Israel's Renewed Apostasy and Consequent Punishment - Judges 10:6-18

As the Israelites forsook the Lord their God again, and served the gods of the surrounding nations, the Lord gave them up to the power of the Philistines and Ammonites, and left them to groan for eighteen years under the severe oppression of the Ammonites, till they cried to Him in their distress, and He sent them deliverance through Jephthah, though not till He had first of all charged them with their sins, and they had put away the strange gods. This section forms the introduction, not only to the history of Jephthah (Judges 11:1-12:7) and the judges who followed him, viz., Ibzan, Elon, and Abdon (Judges 12:8-15), but also to the history of Samson, who began to deliver Israel out of the power of the Philistines (Judges 13-16). After the fact has been mentioned in the introduction (in Judges 10:7), that Israel was given up into the hands of the Philistines and the Ammonites at the same time, the Ammonitish oppression, which lasted eighteen years, is more particularly described in Judges 10:8, Judges 10:9. This is followed by the reproof of the idolatrous Israelites on the part of God (Judges 10:10-16); and lastly, the history of Jephthah is introduced in Judges 10:17, Judges 10:18, the fuller account being given in Judges 11. Jephthah, who judged Israel for six years after the conquest and humiliation of the Ammonites (Judges 12:7), was followed by the judges Ibzan, Elon, and Abdon, who judged Israel for seven, ten, and eight years respectively, that is to say, for twenty-five years in all; so that Abdon died forty-nine years (18 + 6 + 25) after the commencement of the Ammonitish oppression, i.e., nine years after the termination of the forty years' rule of the Philistines over Israel, which is described more particularly in Judges 13:1, for the purpose of introducing the history of Samson, who judged Israel twenty years under that rule (Judges 15:20; Judges 16:31), without bringing it to a close, or even surviving it. It was only terminated by the victory which Israel achieved under Samuel at Ebenezer, as described in 1 Samuel 7.

Judges 10:6-8

In the account of the renewed apostasy of the Israelites from the Lord contained in Judges 10:6, seven heathen deities are mentioned as being served by the Israelites: viz., in addition to the Canaanitish Baals and Astartes (see at Judges 2:11, Judges 2:13), the gods of Aram, i.e., Syria, who are never mentioned by name; of Sidon, i.e., according to 1 Kings 11:5, principally the Sidonian or Phoenician Astarte; of the Moabites, i.e., Chemosh (1 Kings 11:33), the principal deity of that people, which was related to Moloch (see at Numbers 21:29); of the Ammonites, i.e., Milcom (1 Kings 11:5, 1 Kings 11:33) (see at Judges 16:23). If we compare the list of these seven deities with Judges 10:11 and Judges 10:12, where we find seven nations mentioned out of whose hands Jehovah had delivered Israel, the correspondence between the number seven in these two cases and the significant use of the number are unmistakeable. Israel had balanced the number of divine deliverances by a similar number of idols which it served, so that the measure of the nation's iniquity was filled up in the same proportion as the measure of the delivering grace of God. The number seven is employed in the Scriptures as the stamp of the works of God, or of the perfection created, or to be created, by God on the one hand, and of the actions of men in their relation to God on the other. The foundation for this was the creation of the world in seven days. - On Judges 10:7, see Judges 2:13-14. The Ammonites are mentioned after the Philistines, not because they did not oppress the Israelites till afterwards, but for purely formal reasons, viz., because the historian was about to describe the oppression of the Ammonites first. In Judges 10:8, the subject is the "children of Ammon," as we may see very clearly from Judges 10:9. "They (the Ammonites) ground and crushed the Israelites in the same year," i.e., the year in which God sold the Israelites into their hands, or in which they invaded the land of Israel. רעץ and רצץ are synonymous, and are simply joined together for the sake of emphasis, whilst the latter calls to mind Deuteronomy 28:33. The duration of this oppression is then added: "Eighteen years (they crushed) all the Israelites, who dwelt on the other side of the Jordan in the land of the Amorites," i.e., of the two Amoritish kings Sihon and Og, who (dwelt) in Gilead. Gilead, being a more precise epithet for the land of the Amorites, is used here in a wider sense to denote the whole of the country on the east of the Jordan, so far as it had been taken from the Amorites and occupied by the Israelites (as in Numbers 32:29; Deuteronomy 34:1 : see at Joshua 22:9).