In Deuteronomy 33:24, Asher is described as the “most blessed of sons.” And truly blessed his descendants were too. Physically they were given everything a human could dream of in the land they were allotted in Canaan. Rich soil for producing the finest wine, olives and wheat, access to the riches of the Mediterranean Sea, contracts with royalty for their exotic foods and the highly prized Tyrian purple dye, and a beautiful land of date palms and beaches. A paradise. 

What more could one wish for? Well, in verse 25 Moses did offer more, when he told the Asherites, “The bolts of your gates will be iron and bronze, and your strength will equal your days.” This was a promise of security as well, pictured by the strength of the locking system on their city gates. To keep the gates firmly closed, a bar of wood or metal would slot into brackets held in place on the gates and gate posts by metal bolts – providing fortifications strong enough to give the Asherites security “equal to their days,” or as long as they were resident there. So not only were the Asherites promised prosperity, they had security to protect that prosperity too. 

Which was good to know because as a coastal tribe the Asherites were vulnerable to invasion from both sea and land, and the Phoenicians had already set up city states like Tyre and Sidon on their Asherite land too. And the Phoenicians were a power to be reckoned with. They were skilled shipbuilders and canny sailors that had enabled them to build a trading empire that reached as far as the Atlantic Ocean. 

But God had guaranteed Asher’s safety and their prosperity, so again, what more could one wish for? 

Well, there was one more thing: humility, because pride would wreck everything. Or as Moses phrased it in Deuteronomy 8:11, “Be careful,” because when life has been good (12-13) – as it certainly was for the Asherites – “then your heart will become proud” (14), and “You say to yourselves, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me’” (17). The danger then being that they’d lose their awareness of God as their provider (18) and “follow other gods and bow down to them” instead, to which God also says in verse 19, “I testify against you today that (if you do that) you will surely be destroyed.” 

And destruction came too, because in Judges 4:2, “the Lord sold the Israelites into the hands of Jabin, a king of Canaan,” but it’s in the Asherites’ response to God that we see just “What pride can lead to”….(next blog)   

Imagine being Jacob’s eighth son Asher and your Dad tells you in front of your brothers that you’re going to be the rich one. “Asher my boy,” he says in Genesis 49:20, “your food will be rich and you will provide delicacies fit for a king.”

The tribe of Asher got the same good news from Moses too: “Asher is the most blessed of (Jacob’s) sons,” Deuteronomy 33:24, “let him be favoured by his brothers and let him bathe his feet in oil.” Again, it sounds like the Asherites are destined for a life of plenty and luxury. 

Their destiny was set the moment Asher was born too, when “Leah cried out, ‘How happy I am. My women friends call me happy too.’ So she named him Asher,” Genesis 30:12-13 – Asher meaning “happiness.” The hint was there right from the start, then, that God had a great life in mind for Asher. He’d be rich, happy and “favoured by his brothers” too, suggesting that Asher was also generous, happily sharing his bounty with the rest of Israel.  

The Asherites were well positioned to be generous too, because they were given some of the richest soil in all Canaan in a narrow but beautiful strip of land along the coast from the city of Sidon in the north (in southern Lebanon today) down to the slopes of Mount Carmel in the south (in northern Israel today). These well watered lowlands were perfect for vines, olive trees and wheat fields, producing wine, oil and wheat of the highest quality. The ten mile long valley of Asher was so fruitful it was called the ‘fat valley’. Not only, then, would the Asherites be totally self-sufficient, they would also provide rich foods and delicacies “fit for a king” (Genesis 49:20).  

Fit for two kings too, according to 1 Kings 5. In a trade between king Solomon and king Hiram of Tyre, Hiram “kept Solomon supplied with all the cedar and pine logs he wanted” (10), and in return “Solomon gave Hiram 20,000 measures of wheat (125,000 bushels)….and 20,000 baths of pressed olive oil (115,000 gallons) year after year” (11). Such quantities and quality of wheat and olive oil “fit for a king” would suggest the Asherites as the source. The “baths” of olive oil would also tie in with the olive oil being so plentiful the Asherites could “bathe their feet in it” (Deuteronomy 33:24). 

