Category Archive: Bible – OT – Judges
Fixed in His Memory
The thirteenth-century theologian Bonaventure once said that the difficulty with interpreting scripture accurately is needing to have so much of it memorized before one can even begin.
“No one will find this an easy task unless, by constant reading, he has fixed in his memory the text of the Bible to the very letter; not otherwise shall he ever have the ability to interpret Scripture.”
Bonaventure assumed that the Bible can only be understood in light of itself, and that such understanding requires having a great deal of scripture in one’s memory so that, as one reads along, word associations and connections will leap to mind.
Our easy access to the printed word, so easy that now many of us have searchable copies of the Bible with us at all times on our phones and tablets, is a great gift, but such access discourages memory, meaning that we often miss the interconnectedness of the text.
When we read that an event in the biblical narrative took place at Shechem, most of us do not immediately remember all the other events that occurred at Shechem in the course of biblical history. The first writers, readers, and hearers of the text would have thought of those connections.
Those first writers, readers, and hearers were immersed in a great system of symbols that enriched their communication and their understanding of the world. Most of us are deaf to that system of symbols as we read the Bible, and we therefore miss large portions of the meaning.
When we read a story about Gideon putting out a fleece and inspecting the dew that had fallen or had not fallen on it, we need to be aware of the meaning of a fleece and the meaning of the dew if we are to hear all that was there for the first hearers.
I make no claim to having mastered this system of symbols, but I have caught enough hints of it to believe that it cannot be learned apart from approaching the Bible as a unified whole. — Laura Smit, Judges & Ruth, 7-8. (She’s quoting Bonaventure’s Breviloquium, trans. Jose de Vinck [Paterson, NJ: St Anthony Guild Press, 1963], 18.)
Samson the Womanizer?
Samson, commentaries on Judges 14 tell me, was a womanizer. That’s probably because in Judges 16, twenty years later, Samson visits a prostitute and then gets involved with Delilah … and the commentators then read those events back into Judges 14, twenty years earlier.
But what does Samson do in Judges 14? Is he driven here by sheer lust? Well, he sees a woman, judges that she’s the right one for him, sends his father to negotiate for her, goes and visits her himself and talks to her and still concludes that she is the right one for him, and then proceeds to marry her. Wow! What a lust-driven womanizer, huh?
Commentaries puzzle me sometimes….
Riddlemasters (Judges 14)
In Judges 14 and again in Judges 15, we’re told that the Philistines were “ruling” over Israel.
Given the riddle contest in Judges 14, it’s interesting that the root of the word for “ruling” here (MShL) has a homophone — the exact same spelling, the exact same sound — that appears in other places and means “riddle, parable.”
Is there, perhaps, a play on words here? As Jeremy Schipper (“Narrative Obscurity of Samson’s [HiYDaH] in Judges 14.14 and 18,” JSOT 27.3 [2003] 339-353) points out, you could even render the lines in Judges 14 and 15 as “the Philistines were posing riddles over Israel.” But in Judges 14, it’s Samson who proves to be the true riddlemaster, with dominion over the Philistines.
The Nazirite Fetus (Judges 13)
Samson’s mother is under the dietary prohibitions associated with a Nazirite vow only because her son in her womb is a Nazirite. Samson was a Nazirite, not from birth on but from conception on. And therefore, according to Judges 13, life begins at conception.
Chronology of the Samson Narrative
How does the story of Samson’s conception and birth fit into the forty-year Philistine oppression?
The Angel of Yahweh tells Samson’s mother that Samson will begin to deliver Israel. When she reports to her husband, she interprets the Angel’s message as meaning that Samson will die without completing the task of delivering Israel: he will be a Nazirite, she says, until his death. So the forty-year Philistine oppression ends sometime after Samson’s death.
But it cannot end “well beyond” it, as Barry Webb (350) mysteriously says. After all, Samson’s death comes after twenty years of judging Israel, and Samson begins judging Israel at a time when he is ready to get married. Those twenty years as judge didn’t begin when he was a child, but rather when he was a man. He was probably twenty years old, the age of manhood in the book of Numbers, though my point here still stands even if he was a year or two younger.
Putting twenty years of judgeship together with twenty years of growing up prior to judging Israel gives us a total lifespan for Samson of (about) forty years, which roughly coincides with the entire length of the Philistine oppression. Samson begins to deliver Israel and accomplishes the greatest part of his work at his death, and then the full deliverance comes.
But not in the time of David, as K. Lawson Younger suggests (287n11: “Samson will only begin the process of deliverance. The delivering activities of Samuel, Saul, Jonathan, and David are yet future”). There is simply no way to fit Samson’s youth, Samson’s judgeship, Saul’s reign, and David’s rule until his victory over the Philistines into the space of forty years. Instead, the most obvious answer is that this particular Philistine oppression ended at the battle of Mizpah (1 Sam 7), when Samuel led Israel to victory. That, in turn, means that Samuel and Samson were contemporaries and that the battle of Mizpah took place only shortly after Samson’s death.
