Commentary Compass

Judges is one of the most disturbing books in the Bible. It contains assassinations, warfare, mutilation, human sacrifice, sexual violence, idolatry, civil war and repeated failures of leadership. Its heroes are often deeply compromised, its victories become increasingly ambiguous, and by the final chapters the people who were supposed to be distinct from Canaan appear capable of behaving as badly as anyone around them. Readers naturally ask what they are supposed to admire, condemn or learn from such a book.

The strongest commentaries help precisely because they resist turning Judges into a collection of inspirational hero stories. Barry Webb is especially valuable for reading the book as a carefully shaped literary and theological whole; his attention to irony, narrative echoes and the downward movement of the judges is exceptionally illuminating. Daniel Block has given memorable expression to the book’s great tragedy as the “Canaanization” of Israel—not simply Israel failing to remove Canaanites from the land, but Israel gradually becoming indistinguishable from the culture it was supposed to resist. K. Lawson Younger brings historical, literary and ancient Near Eastern context into fruitful conversation with theology, while Susan Niditch, Trent Butler, Robert Chisholm, Tammi Schneider and others illuminate the book’s difficult portrayals of violence, women, leadership and social disintegration.

Read together, these interpreters reveal that Judges is not fundamentally about a succession of imperfect heroes whom God somehow manages to use. Its deeper story concerns a covenant people progressively losing the capacity to recognise what faithfulness even looks like. Religious identity survives in vocabulary. People still invoke YHWH, consult priests, make vows, offer sacrifices and gather for holy war. Yet worship, leadership, sexuality, justice and violence become increasingly shaped by the surrounding world and by what seems right in human eyes.

The central tragedy can therefore be stated like this:

Israel needs repeated deliverance from external oppressors, but the book gradually reveals that Israel’s deepest problem is Israel itself—and none of the judges can deliver the people from that.

Here are twelve insights that make Judges clearer.

1. Judges Is Not a Cycle That Keeps Repeating at the Same Level—It Is a Downward Spiral

Judges 2 provides the familiar pattern by which much of the book is read. Israel abandons YHWH, serves other gods, falls under oppression, cries out, receives a judge, experiences deliverance and then returns to apostasy after the judge dies.

That pattern is real, but it can mislead if we imagine a circle returning repeatedly to the same starting point.

The actual stories deteriorate.

Othniel receives an extraordinarily brief and relatively uncomplicated account. Ehud’s story is more colourful and morally complex, but the result is still clear deliverance. Deborah and Barak lead Israel into one of the book’s greatest victories, celebrated in chapter 5 by a magnificent song.

Then Gideon arrives.

His story begins with weakness transformed by divine calling, but ends with vengeance, royal behaviour, seventy sons and an ephod that becomes a religious snare. His son Abimelech converts the unresolved royal ambitions of his father’s household into murderous kingship.

Jephthah possesses extraordinary verbal and diplomatic skill but makes a disastrous vow that destroys his own household. His story ends not merely with conflict against Ammon but with Israelites slaughtering other Israelites.

Samson is stronger physically than any previous judge and less capable than any of them of leading Israel. He spends much of his career pursuing his own desires, and his greatest victory occurs when blinded, imprisoned and dying.

After Samson, there are no judges at all.

The final five chapters depict religious chaos, sexual violence and civil war without a deliverer entering to reverse the decline.

This is why Block’s “Canaanization” language and Webb’s attention to literary development are so important. The judges do not merely succeed one another. The institution itself proves unable to create lasting covenant renewal.

The spiral becomes tighter.

Deliverers themselves increasingly participate in the disorder from which Israel needs deliverance.

By the end, the question is no longer simply:

Who will save Israel from its enemies?

It is:

Who will save Israel from becoming its enemies?

2. Israel’s Failure Is Not Simply That Canaanites Remain—Israel Becomes Canaanized

Judges begins where Joshua leaves a troubling question. Israel has entered the land, but possession is incomplete. Judges 1 repeatedly describes tribes that do not drive out the inhabitants of particular places.

At first this can look primarily military.

It becomes theological.

The problem with coexistence is not ethnicity as such, and “Canaanization” should not be misused as though the book were teaching racial contamination. The concern of Judges is covenantal and cultural: Israel gradually adopts the worship, values and moral practices associated with the societies whose gods YHWH had forbidden them to serve.

