Fellowship Around the Table
Great conversations about life, faith, and the Bible from Fellowship Bible Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma (www.fbctulsa.org).
Fellowship Around the Table
The Book of Judges: Chaotic Era w/ Eric Johnson (Part 2 of 9)
Join us on Fellowship Around the Table as Eric Johnson and I explore the Book of Judges, uncovering some of the most disturbing and thought-provoking stories ever told. We begin with the grim narrative of Judges 19-21, where the horrifying tale of a Levite and his concubine mirrors the chaos of Sodom and Gomorrah, painting a bleak picture of moral decay and lawlessness. Witness the tribal dynamics and the brutal aftermath that ensues when justice is absent and society spirals into chaos.
From the disturbing to the unexpected, our conversation shifts to the cycle of sin and redemption in Israel’s early history. Discover how unlikely heroes like Ehud, a left-handed Benjamite, and Shamgar, wielding an ox goad, were chosen by God to deliver Israel from oppression. These stories from Judges 3 reveal how God uses ordinary people and objects for extraordinary purposes, reminding us of the themes of divine deliverance and the power of faith. Tune in for a compelling discussion that offers both historical insights and spiritual lessons, as we unpack the complexities of these ancient narratives.
You are listening to Fellowship Around the Table. Welcome back to another week of Fellowship Around the Table, where we endeavor to have great conversations about life, faith and the Bible. We are in week two here with Eric Johnson. Hello, we are going through the book of Judges. Last week we did a good background and through the first couple chapters, getting into chapter three, with our first judge, Othniel, and so today we're going to keep going, but you're actually going to take us to Judges 19 through 21 to cover that story, because that's probably a better chronological fit.
Speaker 2:We'll see as we go through it, but early in the book is actually where that fits chronologically, even though it's placed at the end of the book by the author. So, starting in chapter 19, the first verse of that starts off with a phrase that is repeated over and over again throughout the end of the book. It's repeated, I think, four times in starting chapter 17. It's in those days Israel had no king, or in those days there was no king in Israel, something along those lines. And so what you're getting at the end of the book is a couple of stories that happen during this time in general, that are not chronologically at the end, but they're put in there by the author as an example of how the people are behaving during this period.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And so the phrase that's used in 2125, which is the last verse of the book, is in those days, israel had no king. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes, and we'll get a sample of what that looks like today. It's spoiler alert. It's not pretty.
Speaker 1:It's not pretty. This is a tough story. This is the kind of thing that it doesn't get talked on a Sunday morning, like if you're going verse by verse, you're skipping this section. This would get an R rating or worse.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it would fit in the HBO adaptation of the Bible quite nicely, oh yeah. Based on the phrase that's used over and over, you could call it the game of no thrones. Game of no thrones.
Speaker 1:There it is, the book of judges, the game of no thrones. Me and you have both joked outside of this recording, that I can't believe Hollywood hasn't picked up some of these scripts Right. They're just. There's some crazy stuff in here, crazy stories. They would, I think, be well portrayed on film, or it could be, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Judges 19,. We're not going to go in extreme depth into it, but it is, in short, a story in which no one comes off well. Yeah, I've called it before the worst story in the Bible. Is that right? It's not the worst event because it's hard to beat, like the flood or the tribulation, but it's just a story where you can't pick out any individual person and say, yeah, that person is the good guy in this. Just everyone comes off varying degrees of bad.
Speaker 2:So, in summary, you have a concubine who is described in the text as being unfaithful to her husband. It's not clear whether that means in the sense of adultery or whether she just ran out on him and went back to her father's house. Her husband, who's a Levite, goes off to retrieve her. Her father is kind of reluctant to let him go back to his duties after that and he finally leaves after a few days and he and his servant and his concubine are traveling and they go past Jerusalem, which at that time was not held by the Israelites. It's held by the Jebusites, okay, and his servant wants to stop there and the Levite correctly says no, we shouldn't stay with people who aren't Israelites, we should stay with our own people, right, because they're not supposed to mix with, you know, with the other people in the land.
