Bird's-eye view
Judges 3:31 is one of those verses that is easy to read right past. It is a blip on the screen, a historical footnote wedged between the extended story of Ehud's left-handed deliverance and the celebrated account of Deborah and Barak. But in the inspired economy of God's Word, there are no throwaway lines. This single verse is a miniature portrait of the central theme of Judges, and indeed, of the whole Bible: God delights in saving His people through the most unlikely means. Here we have a man, Shamgar, who is not given an elaborate introduction. He is armed not with a sword or spear, but with a common agricultural tool. And yet, through this humble instrument, God brings about a mighty deliverance for Israel. This verse is a potent reminder that the power for salvation lies not in the vessel, but in the sovereign God who chooses to use it. It is a gospel snapshot, showing us that God's strength is made perfect in our weakness, and that He scoffs at the world's standards of power and prestige.
The account of Shamgar serves as a necessary corrective to our tendency to look for salvation in the polished, the powerful, and the credentialed. God's ways are not our ways. He raised up a farmer with a cattle prod to save Israel, just as He would later raise up a carpenter's son from Nazareth to save the world. The principle is the same. The glory belongs to God alone, and He ensures this by choosing instruments that cannot possibly lay claim to that glory themselves.
Outline
- 1. A Parenthetical Salvation (Judges 3:31)
- a. The Unlikely Successor (v. 31a)
- b. The Unlikely Weapon (v. 31b)
- c. The Unlikely Victory (v. 31c)
- d. The Unlikely Savior (v. 31d)
Context In Judges
This verse appears immediately after the account of Ehud, the left-handed Benjamite who delivered Israel from Moabite oppression, resulting in eighty years of peace (Judges 3:30). The book of Judges operates in a grim cycle: Israel sins, God hands them over to an oppressor, the people cry out, and God raises up a deliverer (a judge). Shamgar's brief story fits within this pattern, though it is presented in a highly compressed form. It serves as a bridge between the major narratives of Ehud and Deborah. The mention of the Philistines is significant, as they will become a persistent and formidable enemy for Israel throughout the rest of Judges, and on into the books of Samuel and Kings. This short verse is the first real taste of that conflict. Furthermore, the Song of Deborah later references this period as a time of great distress and lawlessness, when "the highways were abandoned" (Judges 5:6), underscoring the severity of the Philistine threat and the significance of Shamgar's intervention, however briefly it is recounted here.
Key Issues
- The Sovereignty of God in Deliverance
- God's Use of Unlikely Instruments
- The Nature of Faith and Courage
- The Humility of God's Power
- The Philistine Threat
God's Improvised Weapons
One of the central lessons of redemptive history is that God does not need our polished weaponry. He is not dependent on our strength, our technology, our strategic planning, or our political clout. In fact, He seems to take a particular pleasure in setting all of that aside to work with the mundane, the overlooked, and the downright foolish. When Israel was properly armed and confident in their own strength, they were prone to forget the Lord. So, God often worked when they were disarmed and desperate.
Shamgar's oxgoad is in the same category as the jawbone of a donkey in Samson's hand, the stone from David's sling, the trumpets and clay pots of Gideon's army, and ultimately, the cross of Christ itself. The cross was an instrument of shameful, cursed death, the ultimate symbol of Roman imperial power and worldly contempt. It was the world's oxgoad, intended to crush a peasant king. But in the hands of a sovereign God, it became the instrument of salvation for the entire world. God loves to pick up the world's tools of contempt and use them to bring about His glorious purposes. He takes the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and the weak things to shame the strong (1 Cor. 1:27). Shamgar's oxgoad is a case in point. It is a farm tool, not a battle-axe, and that is precisely the point. The glory goes to God, not to the goad, and not to the man holding it.
Verse by Verse Commentary
31 Now after him was Shamgar the son of Anath.
The verse begins abruptly, "after him," meaning after Ehud. The transition is stark. We move from a detailed, eighty-year story to this one-verse wonder. Shamgar's name itself is not Hebrew, and his patronymic, "son of Anath," is curious, as Anath was a Canaanite war goddess. This has led some to speculate that Shamgar was a Gentile, or perhaps a man from a syncretistic background. We are not told. But the ambiguity itself is instructive. God is not limited to working through those with perfect pedigrees. He is the Lord of history, and He can raise up a deliverer from anywhere. He is not bound by our tribal or ethnic lines. His concern is the deliverance of His covenant people, and He will use the instrument He chooses. The text gives us the bare essentials: here is the man God raised up.
And he struck down 600 Philistines with an oxgoad;
Here is the central action, and it is frankly astonishing. First, the enemy is the Philistines, a formidable and recurring foe. Second, the number slain is six hundred men. This is not a small skirmish. This is a significant military victory. But third, and most importantly, is the weapon: an oxgoad. An oxgoad was a long, wooden staff, perhaps eight feet long, with a pointed iron tip for prodding the oxen and a flat, spade-like piece on the other end for scraping mud off the plow. In a pinch, it could certainly be a weapon, but it was no sword. It was a tool of agriculture, not warfare. This detail is crucial. It is likely that the Philistines, in their oppression, had disarmed the Israelites (a tactic they use later in 1 Samuel 13:19-22). So Shamgar uses what he has. This is an act of raw, Spirit-empowered courage. He did not wait for a properly supplied armory. He saw the need, trusted in God, and used the tool in his hand. God honored that faith. The power was not in the oxgoad; the power was in the God who can make an oxgoad more effective than a thousand swords.
and he also saved Israel.
This is the result and the ultimate purpose. The whole event is summarized in this simple, profound statement. He "saved Israel." The word for "saved" here is the Hebrew word yasha, from which we get the name Joshua, and ultimately, Jesus. Shamgar is a type, a faint echo, of the true Savior to come. His salvation was temporary, political, and military. But it points to the greater salvation that God would one day work. This phrase also places Shamgar squarely in the line of the judges. Despite the brevity of the account, he is numbered with the deliverers. He fulfilled the essential function of a judge, which was to bring God's salvation to His people in their distress. He was not a king, he was not a priest, but in this moment, he was God's appointed agent of deliverance. God used a man who was barely a footnote in the history books to accomplish His eternal purposes, reminding us that our significance is found not in the length of our resume, but in our usefulness to the King.
Application
The story of Shamgar, brief as it is, comes with a sharp point, much like the oxgoad itself. It is a goad from God to us, prodding us out of our excuses and our worldly calculations of what is possible. How often do we survey a situation, whether in our personal lives, our churches, or our culture, and conclude that we are hopelessly outmatched? We don't have the resources, the influence, the numbers, or the right weapons. We look at the Philistine horde and then at our own hands and see nothing but farm tools.
Shamgar teaches us to see our circumstances differently. The first question is not "what do I have?" but rather "who is the Lord?" If God has called us to a task, He is not limited by the tools we bring. He asks for faithfulness with what is in our hand. For Shamgar, it was an oxgoad. For you, it might be a quiet conversation with a neighbor, faithfulness in your mundane vocation, raising your children in the fear of the Lord, or speaking a word of truth in a hostile environment. These things feel like oxgoads when the enemy seems to have all the swords and spears.
But our God is the one who gives the victory. He is looking for men and women of faith, not men and women of impressive means. The question this text poses to us is simple: what is the oxgoad in your hand? And are you willing to trust God and swing it for His glory? Our salvation does not ultimately depend on our strength or our implements, but on the God who saved Israel through Shamgar, and who saved the world through a cross. He is still in the business of winning impossible victories with the most unlikely of instruments.