Gospel Decoded
HomeAll entries › Judges

“Strapped to his right thigh”

Judges 3:16, 21
Cultural referenceSettledNarrator
Now Ehud had made for himself a double-edged sword a cubit long. He strapped it to his right thigh under his cloak… And Ehud reached with his left hand, pulled the sword from his right thigh, and plunged it into Eglon's belly. (Judges 3:16, 21 BSB)
* Ehud was left-handed, so he hid the blade on his right thigh, the side guards never checked, since a right-handed man draws from the left. His tribe, Benjamin, ironically means 'son of the right hand.'

What it sounds like today

A minor note about which leg the assassin's dagger was on.

The cultural key

The placement is the whole trick. A right-handed man wears his sword on the left thigh and draws across his body, so guards frisking a visitor patted down the left side. Ehud, being left-handed, strapped his short blade on the unsearched right thigh and walked in armed to assassinate the Moabite king. The detail carries a quiet irony: Ehud is a Benjamite, and 'Benjamin' means 'son of the right hand,' yet his clan was famous for producing crack left-handed warriors (Judges 20:16). A concealed weapon on the wrong side undoes an empire.

Recovered meaning

Ehud's left-handedness lets him hide the blade where no guard would check, turning a supposed disadvantage into the weapon of deliverance. The son of the right hand strikes with his left.

Parallels: Judges 20:16; Judges 3:15
Part of Gospel Decoded, 833 phrases from across the whole Bible decoded into their first-century meaning. Open this entry in the interactive explorer →
Browse all 833 entries →