach, how they’re going to highlight and illustrate those lessons.

John Bytheway: 00:10:31 Is the conventional wisdom that it was Samuel who wrote this?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:10:36 There’s an old Jewish tradition that Samuel was the author. Most people do not think that’s the case. The approach is that this was finalized sometime in the early to mid-500s BC, right? Looking back at what happened, kind of a, how did we get from entering into the land and getting set up, and Solomon built the temple and look at where we are now. Again, not completely unlike Mormon’s efforts to show, look at what happened to us in the Americas. If we’re getting more specific with the book itself, somebody has collected a variety of older stories, whether they were in oral form or they had written access to them in some form, we don’t know. And there are a number of themes in the Book of Judges that seem to be prefiguring. We might say David, in a positive light and the Benjaminites and Saul in Gibeah, which was Saul’s hometown and his capital. And Saul becomes the first king of Israel further in the story.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:11:35 In a negative light, some people wonder if an early addition of the Book of Judges was produced maybe during the reign of David or shortly thereafter, maybe after Solomon’s reign. Because Dan becomes an important cultic site under Jeroboam I, after the kingdom’s divide at Solomon’s death, Jeroboam I is the king of the northern Kingdom, sets up golden calves and Dan and Bethel as alternate worship places. And these are clearly viewed in the Deuteronomistic historical overview. These are viewed as really negative things, right? Way off track from what the Lord wanted. Some of us are old enough to remember having cameras, but we put film in the camera.

Hank Smith: 00:12:15 If you were born in the 1900s.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:12:17 Right. You finish the roll of film, you have to take it out and you’ve got a whole series of negatives, and then they’re developed and turned into positives. But when you look at the negatives on their strip of say 35 millimeter film, here’s one negative and it’s got a frame or a border around it, and here’s the next negative, and here’s the next negative, but they’re held together by this border. And that’s really what I think we have going on in the Book of Judges is that we have a series of accounts, series of stories, but they’re held together by this framework, which we think is later, which is influenced by the thinking and the language of the book of Deuteronomy. This sort of undergirds this whole historical overview of which Judges is part.

Hank Smith: 00:12:58 The redactors are likely southern Kingdom, because they’re putting kind of a negative slant on the northern Kingdom. I’ve never known that, that’s so helpful.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:13:08 It doesn’t have to be a major emphasis in our study, but if you read through it, you’ll see Judah, a few times it’s mentioned in the Book of Judges is usually fairly positive and northern tribes.

John Bytheway: 00:13:19 Conquerors.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:13:21 Yeah. Northern tribes and northern locations get portrayed in a negative light pretty regularly.

Hank Smith: 00:13:28 I’m fascinated by having the redactors purpose in mind as we read, because that’s to me one of the great things about the Book of Mormon is keeping Mormon’s purpose in mind as we read.

John Bytheway: 00:13:39 Mormon just keeps saying, “Thus we see”, we get those, “Oh, that’s why this is here.” And I don’t know if it comes as often here.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:13:48 I will say it rarely comes in the Bible. If we don’t have a lot of those explicit, thus we see here’s the moral to the story. Biblical redactors, we assume figured that you could figure out what the moral to the story was. They’re going to lay out the story and what you bring to the text, Are you male? Are you female? Are you rich or poor? Are you free or a slave? Have you been abused as a child or not? And all these terrible things and all these good things that happen to people in a lifetime shape what they bring to the text. And so they’re assuming, and I’d love, we’ll get into a couple of these stories. What do you think? What’s the message here? What are you supposed to take from this? Because they don’t specifically tell you, they’re assuming you will deduce what the message is.

Hank Smith: 00:14:31 John, I always hate it when I learn so much that I expose how much I didn’t know.

John Bytheway: 00:14:36 Oh, that’s every time we record for me, Hank.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:14:40 Don’t we believe in eternal progression and keep learning, right? Keep growing.

Hank Smith: 00:14:45 This has already made me love it so much, because I love reading the Book of Mormon that way. I love reading to analyze the narrator, and so now I can do that here.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:14:55 So there’s an interesting passage. It’s in Judges chapter 18, again, showing kind of the influence here of the redactor or later editors, if we’re going to say. Judges 18, looking at verse 30 and it says, this is part of a story that’s been narrated in chapter 17 and 18. So this is kind of the end of the story. The children of Dan set up the graven image, and Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh, and this is really meant to be read as Moses. And we can talk about this later if we get to it. But to make my point, he and his sons were priests to the Tribe of Dan up in the north of the Galilee region, until the day of the captivity of the land. And most people assume that this is the 730s or the 720s when the Assyrians take over the northern part of the Kingdom of Israel.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:15:41 So we’ve got the northern Kingdom, the Assyrians take over the northern part of that in the 730s and then completely conquer the northern Kingdom of Israel in the 720s. So most people think the final form of this book is produced after the 700s. And as I said, the standard approach is that the final form is produced even after the destruction of Jerusalem in the 500s, but again, by southern redactors. But they’re trying to say the captivity of the land the only time we really know about that, and it’s a little vague granted, but the only time we really hear about the captivity of the land is in the 700s. There are little bits and pieces of clues about that.

