Judges — themes & analysis

The opening chapters of Judges set out the pattern that the rest of the book will follow. Chapter 2 is essentially a thesis statement from the editors. Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge and saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge; for the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning under those who persecuted and oppressed them. But whenever the judge died, they would relapse and behave worse than their ancestors, following other gods, worshipping them, and bowing down to them. They did not refrain from any of their corrupt practices or from their stubborn ways.

The pattern is mechanical. Sin, oppression, cry, deliverance, peace, sin again. It is the pattern of a loose tribal society in which religious authority has not yet been institutionalized and central political authority does not exist. There is no temple yet — the ark moves between Shiloh and Bethel and other places. There is no king. Each tribe handles its own affairs, and in moments of large external threat a charismatic leader emerges — sometimes from an unlikely tribe or unlikely social position — who rallies several tribes for a particular crisis and then returns to obscurity or dies.

The brilliance of the book is that the editors, while imposing this cyclical frame on the material, do not make the cycle flat. Each iteration is darker than the last. Othniel, the first judge, is presented as a paradigm — capable, faithful, married into the great family of Caleb. Ehud is already morally edgier — he kills a foreign king with a concealed dagger by deceit. Deborah is the high point of the book, and her song is its theological climax. Gideon starts hesitantly but ends well, then names a son Abimelech who immediately becomes the first claimant of monarchy and slaughters his own brothers to seize it. Jephthah delivers the people but loses his daughter in the process. Samson is a one-man wrecking crew whose faithfulness to his Nazirite vow is broken on every page.

By the end of the book the cycle has degenerated into a national crisis with no judge at all — a Levite's concubine raped to death, a tribal civil war, six hundred captured women, and the editors' verdict in the closing line. What the structure is showing is the gradual exhaustion of charismatic leadership as a model for ordering a covenant people. The system works for emergencies; it does not produce the kind of stable moral and religious life Deuteronomy was asking for. Each judge is a stopgap. Between the stopgaps, the people drift. By the end the drift has become a fall, and the book is pointing — without saying so explicitly — toward the question that the books of Samuel will then take up: should there be a king?

Where to follow it: Judges 2 (the editors' thesis), Judges 9 (Abimelech, the first king-claimant), Judges 16 (Samson's fall), Judges 21 (the closing horror).

Chapters 4 and 5 of Judges tell the same story twice, once in prose and once in poetry. The poetic version, the Song of Deborah in chapter 5, is widely considered one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew poetry surviving anywhere — possibly going back to the twelfth century BCE, almost contemporaneous with the events it describes. To read the prose first and then the poetry is to watch a battle being remembered in two registers, one administrative and one bardic.

Deborah is a prophet, the wife of Lappidoth, who sits under the palm tree between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim. The Israelites come up to her for judgment. She summons Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali and tells him: gather ten thousand from Naphtali and Zebulun, take them to Mount Tabor, and the Lord will draw out Sisera the general of Jabin's army, with his nine hundred chariots of iron, to the river Kishon, and give him into your hand. Barak says: if you go with me, I will go; if you do not go with me, I will not go. Deborah says: I will surely go with you, but the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.

The battle is brief in the prose account. The Israelites come down from the mountain, the Lord throws Sisera and his chariots into a panic, the Kishon overflows and the iron chariots are mired in the mud. Sisera flees on foot. He comes to the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite. She offers him hospitality, gives him milk, covers him with a rug while he sleeps from exhaustion, takes a tent peg in one hand and a hammer in the other, drives the peg through his temple into the ground. Then the song. Awake, awake, Deborah, awake, awake, utter a song.

The poem is fierce, archaic, full of difficult Hebrew that translators have argued about for two thousand years. It curses Meroz, the village that did not come to the battle. It blesses Jael among women. It tells Sisera's death again — between her feet he sank, he fell, he lay still; between her feet he sank, he fell — with a brutal repetition the prose did not have. And then, in one of the most arresting moves in any poem, it cuts to Sisera's mother, watching from her window, asking why his chariot is so long in coming, and being told by her wisest ladies that they must be dividing the spoil — a girl or two for every man, dyed embroidered cloth for the necks of the spoilers. The mother who waits for a son who is not coming home is the mother on every side of every war. Deborah is the only judge whose victory is told twice, in two different literary modes, and the song is in many ways the moral and aesthetic high point of the book.

Where to follow it: Judges 4 (the prose account), Judges 5 (the Song of Deborah).

Chapters 6 to 8 tell the long story of Gideon, the most fully developed judge in the book. The Midianites have been sweeping into the land at harvest time for seven years, taking the crops and leaving the people destitute. Gideon, of the tribe of Manasseh, is threshing wheat in a winepress to hide it from them when the angel of the Lord appears under the oak at Ophrah. The Lord is with you, mighty warrior, the angel says. Gideon's reply is sharp: if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us, and where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us? The text does not soften the bitterness. Gideon is being addressed in language that does not match his situation, and he says so.

The call proceeds through several signs. Gideon tears down his father's altar to Baal in the night and builds an altar to the Lord on the same spot — the men of the town want to kill him for it, but his father Joash defends him with a famous line: if Baal is a god, let him contend for himself. Then the famous fleece. Gideon asks God twice for confirmation — first the fleece wet with dew when the ground is dry, then dry when the ground is wet. The signs are given. Gideon believes. He gathers thirty-two thousand men. The Lord tells him this is too many — the people might claim the victory was their own — and the army is whittled down to three hundred by an obscure test involving how the men drink at a stream.

