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Judges 1: What the Passage Says

108 claims across 36 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Judges 1 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

After Joshua's death, Israel asks the LORD which tribe should attack the Canaanites first, and Judah is chosen. Judah and Simeon win a series of battles, capture Adoni-bezek, take Hebron and Debir, and Caleb gives his daughter Achsah to Othniel along with springs of water. The house of Joseph takes Bethel with help from a man they spare. The chapter then lists tribe by tribe the towns whose people were not driven out, with Canaanites and Amorites staying in the land, some of them later put to forced labor.

Claim by Claim

  1. 1:1
    • Joshua died.
    • After Joshua's death the Israelites inquired of the LORD.
    • They asked who should go up first for them against the Canaanites to fight against them.
  2. 1:2
    • The LORD said that Judah should go up.
    • The LORD said he had given the land into Judah's hand.
  3. 1:3
    • Judah said to Simeon his brother to come up with him into his allotted territory.
    • Judah proposed that they fight together against the Canaanites.
    • Judah said he would likewise go with Simeon into Simeon's allotted territory.
    • Simeon went with Judah.
  4. 1:4
    • Judah went up.
    • The LORD gave the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand.
    • They struck down ten thousand men at Bezek.
  5. 1:5
    • They found Adoni-bezek at Bezek.
    • They fought against Adoni-bezek.
    • They struck down the Canaanites and the Perizzites.
  6. 1:6
    • Adoni-bezek fled.
    • They pursued him.
    • They seized him.
    • They cut off his thumbs and his big toes.
  7. 1:7
    • Adoni-bezek said that seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off used to gather scraps under his table.
    • Adoni-bezek said that God had repaid him according to what he himself had done.
    • They brought Adoni-bezek to Jerusalem.
    • Adoni-bezek died in Jerusalem.
  8. 1:8
    • The men of Judah fought against Jerusalem.
    • They captured Jerusalem.
    • They struck it with the edge of the sword.
    • They set the city on fire.
  9. 1:9
    • Afterward the men of Judah went down to fight against the Canaanites.
    • Those Canaanites lived in the hill country, in the Negev, and in the lowland.
  10. 1:10
    • Judah went against the Canaanites living in Hebron.
    • Hebron was formerly named Kiriath-arba.
    • They struck down Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai.
  11. 1:11
    • From there he went against the inhabitants of Debir.
    • Debir was formerly named Kiriath-sepher.
  12. 1:12
    • Caleb said that whoever struck Kiriath-sepher and captured it would receive his daughter Achsah as a wife.
  13. 1:13
    • Othniel son of Kenaz captured the city.
    • The text is ambiguous as to whether the younger brother of Caleb is Othniel or Kenaz.
    • Caleb gave his daughter Achsah to Othniel as a wife.
  14. 1:14
    • When she came to Othniel, she urged him to ask her father for a field.
    • She dismounted from her donkey.
    • Caleb asked her what she wanted.
  15. 1:15
    • She asked Caleb to give her a blessing.
    • She said that Caleb had given her land in the Negev.
    • She asked him also to give her springs of water.
    • Caleb gave her the upper springs and the lower springs.
  16. 1:16
    • The Kenite was Moses' father-in-law.
    • The descendants of the Kenite went up from the City of Palms with the men of Judah.
    • They went into the wilderness of Judah, which lies in the Negev of Arad.
    • They went and settled among the people.
  17. 1:17
