This is the third of a three part symposium commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Dr. James B. Jordan’s publication of Judges: a Practical and Theological Commentary. Judges was the first book length exposition of Theopolitan Reading, a practice of readingScripture in its fullness that Theopolis continues to refine and grow through its online journal, dozens of publications on the subject, and our app, available free for a limited time.

---

Judges: A Practical and Theological Commentary
by James Jordan
Wipf and Stock, 334 pages

---

In 1919, Karl Barth wrote in his explosive Epistle to the Romans that “Recent commentaries contain no more than a reconstruction of the text, a rendering of the [Greek] words and phrases by their precise equivalents, a number of additional notes in which archaeological and philological material is gathered together, and a more or less plausible arrangement of the subject matter.”¹ More than a century later, and thousands of dissertations, monographs, commentaries later, little has changed. Most commentaries are concerned with things that Barth describes as a preliminary to a commentary, not an actual wrestling with the meaning of the Scriptures as the Word of God for the people of God. Even evangelical theologians suffer a subset of this impotency when they concern themselves with a small subset of the Scriptures deemed to be relevant for pragmatic purposes—mostly the gospels for the history of Christ, the epistles for doctrine, and the stories of patriarchs for moral inspiration—and abandon the rest. Such a method, which is the functional approach of most Churches and the evangelical intellectual scene, leaves most of the Scriptures abandoned to the dustbin of the occasional skim in “Bible-in-a-year” reading plans. However if, we are to heed Paul’s words that “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16), then we must reconfigure the way the Church reads Scripture. New eyes are needed.

James B. Jordan’s Judges: God’s War Against Humanism offers a path forward out of the Church’s captivity to modern criticism by showing how the book of Judges speaks to us today.² Of all the historical books, the book of Judges is especially particular for its relative obscurity in the modern Church. Except for Samson and maybe Gideon by name, none of the characters are familiar to readers. All the marks of a good book are largely missing—there are virtually no philosophical reflections, romantic storylines, gripping character portrayals, or models of virtue. In fact, one evangelical commentator writes, “Judges contains material that flies in the face of everything we identify as biblical morality. We do not know what to do with the rape, murder, genocide, sexual immorality, child sacrifice, lying, idolatry, and stealing.”³ Consequently, most evangelicals will interpret Judges as demonstrating Israel’s need for a king and move on to reading the more familiar stories of Samuel, David, and Solomon.

However, Jordan not only asserts that the stories recorded here really happened but that they speak to us today because “they embody universal characteristics and deal with universal problems, hopes, fears, symbols, and so forth.”⁴ Jordan’s exegetical method reads Judges through a set of symbols found throughout salvation history. For instance, Jordan finds the symbol of “the Woman who will crush the head of the Serpent” repeated throughout the book, such as when Jael crushes Sisera’s head with a tent peg or a woman crushes Ambilech’s head with a rock. Or the theme of the anointed one, the messiah, is repeated “because each of the judges was anointed by the Spirit.”⁵ However, Jordan relates the repetitions of these universal themes to the Church today by interpreting these stories as prophetic: “Judges is numbered among what are called the ‘Former Prophets.’ These books were called prophecies because the histories they recorded were regarded as exemplary.”⁶ Thus, Judges records real events, but those events were so ordered by God that God usurps them to signify moral instruction and gospel truth. Since God orders history to reveal His ways to His people, then we can simply read the history with an eye to sense the universal truths God is trying to tell us. “We do not need some specific New Testament verse to ‘prove’ that a given Old Testament story has symbolic dimensions” since salvation history is de facto symbolic.⁷

