Strong’s Bible Dictionary ref:
H8044 ַשְׁמַגּר šamgar:
Word study Dictionary
A proper noun designating Shamgar, a minor judge in Israel. He was the son of Anath. He killed six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad, a mighty deliverance for Israel (Jdg_3:31).
Judges 3:30-31 NKJV
(30) So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel. And the land had rest for eighty years.
(31) After him was Shamgar the son of Anath, who killed six hundred men of the Philistines with an ox goad; and he also delivered Israel.
Judges 5:3-7 NKJV
(3) "Hear, O kings! Give ear, O princes! I, even I, will sing to the LORD; I will sing praise to the LORD God of Israel.
(4) "LORD, when You went out from Seir, When You marched from the field of Edom, The earth trembled and the heavens poured, The clouds also poured water;
(5) The mountains gushed before the LORD, This Sinai, before the LORD God of Israel.
(6) "In the days of Shamgar, son of Anath, In the days of Jael, The highways were deserted, And the travelers walked along the byways.
(7) Village life ceased, it ceased in Israel, Until I, Deborah, arose, Arose a mother in Israel.
參考: Strong's Bible Dictionary and Old Testament
Shamgar, the parenthetical hero of the book of Judges.
The matter-of-fact brevity and lack of larger context are tantalizing. Questions arise but are left unanswered. Shamgar slew 600 Philistines — was this all at once? Or was it one at a time over a long time? Were these 600 the combatant soldiers of an invading army, or were they women and children in some ill-fated Philistine settlement?
This is the book of Judges, after all, a bloody, R-rated collection of stories in which little distinction is made between honorable feats of military might and brutal atrocities and terrorism. Samson, probably the most famous of the heroes in Judges, practically invented terrorism. He’s praised in the book for setting fire to the enemy’s crops, employing indiscriminate starvation as a weapon of mass destruction. And he’s praised for being a low-tech suicide bomber, killing himself and hundreds of others by collapsing a building filled with Philistine dignitaries. Then there’s Ehud, the sneaky assassin who smuggled a dagger into the court of the enemy king, gutting him in the royal outhouse.
So in the context of Judges, we can’t be sure that Shamgar’s heroism is really heroic. We can’t know if he was like Daniel Inouye in San Terenzo or if he was like William Calley at My Lai.