The Book of Judges

Marc Zvi Brettler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134717040
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The Book of Judges has typically been treated either as a historical account of the conquest of Israel and the rise of the monarch, or as an ancient Israelite work of literary fiction. In this new approach, Brettler contends that Judges is essentially a political tract, which argues for the legitimacy of Davidic kingship. He skilfully and accessibly shows the tension between the stories in their original forms, and how they were altered and reused to create a book with a very different meaning. Important reading for all those studying this part of the Bible.

1
JUDGES AND THE HISTORIAN

As readers of the text, it matters whether or not Judges should be viewed as history in the sense of a work attempting to convey the real past. If we believe that the biblical authors subscribed to the famous words of Lucian in How to Write History : “The historian’s one task is to tell it as it happened” (apud Wiseman 1993: 122), we would conclude that the main goal of the material collected in Judges was to reflect what happened in the pre-monarchic period. We would then ask the following central question: Is it an accurate depiction of the past?

However, if we do not believe that the main goal of these texts’ authors was to depict the past, we will judge these texts differently, and we would ask different questions of them. Our primary questions would not be: Were the authors good historians? Or: Given that all history involves the narrative reworking of events, how accurately did this particular set of narrative reworkings of the past capture the real past? Instead, we would need to ask a fundamentally different set of questions. These would include: Is the real past of the pre-monarchic period reflected at all in these texts? To what extent do they only reflect the period of their authors? Finally, if the goal of the authors was not to recreate the past, was not motivated by “antiquarian interest” (Halpern 1988; Brettler 1990a), we must ask: What was the author of each story (and the book as a whole) trying to accomplish?

Determining the nature, or genre, of Judges, and thus deciding which questions we should be asking, is a difficult task. Elsewhere I have offered a broad definition of a historical text as “a narrative that presents a past” (Brettler 1995). Judges fits this definition, but that is not very helpful in determining which set of questions noted above should be used for exploring it. Much more decisive is whether it is a historical text in the sense of a narrative that presents (or is attempting to present) the past, in other words, if it is written as history of the sort now found in books such as The Cambridge History of Judaism or The Cambridge Ancient History, whose authors are expected to do their best at letting us know what really happened, or if its goal is altogether different.

This problem is compounded by the fact that there is no formcritical marker in any biblical text that says: “I am a text that is attempting to accurately depict the past.” Matitiahu Tsevat expresses this succinctly by noting that from the perspective of the self-presentation of the biblical texts, “the waters of Noah are no less real than the waters of Shiloah” (Tsevat 1980: 184). The lack of a match between the historicity of a text and its form comes through clearly in a cursory examination of biblical genealogies. Though scholars might debate which genealogies accurately reflect real fatherson relationships, most, if not all scholars would agree that some genealogies, especially those preserved in some of the lists in books like Ezra-Nehemiah, should be read in a straightforward fashion as B was the real son of A. On the other hand, genealogies which have exactly the same form and structure should sometimes be read “metaphorically to express other social relationships where real kinship is not involved” (R.R. Wilson 1992: 930; 1977). Yet other genealogies are believed to be forgeries, in which the author, for ideological reasons, attempts to create real kinship relationships that never existed. The genealogy of Zadok in 1 Chr 5:34, “proving” that the reigning family of priests was actually descended from Levi, or the genealogy of Caleb in 1 Chr 2:18, “proving” that his (Kenizzite!) family belonged to Judah, are parade examples of this phenomenon. However, these three types of genealogies, the real, the metaphorical, and the falsified, all look the same. To restate this crucial point: There is no such thing as text which is form-critically marked as true or historical.

This point is not adequately recognized in biblical studies, which is often practiced in a highly charged theological atmosphere. Comparable observations, however, have been made in classical studies. For example, in a recent study “Truth and Untruth in Herodotus and Thucydides,” J.L. Moles observes that there are three explanations for why ancient historians sometimes do not tell the truth: “error, dishonesty, or misconception of history’s true function” (Moles 1993: 90). The same is true of the ancient authors of Israelite history whose works became incorporated into the Bible.