Hank Smith: 00:16:23 So Dana, is the author pro King and pro Jehovah? Because they’re trying to set us up for this idea of, yes, we need a King, but over and over, I mean, if they wrote Joshua 24:15, choose to serve the Lord.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:16:37 So yeah, and I’d say Joshua, the last couple sermons that we have from Joshua in chapters 23 and 24 of that book, very much this Deuteronomistic influence. Jehovah’s the only God, choose him, be loyal to him, don’t chase after other gods, right? As for me and my house, we’re going to worship the LORD Jehovah, and Judges very much the same, pro Jehovah. And look at all the problems when they worship other gods in addition to Jehovah. And I’m going to mention that now, we oftentimes it says, “They forsook the Lord and chased after other gods.” We don’t think that the Israelites ever stopped worshiping Jehovah. The problem we think historically was that in addition to Jehovah, they’re bringing in worship of other deities alongside him, complicating the problem for those who follow the perspective in Deuteronomy that there’s only Jehovah and you only worship him. Don’t go running after these other gods.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:17:30 But in antiquity, right? People were polytheistic primarily. They wouldn’t say, “Oh, forget Jehovah. Let’s worship Baal,” it was, “Oh, we’ve got Jehovah. We’ll cover our bases by worshiping Baal as well.” Bring them both into our little Pantheon, if you want to say it that way. Book of Judges definitely pro Jehovah and it turns out in its final form to be, yeah, we need a human king, not just the heavenly king.

Hank Smith: 00:17:54 When I’ve done my cursory reviews of it’s always been Jehovah or a king. We don’t want Jehovah. We want a king. And that Samuel does seem to say that a little bit. He says, “Look, kings are a bad idea. Let’s not do it.”

John Bytheway: 00:18:08 Let God be your king, sounds Book of Mormon to me. No, we’ll have the reign of the Judges, but the Judges are judging according to laws that God gave us. God is our king. These are his laws.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:18:20 Well, and even the book of Deuteronomy warns about future kings. And if there is a future king, then they ought to abide by the law of God. They ought to read God’s law regularly. They shouldn’t have lots of horses and lots of property, and all this other stuff that Deuteronomy warns about everything that’s going to happen. And Samuel in 1 Samuel 8 is going to warn about everything that ends up happening.

John Bytheway: 00:18:43 He’ll take your sons, he’ll take your daughters.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:18:46 I think I said earlier, part of the question that the Book of Judges raises is, who do we worship? And then, who is our king? And if we have a human king, what kind of a human king are we going to end up having? Think of Deborah, right? We don’t hear a lot about her, but she’s depicted as a prophet and she’s righteous. She’s faithful, what have you. Other Judges are just spiritual bums. They’re just completely off the rails as far as the prophetic perspective that’s portrayed in Deuteronomy and in other books. We’re going to have a mixed bag. Sadly, most human leaders have a lot of flaws and make the most of the situation, But the warning is always here. If they’ll follow the Lord, if they’ll represent him, if he’s the real King behind the Judge or behind the Monarch, then things will go well. And if that link is severed or twisted, we’re going to have problems.

Hank Smith: 00:19:43 That is something I’ve seen before, is that idea of, look when the wicked rule, the people mourn. It’s bad. Okay. I feel like I have a much stronger understanding of what we’re jumping into here.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:19:55 Let’s do a quick overview of where we’re going to go. So the Book of Judges divides nicely into three sections. We could call them three portions, chapter one, chapter two, and the first few verses of chapter three are really introductory material. And of setting the stage, giving us chapter two gives us the program notes. And we can walk through those in a minute of what we’re going to be seeing in the play or the opera or whatever, right? We’ve got the program notes. So the rest of chapter three through chapter 16 and the core of the Book of Judges. This is where we have accounts about Judges. We need to talk about that term. And then chapter 17 through 21, those last five chapters are often called the appendix. There isn’t a judge mentioned at all in those five chapters. These are two stories that have been appended to this collection.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:20:45 Now, all of the Come, Follow Me assignment, the chapters that are part of Come, Follow Me are taken from that core section. Well, we get two and three, kind of the program notes. And then, most of the chapters then are from this core section, reading about specific judges and their activities, kind of an intro, the accounts about the judges and kind of the outro as we might call it nowadays.

Hank Smith: 00:21:07 So three separate sections, chapters one and two, a little portion of three introduction. The main section with the, is there 12 judges?

John Bytheway: 00:21:17 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 00:21:18 These 12.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:21:19 There are 12 judges. Some we hear more about than others. And I have to assume 12 is not a coincidence. It’s a big number in Israel. Again, when we’re talking about redactors maybe they said, “Okay, we’re going to throw in two verses about this judge.”

