The Fallible · Synthetic · Study Bible
Tola
Judges 10:1–2 — Tola. Each verse below carries the full apparatus: the Berean Standard Bible, the vocalized original (tap any word), and a parsed breakdown of every term transcribed from the interlinear. Synthesized commentary, canonical threads, and the reading of Christ gather at the end, over the whole unit.
1After the time of Abimelech, a man of Issachar, Tola son of Puah, the son of Dodo, rose up to save Israel. He lived in Shamir, in the hill country of Ephraim.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
’a·ḥă·rê ’ă·ḇî·me·leḵ ’îš yiś·śā·š·ḵār tō·w·lā‘ ben- pū·’āh ben- dō·w·ḏōw way·yā·qām lə·hō·wō·šî·a‘ ’eṯ- yiś·rā·’êl wə·hū- yō·šêḇ bə·šā·mîr bə·har ’ep̄·rā·yim
Literal — word-for-word from the original
After Abimelech — and-he-rose-up to-save —Israel, a-man-of-Issachar, Tola son-of-Puah son-of-Dodo. And-he was-sitting in-Shamir, in-the-hill-country-of Ephraim.
Where the English smooths the original
The Hebrew is bare: אַחֲרֵי אֲבִימֶלֶךְ (’a·ḥă·rê ’ă·ḇî·me·leḵ), “after Abimelech” — the preposition ’achar (H310), “properly, the hind part.” BSB supplies “the time of” to smooth it, but the unsupplied phrase is harsher: history is dated from the man, not from a reign. Ellicott: “his is merely a note of time. Abimelech is not counted among the judges.” The book will not give Abimelech a judgeship, only a date.
לְהוֹשִׁיעַ (lə·hō·wō·šî·a‘, H3467 yâshaʻ) is a Hiphil infinitive construct — causative: “to bring-to-safety, to cause deliverance,” not merely “to save.” The root sense is “to be open, wide or free.” English “to save” reads as a completed rescue; the Hiphil infinitive names only the purpose of his rising, and the chapter never reports a battle. Barnes calls this “the technical word applied to the judges.”
BSB’s “He lived” renders וְהוּא־יֹשֵׁב (wə·hū- yō·šêḇ) — an independent pronoun plus a Qal participle of yâshab (H3427), whose lexical entry is “properly, to sit down (specifically as judge).” The English loses both the durative force (“and he was sitting”) and the judicial overtone of the seat. JFB reads exactly that: Shamir “as a central place, he made it the seat of government.”
אִישׁ יִשָּׂשכָר (’îš yiś·śā·š·ḵār) is a construct chain, “a-man-of-Issachar,” and in the Hebrew it stands before the name Tola; BSB reorders it as an appositive after the tribal tag. The Hebrew therefore introduces him first by tribe and only then by name — the point Ellicott presses when he notes Tola “seems to have been the only judge furnished by this indolent tribe.”
Abimelech is not counted among the judges, though it is not improbable that, evil as was the episode of his rebellions, he may have kept foreign enemies in check.Ellicott concedes what the narrative withholds: even the usurper may have kept borders quiet. It is a fair-minded guess, not a datum of the text.
Tola means ‘the crimson worm,’ ‘cochineal,’ and Puah probably ‘madder,’ a plant from which a red dye was obtained, in Arab, fûh ; the coincidence can hardly be accidentalThe dye-trade etymology is a nineteenth-century philological proposal; Ellicott reaches the same reading independently. Treat the meanings as probable, not certain.
There was probably no great invasion or grievous servitude, but perhaps frequent border wars requiring an able and watchful chief to maintain the independence of Israel.Frankly labelled “probably” — the Pulpit is reconstructing a silence, since the text names no enemy at all.
but Tola rose up as the deliverer of Israel, even supposing that he simply regulated the affairs of the tribes who acknowledged him as their supreme judge, and succeeded by his efforts in preventing the nation from falling back into idolatry, and thus guarded Israel from any fresh oppression on the part of hostile nations.
