&c. (Judges ii.).
Such is the text, afterwards come the examples.
"And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord,
and forget the Lord their God, and served the Baals and Astartes.
Therefore the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and He
sold them into the hand of Chushan-Rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia,
and they served him eight years. And when the children of Israel
cried unto the Lord, the Lord raised up to them a helper, Othniel
b. Kenaz, and delivered the king of Mesopotamia into his hand,
and the land had rest forty years. And Othniel b. Kenaz died."
The same points of view and also for the most part the same
expressions as those which in the case of Othniel fill up the
entire cadre, recur in the cases of Ehud, Deborah, Gideon,
Jephthah, and Samson, but there form only at the beginning and at
the end of the narratives a frame which encloses more copious and
richer contents, occasionally they expand into more exhaustive
disquisitions, as in vi. 7, x. 6. It is in this way that Judges
ii.-xvi. has been constructed with the workman-like regularity it
displays. Only the six great judges, however are included within
the scheme; the six small ones stand in an external relation to it,
and have a special scheme to themselves, doubtless having been
first added by way of appendix to complete the number twelve.
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