The fact that there is no fundamental marker for accurate historical texts explains much of the debate that has raged in recent years concerning the historicity of particular biblical texts. The texts themselves are not “marked” in terms of their reliability. In addition, the dating of the texts, and thus their distance from the events they describe, is often uncertain; we have little sense of who wrote the biblical texts, and therefore what the authors’ goals or interests might have been. Furthermore, external evidence that can either confirm or disconfirm these texts is lacking, due in large part to the fact that very few ancient Israelite documents have survived from antiquity, most likely because they were written on parchment, which deteriorated. Archaeology can only help on the periphery or in very broad areas, such as suggesting that Joshua may not be read as straightforward “actual” history (Dever 1990: 37–84). Thus, it is typically internal analysis, which is recognized as quite subjective, that suggests how a biblical historical text should be read.

The twentieth century, especially in its last two decades, has seen a remarkable change in the way that Judges has been evaluated as a historical text. For much of the century, it was taken by most scholars as a somewhat embellished account of what happened between the period of the conquest and the rise of the monarchy. This goes back to earlier attitudes from the beginning of critical biblical scholarship. For example, in Julius Wellhausen’s 1881 Encyclopedia Britannica article “Israel” (Wellhausen 1973), the book of Judges is largely paraphrased. The judges within the book are taken as historical figures, the stories are understood to be organized in chronological order, and the numbers in the text are seen as accurate.

This tendency to paraphrase biblical accounts continues with many of the major histories of Israel. It is most obvious in Bright, one of the more conservative historians. He speaks with certainty of “the period of Judges.” He takes the text at face value, keeps the biblical chronology, and even notes, “We can add very little to what the Bible tells us of the various leaders, called judges…” (Bright 1981: 177–81). Even Martin Noth, who is often contrasted with Bright, takes most of the stories at face value, and offers a paraphrase of them in his History (Noth 1960). Noth is more willing than Bright to rearrange the chronological order of the stories, and he does not paraphrase them all,¹ but his basic starting point seems to be that they provide reliable information for the modern historian who wants to reconstruct the history of pre-monarchic Israel.

A detailed examination of a study by Abraham Malamat from 1954 reflects the attitude that prevailed through the middle of the twentieth century, and the problems of this approach. Malamat wrote on the very difficult episode preserved in Judg 3:7–11, concerning the defeat by Othniel of King Cushan-rishathaim of Aramnaharaim (Malamat 1954: 231–42). While Malamat notes that the material in Judges is sometimes schematic, he assumes that it is reliable. He recognizes that the king’s name, Cushan-rishathaim, which means “the dark double-wicked one,” is problematic, but he assumes that it is the corruption of some other name, specifically that Irsu was corrupted to Rishathaim. Even though Othniel is from the south, Malamat takes at face value the text’s comment that Cushan-rishathaim was from Aram-naharaim, the area of modern Syria, and assumes that this invasion from the North occurred at a time of documented Egyptian weakness. In his concluding paragraph, he notes:

The situation in the north makes it clear not only that it is unreasonable to doubt the existence of a Cushan Rishathaim but that the constellation of political forces in this area even renders plausible the rise and expansion of a king in Aram Naharaim.

(Malamat 1954: 242)

This argument is full of problems. Malamat never asks what the likely genre of this short text in Judges is – he automatically assumes that its author is attempting to convey what really happened. Had his ear been more attuned to the absurdity of the name of Cushan-rishathaim – “the dark double-wicked one” – and the fact that it even rhymes with Aram-naharaim, he might not have been so quick to assume that this text is attempting to narrate the past. Furthermore, he sidesteps the geographical problems involved in having a southern judge attack a northern king; this account is like saying that Mexico fought the United States, and the army from North Dakota defended it!² Finally, Malamat does not probe the implications of the fact that the Israelite hero “just happens” to already be known from Josh 15:17 and its parallel in Judg 1:13.