    • Judah went with Simeon his brother.
    • They struck down the Canaanites living in Zephath.
    • They devoted the city to destruction.
    • The city was named Hormah.
  18. 1:18
    • Judah captured Gaza and its territory.
    • Judah captured Ashkelon and its territory.
    • Judah captured Ekron and its territory.
  19. 1:19
    • The LORD was with Judah.
    • Judah took possession of the hill country.
    • Judah did not drive out the inhabitants of the valley.
    • The reason given is that those inhabitants had chariots of iron.
  20. 1:20
    • They gave Hebron to Caleb, as Moses had said.
    • Caleb drove out from there the three sons of Anak.
  21. 1:21
    • The Benjamites did not drive out the Jebusites living in Jerusalem.
    • The Jebusites live with the Benjamites in Jerusalem to this day.
  22. 1:22
    • The house of Joseph also went up against Bethel.
    • The LORD was with them.
  23. 1:23
    • The house of Joseph sent men to spy out Bethel.
    • The city was formerly named Luz.
  24. 1:24
    • The spies saw a man coming out of the city.
    • They asked him to show them the entrance into the city.
    • They promised to deal kindly with him.
  25. 1:25
    • The man showed them the entrance into the city.
    • They struck the city with the edge of the sword.
    • They let the man and all his family go.
  26. 1:26
    • The man went to the land of the Hittites.
    • He built a city.
    • He named it Luz.
    • That is its name to this day.
  27. 1:27
    • Manasseh did not drive out the inhabitants of Beth-shean and its dependent villages.
    • Manasseh did not drive out Taanach and its dependent villages.
    • Manasseh did not drive out the inhabitants of Dor and its dependent villages.
    • Manasseh did not drive out the inhabitants of Ibleam and its dependent villages.
    • Manasseh did not drive out the inhabitants of Megiddo and its dependent villages.
    • The Canaanites were determined to remain living in that land.
  28. 1:28
    • When Israel grew strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor.
    • Israel did not completely drive the Canaanites out.
  29. 1:29
    • Ephraim did not drive out the Canaanites living in Gezer.
    • The Canaanites went on living among them in Gezer.
  30. 1:30
    • Zebulun did not drive out the inhabitants of Kitron.
    • Zebulun did not drive out the inhabitants of Nahalol.
    • The Canaanites lived among them.
    • Those Canaanites became forced laborers.
  31. 1:31
    • Asher did not drive out the inhabitants of Acco.
    • Asher did not drive out the inhabitants of Sidon.
    • Asher did not drive out the inhabitants of Ahlab, Achzib, Helbah, Aphik, and Rehob.
  32. 1:32
    • The Asherites lived among the Canaanites who inhabited the land.
    • The reason given is that they did not drive them out.
  33. 1:33
    • Naphtali did not drive out the inhabitants of Beth-shemesh.
    • Naphtali did not drive out the inhabitants of Beth-anath.
    • Naphtali lived among the Canaanites who inhabited the land.
    • The inhabitants of Beth-shemesh and Beth-anath became forced laborers for them.
  34. 1:34
    • The Amorites pressed the Danites back into the hill country.
    • The Amorites did not allow the Danites to come down into the valley.
  35. 1:35
    • The Amorites were determined to remain living in Mount Heres, in Aijalon, and in Shaalbim.
    • The hand of the house of Joseph grew heavy upon them.
    • The Amorites became forced laborers.
  36. 1:36
    • The border of the Amorites ran from the ascent of Akrabbim.
    • The border ran from Sela, or from the rock, and upward; the text is ambiguous whether a place name or a rock is meant.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

