The Book of Judges falls into three parts, namely, (1) Judg. i. 1-ii. 5, which intrudes, as has already been observed, between the close of Joshua and its immediate sequel in Judges ii. 6 ff.; (2) Judg. ii. 6-xvi. 31, stories of a succession of champions and deliverers of Israel in the centuries preceding the establishment of the kingdom; (3) Judg. 17-18; 19-21, two additional stories laid in the time of the Judges. In the Christian Bibles the story of Ruth, which also is said to have occurred in the days of the Judges, follows.

The introduction, Judg. ii. 6-iii. 6, gives a summary of the whole period: as soon as Joshua and his generation had passed away, the Israelites fell away from the religion of Jehovah, and worshipped the gods of Canaan; indignant at this defection, he allowed them to be overrun and subdued by their enemies; when in their distress they turned to their own God for help, he raised them up champions who delivered them; but their amendment was brief, they presently relapsed into heathenism; and so it went on from bad to worse. In correspondence with this general scheme each epoch in the history is opened in some such way as this: The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of Jehovah; he delivered them into the power of such and such a tyrant or nation; when they cried unto him, he raised up so and so as a deliverer. Thereupon follows the story of the deliverance (see iii. 7-11; iii. 12-15; iv. 1 ff.). Sometimes, as in vi. 1-10, x. 6-18, these preambles are expanded, but the purport remains the same.

Another feature of the book is the systematic chronology in which the frequency of the numbers twenty, forty, and eighty (forty years being in the Old Testament equivalent to a generation) at once strikes the attention; see iii. 11, 30; iv. 3; v. 31; viii. 28; xiii. 1; xv. 20 (xvi. 31). In several other instances the figures vary a little on either side of twenty (eighteen, twenty-two, etc.). The duration of the oppression is given in the introduction of the story; the period of peace and prosperity which succeeded the deliverance, at the end; see, e.g., iv. 3; v. 31. In the same way the life of Moses is divided into three parts of forty years each; Eli judged Israel forty years; David and Solomon each reigned forty years. It can hardly be doubted that this chronology is artificial, and that the key to it is found in 1 Kings vi. 1, which reckons four hundred and eighty years (i.e. twelve generations) from the exodus to the building of Solomon's temple; but the actual figures in Judges and Samuel do not foot up to this sum, and there are some gaps in the series, namely, the years of Joshua after the conquest, the rule of Samuel, and that of Saul. The symmetry of the scheme has been broken by intrusions or accidental omissions in the later history of the book.

The author of the part of the Book of Judges we are now considering (ii. 6-xvi. 31) sees in the history of these centuries a series of "oppressions" by the native kings or by neighbouring peoples which the Israelites brought upon themselves by neglecting their own God and worshipping the deities of the Canaanites, the Baals and Astartes. This is making history illustrate and enforce the prophetic teaching of Hosea in the eighth century and Jeremiah in the seventh.

About the oppressions the author of Judges had clearly no information independent of what he extracted from the stories of the deliverances in his sources. In accordance with his theory of national sin and national disaster he converted what are in the stories themselves local conflicts, involving particular tribes or regions, into oppressions and deliverances of all Israel; where the story tells of raids by the Midianites, for example, the introduction gives them the Amalekites and the Eastern Bedouins for allies, and extends the devastation these wrought across the whole country to the neighbourhood of Gaza. The exaggeration of the evils and the emphasizing of the moral, as in other cases, invited later editors to amplifications in the same spirit. Of the heroes who delivered Israel from its oppressors the author made a succession of dictators ("judges"), who differed from the kings after them chiefly in that their office was not hereditary, and to most of them he gives in his chronology a long reign.

The setting of the history is thus unmistakably a product of the so-called deuteronomist school of the sixth century which we have already recognized in Joshua, and shall learn more of in Kings. The stories themselves have, however, not been recast or extensively retouched by deuteronomist hands; only at the beginning and the end, where they had to be fitted into the frame, are such retouches common.

