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Shamgar
Judges 3:31 — Shamgar. 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.
31After Ehud came Shamgar son of Anath. And he too saved Israel, striking down six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
wə·’a·ḥă·rāw hā·yāh šam·gar ben- ‘ă·nāṯ hū ’eṯ- way·yō·ša‘ gam- yiś·rā·’êl way·yaḵ ’eṯ- šêš- mê·’ō·wṯ ’îš pə·liš·tîm bə·mal·maḏ hab·bā·qār
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-after-him there-arose Shamgar son-of-Anath, and-he-struck the-Philistines — six hundred man — with-the-goad-of-the-oxen; and-he-saved, he also, Israel.
Where the English smooths the original
It has been most needlessly assumed that he slew them single-handed, and not, as is probable, at the head of a band of peasants armed with the same rude weapons as himself.Ellicott is arguing against the popular reading, not against the text: his point is a rule of Hebrew idiom (a leader is credited with what his men do), illustrated from 1 Samuel 18:7. Poole, immediately below, takes the opposite view.
Slew six hundred men with an ox-goad; as Samson did a thousand with the jaw-bone of an ass; both being miraculous actions, and not at all incredible to him that believes a God, who could easily give strength both to the persons and to their weapons to effect this.
So that it is not the number, nor the means that God regards, when he will get the victory.
The heroic deed recorded of him must be regarded, as O. v. Gerlach affirms, as "merely the result of a holy inspiration that suddenly burst forth within him, in which he seized upon the first weapon that came to his hand, and put to flight the enemy when scared by a terror for God, just as Samson did on a later occasion.K&D is quoting O. v. Gerlach here; the words inside the quotation are Gerlach's, reproduced by Keil and Delitzsch.
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 verse begins with a hinge, not a call: וְאַחֲרָיו הָיָה — “and after him there was.” Where Othniel and Ehud are introduced by the LORD raising up a deliverer (Judges 3:9, 3:15), Shamgar is introduced by a bare verb of existence; K&D renders it “After him (Ehud) was, i.e., there rose up.” Everything the reader wants is withheld. Ellicott states the position plainly: we know nothing of his tribe or family, and neither his name nor his father's is Jewish — hence the old conjecture, which Ellicott records without endorsing, that he was a Kenite, encouraged by his standing beside Jael in Judges 5:6. Cambridge goes further and argues that “no Israelite could have been called ‘son of (the goddess) Anâth,’” comparing the Hittite Sangara of Carchemish; Gill simply says that “who he was, and who his father, and of what tribe, we nowhere else read.” Barnes guesses Judah, from the Philistine setting. JFB observes that no tribe or family is given at all and infers a local, western affliction. ⚙ Five careful readers, five different answers, and the Hebrew adjudicates none of them. What Scripture gives is a name and a deed.
⚙ The center of the verse is a hapax legomenon: בְּמַלְמַד הַבָּקָר, which Ellicott translates with exactness — “literally, ‘with a thing to teach oxen’” — and which K&D anchors etymologically in lāmad, the verb used in Hosea 10:11 and Jeremiah 31:18 for training the young ox; Rashi, K&D reports, equated it with the dārbān of 1 Samuel 13:21. The physical object is well attested: Benson, Barnes, JFB, Gill and K&D all cite Maundrell's measurement of goads he saw in Palestine — eight feet long, six inches around at the thick end, a sharp iron prickle at one end for the oxen and an iron paddle at the other for scraping clay from the plough. JFB concludes that such an instrument “wielded by a strong arm, would do no mean execution”; Benson relays Maundrell's judgment that it “was not less fit, perhaps fitter, than a sword for such an execution.” ⚙ But notice what the commentators do not do: none of them makes the weapon the hero. Benson is explicit that the writer attributes the victory “not to the excellence of the weapon which he used, but to the power of God.” Henry says the same in the sentence Benson quotes back to him: it is no matter how weak the weapon is, if God direct and strengthen the arm. Geneva compresses the whole matter into a marginal gloss on the numbers and the means. ⚙ The irony is in the Hebrew itself and survives every reconstruction of the history: the tool whose name means teacher of cattle became, for one day, the instrument by which Israel was taught who fought for her.
