Judges 13
An angel announces to a barren woman that she will bear a son dedicated as a Nazirite from the womb — Israel's last and most complicated judge.
Summary
The people of Israel again do evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord gives them into the hand of the Philistines for forty years. There is a man of the tribe of Dan whose name is Manoah, whose wife is barren. The angel of the Lord appears to her and announces: you are barren and have not borne children, but you shall conceive and bear a son. Therefore beware and drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head, for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines. She goes and tells her husband. Manoah entreats the Lord to send the man of God again to teach them what to do with the child. The angel returns and speaks again with the woman; she runs to tell Manoah.
Manoah follows his wife to where the angel is. He asks: are you the man who spoke to this woman? Yes. What is to be the child's manner of life and mission? The angel repeats the instructions about the Nazirite conditions for the woman. Manoah asks the angel to stay for a meal; the angel says he will not eat, but if Manoah prepares a burnt offering, let him offer it to the Lord. Manoah asks the angel's name, to honour him when the word comes true. The angel says: why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful? Manoah takes the young goat and the grain offering and offers it on the rock to the Lord. When the flame went up from the altar toward heaven, the angel of the Lord went up in the flame of the altar. Manoah and his wife see it and fall on their faces. We shall surely die, Manoah says, for we have seen God. But his wife reasons: if the Lord had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt offering, nor shown us all these things. The woman bears a son and calls him Samson. The Spirit of the Lord begins to stir him.
- Judges 1Chapter 1 functions as a historiographical preface to the whole book, cataloguing the success or failure of each tribe to dispossess the Canaanites after Joshua's death.
- Judges 2Chapter 2 is the hermeneutical key to Judges.
- Judges 3Chapter 3 introduces the judge cycle in action for the first time.
- Judges 4Chapter 4 is the prose account of the same events that chapter 5 will sing.
- Judges 5The Song of Deborah in chapter 5 is widely considered one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew poetry in the entire Bible, possibly dating to the twelfth century BCE, nearly contemporaneous with the events it describes.
- Judges 6Chapter 6 is the opening of the Gideon narrative, which runs through chapter 8 and is the longest major-judge story in the book.
- Judges 7Chapter 7 is the central action of the Gideon narrative and one of the most memorable military scenes in the book.
- Judges 8Chapter 8 is the darkest portion of the Gideon narrative.
- Judges 9Chapter 9 is the longest chapter in Judges and the only episode in the book devoted to an anti-judge — a man who makes himself king by violence and holds it for exactly three years.
- Judges 10Chapter 10 performs two functions.
- Judges 11Chapter 11 is one of the most morally complex chapters in the Hebrew Bible.
- Judges 12Chapter 12 begins with a conflict that is structurally parallel to the Ephraimite quarrel after Gideon's battle in chapter 8, but this time Jephthah's response is not diplomacy — it is war.
- Judges 13Chapter 13 is the birth narrative of Samson, and it is the most elaborate annunciation scene in Judges.
- Judges 14Chapter 14 introduces the adult Samson and establishes the pattern that will govern the rest of his narrative: a desire for a Philistine woman, a display of supernatural strength, a riddle or trap, betrayal by intimacy.
- Judges 15Chapter 15 escalates the private vendetta between Samson and the Philistines into a series of increasingly spectacular acts of violence.
- Judges 16Chapter 16 is the climax and conclusion of the Samson narrative.
- Judges 17Chapter 17 begins the two-part appendix with which Judges closes, and the shift in tone is immediate.
- Judges 18Chapter 18 is the first of the book's two closing appendices.
- Judges 19Chapter 19 is one of the most disturbing chapters in the Hebrew Bible, and the text makes no attempt to soften it.
- Judges 20Chapter 20 is the longest military account in Judges and is remarkable for what it shows about what has gone wrong with Israel as a political and moral community.
- Judges 21Chapter 21 closes the book and extends the moral horror of chapter 19-20 in a different register: the horror of improvised solutions to self-inflicted catastrophe.