Their land produced enough to keep them rich and happy and in favour with both the king and their peers. So “What more could one wish for?”….(next blog)

The tribe of Gad, along with the tribe of Reuben and the half tribe of Manasseh, made a terrible mistake when they ditched the “God of their fathers,” 1 Chronicles 5:25, and “prostituted themselves to the gods of the peoples of the land” they were in, instead. 

But how did they fall for these other gods in the first place? According to Judges 2, it began when the Israelites lost sight of their history. In verse 10, a “generation grew up, who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel” – much like our western nations today losing sight of our Christian heritage and the basic Christian values that enabled our nations to lead the world in law and justice.

The result of losing sight of our history is similar to that of Israel too. When the Israelites “abandoned the God of their ancestors, and went after the gods of the people around them” (12), God’s response in Judges 10:13-14 was: “Well, since you’ve abandoned me to serve other gods, I won’t rescue you anymore. Cry out to the gods you’ve chosen instead, and let them save you when you’re in trouble.” 

And that’s the situation we find ourselves increasingly in today. As we abandon the biblical values that built us, we seek to fill the gap with gods of our own making to save us from all our human ills. Like all the ‘isms’ we’re now stuck with: Socialism, Secularism, Nationalism, Materialism, Globalism, Utopianism, Capitalism, Liberalism, Conservatism, Atheism, Wokism, Environmentalism, and all the man-made religious ‘isms’ too, that we identify our lives with, devoutly follow, fiercely defend, depend on for meaning and purpose, and seek to enforce on others.

So we’re experiencing what Israel experienced, that when the biblical God is abandoned for “images made by man’s design and skill” (Acts 17:29) the ‘isms’ take over. For the Israelites it was Ba’al(ism) and Ashtoreth(ism) that took over (Judges 2:13). But, fortunately, Judges 10:15-16, when the Israelites woke up to what they’d done, they ditched all their gods and turned to God to rescue them, and in response “God took their troubles to heart.” And whenever they turned to him like that he always responded. 

Will our western nations cotton on to that too, then? Because the promise that God will respond is as real today as it was for Israel (Acts 17:26-31). Which ties in with the next son of Jacob, “Asher: the rich one”….(next blog) 

The Gadites were given the lesson in how and why nations succeed and flourish. It was given to them by Joshua right after they’d proved themselves faithful to their promise to Moses, to not return to their homes and families east of the Jordan River until the entire country west of the Jordan was safely in Israelite hands. 

“So,” Joshua told the Gadites in Joshua 22:4, “now that the Lord your God has given your brothers rest as he promised, return to your homes in the land that Moses gave you on the other side of the Jordan. “But,” verse 5 – and here came the lesson – “be very careful to keep the commandments and the law that Moses the servant of the lord gave you: to love the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to obey his commands to hold fast to him and to serve him with all your heart and all your soul.”

And at this point in their history the Gadites were determined to do just that, and demonstrated it visibly by building an impressive altar (10) as “A witness between us that the Lord is God,” verse 34.

With an attitude like that their potential was enormous, because the “Lord would give them rest on every side,” Joshua 21:44, he’d also “hand all their enemies over to them and not one of his promises to them would fail” (45). They had God’s total backing. 

And God was true to his promise too, because when the Gadites “waged war against the Hagrites, Jetur, Naphish and Nodab” in 1 Chronicle 5:19, “God handed the Hagrites and all their allies over to them, because they (the Gadites) cried out to him during the battle,” and God “answered their prayers, because the Gadites trusted in him” (20). 

But something went horribly wrong, verse 26, resulting in “the God of Israel stirring up the spirit of Tiglath-Pileser king of Assyria, who took the Gadites into exile” and they lost everything. The reason being verse 25: “they were unfaithful to the God of their fathers and prostituted themselves to the gods of the people of the land.”

The Gadites failed as a tribe, and so did Israel as a nation, when obeying and trusting God felt so out-of-date and non-progressive compared to the novel and innovative gods and religions that other peoples had. Which rings a rather familiar bell in our western nations today, that were built on a respect for and faith in the biblical God, but are now experiencing what happens “When the ‘isms’ take over”….(next blog)

The Israelites really embarrassed themselves when wrongly judging the motives of their chums in the tribe of Gad. 