2Tola judged Israel twenty-three years, and when he died, he was buried in Shamir.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
way·yiš·pōṭ ’eṯ- yiś·rā·’êl ‘eś·rîm wə·šā·lōš šā·nāh way·yā·māṯ way·yiq·qā·ḇêr bə·šā·mîr
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-he-judged —Israel twenty and-three year; and-he-died, and-he-was-buried in-Shamir.
Where the English smooths the original
וַיִּשְׁפֹּט (way·yiš·pōṭ, H8199 shâphaṭ) is simply “and-he-judged”; the subject “Tola” is supplied by BSB from the previous verse. Ellicott makes the verb itself the argument: “the recurrence of the normal verb (to judge) shows that Tola was an honourable ‘Suffes,’ not a despot, like Abimelech.” The bare Hebrew verb is the whole rebuttal of chapter 9.
The Hebrew counts עֶשְׂרִים וְשָׁלֹשׁ שָׁנָה (‘eś·rîm wə·šā·lōš šā·nāh) — literally “twenty and three year,” with shâneh (H8141, “a year as a revolution of time”) in the singular after the numeral, as Hebrew regularly counts. English must pluralise; the Hebrew leaves the long stretch grammatically undivided.
BSB subordinates: “and when he died.” The Hebrew does not subordinate anything — וַיָּמָת (way·yā·māṯ) is the third in a flat chain of consecutive imperfects, he-judged · he-died · he-was-buried, each waw-linked and equal in weight. A whole life is laid out as three strokes with no clause ranked above another.
וַיִּקָּבֵר (way·yiq·qā·ḇêr, H6912 qâbar, “to inter”) is Nifal — passive, and with no agent named. Unlike Gideon (Judges 8:32) no burying family is mentioned, and unlike Abimelech no shame attaches. Cambridge cites Moore: “we are probably to infer that the tomb of the eponymous ancestor of the clan was in later times shewn at Shamir.”
The recurrence of the normal verb (to judge) shows that Tola was an honour able “Suffes,” not a despot, like Abimelech.“Suffes” is Ellicott’s Latin-Punic term for a shophet, a magistrate rather than a monarch; the printed text reads “honour able,” a typesetting break in the source.
He did not take upon him to be king, as Abimelech did, but acted as a judge, in which office he continued twenty three years, and faithfully discharged it, and died in honour
‘We are probably to infer that the tomb of the eponymous ancestor of the clan was in later times shewn at Shamir’ (Moore).Cambridge is quoting G. F. Moore, and the inference is about later local memory, not about anything the verse asserts.
Quiet and peaceable reigns, though the best to live in, yield least variety of matter to be spoken of.
The verse-by-verse work is done. What follows gathers the whole unit. All three layers below are machine-generated (⚙). Weigh them; they have no authority.
AI synthesis — woven from the public-domain voices above and the original text; generated and fallible.
The unit opens with a preposition and a name: אַחֲרֵי אֲבִימֶלֶךְ, “after Abimelech.” Ellicott states the grammar and the verdict together — “his is merely a note of time. Abimelech is not counted among the judges” — and Gill presses the same point harder, that Abimelech “was no judge of God’s raising up, or the people’s choosing, but usurped a kingly power over them.” Ellicott is nonetheless willing to concede that, evil as the episode was, he “may have kept foreign enemies in check,” and JFB reads the following verb in that light: “deliverance was necessary as well from intestine usurpation as from foreign aggression.” ⚙ What the Hebrew does here is refuse Abimelech a formula. Every real judge in this book gets qûwm (H6965) with a purpose-infinitive; Abimelech got a coronation under an oak (Judges 9:6) and a millstone. He survives in chapter 10 only as a date-stamp.