Judges 2 makes the connection explicitly. Israel enters relationships with the peoples of the land, their altars remain and subsequent generations begin serving the Baals.

The physical presence of Canaan therefore becomes the setting for a deeper assimilation.

At first, Israel cannot or does not drive the Canaanites out.

Later, Israelites worship Canaanite gods.

Eventually, Israelite leaders operate according to Canaanite assumptions about power.

By Judges 17–18, an Israelite household constructs an idolatrous sanctuary while repeatedly invoking YHWH.

By Judges 19, an Israelite city behaves like Sodom.

By Judges 21, Israelites use slaughter and abduction to repair a crisis created by their own violence.

The progression is devastating.

Israel has not merely failed to occupy the land completely.

The land’s disordered ways have occupied Israel.

This helps explain why Judges spends comparatively little time celebrating territorial achievements. Its deeper concern is whether Israel will remain the covenant people YHWH brought into the land.

The answer becomes increasingly bleak.

A boundary on a map cannot preserve holiness when the people on one side of the boundary begin desiring the same gods, power and practices as the people on the other.

3. God’s Deliverance Often Begins in Compassion Before Israel Shows Deep Repentance

The cycle of Judges is sometimes summarised:

sin → punishment → repentance → deliverance.

That is neater than the text.

Judges frequently says that Israel cried out or groaned under oppression. That does not necessarily mean the people have undergone profound covenant repentance. Judges 2 explicitly grounds YHWH’s intervention in compassion when he hears their groaning under those who oppress them.

The exodus echo is significant. Israel groaned under Egyptian slavery and God heard. Now the people have brought oppression partly upon themselves through covenant infidelity, yet the sound of their suffering still moves YHWH to raise deliverers.

This makes the theology of Judges both more troubling and more gracious.

God does not rescue because Israel has finally become worthy of rescue.

Indeed, the people repeatedly return to apostasy almost as soon as circumstances improve.

The judges themselves become progressively worse.

Nevertheless God is moved by misery.

Judges 10 makes the tension particularly vivid. Israel finally confesses sin and removes foreign gods, but the narrative has already allowed YHWH to express profound frustration with repeated apostasy. Yet Israel’s misery becomes unbearable to him.

Divine compassion therefore exceeds the moral quality of Israel’s response without declaring Israel’s sin harmless.

This distinction matters.

Grace does not mean Israel’s choices have no consequences. Judges is almost an extended demonstration that they do.

But judgment does not eliminate compassion.

The repeated deliverances show something remarkable about YHWH before they show anything admirable about Israel.

The book’s cycle is therefore not principally evidence that Israel eventually learns its lesson.

It is evidence that God repeatedly responds to people who have not yet learned it.

4. Deborah, Barak and Jael Show That YHWH’s Victory Does Not Depend on Conventional Power

Judges 4–5 is one of the high points of the book and should be read through both its prose narrative and its poetic song.

Deborah is prophet and judge, providing the authoritative word of YHWH. Barak gathers the forces that confront Sisera. Jael, outside the conventional military structure, delivers the final blow. Chapter 5 then interprets the whole event theologically as YHWH’s victory in which willing human participants share.

Readers have sometimes turned the narrative into a simplistic contest between Deborah and Barak, with Barak humiliated because a woman receives the glory. That interpretation misses too much.

Barak genuinely leads Israel’s forces and is later remembered among the faithful in Hebrews 11. Deborah is not merely a supporting character inserted because no competent man exists; she already exercises recognised prophetic and judicial authority before Barak enters the story. Jael’s unexpected role demonstrates that the outcome cannot be credited simply to military hierarchy.

The Song of Deborah broadens the picture further.

Some tribes volunteer.

Others remain at home.

Meroz is cursed because its inhabitants fail to come to YHWH’s aid.

Jael is praised.

Even creation participates as stars fight and the Kishon sweeps enemies away.

The theological centre is therefore not:

Which human being deserves the most credit?

It is:

YHWH acts, and the question is who will participate when he acts.

This makes Judges 5 a powerful theology of responsibility. Refusing to participate can itself become a moral choice. Reuben’s searching of heart never becomes action. Other tribes remain with ships, coastlands or sheepfolds while the crisis unfolds.

The song therefore celebrates courage while exposing spectatorship.

God’s deliverance does not depend upon conventional status, gender or military prestige.