The Gadites had done nothing wrong too. Quite the opposite: they’d “done all that Moses the servant of the Lord commanded,” Joshua 22:2. And what’s more, they’d been highly commended by Joshua, because “For a long time now,” he told them in verse 3, “you have not deserted your brothers (your fellow Israelites) but have carried out the mission the Lord your God gave you.” 

They truly hadn’t deserted their brother Israelites either. The Gadites had voluntarily offered “to arm ourselves and go ahead of the Israelites (into Canaan west of the River Jordan)” and continue to fight alongside them “until every Israelite has received his inheritance” and every enemy had been defeated (Numbers 32:17-18, 21). Only then would the Gadites return to their own homes and families east of the Jordan (26-27) – and without receiving any inheritance of their own in Canaan either (19). 

So the Gadites had thoroughly put themselves out for their fellow Israelites, fighting with them to win their land for them, and without receiving any of that land themselves. And with that job done Joshua “sent the Gadites home” with his blessing, Joshua 22:6-8.  

But that’s when the trouble began, because “When they came to Geliloth near the Jordan in the land of Canaan, the Reubenites, Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh built an imposing altar,” verse 10. Well, that did it, because when the Israelites got wind of this altar, they immediately assumed the worst, that the three tribes, including Gad, had “turned away from the Lord and built an altar in rebellion against him” (16). They were so convinced their judgment was correct that “the whole assembly of Israel gathered to go to war” (11-12) – no questions asked, no facts checked, no consultation done, just charge the Gadites as guilty and feel justified in lopping their heads off.  

How embarrassing, then, when the Gadites explained they’d built this “replica of the Lord’s altar” (28) as “a witness between us and you and the generations that follow, that we will worship the Lord at his sanctuary” (27). They’d built the altar as visible proof that even though they weren’t living alongside the other Israelites they would remain loyal to Israel’s God too (24-29, 34). At which point there was no more talk of war (33). But the Gadites’ story doesn’t end there either, because they also became “A lesson in why nations fail”….(nest blog) 

It was an awkward situation. The Gadites had discovered a choice piece of land for their huge herds and flocks and wanted to settle there rather than head west over the Jordan River and into battle in Canaan, Numbers 32:1. But when they asked Moses if it was all right for them to stay, he did not react well. 

He was hopping mad. He accused them of sitting idly by while their fellow Israelites did all the fighting, which might discourage them from fighting too, and that would risk God getting angry at the Israelites not following his instructions and consigning them to another 40 years of wandering round the desert, and it would all be the Gadites’ fault (6-15). Moses even called them “a brood of sinners” (14). 

Moses was treading on rather dangerous ground, though, having predicted in Deuteronomy 33:20 that Gad would be “like a lion, tearing at arm or head.” He was very fortunate, then, that the Gadites chose not to tear his arm or head off, and they turned to diplomacy instead. 

They did not back down from what they believed was best for their families and their livestock, Numbers 32:16, but they also took into account the tough position Moses was in. Moses had strict instructions from God to take the land God had in mind for them. To ease Moses’ mind, then, the Gadites told him in verse 17, “we are ready to arm ourselves and go ahead of the Israelites until we have brought them to their place.” They’d be willing to lead Israel into battle and stay in the fight until the job was done.

“So here’s what we’re offering: we’d like to go ahead and build pens for our livestock and fortified cities for our women and children on this side of the river (16), but we won’t return to our homes until every Israelite has received his inheritance (17-18). And, what’s more, we don’t expect any part of that inheritance ourselves since we’ve chosen to settle here instead (19).That’s our promise to you, so do we have a deal?” 

“Agreed on all counts,” Moses replied (20-22), his anger totally diffused, “but you’d better not break your promise because your sin will find you out” (23). Your diplomacy had better be backed up by action, in other words. And happily the Gadites pulled through as promised (Joshua 22:1-9), but that wasn’t the end of the story. The Gadites faced another awkward situation, this time the wrath of all their fellow Israelites because of “Judging motives wrongly”….(next blog)

Gad was born to Zilpah, Jacob’s first wife Leah’s handmaid (Genesis 35:26). In Genesis 49:19, Jacob predicted that “Gad will be attacked by a band of raiders, but he will attack them at their heels.” Later on, Moses spoke of Gad being “like a lion, tearing at arm or head” (Deuteronomy 33:20), and back when Gad was born, Leah cried out “A troop is coming!” (Genesis 30:11). Put those three together and a picture emerges of Gad and his descendants being a warrior clan of fierce fighters. 