1:1
"Asked the LORD" describes a formal inquiry, not private prayer: a question put to God through a priest, who used sacred lots kept in his vestment to get a yes-or-no or a choice between named options. LORD in small capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God, which the translators did not spell out. "Canaanites" is the general term for the settled peoples already living in the land, organized in small city-states each under its own king.
1:2
Israel's tribes are named after the sons of Jacob, so a tribe is regularly spoken of as a single man, "Judah shall go up... into his hand." The whole chapter switches between the ancestor's name, the tribe, and its fighting men without marking the change.
1:3
Simeon was Judah's "brother" in the sense that their ancestors were both sons of Jacob and Leah. The territory each tribe held had been divided by casting lots, so KJV "my lot" means the district allotted to us. Simeon's allotment lay inside Judah's, which is why the two campaign together.
1:4
The Perizzites are one of the peoples regularly listed alongside the Canaanites; the name may refer to villagers living in unwalled settlements. The Hebrew word rendered "ten thousand" is also the ordinary word for a military unit or contingent, so the figure may be a round count of troops rather than an exact body count.
1:5
Adoni-bezek is a title rather than a personal name: it means "lord of Bezek," the town he ruled.
1:6
Cutting off the thumbs and big toes was deliberate maiming, not torture for its own sake: a man without thumbs cannot grip a sword or draw a bow, and a man without big toes cannot run or keep his balance. It permanently disqualified a king from war while leaving him alive as a public trophy.
1:7
"Seventy kings" means the rulers of seventy small towns; a Canaanite "king" governed a single city and its fields, not a nation. Making them feed on scraps under the table was the standard way of displaying captive rulers as domestic animals. KJV "meat" means food of any kind, not flesh, and "requited" means paid back.
1:8
"Smitten it with the edge of the sword" is a fixed phrase for killing the inhabitants of a captured town. Taking Jerusalem did not mean holding it: verse 21 reports the Jebusites still living there, and the city stayed out of Israelite hands until David captured it generations later.
1:9
Three regions, each with a fixed name in Hebrew. The "mountain" is the central hill country, the high spine of the land. "The south" is the Negev, the dry grazing country running down toward the desert, a compass direction used as a place name. "The valley" is the Shephelah, the belt of low foothills between the hills and the coastal plain.
1:10
Renaming a captured town was a way of claiming it, and the writer keeps noting the older names his readers may know. Sheshai, Ahiman and Talmai are the names of clans or clan chiefs, remembered as unusually large and formidable men (see verse 20).
1:11
Kiriath-sepher means roughly "town of the document" or "of the scribe," and Kiriath-arba in verse 10 means "town of four" or "town of Arba."
1:12
Offering a daughter in marriage was a normal reward and a political move: it bound the successful warrior to Caleb's household and gave him a claim on Caleb's land. The bride herself was not consulted.
1:13
The Hebrew is ambiguous about whose younger brother Kenaz was. It can mean Othniel was the son of Kenaz, who was Caleb's younger brother, or that Othniel himself was Caleb's younger brother. Either way the two families are closely related.
1:14
Hebrew has no separate word for "donkey ridden by a woman"; dismounting here is a gesture of respectful approach to her father, not a casual detail. KJV "lighted from off her ass" means got down from her donkey.
1:15
"Give me a blessing" is an idiom for asking a present, here a specific one. Land in the Negev is grazing country with almost no rainfall, so a field there is worth little without a water source. She is asking for water rights, and the "upper and lower springs" are two named sets of them.
1:16
The Kenites were a nomadic group associated with metalworking who lived on the southern fringe of Judah; Moses had married into them. The "City of Palms" is Jericho, in the Jordan valley. Arad is a settlement in the dry southern country.
1:17
"Utterly destroyed" translates a single Hebrew verb meaning to place something permanently beyond human use by devoting it to God, in war, killing the inhabitants and taking no plunder for oneself. The town's new name, Hormah, is built from that same word, so the name means something like "Destruction."
1:18
Gaza, Ashkelon and Ekron are three of the five main Philistine cities on the coastal plain. KJV "the coast thereof" does not mean seashore; it means the territory belonging to each city. Some ancient copies of this verse read that Judah did *not* capture these cities, which fits verse 19 better.
1:19
Chariots with iron fittings were the heavy armament of the day, devastating on flat ground and useless in the hills. This explains the pattern running through the rest of the chapter: Israel holds the high country and fails on the plains. The Hebrew of "could not drive out" leaves it open who was unable, the plain sense is Judah, though the sentence begins with the LORD.
1:20
Anak's descendants, the Anakim, were remembered as exceptionally tall and were the reason earlier scouts had reported the land unconquerable. Caleb had been promised Hebron for dissenting from that report.
1:21
The Jebusites were the people holding Jerusalem. "Unto this day" is the writer's own present, some generations later, a stock phrase marking a situation that still stood when he wrote. Jerusalem sat on the boundary between Judah and Benjamin; the raid in verse 8 burned the town, but the stronghold stayed in Jebusite hands until David took it.
1:22
"The house of Joseph" means the two tribes descended from Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, acting together. Bethel means "house of God."
1:23
KJV "descry" means to reconnoitre or scout.
1:24
"Shew thee mercy" translates a Hebrew phrase for keeping faith with someone; in a captured city it meant specifically sparing his life and his household's when everyone else was killed. It is an offer of terms, not a sentiment.
1:26
"The land of the Hittites" here means the region north of Israel, in what is now Syria, a general name for territory outside Israelite control rather than the Hittite empire itself.
1:27
A walled town with "her towns" is a city together with the unwalled villages that depended on it and farmed its land; Hebrew calls them its "daughters." Beth-shean, Taanach, Megiddo, Ibleam and Dor all sit on the flat valley routes, the ground where chariots worked.
1:28
KJV "put to tribute" means conscripted for forced labor, unpaid work gangs for building and hauling, rather than merely taxed. This became the standard Israelite arrangement with populations they could not or would not expel.
1:29
Gezer guarded the road running up from the coastal plain into the hills. It stayed in Canaanite hands for centuries, until an Egyptian pharaoh captured it and handed it over as a wedding gift in Solomon's time.
1:31
Acco and Sidon are Phoenician port cities on the northern coast; they remained outside Israelite control throughout the biblical period.
1:33
Beth-shemesh means "house of the sun" and Beth-anath "house of Anath," both named for Canaanite deities worshiped there. Several places in the region carry the first name.
1:34
"Amorites" is another broad term for the earlier population of the land, used sometimes for hill-country peoples and sometimes, like "Canaanites," for all of them. KJV "would not suffer them" means would not allow them.
1:36
Akrabbim means "scorpions," and the "going up" is a named mountain pass south of the Dead Sea. "The rock" translates *Sela*, which is both the ordinary word for a crag and the name of a specific place, so the Hebrew can be read either way.

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