But people are still called to join it.

5. Gideon’s Story Moves From Fearful Dependence to Dangerous Self-Importance

Gideon is frequently presented as an inspiring story about overcoming low self-esteem. He begins hiding in a winepress, asks for signs and requires repeated reassurance, yet eventually leads only three hundred men to defeat an enormous Midianite force.

That is part of his story.

It is not the end of it.

YHWH deliberately reduces Gideon’s army so that Israel cannot boast that its own strength produced salvation. The great lesson of the victory is supposed to be dependence.

Then Gideon begins changing.

His pursuit of Midianite kings becomes intertwined with personal vengeance.

He responds brutally to Succoth and Penuel.

Israel offers him hereditary rule.

Gideon gives the theologically correct answer: YHWH should rule Israel.

Yet what follows makes the refusal less impressive than it sounds.

He requests a royal share of gold.

He maintains a large household.

He fathers seventy sons.

His son by a concubine receives the name Abimelech—“my father is king.”

And Gideon creates an ephod that becomes a snare to Israel and his own family.

The irony is especially painful because Gideon had begun his public vocation by tearing down an idolatrous altar in Ophrah. He ends by leaving behind another object around which Israel practises religious infidelity.

The man whose army was deliberately made small so that he could not boast gradually becomes the centre of a quasi-royal household.

Gideon therefore illustrates a danger more subtle than outright apostasy:

a person can begin by depending upon God and slowly convert the fruits of divine deliverance into personal status.

The story asks not merely whether faith can overcome fear.

It asks whether a successful servant can survive success.

6. Abimelech Shows What Happens When Deliverance Is Converted Into Kingship Without Covenant Character

Abimelech is the logical sequel to Gideon.

He is not raised up by YHWH to rescue Israel from an outside oppressor. He creates an internal political project by appealing to his mother’s relatives at Shechem, receiving money associated with the sanctuary of Baal-berith, hiring reckless followers and murdering his brothers.

Seventy sons of Gideon are killed on one stone.

Only Jotham escapes.

Jotham’s fable then becomes one of the Bible’s great reflections on bad kingship. The productive trees—the olive, fig and vine—refuse to abandon their fruitful vocation merely to wave over the other trees. The thornbush accepts.

The irony is unmistakable.

The least suitable plant eagerly becomes king.

And the protective shade it promises is absurd.

Abimelech is kingship as appetite rather than service.

His rule eventually collapses through the same violence by which it was created. Shechem and Abimelech turn against one another. The political coalition held together by ambition becomes mutually destructive, and Abimelech finally dies when a woman drops a millstone upon his head.

The narrative repeatedly stresses divine justice in the reversal. The evil done to Gideon’s sons returns upon Abimelech and Shechem.

This episode is important because Judges is sometimes read as though its final refrain simply says:

Israel’s problem was that it lacked a king.

Abimelech warns us that having a king is not enough.

Kingship without covenant character can intensify the disorder.

Israel does not need merely concentrated power.

It needs righteous rule.

7. Jephthah Knows Israel’s Theology Better Than He Knows How to Trust Israel’s God

Jephthah is one of the most complicated figures in Judges.

He begins as an excluded son driven from his family because of his mother’s status. When crisis comes, the elders who rejected him suddenly need his military ability. Jephthah negotiates his return with extraordinary skill.

That ability becomes even clearer in his speech to the Ammonite king.

Jephthah knows Israel’s history.

He reconstructs the journey through the wilderness.

He distinguishes Moabite, Ammonite and Amorite territory.

He appeals to long possession of the disputed land.

Most importantly, he invokes YHWH as the ultimate Judge.

The tragedy is that the man who can speak so intelligently about YHWH’s dealings with Israel appears far less secure in his personal relationship with YHWH.

The Spirit of YHWH comes upon Jephthah before his notorious vow.

The vow is therefore not needed to obtain divine empowerment.

Yet Jephthah bargains:

if YHWH gives victory, whatever comes from the door of his house will be offered to YHWH.

The story never says that God requested this bargain.

God never commands the sacrifice.

And when Jephthah’s daughter emerges to celebrate his victory, his self-imposed words become a source of tragedy.

Interpreters have long debated whether the daughter is literally sacrificed or permanently dedicated, although the literal-sacrifice reading remains the more natural interpretation for many major commentators. Whichever resolution is preferred, the theological point remains severe: the vow is Jephthah’s idea, not YHWH’s requirement, and it produces devastating loss.

