Catholic Commentary
The Judgeship of Tola
1After Abimelech, Tola the son of Puah, the son of Dodo, a man of Issachar, arose to save Israel. He lived in Shamir in the hill country of Ephraim.2He judged Israel twenty-three years, and died, and was buried in Shamir.
Judges 10:1–2 introduces Tola, a judge from Issachar who arose to save Israel after Abimelech's failed kingship, serving faithfully for twenty-three years before dying and being buried in Shamir. His unremarkable tenure of peace and justice, marked by no recorded crises or conflicts, represents a deliberate theological contrast to Abimelech's violent rule and demonstrates the value of quiet, faithful governance.
A judge named Tola—whose very name means "crushed worm"—saves Israel not through battle but through twenty-three years of faithful, hidden governance, making obscurity itself the measure of his holiness.
Judges 10:1 — Identity, lineage, and vocation: The opening formula — "After Abimelech" — is not merely chronological. It is a deliberate theological reset. Abimelech's rule (Judges 9) had been a grotesque parody of kingship: seized by murder, maintained by terror, and ended by a millstone thrown by an unnamed woman. Tola's appearance immediately after is structured as a narrative counter-image. Where Abimelech was from Manasseh and claimed royal blood through Gideon, Tola is from Issachar, the tribe whose name in the Genesis blessing (Gen 49:14–15) is associated with bearing burdens and laboring under a yoke — a fitting genealogical signal for a judge who will carry the burden of Israel without ambition or violence.
His triple genealogy — "son of Puah, the son of Dodo" — is unusually detailed for a minor judge. The Hebrew name Tola means "crimson worm" or "scarlet thread," a word used elsewhere for the scarlet dye extracted from the coccus ilicis insect, crushed to yield color. Puah is similarly a name associated with the Exodus midwives (Exod 1:15), suggesting continuity with the hidden, life-preserving servants of Israel's history. Dodo (דּוֹדוֹ) carries the meaning "his beloved" or "his uncle," echoing relational warmth. Together, the names of this lineage quietly evoke smallness, service, and sacrifice — crushed things that yield precious gifts.
The verb "arose to save Israel" (וַיָּקָם לְהוֹשִׁיַע) is the classic language of divine raising-up. The subject is Tola, but the agency implies God's initiative; the same vocabulary is used of the great deliverers (cf. Judges 3:9, 15). Tola does not seize power — he is raised to it. His dwelling in Shamir in the hill country of Ephraim is significant: Shamir, possibly meaning "thorn" or "flint," is in the central highlands, geographically removed from the tribal politics of the lowlands. He rules from a place of stability and relative obscurity.
Judges 10:2 — The weight of faithful duration: The entirety of Tola's active governance is summarized in six Hebrew words: he judged Israel twenty-three years, died, and was buried in Shamir. The absence of battles, crises, visions, or failings is itself a form of biblical praise. The Deuteronomistic historian, who is rarely silent when things go wrong, has nothing to record here except longevity and faithfulness. Twenty-three years of justice, of settling disputes, of maintaining the covenant order — and then a quiet death and burial in the same place he had governed. He returned to the earth of Shamir, the thorn-field that had shaped him.
Typological and spiritual senses: The name Tola — the scarlet worm — attracted the attention of patristic commentators precisely because of its connection to Psalm 22:6, where the suffering servant cries, "I am a worm (tola'at), and no man." The tola'at shani, the scarlet worm, was understood in the patristic tradition as a prefigurement of Christ, who is crushed and from whose crushing comes the blood that redeems. Tola, the man whose very name means the crushed thing that gives scarlet, saves Israel not through force but through patient presence — a typological shadow of the Redeemer who saves through self-giving. His rising ("arose") after the violent pseudo-king Abimelech carries a faint but real resonance with resurrection: life emerging from the ruins of false power.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage through several lenses that a purely historical reading misses.
The theology of hiddenness and ordinary holiness: The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the witnesses who have preceded us into the kingdom…are those who have lived by faith" (CCC §2683), and that holiness is not reserved to the dramatic. St. Thérèse of Lisieux's "little way" finds deep biblical resonance in Tola: the judge who governs faithfully for twenty-three years, whose life is entirely unremarkable by the standards of heroic narrative, but who accomplishes the fundamental work of salvation — restoring right order to a people shattered by violence.
Providence working through the obscure: Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth, noted that God's saving plan consistently works through those whom the world overlooks. The Church Fathers, particularly Origen (Homilies on Judges), saw in the minor judges a pattern of divine pedagogy: God raises up what is humble to confound what is proud (cf. 1 Cor 1:27–28). Tola answers the chaos of Abimelech not with counter-violence but with the slow, consecrated work of just governance.
The typological resonance of the name Tola: St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos (on Ps 22), reflects extensively on the tola'at as a figure of Christ's passion — the worm that is crushed yielding the scarlet that purifies. While Augustine does not explicitly develop Tola the judge as a type of Christ, the patristic hermeneutic that links the crimson worm to redemption through humiliation invites the Catholic reader to see in Tola a true, if minor, figura Christi.
Legitimate authority and just governance: The Church's social teaching, rooted in texts like Gaudium et Spes §74, holds that political authority, when exercised justly, participates in the divine ordering of society. Tola's noiseless twenty-three years represent this ideal: authority not as domination but as service to the common good.
Tola's two verses challenge the Catholic imagination precisely because they celebrate what our culture is least equipped to honor: the person who simply does the good work for a long time, without spectacle, and dies where they lived. In parishes, families, schools, and workplaces, most of the saving of souls happens like Tola's judgeship — in the hill country, far from the headlines.
For the contemporary Catholic, this passage is an invitation to examine the spiritual danger of what Msgr. Romano Guardini called the "demand for the extraordinary" — the restlessness that makes steady, humble faithfulness feel like failure. The catechist who teaches the same class for twenty years, the parent who maintains a just and peaceful home after a season of family violence, the priest who administers the sacraments faithfully in an ordinary parish — these are Tola figures. Their faithfulness is the hidden scaffolding of salvation history.
Practically: examine whether you have been neglecting some long, quiet vocation in favor of more dramatic spiritual seeking. Tola saves Israel by staying in Shamir and judging well. What is your Shamir? What does it mean to be buried there — to give your life entirely to one faithful place and work?
Commentary