The author's source was a collection of stories of struggles in different parts of the land, both east and west of the Jordan, with the older settled populations or with invaders, and the exploits of the leaders and champions of the Israelite tribes in these struggles. It included Ehud's assassination of the king of Moab, the defeat of Sisera and the Canaanite kings of the great Plain by Barak and Deborah, the rout and pursuit of the Midianite invaders by Gideon, and Jephthah's victory over the Ammonites in Gilead. The history of Abimelech's kingdom of Shechem—sequel to the story of Gideon—which is not accompanied by the author's moralizing comments, and the stories of Samson, which have no more than a chronological introduction and close, evidently belong to the same cycle of heroic legends; as do also the stories of Micah's idol and the migration of the Danites (cc. 17-18), and the older form of the story of the levite and his concubine and the sanguinary vengeance on Benjamin in cc. 19-21. The two last-named stories were not comprised in the deuteronomist Judges, whose doctrine they could not well be made to exemplify. On the other hand we shall see that this work included Eli and Samuel among the judges, and came to its natural conclusion with the establishment of the kingdom, as it began with the death of Joshua.

In several of the stories we recognize not merely such additions and improvements as are commonly made to popular tales in the retelling, but evidences of the combination of two versions of the same exploit or accounts of other doings of the same hero. This is particularly plain in the story of Gideon, where in Judg. vii. 24 f. (vs. 23 is a harmonistic note), viii. 1-3, the business of the chiefs of Midian is effectually finished, while in viii. 4 ff. it is all still to be done. The phenomenon is entirely similar to those which we have had repeated occasion to observe in the Pentateuch and Joshua and is to be explained in the same way. The two versions of the story had been united before the time of the author of the deuteronomist Judges, for in the joints of the narrative no trace of his peculiar motives or style occur.

The stories recount the exploits of local or tribal heroes, and doubtless represent the traditions of the regions or tribes concerned; with the union of the tribes under the kingdom, however, these traditions became the common property of the nation, and more than one writer made collections of them. As in the patriarchal legends, two strands may be distinguished, which have such affinities with the JudÆan and the Israelite histories in the Hexateuch respectively that they are naturally regarded as the continuations of J and E. To J may be probably attributed the story of Ehud (disregarding the introduction and conclusion), say Judg. iii. 16-28; in the story of Gideon, viii. 4-60 (with small exceptions), and a part of cc. 6-7; part of the history of Abimelech; and the adventures of Samson. A good specimen of the other narrator is the beginning of the story of Abimelech, with the fable of Jotham, Judg. ix. 1-25.

Here, again, additions have been made at various stages of the transmission: to the sources independently, by the author who first combined them, by the deuteronomist author, and in some places by editors at a much later time. These hands cannot always be certainly discriminated, but the main outlines of the literary history are clear enough. A peculiar problem is presented by the so-called Minor Judges, of whom nothing is told but the length of their rule and the sultanly size of their families (Judg. x. 1-5; xii. 8-15). They seem to be brought in only for the sake of the chronology, the difficulties of which they do not diminish.

Except the curt notices that, the Israelites having again offended their God, he gave them into the power of the Philistines for forty years, and that Samson judged Israel for twenty years, it has already been remarked that the stories of Samson have no such introduction and conclusion as those which precede. The statement about the duration of Samson's judgeship occurs both at the end of Judg. 15, and at the end of c. 16, and it has been inferred from this that whoever put this formal close in xv. 20 left out the adventure with Delilah and Samson's tragic end (c. 16).

