Joshua and Judges

Athalya Brenner, Gale Yee, Athalya Brenner, Gale Yee

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780800699376
• eBook ISBN: 9781451426328
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Critique et interprétation bibliques

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Case Studies in Judges

7

Women Frame the Book of Judges—How and Why?

Athalya Brenner

Disclaimer: Context

This article was originally written for a Festschrift in honor of my friend and colleague Yairah Amit, published in 2012. Hence, its contents and context are primarily academic: the wish to honor a colleague, as is so often done, by presenting a piece of writing within that colleague’s expertise, and utilizing her own scholarship for that purpose. But even at the original time of writing, in 2011, I intended to rewrite and expand it for the planned Texts@Contexts volume on Joshua and Judges. Subsequently a version of this essay was delivered as a paper in an SBL session of the Contextual Interpretation Consultation in San Francisco, in November 2011, and I thank the participants in the discussion for helping me crystallize my thoughts further on the topic.

Why write about women in Judges? Ostensibly Judges is a book about men, or mostly about men. Military men, so called “saviors.” Male rulers. Excluding some female figures, of course. When you read the book, this is your first impression: a men’s book. However, this impression cannot last for long. There are plenty of woman figures in Judges. Here as in other biblical passages, the overt and covert links made in the Hebrew bible between female figures and the Hochpolitik of government, nationalism, and territory do not cease to amaze me. On the one hand, at least theoretically, women are by and large removed from the political arena. On the other hand, they are described as saviors in cases of extreme urgency—or as victims in cases of a lost social order. In other words, they symbolize the social order that envelops them to the point of exclusion. A curious paradox, certainly.

Clearly, not all is confident and self-assured in the patriarchal world order that we often watch in the biblical stories, as if we were in a film unfolding unexpectedly to display (male) heroes and antiheroes as dependents, and politically active females as either non-females (non-mothers) or else as ethically deficient, even when they operate on “our” side. And also, somehow, somewhere, there is a nagging voice that tells me, pesters me, that similar paradoxical views of social maleness and femaleness are still inherent in my own culture, in your culture, at least to a degree, in spite of variances in time, space, and mentality. So please do help me, from your own contexts: why do women, actually female figures, mainly a certain type of female figures, actually daughters, frame the book of Judges at both ends and feature in its center, for better or—more often—for worse?

Ostensibly, the book of Judges is about “judges.” These “judges,” שופטים (shophetim), as is widely demonstrated in the book, are persons who effect collective deliverance from (military) danger^[1] more than, as more usual for the verb שפט (sh-ph-t) Qal and its nominal derivatives, they engage in legislative and juridical activities.^[2] Mostly the stories and short[er] notes about “judges” in this book, apart from one, are about male judges and their escapades. However, as has been noticed by many scholars, the book begins and ends with stories about women.^[3] From Achsah (Judg. 1:12-15) and a reference to the Kenites (1:16) and to Jael’s group, which will come to fruition in chapters 4–5, through to the abducted Shiloh women in chapter 21, woman figures are depicted again and again as major linchpins in the evolving drama of local stories made national: the drama of attempts to move from local leadership and its overriding discontents, in spite of occasional successes, to a more central government that would generate a greater success rate and greater security for its subjects, or partners.

The roles woman figures fulfill in the individual sections (such as the Achsah story) or in larger units (Samson’s biography, chs. 13–16), as well as in the overriding plan of the book, the ideological “national” framework, vary. The figures may be defined in traditional terms, that is, as daughters, wives, or mothers; that is, as male-relational figures. Achsah, Jephthah’s daughter, and the young women of Shiloh/Jabesh Gilead are introduced as daughters, as are Samson’s Timnite wife and her sister, and the Levi’s runaway wife (ch. 19). The latter is primarily a wife, albeit a secondary one פילגש, pilegesh); also wives are Achsah, Jael, Gideon’s Shechemite wife (also defined as a pilegesh, 8:31), the wife of Jephthah’s father, Manoah’s wife; and according to many interpreters, ancient and modern, Deborah too—the only female “judge” in this book—is wife of Lappidoth, her textually absent husband, or of Barak (Valler 2012: 236–45). Let us not forget the mothers: Sisera’s mother, Abimelech’s mother (= Gideon’s Shechemite wife), Jephthah’s mother, Samson’s mother (wife of Manoah), Micah’s mother, and last but not least, the metaphorical mother, the “mother in Israel,” Deborah again. Woman figures can also appear as independent agents, positive or negative, with no male filiation. Such are the wise women in the court of Sisera’s mother, the woman from Thebez who kills Abimelech, the whore from Gaza, and Delilah. Most of these female figures are nameless as well as male-relational: they are important for the plot and message, may even assume male knowledge, functions, or roles (Deborah and Jael, Samson’s mother), but are depicted as socially marginal because of their social dependency on males, of which their namelessness is a token. Whatever the individual story or case, all these descriptions are enveloped in two rubrics, both repeated several times, both editorial. The first repeated comment covers chapters 2–16 (end of Samson’s biography): “And the sons of Israel [בני ישראל] did/continued to do what was bad in Yhwh’s eyes” (2:11; 3:7,12 ; 4:1; 6:1; 10:6; 13:1). The second comment frames the last five chapters of the book, appearing at the beginning of the last section and also at its very end: “In those days there was no king in Israel, each man [ איש] would do what was right in his eyes” (17:6; 21:25).^[4]

Having described the relevant textual data, I shall attempt to assess the ways female figures and typecasts are used in Judges for the purpose of either supporting or else refuting the alleged need for central leadership, or kingship, so as to uphold a thriving social order. In this I wish to go beyond the basic recognition that woman figures indeed feature largely in Judges and in an evaluative manner, for instance as phrased by Tammi Schneider in her introduction to her commentary on Judges (2000: xiv):

One of the major components affecting the evaluation of the judges is the role of women in their lives. With the exception of Ehud, Tola, Jair, Elon, and Abdon, the stories of the individual judges contain some reference to a woman, either by name or description of relationship to them, who heavily affect the judge’s character and actions.