If Jordan’s methodology sounds like the allegorical interpretations of the Church Fathers, that is because it is. He writes as much: “Such a ‘maximalist’ approach as this puts us more in line with the kind of interpretation used by the Church Fathers.”⁸ Origen, Augustine, Jerome, and the rest of the Church until the enlightenment admitted that the history of the Scriptures signifies truths relating to doctrine and practice. For instance, Alexander of Hales, in the Summa Halensis, writes that while history regularly relays “singular and individual deeds of the people, and no inner meaning is intended…in sacred scripture historical narratives are not intended to signify the individual acts of humans, but they are supposed to signify universal principles of action and conditions that pertain to instructing the audience and shaping the contemplation of the divine mysteries.”⁹ This is as exact a restatement of Jordan’s point as one can hope for, which flies in the face of the modern readings of OT history. The center of Jordan’s interpretive method, his way out of critical dryness is this: return to the wells of pre-modern interpretation. The way out is a retrieval of ancient methods of exegesis. Hence, as Jordan says that each judge signifies Christ since they are anointed by the Spirit of God, so one protestant commentator, David Chytraeus writes, “These leaders…were types and images of the highest leader our Savior Jesus, who liberates and defends us not only against flesh and blood, or corporeal enemies and tyrants in this world who oppress us with servitude, but also against many more harmful and astute enemies.”¹⁰ On Samson, Jordan finds significance in Samson, a messiah, marrying a philistine: “An offer of marriage to a woman outside Israel would ordinarily be a bad thing, but when it is the messiah who makes the offer, it is an act of evangelism. God offers to incorporate Philistia into His bride, and the sign of that is Samson’s offer of marriage to this girl.”¹¹ Similarly, English minister Arthur Jackson notes that, “Some expositors add this too, that as Samson in his marrying a daughter of the Philistines was a type of Christ in his calling the Gentiles to be his people, and so marrying them to himself as his bride and spouse.”¹² On Samson’s death, Jordan notes that, “Samson positioned himself between the two central pillars. When he pulled them down, he symbolically pulled down the entire civilization built upon Dagon…In all of this, he is a picture of the coming Messiah, Jesus Christ.”¹³ Similarly, Richard Rogers writes, “There was here a lively figure of our Savior Christ, who though he destroyed the works of the devil in his life (even as he came to the same end) and foiled him shrewdly many ways, yet at his death he [The Devil] triumphed over him [Samson] and led him captive.”¹⁴ Similar parallels between Jordan and the pre-modern tradition resound, making Jordan’s Judges an attempt to recover the Church’s ancient hermeneutics.

However, Jordan does not simply repristinate older commentaries; instead, he engages anew with the text in his own literary, symbolic, and scriptural reasoning. For instance, most commentators, ancient and modern, consider the vow made by Jephthah, to offer whatever comes out the doors of his house to be the Lord’s a whole burnt offering to Him, as rash. Many Christians have a hard time squaring the vow he made with Hebrews naming him a hero of faith (Heb 11:32). I have always heard the vow as describing his daughter’s immolation, a horrific act to square away with God’s love and law, and the Spirit being on Jephthah as he makes his vow. However, Jordan argues that Jephthah’s vow was not rash but well thought out. For one, he argues that Jephthah knowingly refers to a person since, “Sacrificial animals, such as oxen, sheep, and goats, were certainly not found in the house.”¹⁵ Moreover, since it is “utterly inconceivable that he would offer to kill a human being in exchange for a victory from God,” Jephthah’s vow must mean he will commit whoever walks through his door not as a physical sacrifice but a symbolic one—the first from his house will be dedicated to the Lord’s service.¹⁶ As for the sacrifice being the first person out the door, Jordan notes that this person would function as a firstborn of his house, dedicating it to the Lord and ensuring the Lord’s provision over his dynasty. Hence, “He vows to sacrifice this person to the Lord, to perpetual Tabernacle service, in exchange for the Lord’s building of his house.”¹⁷ The tragedy for Jephthah is that person who comes out is his daughter, dashing any hopes he has for building his dynasty. “God had not chosen him to be a king, but to be a judge.” While some ancient commentators and rabbis will interpret the vow as referring to temple service, Jordan’s reading resolves apparent tensions and coheres well with the larger story of Judges. This example is emblematic of how Jordan uses larger Scriptural patterns to interpret specific passages, developing the commentarial tradition. To be sure, Jordan’s symbolic maximalism and literary reasoning can be stretched and appears like a “feel as you go approach” method of interpretation, but its results return insights that cannot be dismissed. Even in the face of the tradition, Jordan shows that literary analysis and scriptural reasonings can forge new insights for understanding.

However, Jordan’s most intriguing insights come from his moral reflections on Judges and their applications to today. For instance, in Judges 3:12–30, Ehud kills Eglon by deceiving him, saying that he has a message for him, which turns out to be a two-edged sword for his belly. Phillips P. Elliott rebukes this action saying, “by even the most elementary standards of ethics, [Ehud’s] deception stands condemned.”¹⁸ His actions are a result of “ends justify the means” logic that Christians must resist. Instead, Jordan says, “we must maintain that Scripture nowhere rules against deception in warfare…Ehud was making war, as God was teaching His people to do (Jud. 3:2), and in wartime killing, assassination, and deception are proper, assuming the war itself is a just and holy war.”¹⁹ Jordan derives this from his ethics of the text and God’s evaluation of it, not imposing his ethics on what God rewards. In this case, Jordan concurs with the tradition on the use of deception. Lecturing on this episode, Peter Martyr Vermigli permits the use of deception: “That we may not use evil guile with our friends, but against our enemies it is not prohibited, because it is as it were armor…Howbeit this is to be observed, that we speak only of those enemies which either God himself, or the public wealth, or a just Magistrate declareth to be enemies, and not those which every private man hates.”²⁰ Hence, God condones deception in a just war, a moral principle relevant in an age of intelligence warfare.