In all fairness to Malamat, it is only since the work of Richter in 1964 that we have a better understanding of what stands behind Judg 3:7–11 (Richter 1964: 23–6). It is now generally agreed that these verses are a composition offering a paradigm of the positive judge. This explains why Othniel is known from elsewhere – the historian “borrowed” a known figure, and composed something new about him. It also explains why he defeats “dark double wickedness” – this is logical for a paradigm, though highly unlikely in real life. Finally, in a paradigm, geography does not really matter.

This particular aspect of Richter’s theory about the composition of Judges has won wide acceptance for the simple reason that it explains the odd features of this text, and fits it well within the book, as the first story of a (major) judge. All explanations must justify why particular biblical texts were created or preserved – it succeeds in a much less forced fashion than Malamat’s suggestion. Malamat’s proposal is not absolutely impossible – it cannot be disproved. But its starting point – that the Bible is historically correct unless some unequivocal piece of evidence indicates otherwise, and thus plausibility implies probability – is methodologically problematic for biblical history, as it is for any historical reconstruction.³ We now recognize that this starting point inevitably leads to circular logic – somehow, somewhere, some sort of “confirmation” of the text’s history is discovered.

By the 1970s, the type of methodology used by Malamat was beginning to be called into question. In The Early History of Israel, the great French scholar Roland de Vaux notes that the “age of judges” is an artificial construct, and he is skeptical of the veracity of many of these stories, which were written much later than the events they describe (de Vaux 1978: 751–63).

A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, published in 1986 by Miller and Hayes, follows in the footsteps of de Vaux. It is a significant new type of history, which is often much more methodologically explicit than its predecessors about the problems of the Bible as a source, and in many ways it is symbolic of, and helped to further precipitate the “crisis” of using the Bible as a straightforward historical source.⁴ Like de Vaux, Miller and Hayes are not comfortable with the typical designation of this period, and speak instead of “what is often called ‘the period of the Judges’” (Miller and Hayes 1986: 87). They note that the stories are often schematic or typological, and “can hardly be accepted at face value for purposes of historical reconstruction” (Miller and Hayes 1986: 87), though they tentatively put more confidence in particular stories, and ultimately end up offering paraphrases of some of them. Even the typically iconoclastic Gösta W. Ahlström paraphrases many of the stories in his history, though unlike Bright he tries to bring external evidence to bear. For example, Ahlström finds the story where Ehud confronts Eglon the Moabite king problematic, since there is no evidence for Moabites in this period (Ahlström 1993: 377).

In sum, most historians of Israel now recognize the problematic nature of Judges as a source for ancient Israelite history. This realization stands in the way of their desire to fill in the history, which results in a strange tension: They claim that Judges is problematic as a source, but continue to paraphrase at least certain sections of it. Had they been more fair to their methodological considerations, they might have left this period blank, or used archeological material and analogies concerning pre-monarchic organization from other societies to fill in the picture (Frick 1985; Hackett 1998), ignoring the evidence found in Judges.

The most articulate, carefully reasoned expression of the problem of using Judges as a straightforward narrative recounting the past comes from approximately the same time as Miller and Hayes’ history, by the Copenhagen scholar Niels Peter Lemche in his Early Israel. Based on his analysis of oral literature and careful investigation of how traditions grow, especially in the pre-literary stage, he notes:

This means that the nature of the sources dealing with the period of the Judges prevent [sic] our being able to write a history of this period. We cannot even permit ourselves to use the various traditions of the Judges as historical references to individual events which actually occurred during the premonarchic period.