וַיָּקָם֩ לְהוֹשִׁ֣יעַ — “and-he-rose-up to-save” — puts the book’s technical vocabulary (Barnes: yâshaʻ “is the technical word applied to the judges,” as at Judges 2:16, 18; 3:9, 15, 31) over a career in which no enemy is ever named. The commentators divide honestly over the gap. Ellicott hears a downgrade in the idiom itself: “the phrase implies a less direct call and a less immediate service than that used of other judges.” Benson and Poole insist the opposite, that he arose “not of himself, but raised by God, as the other judges were,” and that he saved “not by fighting against and overthrowing their enemies, but by a prudent and pious government of them.” The Pulpit Commentary reconstructs a plausible middle — “probably no great invasion or grievous servitude, but perhaps frequent border wars.” K&D expressly declines Rosenmüller’s conjecture of constant harassment and settles instead on preventive government: Tola “succeeded by his efforts in preventing the nation from falling back into idolatry.” ⚙ The Hiphil infinitive supports the modest reading. It states a purpose, not an outcome; the text tells us what he rose for, then tells us where he sat.
Three names and a tribe carry more weight than the deeds. Cambridge: “Tola means ‘the crimson worm,’ ‘cochineal,’ and Puah probably ‘madder,’ a plant from which a red dye was obtained… the coincidence can hardly be accidental,” and it points to Deuteronomy 33:19 for Issachar’s trade. Ellicott, working independently, glosses Tola as “worm (perhaps the kermes-worm)” and adds that Issachar furnished no other judge. On the grandfather the ancient versions split: the LXX read υἱὸς πατραδέλφου αὐτοῦ, “son of his uncle,” which JFB extends into a claim that Puah was “uncle to Abimelech by the father’s side, and consequently brother of Gideon.” ⚙ That reconstruction should be treated with suspicion, and Ellicott, Gill and K&D all say why: Gideon was Manassite, Puah Issacharite, and Ellicott notes flatly that “since Tola was of Issachar, he could not be nephew of Abimelech a Manassite.” JFB rescues it only by supposing them “uterine brothers,” which the text nowhere says. Take Dodo as a proper name with K&D and Ellicott — and note, with Ellicott, that it is “from the same root as David, ‘beloved.’”
The second verse is three consecutive imperfects: he-judged · he-died · he-was-buried. Ellicott finds the whole argument in the first of them — “the recurrence of the normal verb (to judge) shows that Tola was an honourable ‘Suffes,’ not a despot, like Abimelech” — and Gill says the same in narrative form: “he did not take upon him to be king, as Abimelech did, but acted as a judge… and died in honour.” Cambridge, quoting Moore, suspects the burial notice preserves a local memory: the clan ancestor’s tomb “was in later times shewn at Shamir.” Henry’s concise line frames the whole unit without excusing it: quiet and peaceable reigns “yield least variety of matter to be spoken of.” ⚙ The Nifal וַיִּקָּבֵר names no buriers and no mourners, and the place-name closes the ring opened in v. 1. He sat in Shamir; he lies in Shamir. That is the complete record of twenty-three years in which Israel was not destroyed.
⚙ Offered to be tested. Chapter 9 ended with a skull broken by a woman’s millstone and a kingship that consumed its own makers. Chapter 10 opens with a man whose name means worm, from a tribe that produced no other judge, sitting in a town nobody can now locate. Scripture gives him no battle, no oracle, no angel, no fleece — three verbs and a number. And the narrator, who has just spent a chapter describing what it costs Israel when a man grasps at rule, calls this man a saviour: he rose up lĕhôšîaʻ, by the same root that names Joshua and, in Greek, Jesus.
The temptation is to read Tola as filler between the Gideon cycle and the Jephthah cycle. I think the placement is the argument. Judges measures deliverance by what it prevents as much as by what it overthrows — K&D’s reading, that Tola guarded Israel by keeping it from idolatry, is exactly the kind of salvation the next paragraph proves was needed, since the moment he and Jair are gone “the Israelites again did evil in the sight of the LORD” (Judges 10:6). Twenty-three uneventful years are not a gap in the record of God’s saving; they are a specimen of it. The verb of his whole tenure is yâshab — to sit. A man who sits, judges, and is buried where he sat may be doing the most durable work in the book, and the book honours him precisely by having nothing to report.
