Judges 3:10

the spirit of the Lord came upon him So the spirit cameupon Jephthah Judges 11:29, and clothed itself withGideon Judges 6:34, and impelled(Judges 13:25) or rushed uponSamson Judges 14:6; Judges 14:19; Judges 15:14, and Saul 1 Samuel 11:6. These heroes seemed to be possessed; their extraordinary feats of strength and daring struck the beholder as due to the presence of a superhuman power the spirit of the Lord, i.e. Jehovah directly acting in the physical, as elsewhere in the intellectual and spiritual, sphere. In the O.T. the spirit is not realized as a distinct personality; the spirit of Jehovah is Jehovah Himself in operation, and, as the divine name implies, in redemptive operation on behalf of Israel.

and he judged Israel See on Judges 2:16. The verb means both -to give judgement" and -to do justice," -to give a person his rights"; in the latter sense it is used in parallelism with -save," and can even be followed by -out of the hand of," 1 Samuel 24:15 2 Samuel 18:19; 2 Samuel 18:31. In the, age before the monarchy the -judges" or -deliverers" exercised in Israel an intermittent function, to which they were specially summoned by Jehovah; hence the Dtc. compiler uses the word almost as the title of an office. When the national sense was more fully developed, the Israelites demanded a king to fulfil the same function permanently instead of intermittently: see 1 Samuel 8:20.