The Era of the Judges: "Everyone Did What Was Right in His Own Eyes"

The era of the Judges is the one long stretch of Jewish history without a central government. The tribes settled their portions, the Tabernacle stood at Shiloh, but no one ruled the country as a whole. The book of Judges describes a recurring cycle: the people drift from the Torah and serve local gods; God "sells" them into the hands of a neighbour — Aram, Moab, Canaan, Midian, Ammon, Philistia; under oppression they cry out; a deliverer arises, a shofet, and the land has quiet for his lifetime; then he dies and the cycle restarts.

There were about twelve judges, and no two resemble each other: Othniel the Torah scholar, Ehud the left-handed assassin, Deborah the prophetess, Gideon the farmer, Jephthah the exile, Samson the solitary Nazirite. They had no standing army, no taxation and no heirs: authority was never inherited, it was improvised out of emergency.

The book closes with a line that reads two ways: "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes." It is both a diagnosis and a portrait of freedom paid for in chaos — episodes like Micah's idol, the concubine at Gibeah and the near-extinction of the tribe of Benjamin. Out of exhaustion with that cycle came the demand put to Samuel: appoint a king over us.