This got them into hot water with Moses, however, because Moses got it into his head that the Gadites weren’t willing to fight, and just when their warrior skills were most needed too, for conquering the land west of the Jordan River as God had instructed. 

The Gadites, however, had huge herds and flocks and the land east of the Jordan River was perfect for their livestock, Numbers 32:1, so they asked Moses if they could settle that land instead and not go any further west across the Jordan (2-5). 

Well that really got Moses’ back up, and he yelled at them, “Shall your countrymen go to war while you just sit here?” (6). He had a point, though, because the Gadites not proceeding any further west could “discourage the rest of the Israelites from going over into the land (west of the Jordan) that the Lord has given them” (7). And that was a sore point for Moses, because forty years earlier the Israelites had been discouraged back then too from entering the Promised Land as God instructed, because of the spies negative report of the land, resulting in God burning with anger and having the Israelites wander round the desert for another forty years (8-13).

So Moses let fly at the Gadites again in verse 14: “And here you are now, you brood of sinners, doing exactly what your fathers did, which means God will get angry and have us wandering round the desert all over again, and you’ll be the cause of it” (15). 

But this is when the Gadites proved themselves to be the “troopers” Leah had called them, but in an even better way than being warriors, because they didn’t get all huffy at Moses calling them a brood of sinners. Instead, despite being hardy fighting men to the core, the Gadites humbly approached Moses with a proposal that would prove to him they could be trusted. It’s an intriguing example of “How anger can be diffused by diplomacy”….(next blog) 

When it came to “putting a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God” in Revelation 7:3, the tribe of Dan is not included. The total number sealed was “144,000 from all the tribes of Israel,” 12,000 from each tribe (4), but no 12,000 from Dan. 

One explanation is that because Judah and Dan had collaborated so closely together in the past, Dan was absorbed into Judah, in the same way that Ephraim is not mentioned in the 144,000 either, but is included in with his father Joseph (8) instead.

Another explanation for why both Dan and Ephraim are missed out by name in the 144,000 is in 1 Kings 12. The story here is that only two generations after king David’s reign a major rift had developed between David’s grandson, king Rehoboam, and Jeroboam who’d returned from exile in Egypt having fled there after king Solomon tried to kill him for rebelling against him (11:26-40). 

On his return, Jeroboam begged Rehoboam to ease up on the heavy taxes inflicted on them by his father king Solomon. But Rehoboam refused, resulting in ten Israelite tribes breaking away and making Jeroboam their king (12:1-20). To provide the ten tribes with an alternative to the temple in Jerusalem, Jeroboam had two golden calves made, claiming they were “the gods who brought you up out of Egypt” (12:28), and set them up in Bethel and Dan (29). Bethel was in Ephraim, Jeroboam being an Ephraimite himself. 

So Dan and Ephraim became the two breakaway centres of worship, but of false gods with non-Levite priests and pagan shrines, and a festival of Jeroboam’s own making for offering sacrifices (31-33). In only two generations after king David, then, his kingdom had been divided by Jeroboam, who also made Ephraim and Dan the religious centres for Israel, that led to Israel’s demise at the hands of the Assyrians who carted them off into captivity and out of the pages of history. Did God, therefore, take all this into account in Revelation 7 when thinking of Dan and Ephraim and their role in drawing Israel away from him?

God had also predicted through Jacob that Dan would “provide justice for his people” (Genesis 49:16), which Dan did not do, so was it pure justice, therefore, that made God leave Dan out in Revelation 7? On then to the tribe of “Gad: the warrior clan”….(next blog)

In rescuing the Israelites from the iron grip of the Philistines, God had Samson miraculously born to an infertile woman. He then gave Samson miraculous strength during his lifetime too, so that with “a donkey’s jawbone he killed a thousand men,” Judges 15:15-16. 