John Bytheway: 00:21:34 So that we’ll have 12.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:21:35 Yeah. It’s kind of symbolic in a way, right? There may have been more. There may have been less. I think we need to talk about a few couple of issues quickly in relation to that. The Hebrew word is shopet, shopet comes from the verbal route shaphat, which means to judge. And so it’s a good translation. The challenges when we look at the Book of Judges, most of them aren’t judging in the way we think about judges like arbitration and dealing with cases and rendering decisions, and what have you. The only time in the Book of Judges we have that is in Judges four there’s one half of a verse about Deborah sitting under a palm tree, and people coming to her and she renders judgment on questions or issues that they’re dealing with.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:22:19 Again, we have to ask ourselves is the Book of Judges representative of what judges did across the board? Or has it just selected examples of judges who happen to not do much judging the way we think about it? But they’re leaders, and in a number of modern translations now have chosen the word chieftain, because these people function is, I don’t particularly like that, but they’re military leaders, the Lord chooses a leader to help deliver the people from their oppression. This is how they’re depicted in the Book of Judges. When we get to Samuel, he’s called a judge, he’s a prophet and he’s a leader. He even does a little bit of fighting, right?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:22:59 So I guess the main point is that there’s variety among judges and we see some people gathering others with them to help in the fight. Samson kind of goes it alone. So even within the military leader, depiction of judges, there’s a certain amount of variety that we encounter in the Book of Judges. We can’t harmonize all the chronological information in Judges with the overall picture. And then if we bring in archeological information and records from Egypt and other places, and try to make sense out of all of this. Scholars end up by saying, “Yeah, it probably wasn’t really 480 years. It was probably 200 years.” Judges one and a half to two centuries. Some of these we’ll see in the framework of Judges, a lot of times it’ll say in the land rested for 40 years or the land rested for 20, which is half of that, or for 80 years, which is twice that, right?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:23:58 Most people don’t think those are meant to be taken literally, but more, “Yeah, it was a short time or a long time or a really long time, but we don’t know”. Most people think, and I happen to agree with this, that the Judges are not sequential. When we read the book, it sounds like, okay, this guy, and then this gal, and then this guy, and then this guy, and they come one after another. Most people think they’re not sequential, but there probably was some overlapping. And part of the reason for that is that we don’t think, if you read the book carefully, they’re never described as universal judges through all the land of Israel, they often will call two or three tribes, maybe one tribe, maybe four or five tribes.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:24:39 But we never hear about all the tribes getting together and fighting together against their oppressors, and being under the leadership of one individual throughout the book. So the general approach to this nowadays, academic approach, I’ll underscore that, is that these are regional judges that overlap that probably not one after another, just the way it’s laid out. But again, this is kind of a mix of the world behind the text and the world of the text. Trying to make sense out of, how do we put this all together?

John Bytheway: 00:25:12 That’s interesting. So they could have been spread out over enough land that it’s not like everybody knew who the judge was at any given time. They could have been, I like what you said, regional judges.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:25:24 It’s ironic that the only time all the tribes get together in the Book of Judges is in chapter 20-21, where they’re about to wipe out the Benjaminites because of something that happened in the town of Gibeah. That’s at the very end of the book, the way it’s been formulated for us. So the rest of the time we don’t hear about them all together. Our perspective is the teachings and the principles in Deuteronomy. And look what’s happening, we’re using that as our lens to look at history and evaluate and interpret history, and to make points again about, so let’s just call it two centuries, right? We got two centuries at a time. They could have blown it off in a page and said, “Well, nothing really happened for two centuries and the same, it came along,” right?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:26:07 But they really want to forcefully bring home the point that Israelite activity produces certain outcomes. They’re going to illustrate that well in the Book of Judges to show how, again, we get from here to here. That’s a good way to get into the book. When we start Judges one, which is not in the assignment, but it’s helpful to just mention quickly.

John Bytheway: 00:26:30 I read the first seven verses and thought, when verse seven ends as I have done so God has requited me. Did God want him to cut off toes and thumbs of all of these kings?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:26:45 This is Adoni-Bezek, right? So he’s saying, “I’ve done these bad things and now God,” generically, probably from his perspective, this is restitution. “I did these bad things to other people and God’s made this happen to me. I had my thumbs and my big toes cut off as well.” So Judges 1:1, now after the death of Joshua. So that’s our link to what we read about at the end of chapter 24, it came to pass the children of Israel, asked the LORD, and I don’t want to beat this to death, because you’ve probably covered this in other episodes. But LORD, all in caps, is our clue that this is the divine name Jehovah or YHWH, it’s Y-H-W-H or yod he vav he in Hebrew, the four letters. Tetragrammaton as we say, the four letters of the divine name of God. And rather than writing Jehovah here or Yaweh they put the LORD.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:27:36 So we get a title in place of a name. We could just read Yaweh or Jehovah every time we see LORD in caps, but this is interesting. The children of Israel ask the LORD, ask Jehovah, saying, “Who shall go up against the Canaanites first to fight against them?” So what questions come to your mind when you read that?

John Bytheway: 00:27:53 They have to drive the Canaanites out of the land, who is going to go do that?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:27:58 Yes. How do they ask the LORD? It just says, “Oh, they ask the LORD.” One of the interesting things about the Book of Judges is there’s not only no political leader, there’s no overall major religious figure in the Book of Judges.

Hank Smith: 00:28:12 Joshua is gone.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:28:14 There’s a priest and a prophet get mentioned here and there, an angel shows up occasionally, but there’s very little explicit religious leadership that’s portrayed in the Book of Judges. Most people think when it says, “They asked the LORD, that they’re using the Urim and Thummim. The Aaronic high priest would’ve been involved,” doesn’t say for sure. So that’s a good guess. And since I said Aaronic high priest, this is a footnote, right? I make this regularly. Latter-day Saints here, high priest, they often think of high priest. The office in the church is restored. And this dispensation, when we’re reading the Old Testament, high priests, especially from Exodus onward, which is the bulk of the Old Testament. We’re always talking about the Aaronic high priest.

