The Years of the Judges

Add the oppressions and the rests in Judges as if each began when the last ended, and you get something like 410 years, before Eli and Samuel. Add those, and a wilderness, and Joshua, and Saul, and you overshoot the 480 years from the exodus to the temple. 1 Kings 6:1 People then say the Bible cannot add. The book of Judges is not trying to be that kind of sum.

The deliverances are tribal and regional. Moab presses the Jordan side. Hazor and Sisera press the north. Midian presses the farmers of the center. Ammon presses Gilead. The Philistines press the southwest, and they are still pressing in Samuel's day, which means Samson's twenty years are not a sealed pocket that ended before Eli was born. A rest of forty years after Gideon is a rest from Midian, not a proof that no other enemy existed anywhere in the land. The narrator even overlaps the story by geography. He is walking around the map, not down a single column of dates.

Jephthah himself uses a round 300 years for Israel's possession of the land east of the Jordan. Judges 11:26 That sentence is a speech in an argument with Ammon, and it fits an early exodus better than a very late one. It is still a round number in a dispute, not a scribe's accession year. It does not require every forty in the book to be stacked on top of it.

Eli's forty and Samuel's years sit at the end of this age and the start of the kingdom. The text does not give Samuel a total. Saul's years are textually thin: one verse that in the Hebrew looks damaged, often read as two years or as a number that fell out. 1 Samuel 13:1 Building a national chronology out of that verse plus every rest in Judges is how people manufacture a collision with 1 Kings 6.

The timeline therefore refuses a BC year for each judge. It says the age runs from Joshua's death until Samuel, in the centuries between the crossing and Saul, and that the crossing's century depends on the exodus date. That is less satisfying than a chart. It is what the book actually supports.