But to fully free the Israelites from their Philistine enemies, Samson would need to die, which he did willingly when bringing the temple crashing down on himself and all the Philistine rulers (16:25-30). So here we have a man in Scripture who was miraculously conceived to deliver his people from their enemies (13:2-5), was miraculously strengthened during his tenure as a judge for twenty years to overcome his enemies, who then willingly gave up his life in his prime to fully save them.  

And God engineered all this from Samson’s conception to his death, purely in answer to the Israelites’ need for salvation from their enemies. The parallels with Jesus are too obvious. So is this why Samson had to die, as a precursor to Jesus having to die as God’s means of saving all humanity from the overwhelming power of evil (1 John 3:8)?

It would seem so, but with one huge difference: Jesus was perfect in his lifetime, but Samson was arrogant, headstrong, provocative and vengeful. And God’s salvation through Samson was by violence too, but not so through Jesus. Jesus, therefore, was the only perfect man in history whose life and death made the salvation of all humanity from our worst enemy possible.

But in Samson God revealed some interesting things about himself, in not only creating such a flamboyant and flawed man in the first place, but also backing him up with superhuman power to kill people. And we find out the reason why God did it too. In Judges 14:4 God was “seeking an occasion to confront the Philistines.” So God had a personal score to settle with the Philistines, because of what they were doing to the Israelites. And if that meant creating such a man as Samson, and having him die to deal with these obnoxious Philistines, so be it. 

But God had Jesus go through the same thing, and for the same reason. Which has to tell us something about how God feels personally about his beloved humans being hounded and destroyed by the powers of evil. Which raises a question: Since God created a great man in Samson from the tribe of Dan to destroy evil, “Why isn’t Dan in the 144,000?”….(next blog)

Samson was born in an age when Israel had no king, and no Joshua or Moses to lead them either. And only one generation after Joshua’s death the Israelite clans had already exchanged “the God of their fathers” for the “various gods of the peoples around them,” Judges 2:12.

So “In his anger against Israel the Lord handed them over to raiders who plundered them” (14), and “Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the Lord was against them to defeat them” (15). But in response to their cries of distress God “raised up judges, who saved them out of the hands of these raiders” (16). Unfortunately, this became the pattern all through the time of the judges. A good judge would die, Israel would return to “following other gods,” God would get angry (3:8), but when Israel cried out in their distress, God would raise up another “deliverer” (3:9) in the form of another judge, like Ehud (chapter 3), Deborah (chapters 4 and 5), Gideon (chapters 6 to 8) and several others, leading up to the birth of Samson in Judges 13 from the tribe of Dan.

Samson had a flamboyant start in life, similar in several ways to Jesus, in that Samson was also miraculously conceived, his birth was announced by an angel to his mother (Judges 13:2-3, 6-7), he was “set apart to God from birth (5) to begin the deliverance of Israel” (just like Jesus in Matthew 1:21), and “the Spirit of the Lord (13:25) began to stir Samson” (again like Jesus in Luke 4:18). In Samson’s case “The Spirit of the Lord came upon him in (physical) power, enabling him to tear a lion apart with his bare hands” (14:6). In strength alone he was impressive, and in his flamboyant looks too, with his long flowing uncut hair (13:5).

But Samson was also flawed. He chose a Philistine lass for his wife against his parents’ wishes (14:1-3), but God was “seeking an occasion to confront the Philistines who were ruling over Israel at the time,” and Samson’s reckless pig-headedness fit in perfectly with his rescue plan (4). And so did Samson riling up the Philistines at his marriage feast too. Samson made a deal with thirty of them (11), that if they could answer a riddle he put to them he’d give them thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes, but if they failed they owed him the same amount (12-13). In response the Philistines threatened Samson’s wife with death to get the answer out of him (15). She did it too, but only after crying for the full seven days of their marriage feast to get him to tell her (16-17). 

God’s response was to give Samson sufficient Spirit power to kill thirty other Philistines in Ashkelon and use their clothes to pay his debt (19). And that marked the start of God delivering Israel from the Philistines. But “Why did Samson need to die?”….(next blog)