⚙ The last clause is the one that makes this a Bible verse and not a war anecdote: וַיֹּשַׁע גַּם־הוּא אֶת־יִשְׂרָאֵל — Hifil of yāshaʻ, the causative of a root whose concrete sense is to be brought out into open, wide, free space. K&D catches the force of gam: “so that he also (like Othniel and Ehud, Judges 3:9 and Judges 3:15) delivered Israel.” The narrator has told us nothing about this man's faith, tribe, tenure, or end, and then applies to him the covenant verb of salvation. ⚙ Against that, the honest counterweights must be stated. Barnes concludes from Judges 5:6 that Shamgar “only procured a temporary and partial deliverance.” K&D notes he is never called judge, that no years are recorded, and that Judges 4:1 dates the next apostasy from Ehud's death, not his. Cambridge argues that the notice was inserted after the Deuteronomic compiler had finished, that the Philistines are too early here, and that some LXX manuscripts place the verse after Judges 16:31 instead. Ellicott passes on Josephus's report (following Jewish haggadah) that Shamgar was made judge and died in his first year, and marks it as probably an inference from his absence in Judges 4:1. ⚙ Take all of it seriously, and the clause still stands where the Masoretic text puts it: whatever Shamgar was, the word for what he did is salvation.
⚙ Read under Sola Scriptura, the striking thing about Judges 3:31 is how little it gives and how much it claims. God is not named in the verse. No call, no Spirit rushing on him, no altar, no years, no burial. Shamgar has a foreign-sounding name, a father named for a war-goddess, no tribe, and a farm tool. And the narrator, without a word of explanation, says he saved Israel — the same Hifil of yāshaʻ he had just used of Othniel and Ehud.
⚙ The temptation is to fill the silence, and the commentators feel it: Ellicott supplies a band of peasants, Poole supplies a miracle, Cambridge supplies a later editor, Josephus supplies a one-year term. ⚙ Our own reading is that the silence is the point. Judges is building, verse by verse, a case that Israel's rescue does not depend on the credentials of the rescuer — not on tribe, not on weapon, not even on the record being complete enough to satisfy us. A left-handed man, a disputed foreigner with a cattle prod, a woman with a tent peg: the book is emptying the category of “qualified deliverer” before it hands the category to anyone. ⚙ And it is emptying it downward — toward a savior with no form or comeliness, out of a town nothing good comes from, who saves with an instrument of execution.
⚙ The line below is ours, not Scripture's — a machine's sentence, offered to be tested and thrown out if it will not hold:
The goad was made to teach oxen; for one day it taught Israel who was fighting for her.
AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.
⚙ Judges 5:6 is not a parallel account but the sole other occurrence of both proper names in the Hebrew Bible: “In the days of Shamgar son of Anath… the highways were deserted.” The Verifier confirms the link at the lexical level — שַׁמְגַּר (H8044) and עֲנָת (H6067) each occur in exactly two verses, here and there. ⚙ That rarity makes the connection certain and the interpretation contested at once. Gill reads 5:6 as evidence that the Philistines were a banditry closing the roads; Barnes infers from it that Shamgar was contemporary with Jael and won only a partial deliverance; Cambridge reads the same verse as giving “the impression that he was an oppressor, not a deliverer, of Israel.” Ellicott finds in his juxtaposition with Jael a hint that he was a Kenite. ⚙ The lexical basis is airtight; the historical reconstruction built on it is not, and we do not claim it.
Judges 5:6
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H8044 Shamgar (in 2 vv) and H6067 ʻĂnâth (in 2 vv) — both rare to the point of being unique to this pair; the verbal link is the names themselves, not a quotation of one verse by the other
⚙ The clause “he also saved Israel” joins יָשַׁע (H3467) to פְּלִשְׁתִּים (H6430) — the exact pairing that later carries the announcements of Samson (“he shall begin to save Israel out of the hand of the Philistines,” Judges 13:5) and of Saul (“he shall save My people out of the hand of the Philistines,” 1 Samuel 9:16), and the plea of 1 Samuel 7:8. ⚙ Both lexemes are common (198 and 244 verses), so this is a shared formula, not a quotation: the book of Judges and the book of Samuel describe Philistine deliverance in the same covenant vocabulary. Shamgar stands at the head of that line, without the annunciation, without the anointing, and — as Barnes and K&D both insist — without any lasting result.
