Judges 14 – Samson, now grown and imbued with God’s spirit (13:25), falls in love with a Philistine woman and asks his parents to get her for him to be his wife.  They remonstrate with him a bit, but do his bidding after all. The writer implies that God was using Samson’s weakness here to foment a crisis with the Philistines that would lead to their liberation, but we must wait and see the story play out (14:4).

Going down to Timnah to see about the…

Birthright: If it please the Court of Quaker Opinion, we birthright Quakers honor the human families that gave us the privilege of being Friends. We have the benefit of a history of persecution to recommend us.

Adoption: Called to, as with our father Abraham, a new existence, we honor the divine dispensation. We are to benefit the history of salvation.

Birthright: Honor thy father and mother so as to secure a long life upon the earth.

Adoption: Rather, hesitate to honor…

 Judges 12 – The Ephraimites are offended that Jephthah did not call on them for help in the fight against the Ammonites.  This brings the two clans into deadly conflict, a conflict which results in the defeat of the Ephraimites.  Jephthah ruled for six years

Ibzan, of Bethlehem, comes next.  He too had 30 sons and 30 daughters (this must be some kind of magic number at this time). He judged for seven…

Chapter 13 of Minding the LIght: Our Collective Journal is now available online and attached as a PDF file below.  For this chapter, we invited Friends to respond to the query, "When was a time that your body helped you see the Light, either by its limitations or abilities.  A time when your body warned you, delighted you, disappointed you, or otherwise taught you about the Light?"  For Chapter 13, we published 8 stories, 2 poems, a video and a photograph.

We invite you to…

Judges 11 – Jephthah (1070), a Gileadite and son of a prostitute, is the one called to save them. He had been driven away from his home by two legitimate sons of his father and he had gone to the land of Tob, where outlaws gathered around him and went raiding with him (11:3). When the Ammonites threaten the land, the elders go and try to get Jephthah to help them but he spurns them at first.  He finally agrees to come back if they will make him head over them…

Judges 10 – Tola is the next judge God raises up, a man of the tribe of Issachar, but nothing is said of the particulars of his 23-year rule.

Then comes Jair, the Gileadite.  He ruled 22 years.  He had 30 sons who rode on 30 donkeys and they had 30 towns in Gilead.

The Israelites backslide again, and the Lord sells them “into the hand of the Philistines and into the hand of the Ammonites, and they crushed and oppressed the Israelites. . .”…

Judge 9 – Abimelech goes to Shechem to get his mother’s clan’s support for going up against the 70 legitimate heirs of Gideon (Jerubbaal).  They give him money with which he hires “worthless and reckless fellows, who followed him” (9:4). Then he goes and kills all his brothers.  Only one survives the massacre—Jotham. 

When Jotham learns that the “lords of Shechem” are gathered “by the oak of the pillar at Shechem” (9:6) he goes up Mount Gerizim and cries out to…

Judges 8:4-35 - On the way through Succoth (pursuing the remaining Midianite kings—Zebah and Zalmunna), Gideon asks the people to feed his men, but they refuse.  Then the people of Penuel deny them too.  Gideon vows to return and punish them for their unwillingness to help.

Gideon finally defeats the last two, he returns and exacts the revenge he has promised on the leaders of Succoth and Penuel. 

Then he tells the kings he wouldn’t kill them had they…

In 1966 Time magazine published a famous cover story asking “Is God Dead?,” and at the time it may have seemed to many to be a reasonable question.  Membership in mainstream churches had begun its long decline; in some cases, according to Demographia.com, in traditions such as the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregational (UCC) churches, membership has dropped by nearly fifty percent in the fifty years since 1960.  In North America, the Catholic Church has seen their numbers grow almost…

Judges 6 – When the people turn again to what is evil, the Lord gives them into the hands of the Midianites (And Amalekites—people of the east).  They would come and pilfer whatever Israel grew or raised in the way of livestock.  They were like Locusts.  This time, the prophet the Lord sent is Gideon (c.1100).  The Lord comes to him and says, “The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior” (6:12). Gideon questions God. He ways, “And…

People follow leaders.  They followed Jesus.  They followed Moses.  Mother Theresa didn't seem to have any trouble finding helpers.  They follow leaders because something about the leaders, their personality, their ideas, their actions, resonate with them.  There is an innate sense within that moves us to follow, to head south or north, east or west and not only so moves us but tells us that we are going in the right direction.  Whether it's a Horace Greeley telling us to go West young man,…

How is the world's best dad like the world's first war?

Out of the mouths of babes, Dadaism was the bold, brash reaction to WWI. Its non-conventional proponents, like the Levelers at the time of our Society's beginning, scorned the political intrigue and royal prerogative that suffered little ones in the battle zones of moral, if not world, domination.

So stark was the reality of desolation that words and images took on a surrealist mode of expression. Defiance, not unlike the…

Judges 5 – There follows a poetic celebration of the victory of Deborah and Barak—it includes a brief retelling of “the story:

“[W]hen you marched from the region of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens poured, the clouds indeed poured water.  The mountains quaked before the Lord, the One of Sinai, before the Lord, the God of Israel” (5:4-5).

“The peasantry prospered in Israel, they grew fat on plunder, because you arose, Deborah, arose as a…

Judges 4 – King Jabin, Canaanite of Hazor, is the next tyrant Israel must fight.  His military commander is Sisera.  They dominate Israel because of their chariots of iron.

Deborah (around 1125—her song is one of the most ancient pieces of writing in the Old Testament)is a prophetess at this time and also a judge.  As judge, she sat under a palm tree situated in the hill country of Ephraim, between the towns of Ramah and…

Judges 3 – The nations the Lord leaves to test his people are the following: the five lords of the Philistines, the Canaanites, Sidonians,  the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon and the Jebusites in Jerusalem. Also the Hittites, Amorites and Perizzites.  They intermarried and worshiped the gods they worshipped—the Baals and the Asherahs.

According to the Eerdman’s guide, Canaan was Ham, son of Noah. They were the sedentary…

June 7, 2013

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has just released a large, detailed survey exploring public opinion about homosexuality and gay marriage. Included in the survey (Part 3) are a number of questions that explore whether respondents see homosexuality as sinful, and they asked respondents their religious identity, too. The Pew Center has asked these…

Judges 2 – The angel of the Lord reminds the people to make covenants with the inhabitants of the land, but to “tear down their altars” (2:2).  But they do not obey.  For this reason it says, they will be forced to share the land.

At age 110, Joshua dies and is buried in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mt. Gaash.  Another generation comes along “who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did what was evil in the…

Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. Share each other's burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ.- Galatians 6:1-2

My …

Introduction to Judges: We learn in Judges that the ban upon the enemies of the Israelites during their wars of conquest were not so thorough as Joshua may have led us to believe.  It is the theme of Judges to show how a remnant of the native peoples remained and how this remnant persisted as a temptation for the Jews.  The point of these conquest stories seems to be to show that God’s people are a people set apart.  Their ways and the ways of the world around them are not to…

Joshua 22 – Joshua releases the Gadites, Reubenites and half-tribe of Manasseh to go to their lands east of the Jordan, instructing them “to observe the commandment and instruction that Moses the servant of the Lord commanded you, to love the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to keep his commandments, and to hold fast to him, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul” (22:5).

When they get there, though, there is a serious misunderstanding. …