Preaching through a Judges series

We've finished going through Judges; I broke it up into 9 weeks a little something like this: 

Judges 1:1-3:6 - beginning badly

Judges 3:7-31 - God's grace

Judges 4-5 - singing salvation

Judges 6-9 - Gideon's gaffes

Judges 10-12 - outrageous oath

Judges 13-15 - Samson's start

Judges 16 - winning through weakness

Judges 17-18 - grifters gonna get grifted

Judges 19-21 - the evil ending

I should add, I didn't think of the alliteration before today - that only just came to me now - always too late!

I try to preach through whole books where I can (see my complete list here), so that people go away from a series knowing that part of the Bible well, hopefully having read the whole thing, and with a growing picture of how the Bible fits together as a whole.

What I have been most struck by as I've worked through Judges (I had two weeks off preaching - Gideon and Samson #1 were preached by others) is the way the book uses recursion or juxtaposition. That is, every story is to be interpreted with reference to the stories either side of it. That is already obvious as the concentric structure of the book is examined, such that the opposing panels handle similar themes: 

Beginning at the end, we meet a Levite from the hill country of Ephraim. Could it be that this was the young Levite from the previous story, who was also a Levite in Ephraim? Probably not, because he moved up to Dan, but the connection is interesting.

So too with the Dan/Micah saga. The story begins without a beginning - it is as if it has slipped in between chapters 16-17. But when it begins we meet a woman who had 1100 silver shekels. Which other woman do we know with 1100 silver shekels? Delilah, from the previous episode, was promised 1100 shekels from each Philistine if she handed over Samson. Could it be that Micah's mother is Delilah? Probably not, but the connection is interesting. 

Similar connections continue throughout Judges (see my notes on Jephthah for some other examples). What this demonstrates is that Judges as a whole is thoughtfully composed, arranged, and edited with reference to every other story. However many original authors or redactors there may have been, the end result is a masterful illustration of adding meaning from structure; juxtaposing two stories next to each other forces them to be understood with reference to each other, so that two stories (or half a dozen or so) are more than the sum of their parts.  

As you work through or read through or preach through Judges, keep asking questions about juxtaposition. Rachelle Gilmour's book on Juxtaposition in Elisha is a superb guide and introduction to the question in general.