The judges of Israel

Ibzan, Elon, and Abdon

Three minor judges · After Jephthah · Delivered Israel from None named; years of quiet judging · Together they judged Israel twenty-five years

Ibzan of Bethlehem, Elon the Zebulonite, and Abdon the son of Hillel are three judges of whom Scripture records little more than their towns, their families, and their years. Ibzan judged seven years, Elon ten, and Abdon eight. No war and no fault is written of them. They fill the space between Jephthah and Samson with quiet, undramatic rule.

And after him Ibzan of Bethlehem judged Israel.Judges 12:8 (KJV)

Their story from Scripture

The three are told together in a few verses. After Jephthah, Ibzan of Bethlehem judged Israel seven years; he had thirty sons and thirty daughters, whom he married outside his clan, and thirty daughters brought in from abroad for his sons. Then Elon, a Zebulonite, judged Israel ten years, and died, and was buried. Then Abdon the son of Hillel, a Pirathonite, judged Israel eight years; he had forty sons and thirty nephews who rode on threescore and ten ass colts, and he too died and was buried.

These notes of many children and many donkeys are, like Jair before them, signs of large and prosperous houses. Beyond that, Scripture is silent, and there is no honest way to say more than the text says.

Their character, honestly

We cannot draw real portraits of these three, and it would be false to try. No deliverance is credited to them and no sin is charged against them. The wide marriages of Ibzan's children and the large households may hint at judges who built family alliances and comfort, but the Bible does not tell us their hearts, and we will not pretend to. They are names and numbers, faithfully kept, in the long record of God's dealings with his people.

How God used them

God used even these near-anonymous men to keep Israel governed for twenty-five years together. Their thin record is itself a lesson: most of God's servants are not famous, and most of their days are not dramatic. Heaven keeps the count of years that history forgets. The chain of judges did not break, because God did not abandon his people even in their obscure and ordinary seasons.

Where they fit in the cycle

These three are the last quiet breath before the storm of Samson and the horrors of the book's final chapters. Their calm, childful years sit between two great troubles. They are proof that the peace of the judges was always fragile and temporary, a series of pauses in a decline that no leader could reverse. The nation kept needing to be delivered because nothing in the nation had changed.

How they point to Christ

Ibzan, Elon, and Abdon ruled a few years each, left many children, and died. Their smallness in the record presses home the ache of the whole book: judge after judge, name after name, grave after grave, and still no deliverer who lasts. The three obscure judges point forward, as much by their silence as anything, to the one King whose name is above every name and whose reign has no end, Jesus, the Judge who will never be buried and never be replaced.

A note on honesty: the book of Judges is one of the darkest and most candid books in the Bible, and it does not flatter its own heroes. The failures named above are the ones Scripture itself records. We do not whitewash them, because the point of the book is not how good the judges were, but how faithful God was to a people who could not save themselves, and how deeply they, and we, need the true Deliverer.

Related: Previous: Jephthah · Next: Samson · Ruth, set in the days of the judges · The Kings of Israel and Judah · All the judges of Israel