The Bible is full of wild stories.

Some of the wildest are in the Book of Judges in the Old Testament.

The book is a story of the transformation of Old Testament Israel from being a people and a country of promise under the rule of Yahweh through their ignominious decline as a nation-state as they chased–and were chased by–other gods. The struggle, ignominy, and decline are framed as a loss of cultural faith, a loss of national perspective, and a loss of focused tribal obedience in terms of worshipping Yahweh in the way that Yahweh commanded He be worshipped.

We moderns, in our own era, read the Book of Judges and are perplexed as to its relevance to our sophisticated, materialistic, technologically driven era, where Yahweh doesn’t even get a seat at the table of our epistemological assumptions. The relevance is there, though.

Read in purely naturalistic terms, the highs and lows in the Book of Judges map neatly to the period of cultural unraveling that took place in the United States, starting from the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and culminating in the horror of September 11, 2001. The people of the United States during that interregnum period had no earthly idea why the “center” was failing to hold, solipsism was taking hold, and “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” The seeds of the cultural chaos of that era, the unraveling, bore fruit in the chaotic cultural period following September 11th.

The period that just ended, in the United States, with the attempted assassination of our current President in July 2024.

The Book of Judges is currently closed as a salient reference point to our particular historical and cultural moment. But have no fear. It will be opened back up again in about 2060 or so.

Right around the time of the next secular unraveling.