Together, the three books Judges – Samuel – Kings tell the larger part of the story of Israel and Judah as more-or-less independent nations on their own land. Their principal focus is on ‘rule’, good rule and bad rule: mostly royal rule (by kings), but also ‘rule’ by judges and deliverers, and even by prophets. God too ‘rules’ in these books, but as judge rather than as king. Together with the book of Joshua, they constitute the sub-set of the Hebrew Bible called Former Prophets.
Judges starts where Joshua finishes, with the death and burial of Joshua under whose leadership Israel had gained her land – and the warning that, with the passing of the conquest generation, people were no longer aware of what Yahweh their God had done for Israel. The larger part of the book (chs 3–16) tells at greater length how a handful of ‘deliverers’ saved Israel from a series of external foes and reports quite briefly on a series of five men who in turn ‘judged Israel’. The latter part of the book (chs 17–21) concentrates instead on problems that threaten Israel from within. Kingship makes a brief explicit appearance in the heart of the book (chs 8–9): victorious Gideon (also known as Jerub-baal) refuses Israel’s offer of monarchy while behaving as if he had accepted it, and his concubine’s son Abimelech is briefly king – not over Israel or even a large grouping within it, but locally in Shechem in the central mountains. Then its absence becomes the focus of the final chapters. Through these, we read a fourfold refrain: ‘in those days there was no king in Israel’. The first and last of these go on to state, ‘each person did what was right in their eyes’ (Judg 17:6; 21:25). In the book of Kings, every king would be assessed as doing right or evil ‘in Yahweh’s eyes’. The actions recounted towards the end of the book of Judges leave readers in no doubt that ‘right in their own eyes’ – and the absence of kings – was very wrong.
Samuel reports the beginning of settled kingly rule in Israel. It opens with the birth and early development of Samuel (1 Sam 1–3) and reports the rise and fall of Israel’s first king, Saul (1 Sam 9–31). But the figure that dominates 40 of its 55 chapters is David: from his secret anointing by Samuel, through his uneasy relationship with Saul, to his acceptance as king first by Judah and then by the rest of Israel, early external successes, his fateful adultery with the wife of one of his leading warriors whose death he then contrives, and growing tensions within his household and mirrored in his kingdom. Though known as ‘Samuel’, its contents suggest ‘[The Book of] David’. Moses may feature across four of the five books of the Torah or Pentateuch; but no biblical character is delineated in such detail as David.
Pace picks up again in Kings: its 47 chapters tell a tale that spans some 20 generations. Solomon, David’s second son by Bathsheba, succeeds him, is proverbially wise, builds the temple in Jerusalem, enjoys international connections, b
