Introduction

This document commonly called ‘Judges’, contains a collection of accounts of ‘Various Heroes and Guides/Leaders’ who helped to rescue the Israeli people from their oppressors. It covers the times from their invasion of Kena’an through to just before their first king. Most of these heroes or guides were actually warriors. Shimshon (commonly called ‘Samson’) is the best-known of all of them, and his story can be read in chapters 13–16.

From this document we can learn that Yisrael (‘Israel’ in older English translations) prospered when they obeyed Yahweh’s instructions, but when they disobeyed, then God allowed other peoples and nations to oppress them. However, God is always ready and prepared to save his people whenever they turn away from their disobedience and return again to obeying the instructions that he’d given them.

The previous book was named after the main character Yehoshua (Joshua) and the following books (Ruth and 1 Shmuel/Samuel) are named after their main characters, but this document with somewhere around a dozen important characters, has no single prominent character that it could be named after. Instead it’s traditionally named ‘Judges’ in English because of around twenty uses of the Hebrew root ‘שָׁפַט’ (shafat) often in roots normally translated as ‘judged’. Despite that, there’s not a single account in this document of these leaders judging the cases and conflicts of the common people. This dilemma offers two possible interpretations: 1/ that these leaders (often military leaders) did judge cases for the common people, but those details aren’t recorded, or 2/ (which we’ve leaned more towards) that this Hebrew word has a wider range of meaning, and so we’ve leaned towards the English word ‘guided’ or ‘led’ in these contexts.

This is still an early look into the unpolished text of the Open English Translation of the Bible. Please double-check the text in advance before using in public.