Speaker 2:We talked about that last time. Yeah, and basically the men of Gibeah apparently read Genesis 19, which is the story of Sodom, and we're like, yes, that's what we should do with our lives, because it's almost beat for beat a retelling of that story. The only exception to that is that there aren't angels on scene who intervene and stop anything from happening. So what the Sodomites were planning to do, the men of gibeah actually do, actually the levites concubine.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's about as gently as I can phrase that I think right and so by the end of the night, she has died from the physical trauma that's been inflicted on her by the men of gibeah, and the levite comes out in the morning and sees what has happened, um which he basically turned her over to them to save his own skin so he's not exactly innocent in this either, right?
Speaker 2:and so he dismembers her body and sends parts of it through israel to kind of show what has happened to her. The people of israel are obviously upset, and they get together and say, all right, what are we going to do about this? Yeah, and so as you move into chapter 20.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just to remind people, there's not a national leader at this time. Right, it's very tribal, it's very regional. There's still a family, they still all know they're related, but you can tell there's, just as he says there's no king in those days.
Speaker 2:There wasn't this. There's no central authority.
Speaker 1:Central authority. That's a good way to put it.
Speaker 2:And so, as you get into chapter 20, kind of, the leaders of the various tribes get together and say all right, what are we going to do about this situation? This is a terrible thing that has happened. The Levite tells his story and conveniently adds a little bit to make himself look better, and then they all muster up an army of about 400,000 people and say all right, we're going to go deal with the town that did this.
Speaker 2:And so they talk to the tribe that that town is from and say, hey, these guys committed this horrific crime. You need to turn them over to us for justice.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the tribe says no, there are people. We're going to stand by them.
Speaker 1:And what tribe.
Speaker 2:We'll talk about that. Okay, sorry, I'm jumping ahead of you Fair enough. And so they get their own much smaller army together, because there's only one tribe. So they've got about 22,000 people. I think something in that. Yeah, I'll probably actually look at that you can look that up, but I'll give some context here.
Speaker 1:So we have a census for when the people leave Egypt, and then there's another census before they enter the land. And I have a chart here, but it's around what 2 million men of age.
Speaker 2:It's about 600,000 men of military age. We estimate about 2 million people total.
Speaker 1:Yeah 2 million because women and children added, but the count of military age men is 600,000. Right, they mustered an army of how big? 400,000. It's a significant number, portion of the population. I mean the population had probably grown, but still.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it's, it's a whole lot. Um, I think it says they left about 10% back to kind of keep an eye on things at home.
Speaker 1:but the rest of everyone mustered up. Sense the level of outrage by how many people came to arms.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we'll find out later that there's only one town that actually didn't show up, basically, and so the tribe that they're dealing with musters. It looks like about 26,000 men and they fight over the course of three days and the the larger force of the Israelites in general, loses the first two days, but they went on the third day and almost completely exterminate the tribe in question.
Speaker 2:There's about 600 men left at the end of that. Wow. And so then that takes us through chapter 20. And then chapter 21,. There is a story about how they don't want the tribe to be wiped completely off the face of the earth, and so they go through kind of a song and dance literally in one case to find wives for the remaining 600 men, because they killed all the women and children as well. Wow.
Speaker 2:So how the book ends is the Israelites need to find wives for these 600 men. They find 400 of them in the one town that didn't come to help them fight. So they wipe out that town and then take the 400, 400 unmarried women there and send them off to marry. And then they essentially arrange an organized kidnapping for the other 200, which is just very strange, because they've taken a vow that none of them will marry their daughter to a man from this tribe. And so they say all right, there's this festival where people, where the women, come out and dance around and we'll have these last 200 guys go out and just grab a girl that they're interested in and run off with her, so it won't be like their family gave them to her in marriage, but they can still have wives.
Speaker 1:It's very strange. Strange is a great way to put this section. It's not well-known, it's not a well-known story, but this is really a moment of civil war within this nation of people.
Speaker 2:We think of the Israelites acting as a coherent unit. A lot of the times, and during the book of Judges, they don't.
Speaker 1:You'll see either subgroups of the Israelites get together to deal with problems, but not the whole country, or you'll see infighting constantly throughout the stories, which just takes me back to getting into the fact that getting into the promised land was never the finish line.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Speaker 1:The fallenness is still very present. They weren't perfectly sanctified the minute they crossed the Jordan.