Hank Smith: 00:28:57 He’s running the show in the tabernacle.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:29:00 As far as the tabernacle and the ritual activity, that sacrifices and other things that take place there. Yeah. And you’ll get a little bit of this in the beginning of second Samuel as well. David asks through the Urim and Thummim, “Should I go up? Where should I go?” So we think that’s what’s going on here. And who’s going to go up first? The Book of Joshua ends with a fairly positive depiction of the Israelites coming in and taking over the land of Canaan. There are some hints that that wasn’t the case, but we sort of read it that way. And then when we get to Judges one and we get the reality check, wow, they haven’t conquered the whole land. They haven’t done everything that the Lord asked them to do as far as driving out or killing people.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:29:40 And so here they’ve got to finish the process and there’s a lot of finishing to do. So who’s going to go up first to fight against the Canaanites. And the LORD says, this is verse two, “Judah will go up first. I’ve delivered the land in his hand,” now Simeon in verse three goes up with Judah. And eventually historically the Tribe of Simeon sort of gets absorbed into the Tribe of Judah, which is interesting that they’re together here.

Hank Smith: 00:30:04 When it says, “Judah shall go up,” it means the tribe, correct?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:30:07 Yes.

John Bytheway: 00:30:08 Yeah. The Tribe of Judah.

Hank Smith: 00:30:09 Not some person named Judah.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:30:11 This is all tribal related at this point. The point here is that the conquest is continuing. It’s not a finished product at this point, right? So the ongoing conquest or the ongoing invasion, and again, depending on your perspective, the Israelites are coming in and taking over this place and killing people and establishing themselves. And the Bible presents that as the Lord’s will for them at this time. But there are challenges in dealing with and questions about those kinds of issues. And some of these historical challenges, it says in seven and eight, well, verse eight, “Children of Judah fought against Jerusalem. Smote it with the sword, set the city on fire.”

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:30:54 We’re going to read that later in Judges and even in Samuel, that the Israelites do not control the city of Jerusalem until 2 Samuel 5 when David takes it. So does this mean they kind of went in and smashed the place and burned it and then let the inhabitants, the Jebusites take over again and continue to live there for a couple centuries? Or is this optimistic or they had a little victory and it became a major note here? It’s hard to know. There are just some historical questions that we can’t answer.

John Bytheway: 00:31:28 I was going to ask you, the Jebusites were the ones who were there at this time. Did they call it Jerusalem or is the redactor calling it Jerusalem?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:31:38 No. We have even in some Egyptian texts from this period and a little bit earlier that refer to the city in a form of what we would say was the name Jerusalem. So we don’t actually hear about Jebusites outside of the Bible, which doesn’t mean they didn’t exist, right? But we do have the name. The Bible says it was called Jebus or Jebus, right? And again, as a footnote, there’s no J sound in Hebrew. When we say Jebusites, it would’ve been the Jebusites. Jebus, Jebus. It was called Jerusalem early on. According to Egyptian texts, the Jebusites are depicted in the Bible as the inhabitants of Jerusalem. It would’ve been a small city state. Again, the land when Joshua and the Israelites come into the land, there is not one unified Canaanite kingdom. These are a whole series of city states, a major city controlling the villages and towns in its area.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:32:37 And these city states, as we call them, would’ve interacted with each other as best they could, sometimes fighting, sometimes peacefully, right? But Jerusalem would’ve been a small city states and small city up in the highland country, even when Joshua and Israelites come. So they go up, Judas depicted as being successful. And then by verse 22, the focus shifts over 21 to Benjamin and 22 and following Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh. And much of the focus from then on out is going to be on the tribes of what end up later in history becoming the Northern Kingdom Tribes.

Hank Smith: 00:33:16 And it’s saying Judah is successful, gets them out of the mountains, not out of the valley. And it seems like the other tribes aren’t able to drive these non-Israelites out of the land. Is that kind of the summary here of chapter one, they weren’t able to completely govern the entire land?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:33:35 Yes, very much the case as that’s being depicted. Verse 19, chapter 1:19, the LORD was with Judah. And this is another major theme in the Book of Judges, but also in the Bible, right? This concept of what we call the divine warrior, that God is the one who’s fighting for or against sometimes Israel. And regularly throughout the book, he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had chariots of iron. And this does not mean that the chariots were all constructed out of iron, right? They’re wooden chariots, but the wheels had iron rims. And again, if we’re doing world behind the text archeologically, this time period is called the Iron Age I. Once we get the time of David, we get into what’s called the Iron Age II, right?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:34:25 But Iron Age I is the early use of iron in the middle east, the near east, as we call it. We hear in Samuel that the Philistines had more access to iron and iron production than the Israelites did. But even here, we’re getting this clue that the Canaanites, some of them anyway have chariots with iron wheels, which means they were sturdier. They could go over the rocky terrain, even in the valleys better than of just wooden wheels could go. The Israelites end up primarily in the mountains or the highlands, the hill country. The Canaanites continue to live in, grow their crops in, be successful in maintaining control over the valleys, which generally are more fertile and more productive.

Hank Smith: 00:35:10 Verse 28 says, “It came to pass when Israel was strong that they put the Canaanites to tribute and did not utterly drive them out.” So is it saying they didn’t do what God asked them to do?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:35:21 Yeah. And we’ve got several verses that are coming up that sort of reinforce this since they didn’t do what the initial program was.

John Bytheway: 00:35:30 Yeah. We’d rather just take a tribute from them than drive them out, “Hey, pay us taxes.”

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:35:36 Yes. And we’re going to see a couple verses as we go along that we’ll highlight that reinforce this idea. Not only that they weren’t able to drive them out, but then there’s a kind of a religious twist put on it that the Lord says, “Okay. If you’re not going to do it my way, I’ll leave them there. And they’ll be thorns in your sides and help to prove you whether you’re going to be faithful or not.”

