Before long Saul has a chance to prove himself, when the Ammonites besiege the city of Jabesh Gilead, a town just east of the Jordan River, about forty miles northeast of the area of Benjamin (11:1–5). The Ammonites also lived in the Transjordan and had captured a large section of Israel’s territory before Jephthah drove them out (Judg. 11:29–33).

Note that the great Samuel scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran (4QSama) provides a transition between the end of chapter 10 and the beginning of chapter 11, a transition that most scholars take to be the original text that was lost by scribal errors. Before this scroll was discovered, the received text of this episode had long been puzzling. What are the reasons for the Ammonites’ sudden aggression against Jabesh Gilead? Why would …