The basic cyclical pattern of Judges goes like this: Israel would engage in idolatry. God would remove their covering and deliver them into an oppressor’s hands. They would pay a hefty tribute to someone who was not a covenant ruler. Their economy would suffer from the drain. After doing this for a while, they would remember to call on Jehovah. It wasn’t necessarily full repentance, but they would call on Him as their national deity. He would send someone to execute covenant justice and deliver them from oppression. Things would be fine until that deliverer died and then Israel would slip back into idolatry again.
During this period they could really drift very far into pagan ways. We get little bits here and there indicating just how normalized it became from time to time. Consider that the very name of Samson celebrated a pagan deity, and some of his exploits were related to pagan practices for marriage and romance.
The story of Ehud rests on a wealth of historical detail that is not included in our Scripture text. The author presumed the reader already knew the story, but if everything we find pertinent was included, the Bible would be a massive tome. While we cannot trust the Talmudic legends, and better sources are few, we can get a clearer picture than what one might guess from the text itself. Keep in mind that the Book of Judges is not in chronological order as we would view it, so the dates of the various narratives can only be guessed.
We know that Moab had several tribes jockeying for primacy, just like a lot of other tribal nations in the Ancient Near East (ANE). Eglon’s pedigree is uncertain, but we know that he would have struggled with keeping the whole nation behind him. Most likely he rose to prominence through bribery after some windfall. This is most likely how he managed to gain an alliance with the Ammonites and Amalekites. These he then relied on to keep him in power over his own Moabites. In the narrative here, Eglon’s behavior betrays a man who faced intrigue against his life every day.
Using his freshly assembled army, he raided the area of Jericho (City of Palm Trees). Once they held it, the area became a source of revenue to help him stay in power. Besides, Jericho had been rebuilt by now and he had himself a nice palace there. It was out of easy reach from his competitors among the Moabites, and it was a really nice place to live. It was warm in the winter, wet in the dry seasons, and provided crops year round. Whatever size he was when this all started, living in Jericho kept him fat — massively obese, even.
So this situation lasted 18 years before Israel started paying more attention to their own God. The Lord raised up Ehud. A significant number of Benjamites were left-handed. That was a very rare trait in the ANE. Given the length of his rule, Eglon’s bodyguard probably became a little complacent about some things. Ehud, as a noble warrior, put himself at the head of the tribute delivery entourage. He had strapped to his right inner thigh a bronze dagger the length of his forearm, and it would have been handle down. Eglon’s bodyguard were unlikely to search there because it would be inconvenient to a right-handed fighter, if you understand the protocols of how this stuff works.
Eglon had a promenade leading to his palace, and the entrance was near Gilgal, the old circle of stones just across the spring creek from Jericho. He would have received this tribute outdoors in some nice shady spot. After having presented several wagon loads of seasonal produce, the group was heading back to the wadi they used as a highway into the Hills of Ephraim. Ehud stopped at the gateway of this promenade where Eglon’s stone pagan images stood, carved at a nearby quarry. Ehud turned back and returned to the outdoor meeting place near the palace. He told Eglon the he had a secret message.
Eglon was hardly suspicious of this. After nearly two decades of faithful service from Israel, and constant unrest from his own nation and neighbors east of the Jordan Valley, it didn’t surprise him that a faithful Hebrew would have a warning about some new intrigue among Eglon’s allies. So the king told Ehud not to speak. He hastily arranged for a private interview in his upper floor breeze room.
This would have been a nice room atop the palace, probably with a secure but open lattice to allow the breezes to help keep him cool. The man didn’t get around very fast, and we should expect he was most often in that breeze room. So he went up there and sent out all his servants, since he could probably never guess who was spying for an enemy and plotting against him.
Ehud would have walked in and dropped to one knee near the man’s throne, and bowed over with his face down to the floor. Announcing that he had a message from Jehovah, Eglon respectfully stood at the invocation of a deity. With his right knee bent in front of him, Ehud could reach unnoticed for the long dagger strapped to the inside of his right thigh, whip it out and stab Eglon low in the belly before the fat man even realized he was hurt. The large gut was pushed back by the thrust, then fell back over the handle of the weapon. Ehud needed to move fast and didn’t bother trying to fish it out for a second strike. Besides, it cut through his entrails and some of the contents oozed out. So he stepped out quickly and locked the door behind himself.
Eglon would have used a chamber pot, and it no doubt smelled like it at this point. So the various servants held back until they felt embarrassed enough to try sneaking into the breeze room for a peek. The found a very messy corpse of Eglon. By this time Ehud was already hustling up the wadi to give the prearranged signal that he had been successful at killing the tyrant. Nothing in the Law inhibits this kind of assassination of a ruler who wasn’t under the Covenant. Never forget: the Covenant is the sole moral covering. Meanwhile, Eglon’s court was thrown into chaos, since any number of parties would have been happy to sponsor Ehud if they had known of his plans.
So the Israeli troops were already primed for action and assembled quickly, while Eglon’s forces were probably thinly scattered and of questionable loyalty in the first place. Ehud’s attack quickly overwhelmed the troops stationed around Jericho. The whole thing was a really big surprise to Eglon’s army. With Moab’s internal disunity, and the lack of vested interest for the Amalakites and Ammonites to defend Moab, it meant a fairly quick defeat.
The tactic described in the narrative was a quick force seizing the fords which were upriver from Jericho, the only reasonable path between there and Moab. So the guard force in Jericho was isolated, outnumbered and slaughtered. Also, no messenger could have gotten through and raised the alarm back home. As even more Israeli troops assembled in the Jordan Valley, they could march against Moab itself in a surprise invasion. The situation was reversed as Moab now gave tribute to Israel for the next 80 years.