Jephthah seems to relate to God partly as he relates to political actors throughout his story: through negotiation.

He bargains with elders.

He negotiates with Ammon.

Then he makes a bargain with God.

This reveals a profound difference between possessing theological information and living in trusting relationship.

Jephthah knows Israel’s story.

What he has not learned is that YHWH does not need to be manipulated into keeping his word.

8. The Treatment of Women Becomes One of the Book’s Clearest Measures of Moral Decline

Judges contains an unusually large number of important female characters, and their changing treatment across the book provides another way of seeing its downward movement.

Early in the book, Achsah acts decisively to secure resources for her household. Deborah judges Israel and speaks YHWH’s word. Jael becomes the decisive human agent in Sisera’s defeat. Samson’s mother perceives the divine messenger and his promise with a clarity her husband often lacks.

The later stories become darker.

Jephthah’s unnamed daughter bears the consequences of her father’s unnecessary vow.

Women around Samson repeatedly become entangled in male rivalry, coercion and violence.

Then Judges 19–21 descends into horror.

A concubine is handed over to an attacking crowd, sexually abused through the night, dies and is dismembered.

Benjaminite women are killed in civil war.

The virgins of Jabesh-gilead are spared only so they can be given to surviving Benjaminite men.

Young women celebrating at Shiloh are abducted to solve a marriage problem created by Israel’s own rash oath.

Smith and Bloch-Smith, Schneider, Chisholm and others have rightly drawn attention to this progression.

The point is not that every early female character lives in a safe or egalitarian world. Judges reflects an ancient patriarchal culture from beginning to end.

But the narrative development is unmistakable.

Women move increasingly from agents within deliverance stories to objects upon whom Israelite men solve their problems.

That trajectory reaches a horrifying irony at the end. Israel initially goes to war because of outrage over the abuse of one woman. By the time the crisis has been “solved,” Israelites have slaughtered and abducted many more women.

The people condemn a crime and then reproduce its logic on a larger scale.

A society’s theological condition can therefore be measured partly by what happens to people with less power when the powerful are under pressure.

Judges does not hide the answer.

9. Samson Is Israel in Miniature: Chosen, Compromised, Powerful and in Need of Deliverance

Samson is not merely the final judge.

He is a concentrated embodiment of Israel.

His birth is announced by an angel before he has done anything. He is set apart. YHWH has a purpose for him. The Spirit repeatedly empowers him.

Yet the first description of his vocation already contains a limitation:

he will begin to save Israel from the Philistines.

He will not finish.

That incompleteness matches the condition of Israel itself.

Earlier cycles normally begin with Israel crying to YHWH under oppression. Judges 13 tells us that Israel has been under Philistine rule for forty years—but records no cry for deliverance.

Accommodation has become so deep that oppression can be normal.

Samson himself mirrors this condition. Set apart as holy, he repeatedly seeks relationships among Philistines. He possesses extraordinary divine empowerment while living with astonishing self-indulgence. He defeats Israel’s enemies without actually leading Israel.

Webb is especially insightful in tracing these parallels.

Samson and Israel are both specially chosen.

Both are attracted to what should threaten their distinctiveness.

Both suffer the consequences.

Both eventually cry out.

And both need YHWH to deliver the very deliverer.

Two prayers are particularly important.

At Lehi, Samson finally acknowledges that YHWH has given the great deliverance and then cries for water. God answers.

At Gaza, blinded and humiliated, Samson again calls upon YHWH for strength. His final act brings judgment upon the Philistine temple, but he dies within his own victory.

This is why Hebrews 11 can remember Samson among people of faith without requiring Judges to transform him into a respectable hero.

His faith appears most clearly when his self-sufficiency has finally been stripped away.

The physically strongest judge becomes the clearest demonstration that Israel’s salvation never depended upon human strength.

10. Judges 17–18 Shows That Religion Can Become Most Corrupt While Still Using YHWH’s Name

The story of Micah and the migrating Danites is darkly comic.

Micah steals silver from his mother and returns it after hearing her curse. She dedicates silver to YHWH—and uses it to produce an idol.

Micah creates a shrine.

Adds an ephod and household gods.

Installs one of his sons as priest.

