Later text
Judges 17:6BSB
In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
Intertextuality Pair
Allusion
Later text
Judges 17:6BSB
In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
Earlier text
You are not to do as we are doing here today, where everyone does what seems right in his own eyes.
Judges 17:6 declares "everyone did what was right in his own eyes" (אִישׁ הַיָּשָׁר בְּעֵינָיו יַעֲשֶׂה, ish hayashar be'einav ya'aseh), employing the exact phrase Moses used in Deuteronomy 12:8, where he commanded Israel: "You are not to do as we are doing here today, where everyone does what seems right in his own eyes." What Moses anticipated as a danger to be overcome upon entering the land has become Israel's defining condition in Judges. The allusion transforms Moses' prohibition into a diagnostic statement: without a king, Israel has reverted to the very worship anarchy that centralized worship at "the place the LORD will choose" was designed to prevent. The author of Judges reuses this same Deuteronomic phrase as a refrain at the book's close (Judges 21:25), bracketing the whole judges era within Moses' original warning against covenant autonomy.