Ehud came to him; and he was sitting by himself alone in the cool upper room. Ehud said, I have a message from God to you. He arose out of his seat.
"With effective employment of ambiguity, irony, satire, hyperbole, and caricature, he [the writer] sketches a literary cartoon that pokes fun at the Moabites and brings glory to God. . . . Biblical historians seldom, if ever, wrote their pieces primarily so later readers could reconstruct historical events. Their agendas were generally theological and polemical, and few texts are as overt in the latter respect as ours." [Note: Block, Judges . . ., pp. 156-57. See also Robert B. Chisholm Jr., "Yahweh versus the Canaanite Gods: Polemic in Judges and 1 Samuel 1-7," Bibliotheca Sacra 164:654 (April-June 2007):165-80.] 