Hank Smith: 00:35:58 So maybe the idea is here that since you’re not going to do what the Lord asked you to do, there’s going to be long term consequences that you’re going to have to deal with, which is an important life lesson.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:36:09 I’m going to assume that the Lord knew this was going to be the way it turned out.

Hank Smith: 00:36:13 Are their children going to pay the price for this? Or is it going to be them?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:36:16 Well, mostly it’s their children, right? Mostly their children and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, which brings us to chapter two, because there’s an important verse that we want to read. Well, there’s several important verses, but we want to get to verse 10. Chapter two starts, the angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to Bochim. Gilgal is this little site down near Jericho. You remember in the beginning of Joshua, the Israelites camp at Gilgal, when they first crossed the Jordan river into the land of Canaan and then they go against Jericho and elsewhere, right? So you remember this name Gilgal already, right?

Hank Smith: 00:36:51 Yeah. You’re supposed to.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:36:54 Bochim is the name of the place that they’re assembled. We’re going to read that how the name came about in verse five. But it says in verse one, “An angel of the LORD,” so this is the LORD in caps, which Jehovah or Yaweh, an angel. Now the Hebrew word, maybe you’ve covered this in past episodes. The Hebrew word is malak, and it means messenger. You don’t know initially whether it’s a human messenger sent by the Lord or whether it’s a divine messenger sent from the Lord. And context is really the only way you can tell. And our English word angel comes from Angelos, the Greek term, which also means messenger. So angels, as we call them, are divine messengers sent from God to deliver messages. Is this a human messenger or a divine messenger? There’s a debate over that, because we don’t have any really extra clues that help us know.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:37:46 I don’t want to beat this to death, but I want to show you something here. So the angel comes, the messenger comes and says, “I made you to go up out of Egypt, brought you into the land, which I swore to your ancestors. And I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you.'” So who’s talking here? It’s being presented as the Lord speaking. So there’s an angel or a prophet, we could say this is the principle of divine investiture, right? Somebody is speaking on behalf of the Lord as if he is the Lord. And we think it’s a he, you shall not make a league or a covenant, verse two, with the inhabitants of this land. Go in and throw down their altars, et cetera, et cetera, the end of verse two. But you have not obeyed my voice. Why have you done what you’ve done?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:38:24 So there is kind of that rhetorical question. Wherefore I also, verse three, I will not drive them out from before you. If you’re not going to do a better job of putting your own efforts into this, I’m not going to be here to help you. The people will be as thorns in your sides and their God shall be a snare unto you. And the people lift up their voice and weep at the end of verse four. And the verb happens to be from Bochim, right? So they call this place, verse five, Bochim because that’s where the people are weeping, and Bochim means the weepers. So couple of quick points to make about this. One, again, somebody speaking as if he’s the Lord. Two, we see this over and over and over again, it’s in Joshua, it’s in Judges, it’s later on in the prophetic books.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:39:12 Why did the Lord deliver the Israelites from Egypt? Well, one, he does deliver them from Egypt. So he has the power to deliver them. And two, he took them out of Egypt to make a covenant and have this relationship with them, right? So deliverance and covenants are major themes that get brought up again and again and again, in the text. If you want to take a break from all the details and say, “How does this relate to me?” Every Sunday, with exception of conference Sundays, I take the sacrament. I renew my covenant with the Lord. And I think of the fact that the Lord has delivered me, in this case from sin and death, right? But these themes of deliverance in covenant are spread throughout the historical and prophetic books of the Old Covenant. And it makes a wonderful way to think application wise, he did it for them. Nephi, and other Book of Mormon prophets do this, right? He did it for them. He can do it for me too, and he does do it. Does do it for me.

John Bytheway: 00:40:05 I really like that you put those together, because I’ve never heard them put together deliverance and covenant. Of course, I really like that you put those together. So I delivered you, keep the covenant.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:40:18 Yeah, and it’s not just delivering for the sake of delivering, right? As other people have said, he delivers them into or unto a covenant opportunity, which we read about at Sinai and all that took place there. And I mentioned this when I talk about the book of Numbers and all the murmuring and everything else that goes on there. But it works throughout the rest of the historical overview. In Exodus 24, the people say, “We’ll do everything the Lord commands us.” They enter formally into a covenant. They don’t do such a great job. Why do we have the sacrament every week? Because we don’t do such a great job. I’m thinking of President Nelson saying, “Repent every day” that the Lord and the prophet know that we’re fallen. We have weaknesses. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to sin. And we need to get back into harmony with, be reconciled with the Lord and Heavenly Father.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:41:09 So I think it’s really helpful to watch where those themes pop up again and again, right? Deliverance, I have the power to do this, but I did it on purpose so we could be in this relationship, make this covenant together.

Hank Smith: 00:41:21 Dana, I got to tell you, this sounds like my life right here. Okay. We made a deal. I told you I would come through for you, and you said you were going to come through for me, and then you didn’t come through for me. Why? Why didn’t you do what you promised to do? I’m like, I can see why the people they weep.

