Spying in the Bible 14 - 1379 BC to c.1100 BC

Judge Dread

During the roughly three hundred year period of judges, Israel was the only true theocracy the world has ever seen, where God, Himself ruled the nation as the head of the state. Other nations that are or have been ruled by religious leadership or clergy are more accurately referred to as ecclesiocracies. However, the people rebelled against God’s law that Moses had implemented, even after God had delivered them out of slavery in Egypt and gave them their own nation in the Promised Land. God punished his people by letting neighboring nations occupy them and oppress them off and on throughout this period of judges (Judges 2:10,12,14,18-19a).

After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel.... They forsook the LORD, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They aroused the LORD’s anger.... In his anger against Israel the Lord gave them into the hands of raiders who plundered them....

Whenever the LORD raised up a judge for them, he was with the judge and saved them out of the hands of their enemies as long as the judge lived; for the LORD relented because of their groaning under those who oppressed and afflicted them. But when the judge died, the people returned to ways even more corrupt than those of their ancestors.

About a hundred years into the time of the Judges, during the Egyptian nineteenth dynasty, Ramses II (also known as Ramses the Great) was Pharaoh of Egypt and was waging a war with the Hittites on the southern border of Israel. During this war, the famous battle of Kadesh was waged in c. 1286 BC. Kadesh is the same place the Israelites stayed on their journey out of Egypt before wandering around the desert. Records of this battle contain the earliest surviving original record of espionage and the first non-Biblical record of spying in history.

Before the battle of Kadesh, the Hittite king sent two spies into the Egyptian army’s camp pretending to be Hittite army deserters to give the Egyptians false intelligence. They tried to convince Ramses that the Hittite army was still very far away, when they were actually very close. Ramses believed their story and as a result, some of the Egyptian army was caught in an ambush. However, Ramses had captured two more Hittite spies and tortured them to get information from them. From this Ramses found out about the ambush, so he sent in a larger reserve of his army to go help the part of the army that was being ambushed. In the end, Egypt ended up winning the battle.

Less than a hundred years later, the Bronze Age ended and the Iron Age I began, which lasted from c. 1200 BC to c. 1000 BC. This also corresponded to the twentieth dynasty of Egypt, which was the last dynasty of the New Kingdom and started the decline in power of the Egyptian Pharaohs. During this time, the Philistines had taken control of Israel and were oppressing the people. One of the Judges that God raised up from the tribe of Dan, around c. 1100 BC was Samson, who was involved with a series of very interesting spying cases involving various women. Sampson had been prophesied to come about 800 years earlier (Genesis 49:16-18).

One day, when Samson was still a young man, he saw a beautiful young Philistine woman, fell in love with her, and his troubles began. That woman became a co-opted informant for the Philistines against Samson and the Israelites. Co-opted means that she was a national of a country (a Philistine), but not an officer or employee of their intelligence service, who assisted that service on a temporary or regular basis. She ended up helping the Philistines, not out of national pride, but out of fear from their threat to kill her and her family if she did not help. This was the first time, but not the last, that Samson fell for a honey trap (Judges 14:2,5-6a,8,11-18).

When [Samson] returned, he said to his father and mother, “I have seen a Philistine woman in Timnah; now get her for me as my wife.”...

Samson went down to Timnah together with his father and mother. As they approached the vineyards of Timnah, suddenly a young lion came roaring toward him. The Spirit of the Lord came powerfully upon him so that he tore the lion apart with his bare hands.... Some time later, when he went back to marry her, he turned aside to look at the lion’s carcass, and in it he saw a swarm of bees and some honey....

When the people saw him, they chose thirty men to be his companions. “Let me tell you a riddle,” Samson said to them. “If you can give me the answer within the seven days of the feast, I will give you thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes. If you can’t tell me the answer, you must give me thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes.”

“Tell us your riddle,” they said. “Let’s hear it.”

He replied, “Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.”

For three days they could not give the answer.

On the fourth day, they said to Samson’s wife, “Coax your husband into explaining the riddle for us, or we will burn you and your father’s household to death. Did you invite us here to steal our property?”

Then Samson’s wife threw herself on him, sobbing, “You hate me! You don’t really love me. You’ve given my people a riddle, but you haven’t told me the answer.”... She cried the whole seven days of the feast. So on the seventh day he finally told her, because she continued to press him. She in turn explained the riddle to her people.

Before sunset on the seventh day the men of the town said to him, “What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion?”

Samson said to them, “If you had not plowed with my heifer, you would not have solved my riddle.”

Sampson then became very angry at being tricked, killed thirty men in a nearby town, and stripped them of their clothes to pay his debt. Later that fall, he went back and asked for his wife, but her father had given her away to another man, thinking Samson would not want her after her betrayal. To get revenge on losing his wife, he caught three hundred foxes, tied them in pairs, lit them on fire, and let them loose in the Philistine’s farm land to burn their grain fields, vineyards, and orchards. In retribution, the Philistines killed the woman Samson wanted to marry and her family. He retaliated again by killing many of the Philistines in a series of battles, essentially starting an all-out war. Samson then became the leader of the Israelites as a judge, and ruled them for twenty years.