Speaker 2:They still aren't and neither are we to this point, amen. The tribe in question, the tribe that the men of Gibeah were from, the tribe that was almost wiped out here, is the tribe of Benjamin. Yes, and that leads us into the story of Ehud, who's our next judge in chapter three.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Now, before we get into Ehud, I do want to point out in chapter 20, when it talks about the war that's going on between the Benjamites and the rest of the Israelites, starting in verse 26, we have then all the people of Israel, the whole army, went up and came to Bethel and wept. They sat before the Lord and they fasted that day until evening and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the Lord, and the people of Israel inquired of the Lord, for the Ark of the Covenant was the Ark of the Covenant of God was there in those days, and Phineas, the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron, ministered before it in those days, saying shall we go out once more to battle against our brothers, the people of Benjamin, or shall we cease? And so the reason I bring that out is because Phineas, who's the only person who's actually named in that entire sordid story, is still alive at the time this is happening. We talked about Phineas last time. We talked about him in Numbers 21.
Speaker 2:So, he was still alive when Moses was alive.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So we're still within the first couple generations of the. Israelites being in the promised land.
Speaker 1:This is how you chronologically say hey, this little story is put in the book of Judges, but it really happened.
Speaker 2:It happens toward the beginning. We don't know exactly when. It might be like right after Joshua dies, it might be during Oth, who's going to be a prophet well into after the king's rolling, is going to say this twice.
Speaker 1:I looked this up. Hosea 9, 9 says they have gone deep in depravity, and he's referring to Ephraim and in the judgment that Hosea is talking about with them, he says they have gone deep in depravity as in the days of Gibeah. Wow, he will remember their iniquity and he will punish their sins. And then in 10, nine, he's talking about Israel sin. He says from the days of Gibeah you have sinned. Oh, israel, there they stand. Will not the battle against the sons of iniquity overtake them in Gibeah? This is on their minds.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:They know this chapter in their story.
Speaker 2:Well, the combination of those two verses is interesting too, because it's saying you're doing the same thing that they were doing, and it's been like that the whole time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so now we're, going back to Judges 3.
Speaker 2:Now we're going back to Judges 3. All right, we're going to have a little bit more of a fun story here. Not that there are any stories that are too much less fun than Judges 19.
Speaker 1:Hey, it's in the word of God. We're not skipping it.
Speaker 2:We are summarizing it there. We are summarizing it lightly.
Speaker 1:This is a family podcast.
Speaker 2:That is not a family-friendly story. No.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right, pick us up with our next judge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we'll get into the cycle again, starting in 3, verse 12. The people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. The Lord strengthened Eglon, the king of Moab, against Israel because they had done what was evil in the sight of the Lord. He gathered to himself the Ammonites and the Amalekites and went and defeated Israel and they took possession of the city of Palms. And the people of Israel served Eglon, the king of Moab 18 years Offhand. Do you know what? The city of palms is I do not.
Speaker 2:My understanding is it's jericho? Which is a little bit of an extra slap in the face to the israelites this quickly after the conquest, because that's kind of one of their, their signature triumphs, yeah wow all right, so into verse 15.
Speaker 2:So we've had the first couple parts of the cycle. You have the sin and you have the punishment. Yeah, next up would be the outcry. So we have. Then the people of israel cried out to the lord and the lord raised up for them a deliverer, ehud, the son of Wow. So you'll hear the argument sometimes, and I don't entirely buy this argument. But you'll hear the argument sometimes that each of the judges has some kind of defect that made it unusual for them to be chosen.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Defect in some sense. So, like you'll hear, you know, deborah's a woman. Obviously that's not really a defect, but it would have been considered unlikely that she would be a leader at the time. You have Jephthah, who's an illegitimate child. I don't entirely buy the argument, partly because you can just go back to Othniel and say Othniel was literally.
Speaker 1:Caleb's nephew and son-in-law. He, I'm joking. I think everyone would be too scared to ask Caleb.
Speaker 2:You got to pick somebody. That's right. But with Ehud, the thing you'll hear in that argument is that he's a left-handed man, and there have been times in the past that left-handers have been considered defective or inherently flawed in some way. And again, I don't entirely buy. The Ehud's defect here is not that he's left-handed, it's that he's a Benjamite. Because we're right after the story of the Levite and his concubine and the Benjamites siding with their wicked family members and almost being exterminated, yeah, like you would not pick a Benjamite to lead Israel at that point in a million years Right.