Under-claim where the text is silent: we do not know who his enemies were, where Shamir stood, or whether the crimson-worm etymology of his name was ever heard as anything but a family name. Say only what is written — that he rose to save, and that for twenty-three years Israel had a judge instead of a king.
The only deeds recorded of this saviour are that he stood up, sat down, and was buried — and that is the point. (This line is ⚙ synthesis, not a verse of Scripture.)
AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.
The two rare names in v. 1 are already fixed in the census lists. Genesis 46:13 and Numbers 26:23 give Tola and Puah as sons — that is, clans — of Issachar, and 1 Chronicles 7:1 repeats the list; 1 Chronicles 7:2 then counts Tola’s house. Cambridge: “According to Genesis 46:13, Numbers 26:23 (P), 1 Chronicles 7:1, Tola and Puah were brothers, ‘sons,’ i.e. clans of Issachar.” K&D says the names “were afterwards repeated in the different households of these families,” which is why a man of the twelfth century can bear them. ⚙ The link is name-identity across a genealogical tradition, not a citation: Judges is not quoting the census, and Cambridge itself warns “it would be rash to conclude that these names were never borne by individuals.”
Genesis 46:13 · Numbers 26:23 · 1 Chronicles 7:1 · 1 Chronicles 7:2
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H8439 Tôwlâʻ (in 5 vv) and H6312 Pûwʼâh (in 4 vv), both rare, plus H3485 Yissâˢkâr (in 40 vv); 1 Chronicles 7:2 shares H8439 (in 5 vv). A rare-lexeme verbal link of proper names — identity of vocabulary, not a quotation of one text by another
שָׁמִיר occurs in only three verses, and one of the other two is Joshua 15:48, a town in the hill country of Judah. The Verifier scores it the strongest lexical match in the unit — and every voice in the brief uses the match to deny an identification. Barnes: “not the same as that mentioned in Joshua 15:48, which was in the hill country of Judah.” Gill says the qualifier “in Mount Ephraim” exists precisely “to distinguish it from another of the same name in the mountain of Judah.” K&D and Cambridge concur, Cambridge adding that “LXX. A and Luc. read Samaria, replacing a strange name by a familiar one,” an ancient substitution Ellicott also rejects. ⚙ So this is a real verbal link that functions as a disambiguation: the word is shared, the place is not, and both sites remain unlocated.
Joshua 15:48
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H8069 Shâmîyr (in 3 vv) — among the rarest place-names in the canon, so the lexical link is certain; the geographical identification is denied by Barnes, Gill, Cambridge and K&D alike
Tola’s grandfather bears a name found in only five verses, four of them in the rosters of David’s heroes: Eleazar son of Dodo (2 Samuel 23:9; 1 Chronicles 11:12) and Elhanan son of Dodo of Bethlehem (2 Samuel 23:24; 1 Chronicles 11:26). K&D appeals to exactly these to refuse the LXX’s common-noun reading: “Dodo is not an appellative, as the Sept. translators supposed (υἱὸς πατραδέλφου αὐτοῦ), but a proper name, as in 2 Samuel 23:9 (Keri), 24, and 1 Chronicles 11:12.” Cambridge tracks the root further — “Dod = lit. ‘loved one,’ then ‘kinsman,’ ‘uncle’” — and lists Dodavahu and Eldad as variants, while Ellicott notes it is “from the same root as David, ‘beloved.’” ⚙ The connection is lexical and onomastic, not narrative: nothing suggests the families are related.
2 Samuel 23:9 · 2 Samuel 23:24 · 1 Chronicles 11:12 · 1 Chronicles 11:26
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H1734 Dôwdôw (in 5 vv) — a rare proper name; the derivation from dôd, “beloved,” and the tie to the name David is a lexicographical claim made by Cambridge and Ellicott, not a Verifier computation
Issachar’s allotment lies north-east of the Plain of Jezreel (Joshua 17:10–11 places it beside Manasseh and Ephraim), yet the judge of Issachar sits in the hill country of Ephraim. Cambridge draws the historical inference: “from this verse we learn that at least one clan of the tribe had its seat further south,” and speculates on a link between Shamir and Shimron. Barnes reads the same datum the other direction — “Issachar would seem from this to have extended into the northern part of mount Ephraim” — while Gill, Benson, Poole and JFB all explain the residence by function rather than territory: Shamir was central, near the tabernacle at Shiloh, “fit for a judge to reside in, to whom the people might apply from all parts.” ⚙ The two explanations are not reconcilable from this verse alone; the tribal-geography link is thematic, and the shared lexemes are too common to carry a verbal claim.