Judges 13:5 · 1 Samuel 9:16 · 1 Samuel 7:8
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H3467 yâshaʻ (in 198 vv) and H6430 Pᵉlishtîy (in 244 vv) — both common, so the basis is a shared deliverance formula, not a verbal quotation
⚙ Poole draws the line first and without hedging: Shamgar slew six hundred with an ox-goad “as Samson did a thousand with the jaw-bone of an ass.” Gill makes the same comparison, and K&D quotes Gerlach's view that Shamgar “seized upon the first weapon that came to his hand… just as Samson did on a later occasion.” Ellicott adds that Samson “had nothing better than the jawbone of an ass.” ⚙ The Verifier finds a real but ordinary lexical overlap between Judges 3:31 and Judges 15:15 — נָכָה (H5221) and אִישׁ (H376) — which is enough to confirm a shared narrative pattern and nowhere near enough to claim quotation. Cambridge presses a third parallel, Shammah ben Agee standing in a lentil field at Lehi (2 Samuel 23:11–12), and argues that the author of this verse drew his particulars from such sources — an argument about composition that we record without adopting.
Judges 15:15 · 2 Samuel 23:11
basis: Verifier pair(Judges 3:31, Judges 15:15): shared H5221 nâkâh (in 460 vv), H376 ʼîysh (in 1449 vv); pair(Judges 3:31, 2 Samuel 23:11): shared H6430 Pᵉlishtîy (in 244 vv), H310 ʼachar (in 664 vv). All four lexemes are common — the basis is a repeated deliverance-with-a-common-implement pattern, not a verbal link
⚙ Ellicott, Barnes, JFB, Benson and K&D all read the oxgoad against the Philistine policy of disarmament: “there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel” (1 Samuel 13:19), so that Israelites went down to the Philistines to sharpen their plowshares and goads (1 Samuel 13:20–21) — the very verse K&D cites from Rashi, who identifies the malmâd with the דָּרְבָן of 1 Samuel 13:21. Barnes ties it to Judges 5:8, and Ellicott adds David's five smooth stones (1 Samuel 17:40). ⚙ Honesty requires the flag: we ran the pair, and the Verifier reports no shared original-language lexeme between Judges 3:31 and 1 Samuel 13:21 — מַלְמַד is a hapax and dārbān is a different word. The connection is a lexicographical identification made by the Rabbins and the commentators, not a verbal link in the text, and the historical setting (Philistine dominance this early) is exactly what Cambridge disputes. Weigh it as argued, not as demonstrated.
1 Samuel 13:19 · 1 Samuel 13:21 · Judges 5:8
basis: Verifier pair(Judges 3:31, 1 Samuel 13:21): no shared original-language lexeme — malmâd (H4451) is a hapax and is only identified with dārbān by Rashi and the ancient versions, as reported by K&D; the historical premise of Philistine disarmament at this date is contested by Cambridge
⚙ Cambridge identifies the implement of this verse with the Greek κέντρον of Acts 26:14, and Ellicott points to the same idiom (Acts 9:5 in the Received Text) alongside 1 Samuel 13:21. The image survives the change of Testament and language: the goad is the thing that drives a beast forward, and the futility of resisting it becomes, on the Damascus road, the risen Christ's diagnosis of Saul of Tarsus — a persecutor of Israel's true deliverance, struck down by the very word he was resisting. ⚙ This is a Greek-to-Hebrew link and therefore cannot rest on shared Strong's numbers; no verbal claim is made. The basis is the shared object and its proverbial use, as recorded by Cambridge and Ellicott.
Acts 26:14 · Acts 9:5
basis: Cross-Testament (Greek↔Hebrew): shared Strong's numbers are impossible by definition. Basis is the object itself — Cambridge explicitly identifies the malmâd of this verse with the κέντρον of Acts 26:14, and Ellicott cites the same idiom; a shared image and implement, never a quotation
AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.
⚙ “He also saved Israel” — וַיֹּשַׁע, Hifil of yāshaʻ (H3467), whose root sense the lexicon gives as “to be open, wide or free.” It is the verb out of which the names Yᵉhôshûaʻ and Yēshûaʻ are built, and the angel's sentence in Matthew 1:21 is a translation of that etymology into a command: you shall call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins. ⚙ Judges applies this word to a series of men who could not keep it: Othniel (3:9), Ehud (3:15), and now a man with no tribe and a cattle prod, of whom Barnes says he procured only “a temporary and partial deliverance for Israel by his exploit.” The book makes the word salvation ache by attaching it repeatedly to saviors who die and leave the land to relapse in the very next chapter (Judges 4:1). ⚙ That ache is the argument. The reading that Israel's judges are a line of partial saviors reaching toward a final one is the ancient and widely-held apostolic shape of redemptive history — Hebrews 11:32 gathers Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah into the cloud of witnesses, and 11:34 says of them that they “out of weakness were made strong,” though Shamgar himself is not named there — and Judges 3:31 is its most stripped-down instance: the verb without the man.
