EXPLORE THE TEXT
God’s people must guard against the danger of forgetting what the Lord has done for them.
11 The Israelites did what was evil in the Lord’s sight.
They worshiped the Baals
12 and abandoned the Lord, the God of their ancestors,
who had brought them out of Egypt.
They followed other gods from the surrounding peoples and bowed down to them.
They angered the Lord,
13 for they abandoned him and worshiped Baal and the Ashtoreths.
14 The Lord’s anger burned against Israel,
and he handed them over to marauders who raided them.
He sold them to the enemies around them, and they could no longer resist their enemies.
15 Whenever the Israelites went out,
the Lord was against them and brought disaster on them,
just as he had promised and sworn to them.
So they suffered greatly.
The “Prologue”
This prologue sets the context for Israel’s sin in the rest of
the book.
Joshua had divided the land around 1385 BC.
A few years later, Joshua died and the nation’s spiritual
spiral began.
Identify the gods pursued by the Israelites after Joshua’s death:
The Israelites worshiped Baal and the Ashtoreths.
“Baal” literally means
“lord, master, owner, possessor, or husband.”
As a proper noun, it referred to the supreme god of the fertility cult of the Canaanites.
He was the storm god whose worshipers believed gave his rain to the earth so that it could bear fruit.
Ashtoreth was the Canaanite goddess of
fertility, love, and war.
The fertility of the land depended on
the sexual activities of Baal and his consort.
Therefore, the false religion of the Canaanites
promised its adherents material prosperity
while incorporating flagrant sexual immorality into its manipulative practices. (PSG, p. 76)
God didn’t take Israel’s sin lightly.
He had warned them that idolatry would come with consequences,
and He poured out His anger on them in an effort to bring them back
to Him.