The stories of Micah and the migration of the Danites (Judg. 17-18) and of the levite and his concubine and the decimation of Benjamin (cc. 19-21) were not included in the deuteronomist book; but there is no reason to doubt that they are of the same age as the other stories in Judges, nor that they were found in one or more of the literary collections of these stories. In cc. 17-18 the character of the narrative in the main suggests the same source with the stories of Samson (J), but there are some duplications and inconsistencies which may be regarded as fragments of a closely parallel account of not greatly inferior age. In cc. 19-21, again, the original story seems to be from J (with perhaps traces of another version in c. 19), but in the following account of the vengeance taken by all Israel on the Benjamites, the older narrative has been united with a second, which in its point of view, its language, and its unimaginable exaggerations, is evidently akin to parts of the Books of Chronicles, or to the youngest additions to the Pentateuch such as the vengeance on the Midianites (Num. 31), and doubtless belongs to the most recent stratum of the Old Testament.

Judges i. 1-ii. 5, as has been pointed out above, is foreign to the connection in which it stands, and can only have been introduced there by a late compiler or editor. It is a remnant of the most historical, and presumably the oldest, account of the establishment of the tribes in western Palestine. That, in completer form, it had originally a place in the JudÆan history (J) is unquestioned, and in that work it may have been closely followed by stories of exploits such as those of Ehud, Barak, Gideon. Inasmuch as it contradicted the theory of the complete conquest and extermination of the Canaanites, it was left out of the works which described the conquest in that way, but scraps of it were subsequently introduced in Joshua, and finally the whole restored in its present position. It is easily seen that the recurring apostasies into Canaanite heathenism, as well as such stories as those of Deborah and Barak and of Abimelech, assume that the Canaanites had not been killed off to the last man, but, on the contrary, were very much alive; and, in fact, the authors of Judg. ii. 20-iii. 4 feel the necessity of explaining why God had allowed these heathen to survive.

The historical value of the stories in Judges is very great. However large the element of legendary embellishment may be in them, they give us a picture of the social and religious conditions in the period preceding the founding of the kingdom which has an altogether different reality from the narratives of the exodus and the wanderings.

The trustworthiness of this picture is confirmed by one contemporary monument of prime significance, the triumphal ode in Judg. 5, commonly called the Song of Deborah, celebrating the victory of the Israelite tribes over Sisera and his hosts and the death of the fleeing king by the hand of a Bedouin woman in whose tent he sought refuge. The text in the middle of the poem has suffered greatly, but the beginning and end are better preserved and display not only a developed poetic art but poetic inspiration of the highest kind. To the historian it has an even greater interest for the light which it throws on the times: the independence of the tribes on both sides of the Jordan, the subjection of those along the Great Plain to the Canaanite kings with their walled cities and their formidable chariotry, the summons to the struggle in the name of religion and the varying response, the victory of Jehovah over his foes. It should not be overlooked that Judah is ignored; it was not counted among the tribes of Israel.

The moralizing improvement of the history in the Book of Judges is not carried beyond the story of Jephthah, but neither at that point nor after the stories of Samson is there anything to indicate that the author is done. The introduction in Judg. ii. 11-iii. 6, a passage in which both the deuteronomist historian and a predecessor in the same way of thinking have had a hand, seems to require a correspondingly solemn conclusion, and the example of Deuteronomy and Joshua suggests that this would take the form of a hortatory address such as Moses and Joshua deliver as their testament to the people. Exactly such a discourse is found in 1 Sam. 12, where the aged Samuel, on the point of laying down his office as judge, reminds the people's conscience of the chief crises of the times of the judges in terms reminiscent of the introduction to the Book of Judges and to the several oppressions, upbraids them for their sin in desiring a king, and closes with admonitions for the future. Here Samuel appears as a judge, the last in the succession; as a judge he is represented also in 1 Sam. 7, where he delivers his people from the Philistines in the great victory at Ebenezer through the efficacy of his sacrifice and prayers—a Gideon or a Jephthah went about the business in a more secular fashion! Eli also is said to have judged Israel forty years. At some stage in the history of the sources of Judges and Samuel, therefore, Eli and Samuel were enumerated among the judges, and the close of the period was marked by the address of Samuel which we now read in 1 Sam. 12. The contents and form of this address have their parallels in the writings of the sixth century or the latter part of the seventh, and to that time it is doubtless to be ascribed.