Judges 12 - Samson's Marriage and Riddles | Bible Podcast, David Alley, Peace Christian Church

In this video listen to Judges 12 read by David Alley, followed by comments and prayer.

In Judges 12 the tribe of Ephraim is jealous of Jepthah’s victory and threatens to burn down his house. This is the second time that Ephraim has been jealous. This also happened when Gideon was victorious over the Midianites. They seem to not want to fight the enemy, but seem to want the credit after it is over. Occasionally we find this type of thing in the Body of Christ.

Some people think that unless it is them that does something, it doesn’t count. The truth is that God deliberately uses weak things to achieve his ends, and so it leaves Ephraimites - people of strength out in the cold. Isn’t a victory worth celebrating? Why then cause a fight over a victory? But in the body of Christ some people are not happy celebrating someone else’s success, they want it for themselves.

Such people don’t really have a heart for the whole, but only for themselves. Jepthah wasn’t the diplomatic genius of Gideon, and so the pride of the Ephraimites was put to bed. This sometimes is the only solution for those who think so much of themselves that they cannot learn with words, but must learn with humiliation.

This story is also an interesting window into ancient accents of the Hebrew language. Apparently the Ephraimites couldn’t pronounce “sh.” After this the mighty tribe of Ephraim was much less mighty until later times. Here they lost 42000 fighting men. At the time of the second census about 300 years earlier,

Ephraim only had 32500 fighting men, so this was clearly a big percentage of their population. After this Izban was the ninth Judge. Elon is the tenth judge and Abdon is the eleventh judge.