According to Chuck Swindoll,
The period of the judges began after the death of Joshua in the early fourteenth century BC (
Joshua 24:29) and continued until Saul was crowned king of Israel by the prophet Samuel in 1051 BC (
1 Samuel 10:24). The book of Judges acts as the sequel to the book of Joshua, linked by comparable accounts of Joshua’s death (
Joshua 24:29–31;
Judges 2:6–9). Events within the book of Judges span the geographical breadth of the nation, happening in a variety of cities, towns, and battlefields. Scholars believe some of the judges ruled simultaneously in separate geographical regions. Attempts to calculate the exact amount of time covered in Judges are inconclusive, but generally, the book begins soon after the death of Joshua and ends in the years just before the entrance of Samuel onto the scene, a period of about three hundred years.
The contents of Judges were likely not written chronologically. The final few chapters (
Judges 17–21) give an overview of the moral climate during those days and, rather than occurring after the period of the judges listed earlier in the book, they probably happened in and around the times of various judges mentioned in earlier chapters.
source
Since the second half of the 20th century most scholars have agreed with
Martin Noth's thesis that the books of
Deuteronomy,
Joshua, Judges,
Samuel and
Kings form parts of a single work.
[39] Noth maintained that the history was written in the early
Exilic period (6th century BCE) in order to demonstrate how Israel's history was worked out in accordance with the theology expressed in the book of Deuteronomy (which thus provides the name "Deuteronomistic").
[40] Noth believed that this history was the work of a single author, living in the mid-6th century BCE, selecting, editing and composing from his sources to produce a coherent work.
[41] Frank Moore Cross later proposed that an early version of the history was composed in Jerusalem in
Josiah's time (late 7th century BCE); this first version, Dtr1, was then revised and expanded to create a second edition, that identified by Noth, and which Cross labelled Dtr2.
[42]
Shalom