However, Jordan presses the ethics of deception further than some in the tradition are willing to go. Consider another case of deception—Jael killing Sisera after he seeks refuge in her husband’s tent, whom he had a treaty with. Elliot again condemns this deception and violation of hospitality saying, “Such evil deeds cannot be justified or defended”²¹ However, Jordan observes that Jael put allegiance to the Lord above everything else: “Jael broke the treaty with the Satanic Jabin because she converted to the side of the Lord.”²² Hence, Jordan welcomes Jael’s lies as righteousness as they advance God’s kingdom against evil. On the point of outright lying, as opposed to feigning ignorance, there is a division in the tradition. Vermigli allows for deception but not lying. So when it comes to Rahab, the Hebrew midwives, and other instances of lying, he says that while they acted out of faith and love of God, “out of infirmity they lied.”²³ Even when it comes to whether it’s permissible to lie to save a neighbor’s life, Vermigli hesitates to permit lying, “In these cases I think it is not forbidden, yea I judge it is most lawful to speak doubtfully.”²⁴ Jordan dismisses a relevant distinction between feigning ignorance and lying, they are forms of deception, which is allowed in service of defeating God’s enemies. Hence, he derives this moral principle, “Deception and lying are authorized in Scripture any time God’s kingdom is under attack.”²⁵

The application he derives from this point are especially interesting: “Serious Christians need to consider ways to deceive the enemy…If we have to deceive and lie to bureaucrats in order to keep our churches and schools running, we must do so freely and with relish, enjoying the opportunity to fight for the Lord.”²⁶ On the other side of COVID lockdowns, this point is particularly poignant. Although this application would be dismissed by most evangelical ethicists and cause trouble for Vermigli, it is not easily dismissed from the text of Scripture. I doubt that Jordan wants to give license to liars and trolls, but writing in the 90s his words are relevant in a Church that could potentially wrestle with antagonistic magistrates. Indeed, at the very least, he warns us against blind servitude to authorities, as if that were a noble end at the consequence of abdicating the call to obey the Lord and not man.

            Jordan fluidly connects morals from Judges to our present situation because he sees the same forces that opposed Israel then oppose us today, namely Baalism. He abstracts those particular details of Baal worship to conclude that the essence of Baalism is the “ascription of power to Nature: the universe has within itself the force of life.”²⁷ Moreover, nature can be stimulated to obtain beneficial outcomes that ultimately serve man. For Jordan, secular humanism is another form of Baalism as it makes nature ultimate and presumes that man can influence nature by his own efforts. On technology he writes, “modern medical science believes they will solve problems of disease by learning how to control nature, and modern philosophers believe that controlling nature will permit man to control evolution and advance humanity,” No matter what we call it, the force is resistance against God and a desire for human dominion. Moreover, Jordan connects the principles of Baalism to Statism, which is also present in the West: “Part and parcel of Baalism, and of all non-Christian philosophy, is statism, the absolute rule of man over other men by means of force.”²⁸ Thus, faced with modern secular humanism and government statism, Judges proves fertile ground for moral reflection on the relationship between Church and society. Indeed, the reformers reflected on the book of Judges to resist statism and consider the principles of good government. For instance, Vermigli espouses the right to resist unjust laws in his lectures on Judges: “undoubtedly (if the Prince perform not his covenants & promises) it is lawful to constrain & to bring him into order, & by force to compel him to fulfil the conditions & covenants which he had promised, and that by war when it cannot otherwise be done.”²⁹ Another reformer, David Chytraeus, comments on the principles of good government and on the need for a good magistrate:  “Concerning the necessity, dignity, and benevolence of the civil magistrate, [he is] phylakos nomou [guardian of the law] who vigilantly and sedulously does his duty to the standard of the law that God wants to be the rule of the human race by which the manners of his subjects are honestly regulated.”³⁰ Judges was a commonplace to discuss matters of justice, politics, and resistance in the time of the Protestant Reformation. Likewise, Jordan’s moral reflections can be read as an attempt to resource Protestant political thought through a reengagement with the Scriptures. Whereas most evangelicals are content to limit their political reflection to Daniel and Peter, Jordan insists on surveying all of God’s history for political reflection.