The three hundred surround the Midianite camp at night, each carrying a torch hidden in a clay jar in one hand and a trumpet in the other. At a signal they smash the jars, blow the trumpets, and shout: a sword for the Lord and for Gideon. The Midianites panic and turn on one another in the dark. The land has rest for forty years. Gideon then refuses kingship in a famous line — I will not rule over you, neither will my son rule over you, the Lord will rule over you — but he asks each of his men to give him an earring from the spoil, and from the gold he makes an ephod which the people end up worshipping, and which the text plainly calls a snare for Gideon and his family.

He has seventy sons by his many wives, plus a son named Abimelech by a concubine in Shechem. Within a generation that son will hire a band of mercenaries, return to his father's town, and slaughter his seventy half-brothers on a single stone — all but Jotham, the youngest, who escapes and delivers a blistering parable from the top of Mount Gerizim. The book's pattern of decline runs directly through Gideon's own story: deliverance, ambivalence, compromise, and a son who becomes the first aspirant to monarchy in Israel.

Where to follow it: Judges 6 (the call; the fleece), Judges 7 (the three hundred), Judges 8 (the ephod; the refusal of kingship), Judges 9 (Abimelech).

Jephthah is a Gileadite, the son of a prostitute, driven out of his father's house by his half-brothers because of his irregular birth. He flees to the land of Tob and gathers around himself a band of outlaws. When the Ammonites threaten Gilead, the elders who had driven him out come and beg him to come back as their commander. He bargains. If you bring me back, and the Lord gives the Ammonites into my hand, I will be your head. They agree. He sends a messenger to the Ammonites with a long historical defence of Israel's claim to the land, and when the Ammonite king refuses, he prepares for battle.

Then the vow. The spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he made a vow to the Lord: if you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious, shall be the Lord's, and I will offer him up as a burnt offering. The Hebrew is ambiguous on whether he expected a person or an animal — houses in this period sometimes kept animals on the ground floor — but the result is unambiguous. He defeats the Ammonites with great slaughter. He returns home in victory. His daughter, his only child, comes out of the door of his house with timbrels and dancing.

Jephthah tears his clothes. Alas, my daughter, you have brought me very low. I have opened my mouth to the Lord and I cannot take back my vow. The daughter — never named in the text, though tradition gives her names — answers with a gravity that is harder to read than her father's grief. My father, if you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth. Grant me this one request: let me alone two months, that I may go and wander on the mountains and bewail my virginity, I and my companions. He grants it. She goes. After two months she returns, and the text says simply: he did with her according to the vow he had made.

The text does not editorialize. It does not say the vow was foolish; it does not say God required the sacrifice; it does not say the law forbidding human sacrifice — which the Pentateuch states clearly more than once — should have stopped him. The chapter ends with the note that it became a custom in Israel for the daughters of Israel to go year by year to lament the daughter of Jephthah for four days. She is mourned by the women of the people, ritually, every year, even though her own father is the one who sacrificed her. The judge who delivered Israel from the Ammonites destroyed his own household to do it, and the price is paid by his daughter.

Where to follow it: Judges 10 (the Ammonite threat), Judges 11 (the vow and the daughter), Judges 12 (the shibboleth; Jephthah's death).

Samson takes up four chapters — 13 to 16 — and is the longest single narrative arc in the book. He is born to a barren woman of the tribe of Dan after an annunciation by the angel of the Lord, who tells her that her son is to be a Nazirite from the womb: no razor on his head, no wine, no contact with the dead. He grows up, the spirit of the Lord begins to stir him, and from there the trouble begins. He falls in love with a Philistine woman at Timnah. He kills a lion with his bare hands on the way to the wedding feast and later finds bees nesting in the carcass — the source of the riddle he poses to his wedding guests, who get the answer out of his bride by threatening her family. He kills thirty Philistines to pay off the wager. His wife is given to another.

He sets fire to the Philistine grain fields with three hundred foxes and burning torches. He is captured and bound by his own people, who hand him over to the Philistines, and he breaks the ropes and kills a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. He goes to a prostitute in Gaza and tears the city gates off their hinges in the morning. Then he loves Delilah in the valley of Sorek. The Philistine lords offer her eleven hundred pieces of silver each to find out the secret of his strength. Three times she asks him; three times he lies; three times the Philistines spring on him and find his strength intact. The fourth time she presses him until his soul is vexed to death and he tells her: it is the unshorn hair of his Nazirite vow.

She lulls him to sleep on her knees. They shave him. The strength leaves him. The Philistines seize him, gouge out his eyes, take him down to Gaza, bind him with bronze fetters, and put him to grinding at the mill in the prison. The end is one of the most theatrical scenes in the book. The Philistine lords gather in the temple of Dagon to celebrate. They send for Samson to entertain them. His hair has begun to grow back. He prays — the only sustained prayer Samson ever utters — Lord God, remember me and strengthen me only this once, that with this one act of revenge I may pay back the Philistines for my two eyes. He pushes against the pillars. The temple falls on the lords and on Samson. So the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those he had killed during his life.

The whole arc is read by the editors as a national figure. Samson is dedicated from the womb, has every advantage, breaks every part of his vow, accomplishes deliverance only through suicide, and ends in a heap of rubble. The judge who was supposed to be set apart from birth becomes a parable of how Israel itself is squandering its calling, and the book's pattern of decline reaches its lowest point in the personal story of the most gifted of the judges.

Where to follow it: Judges 13 (the annunciation), Judges 14 (the lion; the riddle), Judges 15 (the foxes; the jawbone), Judges 16 (Delilah; the temple).