This is a history of the chosen people during the 400 or 450 years which intervened between the death of Joshua and the time of Eli, Acts 13: 20. It is not a connected history, but a collection of outstanding incidents, which determined the fortunes of the chosen people, and gave special illustrations of the power of faith in God. The chief lesson of the book is the intimate connection between loyalty or disloyalty to God and the corresponding results in well-being or misery. This is distinctly stated in 2: 11-23.

The judges were extraordinary agents of the divine pity and helpfulness, raised up as the urgency of the people’s need demanded, to deliver Israel from their oppressors, to reform religion, and to administer justice. Their administration was generally local, as Borak among the northern tribes, Samson in the extreme south, and Jephthah across the Jordan in Gilead.

It must not be supposed that Israel perpetrated an unbroken series of apostasies. Though these and their special deliverances occupy the major part of the book, there were evidently long interspaces of fidelity and prosperity. And. in the darkest hours, there were probably large numbers who, amid the abominations, sighed and cried for a better day.

There are two appendices, relating events which took place not long after Joshua’s death, and therefore preceding the greater part of the history. We may almost consider the book of Ruth as the third. The touches of human characteristics are very vivid and instinctive, and the book deserves much more attention than it receives from the ordinary reader.