Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Judges 12: Ephraim vs. Gilead

As foreseen in the time of Joshua, the Israelite tribes divided by the Jordan River are susceptible to grave misunderstandings between them and sometimes fall into a civil war.  Such is the case in Judges 12 when Ephraim goes to war against Gilead.  This episode also became the source for a term that is used to describe the sorting out of whether one truly belongs in a group of people.

shib·bo·leth: a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.

What happened was this: after Jephthah's defeat of the Ammonites (at the very high cost of the sacrifice of his daughter - see Judges 11), the Ephraimites cross the Jordan River in anger at being uninvited to the battle  (vs. 1).  In hot anger, they threaten Jephthah, who points out that they had never been helpful in the long-running struggle with the Ammonites before.  This leads to outright fighting, resulting in Jephthah's victory over the Ephraimites with the Gileadites securing the fords of the Jordan.

Whenever any of the Ephraimites wanted to slink back across the Jordan westward to their home, they had to cross the Gileadite line. The Gileadites had a little speech test for the Ephraimites: to say the word "Shibboleth."  The word itself meant something along the lines of "an ear of corn" or "a stalk of grain," but its meaning wasn't important - only its pronunciation!  Apparently the Ephraimites' language had diverged from the Gileadites in 300 years, because they could not pronounce the "sh" sound and instead said, "Sibboleth."  Getting the word wrong meant instant death there on the banks of the Jordan.

Today, a "shibboleth" is something that is required for people to express in order to say that they belong to a group, even if it isn't a very relevant or timely belief.

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