Joshua 17:10 · Joshua 17:11
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H3485 Yissâˢkâr (in 40 vv) and H669 ʼEphrayim (in 164 vv) — both too frequent to support a verbal tier; the link is the shared subject of Issachar’s border with Ephraim, and Cambridge’s and Barnes’s inferences from it point in opposite directions
If Ellicott and Cambridge are right that Tôwlâʻ is the crimson worm, the name touches a small vocabulary of humiliation and dye: the sufferer of Psalm 22:6 who says “I am a worm and not a man,” and the “worm Jacob” of Isaiah 41:14 whom the LORD addresses as Redeemer. ⚙ This must be stated carefully. The Verifier returned no link here, and it could not: the judge’s name is H8439, a proper noun, while Psalm 22:6 and Isaiah 41:14 use the common noun tôlaʻath — a different Strong’s entry, however close the sense. So there is no confirmed verbal basis, only the meaning of the name as two commentators reconstruct it, and a shared image of the lowest creature standing for a rescued or rescuing figure. Held loosely, it is suggestive; asserted as a word-link, it would be false.
Psalm 22:6 · Isaiah 41:14
basis: No Verifier basis: H8439 (proper name) and the tôlaʻath of Psalm 22:6 / Isaiah 41:14 are distinct Strong's entries. The whole link rests on the etymology proposed by Ellicott (“worm, perhaps the kermes-worm”) and Cambridge (“the crimson worm, cochineal”) — a philological reconstruction, not a textual datum
AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.
The purpose-clause of v. 1 is לְהוֹשִׁיעַ, the Hiphil of yâshaʻ (H3467), the root that gives Israel the names Hoshea, Joshua and — through its Greek form — Jesus. Barnes marks it as “the technical word applied to the judges” and sends the reader to Nehemiah 9:27, where the confession recalls that God “gavest them saviours who saved them,” the same root turned into a noun. ⚙ Judges is thereby building a series that the book itself keeps declaring insufficient: every saviour it raises dies, and the very next paragraph reports that “the Israelites again did evil” (Judges 10:6). Tola’s notice is a clean specimen of the pattern — a man raised to save, twenty-three years, a grave. The apostolic reading of that pattern is that the series is a shape waiting on a term: the angel’s word to Joseph, “you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21), names a saviour of the same root who does not die and leave the people to relapse. The judges as provisional deliverers pointing beyond themselves is the widely-held Christian reading of the book; the specific Hebrew-to-Greek name link is etymological, not a quotation, and should be held as such.
Judges 2:16 · Nehemiah 9:27 · Matthew 1:21 · Hebrews 7:25
⚙ Two verbs frame Tola’s whole tenure: he sat (yâshab, H3427 — “properly, to sit down, specifically as judge”) and he was buried (qâbar, H6912, Nifal, agentless). Ellicott insists the point of the notice is that he was “an honourable ‘Suffes,’ not a despot,” and Gill that “he did not take upon him to be king, as Abimelech did.” Chapter 9 has just shown what the grasped crown costs. ⚙ The reading I offer is that Judges here sets out, in miniature, the two things a true saviour of Israel does not do: he does not seize the throne, and he does not escape the grave. Christ, in the Gospels’ telling, refuses the crown offered by force (John 6:15) and goes to a borrowed tomb. The difference is the whole gospel — Tola’s burial closes his notice, while the burial of Christ opens the next chapter of his. Hebrews states the contrast in the terms Judges keeps supplying: the former ministers “were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office,” while He holds His permanently. Where Tola sits in Shamir, the Son sits “at the right hand of the Majesty on high.”
