Conquest & the Judges

After forty years in the wilderness, Israel finally crosses into the land promised to Abraham — and the long, uneven work of possessing it begins. This period covers two phases: the conquest under Joshua, and the turbulent centuries of the judges that followed. It is a story of God's faithfulness meeting Israel's faithlessness, again and again.

Under Joshua, Israel crosses the Jordan, takes Jericho, and breaks the back of Canaanite resistance in a series of campaigns, after which the land is divided among the tribes. But the conquest is left incomplete; pockets of Canaanite peoples remain, and with them their gods. The book of Judges chronicles what happens next: a downward spiral repeated through figures like Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson. Israel falls into idolatry, God hands them over to oppressors, the people cry out, and God raises a deliverer — a 'judge' — to rescue them. Then the cycle resets, each turn darker than the last.

The era's dates are approximate and depend partly on the disputed Exodus date; we follow a traditional range of roughly 1400–1050 BC. Its closing verdict is one of the most haunting lines in the Old Testament: 'In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes' (Judges 21:25). That refrain sets up the hunger for a king that drives the next period, and it makes a deeper theological point — that without a faithful king and a changed heart, even a redeemed and settled people drift back into chaos. The quiet, hopeful story of Ruth, set in this same age, shows God still at work in ordinary faithfulness, weaving the line that will lead to David.