Bird's-eye view
This passage captures in miniature the entire spiritual trajectory of the book of Judges. It is a story of partial obedience, which is really just a respectable word for disobedience. We see initial successes, born out of a lingering faithfulness from the Joshua generation, immediately followed by failures rooted in faithlessness and compromise. The book of Joshua was a story of conquest, moving from left to right. The book of Judges is a story of cycles, a downward spiral that begins right here. Judah, the lead tribe, experiences victory when Yahweh is with them, but they falter when faced with a technological challenge, the infamous iron chariots. This is the key: their failure was not metallurgical but theological. They trusted in their own strength in the hills and feared the enemy's strength in the plains, forgetting that God is the Lord of hills and plains alike. This section sets the stage for the recurring pattern of sin, oppression, repentance, and deliverance that will characterize this dark period of Israel's history. The seeds of apostasy are sown in these early compromises.
We also see the fulfillment of promises, as with Caleb receiving Hebron, a reminder that God is faithful even when His people are not. But this faithfulness is set in sharp contrast to Benjamin's failure to drive out the Jebusites from Jerusalem, a compromise that would have profound and bloody consequences for centuries to come. The phrase "to this day" is a clear signal from the author to his original audience, reminding them that the sins of the past have a long and stubborn legacy. This is not just a historical record; it is a theological diagnosis of a nation's heart trouble.
Outline
- 1. The Conquest's Mixed Results (Judges 1:16-21)
- a. An Alliance of Faithfulness: Judah and the Kenites (Judges 1:16)
- b. A Victory of Judgment: Judah and Simeon at Hormah (Judges 1:17)
- c. A Partial, Incomplete Obedience (Judges 1:18-19)
- i. Success on the Coast (Judges 1:18)
- ii. God's Presence and Man's Failure (Judges 1:19)
- d. A Promise Fulfilled: Caleb in Hebron (Judges 1:20)
- e. A Defining Failure: Benjamin and the Jebusites (Judges 1:21)
Context In Judges
Judges 1 serves as a grim overture to the rest of the book. After the death of Joshua, the central, unifying leader is gone, and the tribes are now responsible for mopping up the remaining pockets of Canaanite resistance in their allotted territories. This chapter is a report card, and the grades are not good. It begins with Judah taking the lead, as they were appointed to do (v. 2), and there is an initial flurry of activity and success. However, the momentum quickly stalls. The chapter systematically goes through the tribes, listing their failures to drive out the inhabitants of the land as God had commanded. This disobedience is not presented as a military blunder but as a covenantal failure. It is the original sin of the period of the Judges, the root cause of the subsequent cycles of apostasy and judgment. The Canaanites who are allowed to remain become, as God warned, "thorns in their sides," and their gods become "a snare to them" (Judges 2:3). This passage, then, provides the essential backstory for everything that follows.
Key Issues
- Partial Obedience as Disobedience
- The Nature of Holy War (Herem)
- Faith vs. Fear in the Face of Technology
- Covenantal Faithfulness and Failure
- The Long-Term Consequences of Compromise
The High Cost of Low Expectations
The story of Israel's settlement in the land is a tale of two books. Joshua tells us what happens when the people of God follow their leader in faith. It is a story of victory, conquest, and fulfilled promises. But Judges tells the story of what happens when that generation dies off and the next generation decides to get practical. They start making calculations. They look at the enemy's iron chariots and their own lack of comparable technology, and they conclude that God's command to "drive them out completely" was perhaps a bit of an overstatement. Maybe God only meant for them to take the parts of the land that were easy to take.
This is the essence of faithless pragmatism. It reinterprets the clear commands of God through the lens of human limitation and fear. "Yahweh was with Judah," the text says, and in the very next breath, "but they could not dispossess the inhabitants of the valley." The conjunction is jarring. It should not be there. If Yahweh is with you, then iron chariots are irrelevant. The problem was not in the valley; the problem was in their hearts. They had exchanged the radical, miracle-working faith of their fathers for a more sensible, manageable religion of low expectations. And as the rest of this book demonstrates, this kind of compromised religion always leads to disaster. It leaves the enemy in place, ready to corrupt, harass, and oppress. The lesson for the church in every age is stark: when we stop taking God at His word, we begin a long, slow slide into apostasy.
Verse by Verse Commentary
16 Now the sons of the Kenite, Moses’ father-in-law, went up from the city of palms with the sons of Judah, to the wilderness of Judah which is in the south of Arad; and they went and lived with the people.
Here we have a small note of covenantal faithfulness. The Kenites were not Israelites by blood, but they had attached themselves to the people of God through Moses. They cast their lot with Israel in the wilderness and now they join Judah in the conquest. This is a picture of how outsiders are incorporated into the covenant community by faith. They leave the "city of palms," Jericho, a symbol of the world, and identify with God's people in their task. Their willingness to live in the harsh wilderness of Judah shows their commitment. They are a foil to the faithlessness that is to come. These Gentiles are acting more like true Israelites than many of the Israelites will.
