Shamgar

Shamgar's family was hungry.

They were always hungry. It was becoming a way of life– and that wasn't okay with Shamgar.


Year after year the Philistines marched right into Israel’s land– into his plot of land– and they would take everything. His wheat, his barley, his rye– all his crops in fact– there was nothing they wouldn't pilfer, poach and pack away with them back to Philistia.


All year he and his family would toil in their fields, plowing, planting and praying that this year they would be able to eat well - that this year the Philistines would leave. Them. Alone.


Israel had no king.


There was no government, but the Word of the Lord from the Prophet Moses was meant to be the guiding standard of the nation. However, each tribe since the death of Joshua and the elders had pretty much governed themselves. The people had fallen away from the Law of Moses into the idolatrous practices of the surrounding nations. By doing so, they had stepped away from God's protection.


Invaders would encroach and pillage and persecute, and God would patiently wait for Israel to become uncomfortable enough to return to Him. They would be warred against and put to tribute by the surrounding nations.


Occasionally a judge would arise and deliver them– usually when the people realised their folly and returned to serving the Lord their God for a generation or two.


But a mere forty years, maybe eighty years, would see a return to old ways and bad habits.


Shamgar thought of this often as he would hit his knees of a night, after they had wearily harvested a portion of their stock for the coming winter. He’d spend the better part of the night in prayer, falling asleep where he knelt. He'd beg the Lord to forgive his people, and turn the Philistines away; to keep them from coming to his little farm and taking everything he had.


However, it wasn't to be.


It was with a familiar dread that at the end of the harvest season, just as they were locking up the stores, Shamgar heard a faint, horribly repetitive clanking starting up the road towards his humble homestead.


It wasn't long before the Philistine army, shining in the midday sun like an inexorable, starving swarm of beetles, came into view.


His wife and children looked at him. Their despair and hunger pleaded with him from their wasted faces and emaciated, care-worn forms. They were dying. They would die this winter, if someone didn't do something.


Shamgar wasn't a warrior.


He was just a poor, humble farmer. A labourer. There wasn't a chance he'd be able to stand up to, let alone fight, let alone defeat even one man in the armour-plated Philistine army. 


But he had to do something.


He looked around.


All he had to hand was an old ox goad– a rustic tool he used for driving the ox ahead of him to plow his fields. The same fields that grew the food he now had to protect for his family’s sake.


His hand closed upon the goad with grim, determined purpose. 


Enough was enough.



***

Judges 3:31 KJV

[31] And after him was Shamgar the son of Anath, which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox goad: and he also delivered Israel.

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