Judges
Once Upon a Time in Israel
Hardback (No longer our product)
(June 2023)
ISBN: 9781914490316
6.14 x 9.21 inches
Price: $75.00
PDF (Published)
(June 2023)
ISBN: 9781918358179
Price: $95.00
Judges is the Bible’s end-of-the-frontier epic. It depicts the first generations of Israelite life in Canaan and portrays a set of memorable protagonists the “judges ” who were wild enough to tame a wilderness but too wild to persist into the next era of royal courts central shrines and political states. The core of Judges consists of a series of narratives about the outlaws warlords and war-ladies mercenaries and jackleg and priests and prophets from ancient Ephraim whose exploits were recounted in a series of redacted documents that to the chagrin of pious readers over the centuries ended up in the Bible of all places.
There is Ehud the left-handed assassin on a grim solo labyrinthine mission in and out of an enemy fortress. There is Deborah the alpha female who in one chapter commands an army and in another is credited with uttering her eponymous song which deserves to be counted among the world’s great war poetry. There is Jael the man-slaughtering Bedouin woman who is handy with a hammer. There is Gideon the insecure hero who leads in one story an outnumbered elite band of warriors to victory over an enemy force of uncountable proportions and in another story a clannish vendetta filled with torture arson and revenge killings. There is the tale of Abimelech which traces the rise and fall of a gangster. There is Jephthah the outcast summoned to rescue his tribe when they need his desperado skill set but whose rash vow has fatal consequences for his daughter. Finally there is Samson one of folk literature’s most memorable characterizations a walking talking incarnation of unshaved unbalanced hyper-masculinity.
This reading of the tales of Judges as a set of adventure stories from the early centuries of alphabetic literacy requires that we dig through mounds of didactic theological moralistic messianic and nationalistic landfill in order to reclaim the full glory-and horror-of their dark violence and eroticism as well as to marvel at the coarse folk poetry in the tales’ narration and dialogue.
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