John Bytheway: 00:41:41 Do you know why you’re in this spot right now? What we’re talking about right here reminds me of the first paragraph in the Come, Follow Me manual on page 101. It says, “We all know what it’s like to make a mistake, feel bad about it, and then repent and resolve to change our ways. But in some cases we forget our early resolve. And when we face temptation, we find ourselves making the mistake again. This tragic pattern is typical of the Israelites experiences described in the Book of Judges.” That’s I think what you just described there. Influenced by the beliefs and worship practices of the Canaanites, whom they were supposed to drive out of the land. The Israelites broke their covenants with the Lord and turned away from worshiping him. Anyway, it kind of sounds like a pride cycle pattern, similar to what we talk about in the Book of Mormon.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:42:26 Yes. And as we keep going in chapter two, we’re going to get that cycle laid out for us. And biblical scholars don’t use the word pride cycle, but cycle is regularly used to describe this going through this cycle as we’ll see it outlined here. So yeah, good. Glad you brought that in. The next few verses in the Book of Judges chapter two, we got a recap. Chapter 2:7, people serve the Lord during the time of Joshua. Saw all the works that the Lord did. Joshua died. And then we get this verse that’s often cited in chapter 2:10. And also, all that generation were gathered unto their fathers, right? Their ancestors. So they’ve died, they’re put in the tomb. And there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD Jehovah nor yet the works, which he had done for Israel. I always struggle with this, right? On the one hand, why didn’t they know the works of the Lord?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:43:15 Well, they didn’t live through them, but you would’ve hoped their parents or grandparents taught about these things. But as time goes on, those great events, like the Red or Reed Sea, the wilderness, the Mount Sinai, the Covenant, building the tabernacle, Joshua coming into the land and the Jordan River said to have stopped, cross on dry ground as symbolic follow up to the Red Sea episode. They didn’t live through those, and as time goes by generations move along and people that haven’t had those personal experiences, those events from the past seem to have less power in their lives.

John Bytheway: 00:43:51 That reminds me so much of the Book of Mormon. There was another generation that arose that weren’t there to hear the words of King Benjamin. Perfect question. Why didn’t they know? And it seems like so much of what the Lord is doing in these Old Testament chapters is setting up reminders and feasts and everything to remind them of all the things that he’s done for them.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:44:12 Yeah. Yeah. So on the one hand, it reminds me now, not only a parent, but a grandparent. I have a responsibility, my wife and I, to talk to our children and grandchildren and to continue to remind them about the great things the Lord has done in our lives, as well as further back in history is in the scriptures. But at the same time, it reminds me that every generation, every person has their own agency. We can’t control that, but called upon as parents to do all we can to teach and to encourage.

Hank Smith: 00:44:40 It reminds me of Joshua four where they were supposed to set up the 12 stones on the other side of Jordan and over and over come to this place and your children will say, “what are these stones for?” And you’re to tell them, “Let your children know what God did.” He foresaw this chapter 10, this next generation doesn’t know.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:44:58 Yes. And the generation after that. Well, the rest of chapter two from verse 11 to the end, again, this is what I call the program notes, a lot of people refer to them this way. And I don’t want to get lost in the details, but it’s going to tell you what’s about to happen with these cycles. So verse 11, the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and served Baalim. Quick detail, so Baal is the Canaanite storm god who brings the rain and which brings crops and supports life. I don’t want this to sound too negative, but for some reason, the church’s Bible dictionary, even online as of yesterday still has, Baal is the sun god of the Canaanites, that is wrong. And if you think he’s the sun god, it messes up a whole lot of stories in the Bible, right?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:45:45 He’s the God of rain, rain and storm, which then produces fertility, life for crops and people, and what have you. Baalim is the plural form, I’m saying Baal, it may sound odd, right? They serve the Baals, and the question is, people a lot of times, different manifestations of Baal. Well, I had an experience with Baal at this town or at this town, or he did something wonderful for me over here. So we’re going to call Baal Berith and Baal Peor, and we hear about this occasionally in the biblical text. Nowadays, and I think more correctly, this is just being used as code for, they worship lots of male, Canaanite male deities. So lots of other gods, especially male gods. And we’re going to have the female equivalent in verse 13, right? So not to leave out the other side of the equation there. So verse 12, they forsook the Lord God, brought them up out of the land and they followed other gods from all the people’s roundabout.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:46:42 Verse 13, and they forsook the Lord and served Baal, here in the singular, and Ashtaroth, that’s a feminine plural form on the end of this, Ashtoreth as it’s sometimes given elsewhere in Hebrew. We generally think that this is Astarte, Babylonians called her Ishtar, a Canaanite’s fertility goddess, but here it’s in the plural form. So the sense is we think that the text is just trying to say, “Listen, they’re worshiping specific gods, but we can just kind of lump them all together and say lots of other male gods, lots of other female gods,” part of the world in which they lived here.

John Bytheway: 00:47:19 I think a lot of people that might not remember this in the Book of Judges might remember Elijah and the priests of Baal, same guy?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:47:26 Yes, same fertility God, 1 Kings 18. And what do they want? There’s a drought for three and a half years. And if you think Baal is the sun god in that story, it doesn’t work. They’re waiting for rain to come and Baal can’t produce the rain, but Jehovah, Yaweh does produce the rain that ends the drought. But because he’s the God of storms and rain, it was pretty easy for Israelites, we think, based on the perspective given in the Bible to say, “Well, things aren’t going so well, and I’ve been praying to Jehovah. So maybe I should bring Baal in and pray to him too. And maybe between the two of them, they can figure out how to bring more rain so we can fill up the cistern. So we can have a harvest. So the animals survive. So we can drink water all summer and fall till it rains again.”

