Ehud

We have a period of almost 400 years of loose central authority, which is the period of time of judges.

where various people appear and to save the Jewish people from threats, people like Deborah and Ehud and Othniel and Dvorah and Samson.

And then we have the great prophet who is Shmuel, Samuel.

He is the transitional leader who brings us into what is the monarchy and Saul being the first king of Israel from the tribe of Benjamin.

And this is where people think, I gotta get some inside information that's not in the Bible, the stuff that your pastor won't tell you.

Mainstream Christianity has hidden this for 2,000 years, but we found a scroll in the caves of Turkey, and we found out that the book of Josephus was actually talking about Ehud, and it's like, hold on, if it's not in the Bible, because there's some stuff online right now that's pulling people into some weird ideologies.

Biblical Christianity is not built on secret knowledge from the internet.

It's built on Jesus and the revealed word of God.

It must be toward the beginning of the judges' time, for Boaz, who married Ruth, was born of Rahab, who received the spies in Joshua's time.

Some think it was in the days of Ehud, others of Deborah.

The learned Bishop Patrick inclines to think it was in the days of Gideon, because in his days only we read of a famine by the Midianites' invasion, Judges 6 verses 3 and 4.

While the judges were ruling, some one city and some another, Providence takes particular cognizance of Bethlehem and has an eye to a king, to Messiah himself, who should descend from two Gentile mothers, Rahab and Ruth.

It means weight or heaviness.

Um, there's a, a famous spy story, uh, in the biblical book called Judges, and there's a man named Ehud, who-- he's left-handed, and so he always wears his dagger.

He has a little secret assassin's dagger that he straps to the inside of his right thigh.

And so the guards don't think about it, and so they check him.

When he goes into this king's palace, they check his, his left thigh, and there's no knife there.

And so Ehud, he goes into the throne room of a king named Eglon.

It's a wonderful boy name, Eglon.

And he's the king of Moab, and he's so kavod.

anyway.

We're studying the book of Judges right now in adult Bible class, and Ehud, one of the early figures in the book of Judges, is left-handed.

And so we recently had that conversation.

There were some left-handed folks in the Bible class, and we had some fun with that.

In Benjamin's blessing, Jacob referred also to the service in the temple, because the holy place was situated in the territory of Benjamin.

And when Jacob called his youngest son a wolf that raveneth, he was thinking of the judge Ehud, the great scholar, a Benjamite, who conquered Eglon, king of Moab, and also he had in mind the Benjamites that captured their wives by cunning and force.

Again, if he called Benjamin a wolf, Judah a lion, and Joseph a bull, he wanted to point to the three kingdoms known as wolf, lion, and bull, the doom of which was and will be sealed by the descendants of his three sons.

And what was it, Dan? Was it in Genesis he was compared to a, uh, a viper or a snake that lieth, uh, on the way? Uh, Babylon the king, uh, the kingdom of the lion, fell through the hands of Daniel of the tribe of Judah.