(Lemche 1985: 379)

He expresses quite clearly what this would imply for the Ehud narrative:

… we should ignore the details, including such names as Ehud and Eglon, or even, for that matter, Israel and Moab. Thus we would no longer automatically be able to assign a particular milieu to this narrative of the period of the Judges. It might just as easily be pre-Israelite, but assimilated into Israelite tradition. It might just as easily derive from the period of the monarchy, although the oral tradition has assigned it to the period of the Judges. In short, we have no way whatsoever, to determine whether any historical tradition at all underlies the narrative in Jdg 3,12–30, as long as we lack other sources. Precisely the same judgment applies to most of the other traditions in the Book of Judges.

(Lemche 1985: 383)

Once stated so clearly, and put into the broader perspective of how traditions develop, this position is quite obvious, and it is not surprising that it has gained general assent.

My belief in the correctness of Lemche’s position concerning the period of the judges does not mean that I agree with the more recent studies completed by Lemche and his Copenhagen colleague, Thomas L. Thompson (Lemche 1998; Thompson 1999). These scholars have raised extreme skepticism concerning almost all biblical traditions, and have suggested that much of the Hebrew Bible is a late post-exilic, Hellenistic creation. This is not the place to fully debate this broader issue,⁵ since I concede their argument concerning the (lack of) historicity for Judges. I would just note that had I been writing on Kings, the types of questions I would be asking would be different, because unlike Judges, (1) sections of Kings were written relatively close to the events they narrate; and (2) it is likely that some archival material is preserved in Kings.

Nor should my agreement with Lemche suggest a still broader agreement with certain historians and philosophers of history who are deeply skeptical about the ability of narrative history to reflect the real past. I do not believe that either as a result of Hayden White’s studies of historical discourse, or the literary currents of deconstructionism or post-modernism, we must speak of the end of history as a discipline (Iggers 1997: 118–40). Various scholars have pointed out that the well-known critique of objectivity in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream is really quite overstated, and in any case, has not stopped him from trying to write history (Novick 1988; Haskell 1998: 145–73).

As I have outlined in The Creation of History in Ancient Israel (1995), I am more sympathetic to more specific claims made about ancient historians, specifically that they rarely partake in the perceived Rankean ideal of telling it as it really was, which developed only with the rise of professional university historians in the last few centuries. I would add to the scholars cited there the observations from G.W. Bowersock’s influential Fiction as History: Nero to Julian, who notes that in antiquity there was “a general indifference to the distinction between history and myth” and “the overt creation of fiction as a means of rewriting or even inventing the past was a serious business for many of the ancients” (Bowersock 1994: 9, 12–13). Entertainment was also an important part of ancient historical writing (Wiseman 1993: 139–40). Sometimes the point that needed to be illustrated or the moral that needed to be told was too important to be reined in by facts (Moles 1993: 120). These observations are as true of Judges as they are of the classical works that Bowersock and others have explored. This would suggest that Judges should not be studied to reconstruct ancient Israelite history of the pre-monarchic period. Nor should we examine it as a historical work by asking how it recreates the past that it is purporting to narrate, since (1) we have no independent method to create that past; and more significantly (2) its main objective was not recreating the past. Our study must find a different point of entry into the book.

2
READING JUDGES AS LITERATURE?

If we are not going to approach Judges as history, it seems that we should study it as literature.¹ This contrast between history and literature is well-entrenched in biblical studies, predominantly thanks to John van Seters’ In Search of History (van Seters 1975b: 1), which called attention to Johan Huizinga’s essay “A Definition of the Concept of History.” Huizinga claims that: “The sharp distinction between ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1: JUDGES AND THE HISTORIAN
• 2: READING JUDGES AS LITERATURE?
• 3: THE SHORT STORY
• 4: THE SAMSON CYCLE
• 5: POETRY AND PROSE IN JUDGES 4-5
• 6: WINDING DOWN: THE CONCUBINE OF GIBEAH
• 7: A CONCLUSION THAT BECAME AN INTRODUCTION
• 8: CONCLUSION: THE CENTER DOES COHERE
• NOTES
• REFERENCES