“The Hebrew Bible: Judges” (translated by Robert Alter)

In his introduction, Alter begins by guessing as to the date of compilation of the Book of Judges. “The redaction and final literary formulation of these stories are much later [than their setting]—perhaps, as some scholars have inferred, toward the end of the eighth century B.C.E., some years after the destruction of the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. and before the reforms of King Josiah a century later.” Next, Alter gets into the nuance of the translation. “The word shofet, traditionally translated as “judge,” has two different meanings—“judge” in the judicial sense and “leader” or “chieftain.”… The narrative contexts make perfectly clear that these judges are ad hoc military leaders—in several instances, guerrilla commanders.” Finally, Alter describes the repetitive flow throughout the course of the narrative, “From the latter part of chapter 3 to the end of chapter 12, there is a formulaic rhythm of events: Israel’s disloyalty to its God, its oppression by enemies as punishment for the dereliction, the crying out to God by the Israelites, God’s raising up a judge to rescue them.”

In Judges 1:6, Alter suggests the foreshadowing of violence recurrent throughout the book, “they chopped off his thumbs and his big toes. The mutilation, which on evidence of Adoni-Bezek’s own words in the next verse was evidently a common practice, is both a humiliation and a means of permanently preventing the captured leader from becoming a combatant again because he would be unable to wield a bow or sword or run on the battlefield. It should be observed, moreover, that this grisly detail is an apt thematic and imagistic introduction to Judges, the most violent of all the books of the Bible…. The mutilation of the king, then, introduces us to a realm of political instability in which both people and groups are violently torn asunder.”

Alter always alerts the reader to the formulaic nature of biblical narrative. The form of the prose foreshadows the subject and structure of the story following. For good measure, he throws in a bit of history and semantics. He relates in Judges 5:1, “And Deborah sang, and Barak son of Abinoam with her. The use of a singular verb (feminine) followed by a compound subject is an indication in biblical grammar that the first of the subjects named is the primary actor and the second one ancillary to the action. Deborah is introduced as singer of the victory song, but that is not a claim of authorship, and elsewhere in the poem she is addressed in the second person. In any case, the scholarly consensus is that this is one of the oldest texts in the Bible, perhaps composed not long after the battle it reports, around 1100 B.C.E. Its language abounds in archaisms, many of them uncertain in meaning and probably some of them scrambled in scribal transmission.”

As always in the Bible’s more archaic bits, there is evidence of the continuing struggle between monotheism and the continued relevance of the plethora of pagan gods. In Judges 11:24, Alter notes, “Do you not take possession of what Chemosh your god gives you to possess? The theological assumption of this statement is perfectly characteristic of this early period of Israelite history. Israel has its own God, YHWH (“the Lord”), believed to be more powerful than other gods, but each nation has its guiding deity, assumed to look after the national destiny.”

In Judges 16:13, we get a description of Samson’s famous hair. Alter describes the multiple allusions involved with this account, “If you weave my head’s seven tresses together with the web. Only now do we learn how Samson wears his uncut hair (and one should note the magical number seven). In the third of his three false explanations, he edges toward the real secret because his hair is involved. This version also comes close to his actual predicament because it conjures up entanglement in a woman’s instrument, the loom.”

Finally, at the conclusion of the book, in Judges 21:25, Alter relates, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. This refrain is now inserted at the end as a kind of epilogue to the Book of Judges. The state of political anarchy has been especially manifest in the story of the concubine at Gibeah and the civil war it triggers, and perhaps in the war’s aftermath as well. The refrain sets the stage for the Book of Samuel, which will move in swift steps to the founding of the monarchy.”