17 Then Judah went with Simeon his brother, and they struck the Canaanites living in Zephath and devoted it to destruction. So the name of the city was called Hormah.
Judah and Simeon, two tribes acting in concert, fulfill the command of God here. The key phrase is that they "devoted it to destruction." This is the Hebrew concept of herem, or the ban. It means to utterly destroy something as a sacrifice to God, removing it from human use. This was not wanton cruelty; it was a judicial act of divine judgment against a culture saturated with depravity and idolatry. By executing God's judgment, they are acting as His loyal covenant vassals. They rename the city "Hormah," which means "destruction" or "a devoted thing," as a permanent memorial to God's righteous judgment and their obedience in this instance. This is a high point of faithfulness in the chapter.
18 And Judah captured Gaza with its territory and Ashkelon with its territory and Ekron with its territory.
The momentum continues. Judah presses its campaign into the Philistine coastal plain, capturing three of their five major cities. On the surface, this looks like a great success. They are taking territory and extending the borders of their inheritance. But as we will see, these victories were temporary. The fact that these cities would become major thorns in Israel's side for centuries suggests that while they "captured" them, they failed to follow through with the full measure of herem. They occupied the cities but did not deal decisively with the inhabitants.
19 Now Yahweh was with Judah, and they took possession of the hill country; but they could not dispossess the inhabitants of the valley because they had iron chariots.
This is the pivot point of the entire chapter, and indeed, the book. The verse begins with a glorious declaration: "Yahweh was with Judah." The result? They were successful in the hill country. The cause and effect are clear. But then comes the great "but." The logic of the sentence falls apart. The presence of Yahweh is placed side-by-side with their inability to conquer the valley. The reason given is "iron chariots." But this is an excuse, not a reason. Was the God who parted the Red Sea and flattened the walls of Jericho intimidated by iron chariots? Of course not. The problem was not the enemy's technology but Judah's faith. They looked at the chariots and their hearts failed them. They stopped trusting in Yahweh and started calculating military odds. Their failure was a failure of nerve, a failure of faith. They drew a line on the map where they believed God's power stopped, and consequently, that is exactly where it stopped for them.
20 Then they gave Hebron to Caleb, as Moses had promised; and he dispossessed from there the three sons of Anak.
Set in immediate contrast to the failure of the tribe of Judah is the stunning success of one man from that tribe, Caleb. While the collective tribe faltered at the sight of iron chariots, this old warrior, who had seen the giants forty years earlier and said, "they are bread for us," goes right into the heart of giant country and does what God told him to do. Hebron was the stronghold of the Anakim, the fearsome giants who had terrified the first generation of spies. Caleb, now an old man, takes them on and drives them out, fulfilling the promise Moses had made to him. He is a shining example of what one man of faith can do. His personal faithfulness is a rebuke to the corporate faithlessness of his kinsmen.
21 But the sons of Benjamin did not dispossess the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem; so the Jebusites have lived with the sons of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day.
The chapter concludes this section with another stark failure. Benjamin is assigned the great honor and responsibility of taking Jerusalem, the city that would one day be the center of Israel's worship and government. But they fail. They do not drive out the Jebusites. They settle for a compromise, a co-existence. The author then adds the editorial comment, "so the Jebusites have lived with the sons of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day." This tells us that the author is writing at a later time, looking back on this failure and pointing out its long-lasting consequences. This was not a minor oversight. This compromise left a pagan cancer in the very heart of the promised land, a cancer that would only be cut out centuries later by David. This failure is emblematic of the entire period: a refusal to obey God's command completely, leading to a state of perpetual spiritual and military conflict.
Application
The lessons from this passage are painfully relevant. The church is constantly tempted by the same spirit of compromise that infected the tribes of Israel. We are called to a radical, uncompromising faith, a faith that takes God at His word and moves forward, irrespective of the "iron chariots" the world arrays against us. These iron chariots can take many forms: cultural pressure, intellectual intimidation, political power, or the simple fear of man.
When the church begins to calculate what is "possible" or "practical" apart from the promises of God, it has already begun to retreat. We start to believe that the gospel can conquer the "hill country" of our private lives and families, but it cannot possibly take the "valley" of public life, of education, of the arts, of politics. We settle for a partial victory, a spiritual co-existence with the idols of our age. We fail to drive the Jebusites out of our own hearts and homes, and we are surprised when they cause trouble for our children for generations to come.
The contrast between the tribe of Judah and the man Caleb is the central application. We are called to be Calebs in a generation of compromisers. We are called to have a "different spirit," to follow the Lord fully, even when those around us are shrinking back in fear. God is still looking for those who will believe His promises and go up against the giants in the land. The question is whether we will be a people who make excuses about iron chariots, or a people who trust in the God for whom nothing is impossible.