Matthew 1:21 · Judges 3:9 · Judges 3:15 · Hebrews 11:32-34
⚙ Henry states the principle in this very verse: “It is no matter what the weapon is, if God directs and strengthens the arm. Often he works by unlikely means, that the excellency of the power may appear to be of God.” Benson quotes Henry back and adds “that he may have all the glory”; Geneva's gloss says it is not the number nor the means that God regards when He will get the victory; Barnes notes that the poverty of the weapon “enhances his faith, and the power of his divine helper.” ⚙ The principle is Paul's own — God chose the foolish, the weak, the low and the despised, that no flesh should glory (1 Corinthians 1:27–29), and the treasure is in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us (2 Corinthians 4:7). ⚙ Extended to its end, the principle has one final instance: an implement of agriculture in a peasant's hand is an unlikely means of salvation, and an implement of Roman execution is a more unlikely one still — “unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called… Christ the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:23–24). The principle itself is stated by Henry, Benson, Geneva and Barnes and is ancient; neither of them names the cross at this verse, and the last step is ours.
1 Corinthians 1:27-29 · 2 Corinthians 4:7 · 1 Corinthians 1:23-24
⚙ Ellicott records the etymology of Shamgar as “name of a stranger,” comparing Gershom; Cambridge argues that his name is foreign and that “no Israelite could have been called ‘son of (the goddess) Anâth.’” Gill notes that his father and tribe are nowhere recorded. ⚙ Scripture elsewhere is unembarrassed by rescue coming through outsiders — Rahab of Jericho, Ruth the Moabitess, both of whom stand in the genealogy of Matthew 1 — and the New Testament makes a point of a savior whose paperwork satisfied nobody: “Is not this the carpenter's son?” (Matthew 13:55), “out of Galilee ariseth no prophet” (John 7:52). ⚙ We mark this reading novel. None of the commentators in this unit draws a typological line from Shamgar to Christ, and the case for Shamgar's foreignness is itself contested. We offer it as a resonance to be tested, not as a claim on the text.
Matthew 1:5 · Matthew 13:55 · John 7:52
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:
⚙ Word order. The interlinear indices in our source are aligned to the English rendering, so the pronoun הוּא and the particle גַּם appear at indices 5 and 8, on either side of וַיֹּשַׁע. The Hebrew clause order is wayyōšaʻ gam-hū ’eṯ-yiśrā’êl, and it stands at the end of the verse, after the account of the slaughter — which is how K&D reads it (“so that he also… delivered Israel”). Our literal rendering follows the Hebrew order, not the index order; no word has been added or removed.
⚙ The hapax. מַלְמַד (H4451) occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, so its meaning rests on etymology (from lāmad, to train), on the Rabbins and the ancient versions, and on the physical goads described by travellers. Ellicott notes that the LXX Codex B and the Vulgate read “with a ploughshare” and that the Alexandrian Codex renders “besides the oxen,” judging both untenable; Benson reports the same versional variants. We follow “oxgoad” with the commentators, while recording that the versions are not unanimous.
⚙ Placement and date. Cambridge argues that this verse was inserted after the Deuteronomic compiler's work, that Philistine aggression is too early for this point in the book, and that some Septuagint manuscripts (the Aldine edition, the Syro-Hexaplar, the Slavonic versions) place it after Judges 16:31 as well as here. Pulpit, JFB, Barnes, Gill and K&D all read it in place, differing over whether the affliction was local banditry or an invasion. We have not adjudicated this; the reading above works from the Masoretic text as received and marks the dispute where it bears on interpretation.
⚙ What is uncertain. Shamgar's tribe, nationality, date, tenure, and whether he fought alone (Poole, Gill) or led armed peasants (Ellicott, JFB) — all are unknown. Josephus's report that he judged one year, and the Rabbinic statement to the same effect relayed by Gill, are inferences from silence, as Ellicott himself observes. Every commentary excerpt above is quoted verbatim from the public-domain source and attributed by name; every ⚙ paragraph 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)