Judges 9:22 · John 6:15 · Hebrews 7:23-24 · Hebrews 1:3
⚙ Flagged as a figural reading, and dependent on a disputed etymology. If Tola’s name is the crimson worm (Ellicott: “worm, perhaps the kermes-worm”; Cambridge: “the crimson worm, cochineal,” paired with Puah, “madder”), then the deliverer God raised after Abimelech bore the name of the creature crushed to yield scarlet. Psalm 22:6 puts that word in the mouth of the righteous sufferer — “I am a worm and not a man” — and Christian readers from the Fathers onward have read Psalm 22 of Christ crucified, which is ancient and widely held. What is not ancient, and is offered here only to be tested, is reading the judge Tola in that light: that Israel’s quietest saviour carried, as a family name, the word its Messiah would use of Himself in death, and the word for the dye of the tabernacle curtains and of the scarlet that Isaiah 1:18 promises to make white. The Hebrew words are not identical (see the thread badge), no commentator in this unit makes the connection, and it should be held as a resonance, not a proof.
Psalm 22:6 · Isaiah 1:18
The biblical text is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain (CC0). Hebrew/Greek text, transliteration, morphology and Strong’s are transcribed from the Berean interlinear (CC0) + Strong’s lexicons (PD); the literal renderings, divergence notes, word notes and all synthesis are this tool’s own work (⚙) — fallible; verify them.
Named voices, quoted verbatim from public-domain works:
Text. The Hebrew of both verses is straightforward and undisputed in the sources used here; the only variant of substance is ancient and versional. At v. 1 the LXX read דּוֹדוֹ as a common noun, υἱὸς πατραδέλφου αὐτοῦ, “son of his uncle,” a reading the Syriac shares (Cambridge) and some Targum copies and the Vulgate follow (Gill). K&D, Ellicott and Gill all reject it in favour of a proper name, on the strength of 2 Samuel 23:9, 24 and 1 Chronicles 11:12. Also at v. 1, Cambridge reports that “LXX. A and Luc. read Samaria” for Shamir, “replacing a strange name by a familiar one”; Ellicott rejects any connection with Samaria. The final פ on v. 2 is a Masoretic paragraph marker, not a word.
What is uncertain. The site of Shamir is unknown — K&D, Cambridge and the Pulpit all say so outright. The enemies from whom Tola “rose up to save” are never named; the Pulpit’s “frequent border wars” and K&D’s preventive-government reading are both reconstructions of a silence, and K&D explicitly declines Rosenmüller’s alternative. The meanings “crimson worm” and “madder” for Tola and Puah are a nineteenth-century philological proposal (Ellicott, Cambridge), not a statement of the text, and every use made of them in this unit is marked accordingly. JFB’s claim that Puah was Abimelech’s uncle and Gideon’s brother is contradicted by the tribal data in the same verse and by Ellicott, Gill and K&D; it is reported above as an opinion under challenge, not adopted. Cambridge’s source-critical account of the Minor Judges notices (that they predate the Deuteronomic editor) is a scholarly hypothesis of its period.
Sources. Scripture text BSB (CC0); interlinear surface forms, transliterations, glosses, Strong’s numbers and parses from the Berean interlinear; all ✦ excerpts are verbatim contiguous substrings of public-domain commentary (Ellicott 1878, Benson 1810s, Henry 1706, Barnes 1834, JFB 1871, Gill 1746–63, Geneva 1599, Cambridge 1880s, Pulpit 1880s, K&D 1860s, Poole 1685), resolved by anchor rather than retyped. Poole has no note on v. 2, and the Geneva entries for both verses reproduce the verse text without gloss, so neither is quoted. Thread bases are Verifier-computed shared Strong’s lexemes with frequencies, except where a badge states plainly that no Verifier basis exists. Everything marked ⚙ is machine synthesis and fallible.
✦ = human, public-domain source, quoted and named. ⚙ = machine synthesis, to be verified. Flagged cross-references are left visible on purpose — the verifier working in the open. “Search the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11)