Judges12chapter 12

Judges 12:1-3

Ephraim brought the same complaint to Gideon at 8:1, after Midian was already beaten, and a soft answer turned it away; here the same tribe crosses the Jordan and threatens to burn a man's house over his head. Joshua 17:14-18 has Ephraim asking for a larger lot while the Canaanite chariots still hold the valley, so the tribe's record is a claim laid on other men's fighting. Jephthah answers with a fact the narrative never reported, that he called them and they did not come, and Albert Barnes places that call at his election by the Gileadites in chapter 11. The phrase at verse 3, I put my life in my hands, returns at 1 Samuel 19:5 and 28:21 for a risk knowingly taken.

Judges 12:4-7

The war turns on an insult rather than on the original grievance, since verse 4 gives the reason as the taunt that Gilead were fugitives of Ephraim, and Adam Clarke says the point of that reproach can no longer be recovered. The test at the ford rests on one consonant, samech where Gilead said shin, and Clarke argues the difference was plain to a Hebrew ear though it looks slight on the page; the word itself has come into English for any test that sorts one group from another. Forty and two thousand is the heaviest loss of a single tribe recorded in the book, above the twenty and five thousand and an hundred of Benjamin at 20:35, and every man of it died at a river crossing at the hands of Israel. Jephthah's six years is the shortest term given to any judge here, and the land is not said to have rest, a formula the book last used at 5:31.

Judges 12:8-15

Three judges close the chapter and what is recorded of them is households and graves rather than an enemy, which is how the book marks its quiet stretches; Adam Clarke counts twenty-five years of peace across the three. Abdon's forty sons and thirty nephews, which in this English means grandsons, ride seventy ass colts, and Jair's thirty sons rode thirty at 10:4, so standing is counted here in mounts and in marriages. Ibzan sent thirty daughters out and took thirty in, and which Bethlehem he came from is unsettled, since Joshua 19:15 puts one in Zebulun while Josephus places him in Judah, and the rabbis quoted by John Gill identify him with Boaz on the strength of the town. Abdon is buried in the mount of the Amalekites inside Ephraim at verse 15, an Amalekite name left standing in Israel's hill country, and Deborah's song at 5:14 already set Ephraim's name against Amalek.