Speaker 2:And yet that's who God sends.
Speaker 1:So maybe point out too they're battling here with Moab and several of these nations that surround them, especially on the Western and Southern side, are distant family. So you have Moab and Ammon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, moab and Ammon are both descended from Lot Lot's daughters, abraham's nephew.
Speaker 1:Yep, so those, those two nations, come from Lot's daughters, and then the Edomites would come from Esau, yeah, and the Edomites.
Speaker 2:I don't think we see them specifically in Judges but, we do see them a lot later on.
Speaker 1:Later on.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, so Ehud is then going to make his preparations to deliver his tribute such as it is. If you'll start us off in verse 16, there go through 18.
Speaker 1:Okay, ehud made himself a sword which had two edges, a cubit in length, and he bound it on his right thigh under his cloak. He presented the tribute to Eglon, king of Moab. Now, eglon was a very fat man. It came about when he had finished presenting the tribute that he sent away the people who had carried the tribute.
Speaker 2:So we have the first of two reasons in here that my inner 12-year-old loves the story of Ehud, which is that it has a big fat guy in it Right. It's very explicit and the text points it out. It does. Yeah, he's very fat.
Speaker 1:He's very fat.
Speaker 2:Okay, so Ehud has armed himself. He puts it on his right thigh and we have kind of the significance here of him being left-handed. When you are putting your sword on your body, you put it on the opposite hip because that's how it's easier to draw. You can't draw from the same hip Right, and Ehud, as a left-hander, would put it on his right leg. Well, if they're checking him for being armed, they don't know he's left-handed. They're going to check his left hip because they're going to assume he's right-handed because most people are yeah, and so he's on the wrong side.
Speaker 2:We'll go to verse 19. Then it says Ehud himself turned back at the idols near Gilgal and said I have a secret message for you, o king, and he commanded silence and all his attendants went out from his presence. Now picture this. Let's put it in a modern context. Let's say that Iran has sent a delegation to talk to the president of the United States and one of the people in that delegation says I have a secret message for you. You think the president sends the secret service out of the room to hear the secret message.
Speaker 2:I do not think he sends the secret service out of the room. No, but you have essentially a hostile power. Who's visiting the king of Moab here and one of the visitors says I have a secret message for you, and he sends everyone away to hear the secret message?
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 2:Visitor says I have a secret message for you and he sends everyone away to hear the secret message. What's going on? That's an odd choice. That is a very odd choice. Spoiler alert it does not work out for it. So if you'll take us starting in 20 through 23.
Speaker 1:Ehud came to him while he was sitting alone in his cool roof chamber and he had said I have a message from God for you. And he arose from his seat, ehud stretched out his left hand and took the sword from his right thigh and thrust it into his belly. The handle also went in after the blade and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not draw the sword out of his belly, and the refuse came out. Then Ehud went out into the vestibule and shut the doors of the roof chamber behind him and locked them.
Speaker 2:So here we have part two of the reasons why my inner 12-year-old loves this story Because essentially it has a poop joke it does Like. My tentative understanding is that the actual word that's translated in the one you're reading is refuse. Like the translation is not entirely clear, but he stabs Ehud in the belly and something comes out.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:It probably doesn't smell great, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness. And just to the detail that the fat closed over the yeah, that's why it's relevant that he's fat.
Speaker 2:It's part of the reason is relevant. Actually, We'll Actually, we'll talk about the rest of it here in a minute.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Because it actually gets even funnier from here. Yeah, so Eglon sent all his bodyguards away, and the outcome is predictable, as he doesn't have his bodyguards anymore, and he gets stabbed in the stomach and dies.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's kind of why you have the bodyguards there in the first place. So in verse 24, we get when he had gone, the servants came and when they saw that the doors of the roof chamber were locked, they thought surely he is relieving himself in the closet of the cool chamber. And they waited till they were embarrassed. But when he still did not open the doors of the roof chamber, they took the key and opened them and there lay their lord dead on the floor. So what are the servants thinking at this point, like before they find him?
Speaker 1:I mean, I think he's using the restroom.