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:48:14 So that seems to be what’s going on here, right? Again, not leaving Jehovah, forsake, really means they abandon him. What I’m suggesting and most people think is the case is that they’re not abandoning him. I don’t worship you anymore. It’s abandoning the appropriate way to worship him. Abandoning the perspective and Deuteronomy that you’re only loyal to Jehovah, no other gods.

Hank Smith: 00:48:39 I’m pretty sure that was commandment one, if I remember right. Thou shall have no other gods before me.

John Bytheway: 00:48:46 Well, I’ve got other gods. I’m just putting one as a priority, right? And that wording makes more sense now when you’re saying that, or if they love Satan more than God. They love God, but they love Satan more than God. But just the idea of, there’s still others, I think that makes more sense with a lot of what we’re reading here. There’s other gods, and they’re trying to have it both ways or many different ways, depending on their needs.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:49:11 For them, it feels like it was a little fluid. I’ll try to be faithful, but if I need to bring in some help, okay.

Hank Smith: 00:49:18 I love that you say for them, because that’s definitely us as well, right? It’s a little fluid. I love the Lord, right? I want to read something from Elder Oaks. He says, this is a talk from October 2013 General Conference called No Other Gods.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:49:34 Sounds biblical. Yes.

Hank Smith: 00:49:35 Yes. Yeah. “What other priorities are being served ahead of God by persons, even religious persons in our day? Consider these possibilities, all common in our world, cultural and family traditions, political correctness, career aspirations, material possessions, recreational pursuits, power, prominence and prestige.” The principle is not whether we have other priorities. The question posed by the second commandment is, what is our ultimate priority? Are we serving priorities or gods ahead of the God we profess to worship? So I like how you said that, Dana, it’s kind of fluid. I love the Lord. I just was wondering if maybe I could bring this other thing in here.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:50:21 And that statement from Elder Oaks sounds like an updated summary of what President Kimball taught a long time ago about modern idolatry. And he uses a lot of the same examples of how we, our focus, our time and our energy gets shifted to things that are of this world and less relevance in the long run. Important as they may be in their own rights, they can’t dominate our lives. Chapter two continues on, we’ve got the Lord gets angry then. So the people fall into sin, especially here, apostasy worshiping other gods in addition to Jehovah, and improperly worshiping him. An oppressor is going to come, the Lord sells them into the hands, verse 14 of spoilers. People who come and plunder them, another translation, their alternative, their enemies roundabout. This is mostly, generally they’re immediate neighbors not coming from hundreds of thousands of miles away.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:51:14 Oh, they cry out to the Lord. Verse 16, the Lord raises up a judge or raised up judges, leaders to deliver them out of the hands of their oppressors. They wouldn’t always follow the judges. They’d go whoring after other gods. Verse 17, we’re back to this. I mean, there’s the cycle, right? Sin brings oppression, cry out to the Lord, some sort of repentance you’d like to think. The Lord sends a deliverer, they’re delivered in their land and the people have rest for X number of years. And then, of course in their peace and prosperity, they slide into their old ways. And the cycle starts all over again. Some portions of Israel, maybe more than others, some areas sooner than others.

Hank Smith: 00:52:00 We just hit repeat on that 12 different times for the next few chapters. Just repeat, repeat, repeat.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:52:06 Yes. In one form or another anyway. And that’s generalized, there’s no doubt about that. And as we can say as we go along, why do the people continue to fall into these ways? Well, it’s individuals making individual choices or families making family choices. And then soon that kind of infects and influences a larger group in the community and our tribe or what have you. It’s the same situation we see in modern religious history as well.

Hank Smith: 00:52:35 Dana, when I go back to Judges one then, where it says, “They didn’t do what the Lord asked them to do.” Am I to maybe learn from this if great grandpa doesn’t do what the Lord asked him to do, then grandpa, dad, son, grandson, great grandson are all going to suffer. John, we’ve brought up Elder Holland’s, A Prayer for the Children over and over and over, right? The idea that the payments come out of your children’s and your grandchildren’s pockets in far more expensive ways than you ever intended.

John Bytheway: 00:53:05 You make a slight deviation, they might make it even further. We talked about this with my family the other day, where it talks about visiting the iniquity onto the third and fourth generation. And it doesn’t sound like it’s fair with agency, but there’s a footnote says, If the children follow the course their father’s followed, then they will have the same bad consequences type of thing. That made a lot more sense to me because the children might fix it, might turn it around, which the pride cycle suggests they do. It’s not the same people doing this every time. It’s going through generations and we are backed up for a couple of centuries and watching it happen. Is that fair?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:53:43 Yeah. Yeah. I’d say so.

Hank Smith: 00:53:45 This is like reading the Book of Helaman, almost.

