The author's source was a collection of stories of struggles in different parts of the land, both east and west of the Jordan, with the older settled populations or with invaders, and the exploits of the leaders and champions of the Israelite tribes in these struggles. It included Ehud's assassination of the king of Moab, the defeat of Sisera and the Canaanite kings of the great Plain by Barak and Deborah, the rout and pursuit of the Midianite invaders by Gideon, and Jephthah's victory over the Ammonites in Gilead. The history of Abimelech's kingdom of Shechem--sequel to the story of Gideon--which is not accompanied by the author's moralizing comments, and the stories of Samson, which have no more than a chronological introduction and close, evidently belong to the same cycle of heroic legends; as do also the stories of Micah's idol and the migration of the Danites (cc. 17-18), and the older form of the story of the levite and his concubine and the sanguinary vengeance on Benjamin in cc. 19-21. The two last-named stories were not comprised in the deuteronomist Judges, whose doctrine they could not well be made to exemplify. On the other hand we shall see that this work included Eli and Samuel among the judges, and came to its natural conclusion with the establishment of the kingdom, as it began with the death of Joshua. In several of the stories we recognize not merely such additions and improvements as are commonly made to popular tales in the retelling, but evidences of the combination of two versions of the same exploit or accounts of other doings of the same hero. This is particularly plain in the story of Gideon, where in Judg. vii. 24 f. (vs. 23 is a harmonistic note), viii. 1-3, the business of the chiefs of Midian is effectually finished, while in viii. 4 ff. it is all still to be done. The phenomenon is entirely similar to those which we have had repeated occasion to observe in the Pentateuch and Joshua and is to be explained in the same way. The two versions of the story had been united before the time of the author of the deuteronomist Judges, for in the joints of the narrative no trace of his peculiar motives or style occur.