Speaker 2:Yes, how long do you think they waited? They waited.
Speaker 1:I'm going to say after 15 minutes it was uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:That's probably a decent estimate, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then in the context I'm trying to okay, I need some help thinking through this story.
Speaker 2:They know that Ehud is with him or not. He has left and the door was locked behind him. I don't know if they know that he's left or if they like maybe they saw him leave and the door is still just locked.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And there's a smell coming out of there I'm putting it together, because again something came out.
Speaker 1:Something came out, okay.
Speaker 2:So remember too he's. He's the king. Yeah, if you come in on him while he's in the middle of.
Speaker 1:That's a scary proposition.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like you're, you're the servant to a King. You don't want to barge in on him while he's in the middle of using the restroom, and so I figured they probably waited a little while. Yeah, and also not not to be too crass, but he's we've talked about before a very large man, right? You know his waste products might be more prodigious than some people's, so I kind of picture the servants like having a conversation outside the door is about should we go in now?
Speaker 1:No, I'm not going in there you go in, are you crazy?
Speaker 2:Jeff went in that one time we never saw.
Speaker 1:Jeff again. Jeff's not with us anymore. Oh goodness.
Speaker 2:So Ehud, meanwhile, makes his escape. He goes into the hills and musters up an army of Israelites and they go down and strike down 10,000 Moabites at the fords of the Jordan, and then the land has peace for 80 years, 80 years, 80 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is I?
Speaker 2:think, the longest period of peace they get during this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does get shorter and shorter, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:But yeah, it is interesting too that Ehud goes into the hill country of Ephraim, so it does not say that he goes to the land of the Benjamites, which is his own people. He goes up to the north of there a little bit and musters up the army from there, probably because, again in the chronology, there would not have been that many Benjamites to muster in the first place.
Speaker 1:Right, and that's a really large tribe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, ephraim is large and notoriously militarily strong. They're very warlike and belligerent and we'll see that a few times throughout the book. Okay, but yeah, so you have God using someone who would not have been expected, in an unusual way, to deliver his people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but the Moabites aren't fully destroyed they're not eliminated no they aren't supposed to be, like the israelites were not were told on the way into the promised land not to fight the moabites right set as your kin yeah um, so they will continue to be a sometimes ally, sometimes enemy, the israelites moving forward yeah, there's a pretty famous woman that's gonna make her way from that nation absolutely grafted into the line of christ definitely, yeah, all right.
Speaker 2:so that leaves us with one verse left in chapter three, so you'd think we would just skim over that, but we're actually going to spend a few minutes on it here.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:All right, so 331,. After him was Shamgar, the son of Anath, who killed 600 of the Philistines with an ox code, and he also saved Israel. Wow, what do you? I want some more details, so there's two little nuggets in this verse that.
Speaker 2:I definitely did not catch. The first or second or third time I went through this. The first one I'm borrowing this from the footnotes of my old NIV study Bible here is that Shamgar, son of Anath, is not an Israelite name. Oh, so son of Anath in particular, anath was a Canaanite deity, was, I think, a war goddess, if Wikipedia is to be believed, yeah, so having someone who is saving the Israelites and does not have an Israelite name and is in fact named after a Canaanite goddess or is related to someone named after a Canaanite goddess, how does, how do you think that comes about in this context?
Speaker 1:Boy, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Like. So I can think of three options. Okay, the first one is that it is someone who's just not an Israelite, who has just started, you know, converted to faith in God, or has just been friends with the Israelites in some way. The second one is that it's an Israelite who's given a non-Israelite name because of the cultural intermingling they've been doing with the people who live in that area. And the third, third one, and the one that I think is probably the most compelling, is that he's the product of an intermarriage ah, yeah, that's very compelling that.
Speaker 2:That's my guess. Obviously we don't know. It doesn't say in the text, right? My inclination again is to pick the most interesting option, and the most interesting option to me is that he's the product of a marriage that shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so he had a significant event that people remember, but it gets one sentence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when he's not listed as being a judge, he doesn't say he ruled over the people, just as he saved them in one instance. So the second thing is the word ox goad.
Speaker 1:Yes, what is that?
Speaker 2:So ox, goad is a compound word. So to start off, what is an ox?