Thus, while Judges may be one of the most overlooked books in the canon, its message is as relevant as ever to the American Church. Jordan’s exegesis calls the modern Church back to pre-modern forms of receiving the Word. His moral reflections call the Church back to derive her rules from God’s Word. His applications call the Church to wrestle with the secular humanism that threatens the land she sojourns and the people she reaches. Moreover, he shows that all these principles are connected—one cannot recover pre-modern exegesis without also recovering and confronting premodern ethical and political thought. At the same time, Jordan shows us how not just to recover premodern readings but to wrestle with them and in some cases improve upon them. She has hitherto been deprived of the riches of her tradition and her Scripture. Jordan shows us what a path out, what faithful exegesis and application can be for the Church today.

---

Stiven Peter is an M.A. student at Reformed Theological Seminary-NYC. Previously, he graduated from the University of Chicago with a double major in economics and religious studies. He currently lives in NYC.

---

NOTES

1. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 6. ↩︎
2. Renamed Judges: a Practical and Theological Commentary in the reprint. ↩︎
3. J. Gordon Harris, Cheryl A. Brown, and Michael S. Moor, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Understanding the Bible Commentary Series (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2012), 124–125. ↩︎
4. James Jordan. Judges: God’s War Against Humanism (Tyler, TX: Geneva Ministries, 1985). ↩︎
5. Jordan, Judges, x. ↩︎
6. Jordan, Judges, xi. ↩︎
7. Jordan, Judges, xii. ↩︎
8. Jordan, Judges, xiii. ↩︎
9. Lydia Schumacher, ed., The Summa Halensis: Doctrines and Debates (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 57. ↩︎
10. N. Scott Amos, ed., Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Reformation Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament 4 (Downers Grove: IVP Academic 2020). ↩︎
11. Jordan, Judges, 244. ↩︎
12. Arthur Jackson, Annotations upon the remaining historicall part of the Old Testament. The second part, to wit, the books of Joshua, Judges, the two books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, and the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther: wherein first, all such passages in the text are explained as were thought likely to be questioned by any reader of ordinary capacity: secondly, in many clauses those things are discovered which are needfull and usefull to be known…and thirdly, many places that might at first seem to contradict one another are reconciled (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1646), 168. Available at https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A46811.0001.001. ↩︎
13. Jordan, Judges, 275–276. ↩︎
14. Richard Rogers, A commentary vpon the vvhole booke of Iudges Preached first and deliuered in sundrie lectures; since collected, and diligently perused, and now published. For the benefit generally of all such as desire to grow in faith and repentance, and especially of them, who would more cleerely vnderstand and make vse of the worthie examples of the saints, recorded in diuine history (London: Felix Kyngston, 1615), 786–787. Available at https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A10933.0001.001. ↩︎
15. Jordan, Judges, 200. ↩︎
16. Jordan, Judges, 201. ↩︎
17. Jordan, Judges, 203. ↩︎
18. “Exposition, Judges: Introduction and Exegesis” in The Interpreter’s Bible, ed Jacob M. Myers (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1973), ii, 708. ↩︎
19. Jordan, Judges, 64. ↩︎
20. Peter Martyr Vermigli, Most fruitfull [and] learned co[m]mentaries of Doctor Peter Martir Vermil Florentine, professor of deuinitie, in the Vniuersitye of Tygure with a very profitable tract of the matter and places. Herein is also added [and] contained two most ample tables, aswel of the matter, as of the wordes: wyth an index of the places in the holy scripture. Set forth & allowed, accordyng to thorder appointed in the Quenes maiesties iniunctions (London: John Day, 1564), 84–85. Available at https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A68840.0001.001. ↩︎
21. “Exposition, Judges: Introduction and Exegesis,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, 711. ↩︎
22. Jordan, Judges, 88. ↩︎
23. Vermigli, Most fruitfull [and] learned co[m]mentaries of Doctor Peter Martir Vermil, 89. ↩︎
24. Vermigli, Most fruitfull [and] learned co[m]mentaries of Doctor Peter Martir Vermil, 92. ↩︎
25. Jordan, Judges, 89. ↩︎
26. Jordan, Judges, 89–90. ↩︎
27. Jordan, Judges, 35. ↩︎
28. Jordan, Judges, 113. ↩︎
29. Vermigli, Most fruitfull [and] learned co[m]mentaries of Doctor Peter Martir Vermil, 91. ↩︎
30. Amos, ed., Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 431. ↩︎