Godless leadership leads to godlessness in society that invites the discipline of God.
Othniel is the perfect model of a judge; Ehud is deceptive; Barak is fearful; Gideon is skeptical and hubristic (and Abimelech is a bloodthirsty butcher—not a judge figure); Jephthah is a manipulator and a child-sacrificer; Samson cannot control his fleshly passions and defects from his calling. It is no wonder, then, that at the end the book of Judges, in the Epilogues (17:1–21:25), the nation collapses into gross idolatry and civil war—the consequences of the deterioration that had begun in the days of the judges: the Canaanization of Israel. So much so, in every one of the bizarre episodes that comprise the Epilogues, there is an echo of a specific event that occurred in the life of a major judge in 3:7–16:31. As go the leaders, so go the people!
Scattered throughout 17:1–18:31 are terms with unambiguously negative connotations: “idol” (17:3, 4; 18:14, 17, 18, 20, 30, 31), “molten image” (17:3, 4; 18:14, 17, 18), “ephod” (17:5; 18:14, 17, 18, 20), “teraphim” (17:5; 18:14, 17, 18, 20), “my gods which I made” (18:24), and “what Micah had made” (18:27). Confusion not only reigns, it pours!
Micah (whose name, ironically, means “Who is like Yahweh?”) violates two of the commands in the Decalogue right away: he steals, and he dishonors his parent (Exod 20:12, 15; Deut 5:16, 19). His seeming repentance is only a fear of his mother’s curse (Jdg 17:2), not an act of remorse. Micah’s mother is no better: she curses one day and she blesses the next (17:2). She is thankful enough that she dedicates the silver to Yahweh, but she does so by making an idol and a molten image out of the metal (17:3)! Besides, after her declaration that she would “solemnly/wholly dedicate” the silver for this purpose, she seems to have kept back the bulk of the money and used only two hundred pieces for her idolatrous fancies. Her son, a chip off the old weird block, continues his mother’s anti-Yahwistic endeavors by building a shrine (“house of God,” 17:5; see Deut 12:4–27) to house an ephod and teraphim, and by consecrating one of his sons as a priest—an illegitimate appointment.
Later, Mr. “Who-Is-Like-Yahweh” expands his aberrant cultic endeavors as he corrals a stray Levite (17:7–9), and sponsors him as his own priest in his household shrine, for a monthly wage (17:10; 18:4). Micah then consecrates the Levite (17:8–12), with the ambitious certitude that Yahweh will prosper him, now that he had a Levite as a priest (17:13), as if all that was needed was a combination of mechanically performed acts, however improper, that would automatically trigger blessings from deity like a good-luck charm.
In the next section of this passage, Micah’s gods and his priest are appropriated by the marauding Danites (who are no better than the individuals we’ve already seen: cruel, vicious, and anti-Yahweh), leaving Micah bereft of his rabbit’s foot, his four-leaved clover, and his horseshoes. And everyone suffers the consequences (I’ll let you read all about it.)
All of this is a stark depiction of the sort of evil that had permeated generations of Israelite society under the judges. At the beginning of the book, the nation struggled with the temptation to consort with foreign gods (2:6–3:6). There is no such struggle now, at the end of the book: Israelites are cheerfully manufacturing their own gods and blurring the lines of division between false deities and the true God, Yahweh. The deterioration of moral values is worsening and is being passed on to every new generation.
Israel’s Canaanization is pretty much complete. Now all that remains is for the nation to fall apart, and fall apart it does, in the next section that close this dark book of Judges.