Then hires a Levite and concludes that YHWH must now prosper him because he has obtained a more impressive religious professional.

Almost every element sounds religious.

That is precisely the problem.

The story is not about people openly declaring that YHWH does not exist.

It is about people constructing a religion around YHWH’s name while ignoring YHWH’s revealed requirements.

The Danites make the corruption larger. They steal Micah’s sacred objects and persuade his priest that serving a tribe is a better career opportunity than serving one household.

The priest agrees.

Religious vocation becomes upward mobility.

The tribe then establishes the stolen cult for itself.

Webb’s observation about Micah’s “house of God” becoming effectively a “house of gods” captures the confusion perfectly. The boundaries between YHWH worship and idolatry have become so blurred that the participants seem largely unable to recognise the contradiction.

This may be more dangerous than straightforward apostasy.

If people openly abandon YHWH, at least the breach is visible.

Judges 17–18 portrays something more insidious:

religion remade according to human preference while retaining enough biblical vocabulary to feel legitimate.

That is why the refrain appears here:

everyone does what is right in their own eyes.

The crisis is not the absence of religion.

It is religion created in our own image.

11. Gibeah Shows That Israel Has Become the Sodom It Was Supposed to Resist—and the Civil War Makes the Problem Worse

Judges 19 deliberately recalls Genesis 19.

A Levite travelling home refuses to spend the night in foreign Jebusite Jerusalem and instead goes to Gibeah, an Israelite city. The assumption is obvious: surely one is safer among covenant brothers.

He is not.

Nobody initially offers hospitality.

Eventually an old man takes the travellers in.

Then men surround the house and demand sexual access to the male guest.

The scene becomes a virtual Sodom.

But Judges makes the horror even more painful because these are not Canaanites.

They are Benjaminites.

Israel has become capable of the behaviour associated with the cities Scripture earlier held up as paradigms of corruption.

The Levite and his host do not emerge morally clean either. The concubine is handed over to save the men. After her death, her body is divided and sent throughout Israel.

The tribes are rightly horrified.

Benjamin then compounds the evil by refusing to hand over the perpetrators.

Civil war follows.

But the moral logic continues deteriorating.

Israel nearly annihilates one of its own tribes and then realises the implications of what it has done. Rash vows make a solution difficult. Rather than questioning the moral framework that created the crisis, the tribes massacre Jabesh-gilead and seize surviving women. When that does not provide enough wives, more women are abducted at Shiloh.

One of the most disturbing features of the ending is therefore that Israel can correctly identify one atrocity while becoming blind to the atrocities it commits in answering it.

The people know the language of purging evil.

They know how to assemble.

They seek YHWH before battle.

They build altars.

Yet religious procedure cannot compensate for a moral imagination that has become profoundly disordered.

The book that began with Israel fighting Canaanites ends with Israel conducting something resembling holy war against Israel.

Canaanization is complete.

12. “There Was No King” Creates a Need for Righteous Rule, Not an Easy Endorsement of Monarchy

Four times in the final chapters we hear variations of the statement:

“In those days there was no king in Israel.”

Twice it is joined to the devastating conclusion:

everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

It is natural to hear this as preparation for monarchy.

And in an important sense it is.

Israel desperately needs leadership capable of ordering communal life under YHWH rather than allowing every household, priest, tribe and warrior to define righteousness privately.

But the best commentators rightly resist turning the refrain into the simplistic conclusion:

Any king would solve this.

Abimelech has already demonstrated otherwise.

The books of Samuel and Kings will make the point even clearer. Kings themselves can do what is right in their own eyes. Some become sources of idolatry, injustice and violence on a national scale.

The issue is therefore not merely decentralised versus centralised power.

It is whose eyes define what is right.

The refrain echoes a Deuteronomic concern: covenant Israel cannot simply construct worship and ethics according to individual preference. Even the future king in Deuteronomy 17 is supposed to live under Torah rather than stand above it.

Judges therefore generates a longing for righteous rule while withholding the illusion that human kingship by itself can cure the human heart.

Within the larger biblical story, Davidic kingship becomes one answer to that longing, but the subsequent failure of David’s descendants keeps the question open.

For Christian readers, the trajectory eventually leads farther.

Israel does not ultimately need merely a stronger Samson, a wiser Gideon or a more centralised Abimelech.

