1. Judges 3:11 (ESV)
  2. Exposition

Did Othniel’s death come at the end of the land’s forty-year rest?

Judges 3:11 (ESV)

11 So the land had rest forty years. Then Othniel the son of Kenaz died.

This was not necessarily the case. The report of his death “rather serves to close this episode and simultaneously to prepare the way for the announcement of Israel’s renewed apostasy in Judges 3:12."1