Or in her conclusion (288–89):

Men in Judges often receive a negative evaluation because of the women in their lives, and the roles those women take, though the characters of the women themselves are not always seen negatively. . . . Achsah could be considered a vehicle for a slightly negative evaluation of Othniel. . . . In Judges the focus is not on the women as characters evaluated in their own right but as foils through whom the men, especially the judges, are tested. . . Women also serve to reveal the impact of Israel’s actions on the nation of Israel at large. . . . The Shiloh women’s tragic plight demonstrates how Israelite society strayed so that women were institutionally raped and the system of protection was intentionally destroyed. . . .

I find Schneider’s position absolutely correct and balanced, in as far as it goes, in that she de-marginalizes woman figures by clearly pointing out some of their functions as a literary device while simultaneously emphasizing their marginal status—basically just indicators for assessing males and their behavior—in the biblical text itself. Nevertheless, I would like to take the matter further, especially because, crucially, woman figures open and close the book of Judges, framing it on both ends.

That the book of Judges almost begins and certainly ends with woman figures is a given fact and an indication of their importance to it. They appear as individuals and in groups, in various roles, as agents and as objects, as autochtones (indigenous) and as allochtones (foreign), in stories as well as in short notes. Let us look again at the list of female figures earlier categorized into daughters, mothers, and wives, but this time from another perspective: that of the order they come into our view within the book. Achsah stars already in chapter 1, at least in the fragment about Judah, a rare reference in Judges (vv. 12-15). Then come Deborah and Jael as “national” saviors, as against the unnamed mother of Sisera and the group of her companions (chs. 4–5). Gideon has many wives, among them a secondary wife from Shechem, Abimelech’s unnamed mother (8:31). This wife and mother from Shechem is not an actor or an agent in the stories depicting her husband and son. However, her community of origin is instrumental in Abimelech’s attempt to secure dominance and eventually in his downfall and death—at the hand of a woman (9:50-55). Remember Dinah and Shechem (Genesis 34)? If you do, you know already at the beginning of chapter 9 that it will end in disaster. Abimelech is killed by an unnamed woman, and his attempt to institute kingship is thus aborted. Jephthah’s mother is an unnamed זונה (zonah, “harlot”)—which is difficult to understand, since with a harlot determining paternity is an issue, while it is implied in the text that Jephthah’s paternity is recognized by his hostile half-brothers (11:1-3); Jephthah’s daughter is nameless too (11:30-40). The daughter is sacrificed to Yhwh in accordance with Jephthah’s vow, willingly on her part—believe it or not. In Samson’s saga (chs. 13–16), women seem as important as Yhwh’s spirit and the Nazirite condition, even more so perhaps, as motivation and cause for the stories to unfold: from his mother, so much more proper and intelligent than her bumbling but named husband (ch. 13); to Samson’s first Philistine wife, the Timnite, and her barely mentioned sister (14:1-15:6); to the Gaza whore (all of them unnamed) (16:1-3), then to Delilah, who delivers him to his fate and glory in death (the rest of ch. 16). Micah’s mother, of the Ephraim hills, uses her money, stolen then returned to her by her son, to establish a local temple around a statue and an ephod; these are eventually taken, together with the appointed Levite priest, by the Danites on their migration to the northern Laish/Dan (chs. 17–18). The secondary wife of the Levite, again unnamed (as is her husband, apart from his tribal tag), is raped by the men of Gibeah, perhaps ultimately murdered by her husband when she returns in the morning^[5] (ch. 19). In the ensuing civil strife, the Benjaminites are nearly extinguished (ch. 20). To circumvent the decision not to allow exogamic wives to Benjamin men, two solutions are found: four hundred virgins (= daughters) are imported from Jabesh Gilead, after all other locals have been killed; and the other Benjaminites are encouraged to kidnap Shiloh girls (= daughters) dancing in the vineyards and to marry them. These last two groups are unnamed as well, and there is no doubt that the young women are illegally taken by the Benjaminites (the root גזל, g-z-l Qal, “to rob,”^[6] is used in 21:23 for this action). This is the end of the civil war and of the book: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his eyes.” Thus we begin by reading about a well-established daughter in Judah, newly married and working for the success of her marriage (see Klein Abensohn 2012: 133–44), outside the natural habitat—so to speak—of the “judges”; and we end our reading with two groups of daughters—young women—coerced this way or the other to marry the corrupt Benjaminites, with neither their fathers nor they themselves having a say in this matter.

A quick analysis and summary of principal features will show that:

1. Most of the woman figures, be they individuals or groups, are unnamed. The only named female figures are Achsah, Deborah, Jael, and Delilah.
2. Most figures fulfill traditional, male-relational roles: mothers, wives, secondary wives, daughters, or a combination thereof. There are two categories of exceptions: saviors and sexual objects. Abimelech’s killer, Deborah, and Jael are saviors—although, in the case of the last two, they may boast absent husbands in the biblical text and/or in its interpretation; Delilah is a temptress, another of Samson’s women is a zonah, “prostitute,” and others are sexual objects in addition t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table Of Contents
• Copyright
• Other Books in the Series
• Series Preface, Updated: Texts in/at Life Contexts
• Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• What Do We Do, What Can We Do, about Joshua and Judges?
• Case Studies in Judges
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Scripture Index