It needs a king who does not use the people to feed his own power, who truly does what is right in YHWH’s eyes and who can lead a people into covenant faithfulness rather than merely rescue them temporarily from external enemies.

Judges therefore ends without such a figure.

The absence is the point.

What Judges Finally Teaches About Deliverance

The twelve insights reveal why Judges becomes progressively more disturbing.

At first the problem appears relatively straightforward.

Israel has enemies.

YHWH raises deliverers.

Enemies are defeated.

The land experiences rest.

But the longer the book continues, the less adequate that solution appears.

The enemies remain real, but the boundary between Israel and its enemies becomes morally unstable. Canaanite worship enters Israel. Israelite leaders increasingly imitate the power structures around them. Judges become entangled in vengeance, manipulation and self-interest. Israel’s strongest deliverer needs to cry for deliverance himself.

Eventually the people turn their weapons upon one another.

The deepest problem therefore cannot be solved by another battlefield victory.

Israel needs renewed worship.

Renewed leadership.

Renewed moral imagination.

Renewed covenant allegiance.

Judges is remarkably realistic about the limits of charismatic leadership. The Spirit can empower a person for a particular act of deliverance without turning every feature of that person’s character into a model for imitation.

This is especially important when reading Gideon, Jephthah and Samson.

Divine use is not the same thing as divine endorsement of everything the person does.

The book’s great constant is therefore not the excellence of the judges.

It is the compassion of YHWH.

Again and again God acts through inadequate people for an unfaithful people.

That grace prevents annihilation.

But grace repeatedly received without deep transformation does not prevent deterioration.

The book ends with Israel still existing.

That itself is mercy.

But survival is not yet salvation in its fullest sense.

Judges Within the Larger Biblical Story

Judges begins immediately after Joshua and deliberately tests what will happen when the generation that knew Joshua and the great acts of YHWH passes away.

The answer is sobering.

The conquest remains incomplete, covenant memory fades and Israel’s distinctiveness erodes. Deuteronomy had warned repeatedly about forgetting YHWH, adopting the worship of the land and doing what seemed right in one’s own eyes. Judges turns those warnings into narrative.

Yet the book also points forward.

Ruth takes place “in the days when the judges judged” and offers a strikingly different picture of ordinary covenant faithfulness. While Judges ends with men seizing women to secure Israel’s future, Ruth tells of a Moabite woman, a faithful Israelite landowner and a community through whom David’s line emerges. The contrast should not be pressed into simplistic opposition, but canonically it is difficult to miss.

Samuel then begins another search for leadership.

Kingship arrives.

David becomes a genuine advance over the anarchy of Judges.

Yet Samuel–Kings eventually demonstrates that monarchy cannot by itself cure the problem identified in Judges. Kings too can abandon YHWH, exploit the vulnerable, corrupt worship and bring the nation toward exile.

The problem of “right in our own eyes” therefore survives the institution of kingship.

The New Testament mentions several judges in Hebrews 11—Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah—as witnesses to faith. This should keep Christian readers from dismissing them as merely wicked men. At moments they genuinely trust God and participate in remarkable deliverance.

But Hebrews does not erase Judges.

Their faith is real.

Their flaws are real.

The final biblical answer is not that God finally finds a flawless judge among them.

It is that the long trajectory of failed human deliverers reaches toward a ruler whose kingship is defined by obedience, service, justice and self-giving rather than by doing what is right in his own eyes.

Perhaps the deepest lesson of Judges can therefore be stated like this:

Judges teaches that God can repeatedly rescue his people from their enemies, but unless their worship, desires and moral imagination are transformed, they will eventually reproduce the very world from which they were delivered.

That is why incomplete conquest becomes assimilation.

Why the cycle becomes a spiral.

Why divine compassion matters more than the quality of Israel’s repentance.

Why unexpected women can become central agents of deliverance.

Why Gideon can begin dependent and end dangerous.

Why Abimelech proves that kingship without covenant character solves nothing.

Why Jephthah can know Israel’s history yet misunderstand how to relate to Israel’s God.

Why the fate of women becomes an index of social collapse.

Why Samson can be both deliverer and a man desperately needing deliverance.

Why idolatry can flourish while still using YHWH’s name.

Why Gibeah becomes another Sodom.

And why the book’s final words are not a solution but a diagnosis:

everyone did what was right in their own eyes.