Speaker 1:It's a large animal, like a from like I think of like cattle, but like poles used for labor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's similar to a cow, but it's. It's used for pulling plows or pulling wagons. If you ever played the game Oregon trail growing up, then you have your teams of auction that pull your wagon around, and then what is then? What does goad mean? I am not sure. So the best definition I've been able to think of for goad is to motivate through annoyance yeah, you goad somebody. Yeah, you goad someone into doing something Maybe you're poking at them like hey, hey, go do that thing.
Speaker 1:Hey.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I've been goaded into a few things.
Speaker 2:Yes, so have I. I was goaded into a few things. Yes, so have I. I was goaded into reading the book of Judges.
Speaker 1:It worked out pretty well. So goading can be good, it can be. I've been goaded into some negative things too.
Speaker 2:Definitely too, but yeah, so an ox goad is a device that's used to motivate an ox through annoyance, essentially.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's not a part of the animal. No, I think that's where I get stuck in my head.
Speaker 2:So we kind of touched on this earlier. But if you're trying to motivate your ox to do something, what are you trying to motivate them to do? Move forward, right. You're trying to motivate them to pull something, usually, but to get a move on, yeah. What do you not want to have happen while you're motivating your ox?
Speaker 1:Okay, I don't know.
Speaker 2:So the normal ox goad is like a pokey stick. Okay, you just take a stick and put like a kind of a rounded point on the end of it and just poke at it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I grew up around cattle and raising cattle and I mean we had a cattle prod. Now they make those. Now that are like an electrical shock.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, the Israelites did not have the taser form of the ox goad Right, so they just had like a stick that they would just poke it with. Okay, and when you're poking the ox with a stick, you want it to pull the plow or pull the wagon or whatever you're having it do. What do you not want to have happen to the ox?
Speaker 1:I think to get angry or to back up or that's part of it.
Speaker 2:Okay, you also want the ox to still be able to pull the thing that you're having it pull.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't want to harm it, you don't want to hurt it.
Speaker 2:Yes, like you want to bother it, but you don't want to actually injure it. You don't want the goat to go into it and like, injure its muscles or anything along those lines. So an ox goad is a specifically non-lethal object.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I'm following you now, and yet Shamgar kills 600 Philistines with one, which is pretty impressive, pretty impressive. So the thing that makes this verse that's what makes this verse so interesting to me is that God takes an implement that is intended for one purpose and uses it for a completely different purpose. It's fascinating. So that verse is really motivational for me. Honestly, like if God can take an ox code which is not supposed to hurt things and use it for a purpose other than what you would expect, why can't he do that for me? Wow, I'm a pretty introverted person. I don't like walk up to people and strike up conversations. It's just not my repertoire as a person. Judges 331 is part of the reason that I can get myself to go to stand up in front of a class of people and teach about judges. Is that right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, judges 3.31. Fantastic, I love that. You never know what the Lord will do with his word, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, I don't. I don't know that that is a verse that very many people have looked at very closely, but that one has really stuck with me.
Speaker 1:Eric and the ox goad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if there's something that you feel like you may be called by God to do, but it's not something you're comfortable doing, it's not up to you whether it succeeds or not.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:God can still use you for something that you would not expect to have happen well said.
Speaker 1:One verse just kind of. It almost seems like it should be in parentheses in this reading right absolutely, yeah it, yeah, it doesn't get the full cycle treatment.
Speaker 2:You just have this guy showed up and he did a thing, and then we move on saved israel, and this is the philistines.
Speaker 1:This name is familiar, I think, but it's first time mentioned in judges. This is a people group on the far western side, on the coast, where there's famous things going on now. This is gaza.
Speaker 2:This is that whole area where the gaza was a city, where the philistines yeah, that was one of their main cities yeah. So yeah, the, the philistines will have come up before and they will come up many, many times moving forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, I think that's a great ending point for this episode. Next week we're going to jump into chapter four. All right, I'll see you all next week. Thanks for joining fellowshiphip Around the Table. To check out more, visit fbctulsaorg.
Speaker 2:And so that's how the book ends essentially is finding wives for the remaining 600 Benjamites.
Speaker 1:Which is another crazy story.
Speaker 2:We'll do that again, so I don't actually say which tribe it is.
Speaker 1:Okay, go for it.
