Tola & Jair: Fifty Five Shades of Nothing

After Gideon’s colorful leadership and the trauma-inducing events following his death, Tola and Jair led Israel for fifty- five years. The work of these two men over fifty-five years is covered by exactly four verses in the Bible. The fifth verse clarifies the significant social bankruptcy that followed the insignificant leadership of these two men. What made the lives and times of these two men so disregarded by the chronicler of the book of Judges? The extreme destructiveness of laziness and corruption in leadership is highlighted in Series 23.

Ehud: What is left when you are right?

Ehud’s escape from the court was easy. It was as if the soldiers milling under the palm trees were used to men fleeing from private trysts with the king. Rushing to the mountains of Ephraim, he retrieved the trumpets hidden at the foot of the mountain. With the thirty men waiting for him, the trumpet blasts cut the air and ruled the waves of sound for more than an hour.