The battle of Mizpah itself comes twenty years after the fateful battle of Aphek, when the Ark was captured by the Philistines and the high priest, Eli, died (1 Sam 4). The removal and capture of the Ark is the tearing apart of the Tabernacle of Moses, and the Tabernacle was never put together again. When the Philistines removed the Ark, it was not returned to the Tabernacle but was kept in Kiriath Jearim for those twenty years (1 Sam 7:2). As James Jordan points out, this chronology suggests that Samson’s actions in Judges 14-15 may take place just after Aphek, perhaps even during the time when the Ark was in captivity in Philistia.
These calculations are significant also for the beginning of the Samson narrative. Barry Webb writes about Judges 13: “By the time Samson is born the Philistine domination over Israel is so complete, and the morale of Israel so low, that even the hope that Yahweh might save them has been extinguished. There is no strength even to cry out” (350). And certainly Israel doesn’t cry out in Judges 13, and by Judges 15 Judah is even willing to hand over its savior to the Philistines.
But if we count backwards from the end of Samson’s life to the beginning, those forty years, we discover God’s grace. Normally, in Judges, Israel cries out to Yahweh after several years of oppression, and only then does Yahweh raise up a judge. But Judges 13 doesn’t take place (as Webb may imply) after a long time of Philistine oppression. It takes place at the beginning of it. At the very time the Philistine oppression starts and without any mention of Israel crying out for help, Yahweh is already preparing the judge, sending his Angel to announce to a barren woman the conception of the one who will begin to deliver Israel.
Samson the Prankster?
As with Jephthah, so with Samson. Commentators seem to vie with one another in finding terms with which to vilify him. Robert O’Connell (The Rhetoric of the Book of Judges), for instance, calls Samson a “self-gratifying brute” and “a prankish womanizer,” and says that his “acts of deliverance are rarely better than by-products of his spiteful nature.”
Contrast these descriptions with that of Hebrews 11, where Samson is one of the great examples of a faithful man, one of those “who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”
These two approaches have implications for what we do with the details of the Samson narrative. If you view Samson’s actions in Judges 14-15 as “pranks,” then you are spared the trouble of having to interpret them, of trying to see what meaning they might have. Instead, they’re just a bunch of dumb, destructive, pointless things that a “self-gratifying brute” driven by his “spiteful nature” did instead of actually saving Israel.
But if Samson was, as Judges 13 tells us, “impelled” by the Spirit of God, then his actions are worth thinking about. In fact, we discover in Judges 14 that Samson tells riddles, which leads us to consider his actions also as riddles, puzzling parables full of wisdom. Judges 14-15, then, invites us to wrack our brains to figure out what the Spirit — and Samson! — had in mind so that we can grow in wisdom ourselves.
Expulsion from the Garden (Judges 8-9)
Adam grabs for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and in the Bible the knowledge of good and evil is especially associated with the sort of wisdom that kings need. David has it and Solomon asks for it. Adam is grabbing for kingship and ends up expelled from the Garden so that he doesn’t enter into God’s rest.
At the center of Judges, Israel asks Gideon to be their king, thereby rejecting Yahweh as king. They’re grabbing for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And even though Gideon himself rejects their request and calls them to acknowledge only Yahweh as their king, he adopts the trappings of (pagan) kingship and even names his son Abimelech (“My father is king”). He touches the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but the land still has rest.
But what Gideon is tempted by and dabbles in, Abimelech adopts, killing his brothers to become king of Israel. He eats the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And from then on, we never hear again in Judges “the land had rest for X years.” God continues to raise up judges and they “rule” for X years, but Israel, like Adam, having rejected Yahweh as king, is expelled from God’s rest.
Head and Body in Judges
One way to view the book of Judges is as a series of relationships between the head and the body:
Othniel: The head wins the victory. The body is not mentioned.
Ehud: The head (Ehud) crushes the enemy’s head (Eglon). Then the head summons the body (Israel, and specifically Ephraim) and the body follows the head to conquer the enemy’s body.
Deborah & Barak: The head (Barak) is somewhat weak and loses glory but, when the head leads, the body willingly follows to win the victory. The glory goes to a woman (instead of to the woman’s seed), because she crushes the serpent’s head.
Gideon: The head (Gideon) is quite weak and the body still in rebellion at the outset of the story. But when the head grows in faith, the body is converted and follows the head, except at the end of the story, the body (Ephraim) responds negatively to the head until the head successfully resolves the tension. But then the head leads the body into sin.
Abimelech: A bramble becomes the head because that’s what the body wants. This head is crushed, again by a woman.
Jephthah: The body is in sin and there is no head. In fact, they’ve cast out the one who was qualified to be head. But then they decide to make him head and he wins the victory. But again, as with Gideon, there is tension with the body (Ephraim again) — so much so that Jephthah the head has to fight against part of the body and conquer them.
Samson: The body doesn’t want the head and even hands the head over to the enemy. But the head fights solo anyway. Toward the end of the story, the head replicates the body’s sin and ends up bearing (solo) the punishment the body deserves. At the very end, the head (solo) defeats the enemy.
