Starting well with children August 7, 2011 Sunday School Lesson
Judges 13:1-8, 24, 25 Again and again, Israel was found to be
evil in the Lord’s eyes, and the thirteenth chapter tells us He
had handed them over to suffer at the hands of the Philistines
for forty years. In the third chapter of this book, we were told
that God left some people in Israel for the purpose of
discipline and to teach succeeding generations how to go to
battle. The Philistines were among those people the Lord left in
Israel, and they were not, at least on the surface, an
overpowering force. Under the Lord’s control, however, they were
powerful enough to subdue Israel. It was during the four decades
of oppression by the Philistines that Samson, the Israelite who
subdued the Philistines, was born. The fact that Samson was from
the tribe of Dan is of importance in at least two ways: the
tribe was geographically situated closest to the Philistines and
would have been most bothered by them, and Samson seems to have
a possible role in the