John Bytheway: 00:53:47 Yeah. It’s like pride cycle, pride cycle.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:53:50 God’s covenant people struggling to live in the world, right? So, all times in all places. Look at chapter 2:20, just to wrap up the chapter two, “The anger of the Lord was hot against Israel,” This is a great idiom, right? Because in Hebrew it says the nose of the Lord was hot against Israel. This is a standard line. His nose got hot. He said, “Because this people have transgressed my covenant, which I offered this opportunity to you, which I commanded your ancestors. They haven’t hearkened to my voice. I also will not hence forth drive out any before you,” of the nations, which Joshua left when he died. Verse 22, “That through them, I may prove Israel, whether they will keep the way of the Lord to walk therein as their ancestors did or not,” the word prove or test or try, because those are alternative translations of the verb here. Show up multiple times in the Book of Judges. You might think of Genesis 22:1, right?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:54:47 So the Lord was going to test or try Abraham with the sacrifice of his son. You could think of Abraham three, right? We’ll send them down and prove them now, but there’s a lot of proving that goes on. And in this case, the Lord saying, “I’m going to use the leftover Canaanites as a way to prove the Israelites. Can they live in the world, but not be part of the world?” And we know the story, things don’t go so well for many of them. But sometimes people are proving the Lord. Gideon’s going to say, “I need a sign before I can go forward. I’m a little shaky here. Give me a couple of signs. And so is the Lord really going to be with me?” And so it’s interesting in the biblical text that can go in both directions. The Lord proves us but sometimes people are said to have proved the Lord.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:55:32 Will he be faithful no matter what? And of course the answer from our perspective is yes. He’s always faithful no matter what, that’s the biblical depiction as well. But if we go into chapter 3:1, These are the nations, which the Lord left to prove Israel by them will show up a few more times. So yeah, they don’t drive them all out, so he doesn’t help them finish the charge, and now this is what we’re left with. Chapter 3:4, “They were there to prove Israel, whether they would follow the Lord or not.” Can we do chapter 3:7? I want one more thing about Canaanite gods here. This is chapter three, five, six and seven, right? “The children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites” and all these other -ites, that are just for our purposes, they’re subsets of the general overall Canaanite population.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:56:19 They took their daughters to be their wives. So Israelite men are marrying Canaanite women and gave their daughters to their sons and vice versa and served their gods. And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and forgot the Lord their God, and served Baalim and the groves. Baalim we’ve already mentioned, the plural form of Baal probably just gods in general, other gods. And then the groves, this will show up multiple times in the next few weeks reading as well. And I hope if your viewers aren’t used to regularly looking at the footnotes and I still use paper a lot. So it’s easy just to glance down at the bottom of the page. If you’re on your phone or your tablets, you have to click the link. It’s not as quickly visible, but I was noticing as I reread Judges, there are a number of occasions, almost every page there’s one, if not two or three annotations in our footnotes that say H-E-B, right?

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:57:15 Heb for Hebrew, the Hebrew means this or the Hebrew says this. So they’re trying to help you deal with the King James English, which sometimes is less than accurate, or we say things differently nowadays than they did long ago. So I would encourage folks to regularly look or glance at the notes to get a little help along the way, especially as you’re reading King James. So back to verse seven, the Baalim and the groves. Groves is the rendition here, tells you in the footnote for 7D, Hebrew is Asher wrote, which is the plural of Asherah. Asherah is Canaanite goddess as well. Mother goddess associated with fertility and other things. So sometimes we see the Grove because Asherah was associated. One of her symbols was a tree, tree with branches, typically life.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:58:08 There are occasions where we have depictions of a tree of Canaanite remains, material remains showing a tree with lions or animals, ibexes around it. We think it’s, again, the mother goddess giving life to creatures. Canaanite goddess, Asherah, Hebrew, the word, the noun is Asherah. But is rendered here as groves, Septuagint picks up on the tree idea. So the trees shrines to her. So she’s often depicted by the symbol of a tree or a post or pillar or something, artificial tree or a real tree. And we’re going to see even examples as we go along. They cut down the Asherah, they burn the Asherah or whatever, right? So the Israelites, as well as Canaanites are using a stylized tree, it sounds like, putting it near altars to help them focus on Asherah as well as Baal or Jehovah or other deities, right? So here again, there’s a plural form of that. So again, we’re thinking, okay, just the gods and the goddesses of these other peoples.

Hank Smith: 00:59:14 I want to sum up here that the Lord is, look, you didn’t keep your covenant, look, you’re serving other gods. So I’m going to not punish you so much as to, you’ve got some important lessons that you are going to have to go through and they’re going to be somewhat painful. That’s what it feels like to me is we’re setting up for some very painful lessons.

Dr. Dana Pike: 00:59:39 Some testing and trying is going to take place. And we hear, which is often the case in the news, not just in the scriptures. The negative element tends to get a lot of the attention. So when I read Judges, I’m always going to be thinking, this isn’t talking about every single Israelite is way off the rails. We can use for thinking the Latter-day Saints nowadays, right? There are some that are very faithful, there are some that are sort of faithful, there are some that come occasionally and then keep most of the commandments. There are some that are-

Hank Smith: 01:00:10 Fighting against the Lord and the prophet.

Dr. Dana Pike: 01:00:13 We don’t have secularism in antiquity, but we have alternatives to religious approaches, as we’ve already said, right? And some people are more in harmony with this perspective that Deuteronomy and the prophets present. And some people are less in harmony with that, but there are always good people. When we think of Ruth, here’s a family and the town of Bethlehem, it happens to be the town from which David will come from eventually. But here is a family and there are good people trying to lead good lives and trying to worship the Lord. We get a pretty negative view as we go through Judges. But I would say, keep in mind, this is not all folks, but this unfortunately becomes a lot of people. And whether it’s the majority or not, I can’t tell, but eventually we have to reconcile the fact that the negative aspects are getting the press.

John Bytheway: 01:01:10 Please join us for part two of this podcast.