Did Jephthah Bribe God (Judges 11)?
That’s certainly the impression you’d get from many commentaries. Barry Webb and K. Lawson Younger both say as much. In fact, in commentary after commentary, I hear that Jephthah’s vow in Judges 11 was manipulative, an attempt to bribe God into giving him victory.
But what’s the evidence for that claim? How is Jephthah’s vow any different from the similar vows (“If you do X, I will do Y”) we find elsewhere in Scripture (e.g., Gen 28:20-22; Num 21:2; 1 Sam 1:11)? Are all such vows manipulative? Are they all bribes?
Take just the last example. I’m 99% sure that there isn’t a single commentary out there that claims that Hannah was being manipulative and trying to bribe God when she said that if God gave her a son, she would give him to Yahweh. But if her vow isn’t manipulative — and it isn’t — then why say that Jephthah’s is?
I suspect that it’s because commentaries already think they know that Jephthah is a bad man. K. Lawson Younger, for instance, describes Jephthah this way:
Jephthah came from a dysfunctional background. He was an illegitimate son, born of a prostitute, rejected and disinherited by his family, leader of a gang. He became a man who was hurt, angry, bitter, ambition-driven, ready to fight, manipulative, ignorant of God’s Law, abusive of his daughter, lacking boundaries, contentious, emotionally reactionary, revengeful, and doing what is right in his own eyes for his own gain. He made his daughter responsible, blaming her for the disaster that he would inflict on her and making himself the victim of his rash vow.
It’s hard to see how Hebrews 11 could call such a man faithful, isn’t it? And yet it does. So how about starting with Hebrews 11 — starting with the conviction that Jephthah was, on the whole, a faithful man — and then reading the Jephthah story again in that light? If we think of Jephthah as faithful, just as we think of Hannah as faithful, then there’s no reason to think that his vow was any more manipulative than hers was. Unless, of course, you think that all vows are manipulative, all vows are lies. But that’s not what Scripture teaches.
What Did the Spirit Prompt (Judges 11)?
Judges 11 tells us that the Spirit of YHWH came upon Jephthah (11:29). In his commentary on Judges, Barry Webb says (rightly), that this statement “implies that Jephthah’s activity that immediately follows is a consequence of the Spirit coming upon him.”
But what is that activity? For Webb, it’s all the movement from place to place in v. 29: “And the Spirit of YHWH was upon Jephthah and he passed through Gilead and Manasseh and he passed through Mizpah of Gilead and from Mizpah of Gilead he passed through to the sons of Ammon.”
But notice that that string of ands continues, unbroken, into verse 30: “And Jephthah vowed a vow to YHWH, and he said….” and on into verse 32, “And Jephthah passed through to the sons of Ammon to fight against them….”
From the fact that verse 32 resumes what was said at the end of verse 29, Webb argues that Jephthah’s vow (vv. 30-31) is an “interruption to Jephthah’s progress from his endowment with the Spirit to his victory in battle.” Well, it’s certainly an interruption in the account of Jephthah’s movements. But it’s still part of the chain of “and this and that” that follows from the coming of the Spirit.
If the passing through this place and that place in verse 29 and the advancing to fight the Ammonites in verse 32 are “a consequence of the Spirit coming upon him,” then the vow sandwiched in between is too.
Irrelevant Vows?
According to Barry Webb (Judges) Jephthah’s vow was “an irrelevancy; he would have been victorious anyway.”
But then couldn’t you say that about any vow (at least, once you know the outcome)? Should we tell Hannah in 1 Samuel 1 that her vow (i.e., if you give me a male child, I will dedicate him to you) was irrelevant because God was going to give her a male child anyway?
In fact, couldn’t we say this about prayer of any kind (“You prayed for Bob’s healing, but your prayer was irrelevant because, as it turns out, God was going to heal Bob anyway”)? But that’s a dangerous form of unbelief. God tells us to pray and assures us that he responds to our prayers, and we aren’t allowed to think that they are irrelevant because “he was going to do it (or not) anyway.”
But if there’s nothing irrelevant about praying for Bob’s healing or for Hannah to make a vow in her prayer for a son — and there isn’t! — then there’s no basis for saying that Jephthah’s vow was irrelevant either. Jephthah prayed and God heard his prayer and granted his request.
Disregarding Jephthah’s Vow?
K. Lawson Younger (Judges, Ruth) compares the results of Jephthah’s three “negotiations” in Judges 11: “With the Gileadites he achieved all he wanted (11:4-11); with the Ammonites he received a verbal if negative response (11:12-28); with Yahweh there is only silence, indicating that God disregards Jephthah’s vow.”
Well, it’s true that Yahweh doesn’t speak here. But then he doesn’t speak to you out loud either when he answers your prayers. Jephthah says, “If you give the sons of Ammon into my hand,” and then we’re told “Yahweh gave them into his hand.”
Far from disregarding Jephthah’s vow, Yahweh actually responds to it word for word.