The English title, with its jurisprudential atmospherics, might lead the contemporary reader astray: better would be "Leaders." But the kings are yet to come. In Israel's early days in Palestine, it was not a nation or kingdom but a confederation of tribes, and the leaders, or "judges," are unfamiliar to all except those who, for whatever odd reason, know about another of the Old Testament's many unenjoyable books. Gideon would be a small exception to the general anonymity of the judges. He must have been the inspiration for the group that makes sure your motel room has reading material. Samson is a more significant exception. His story is found in the later chapters of Judges. More about him and his treacherous girlfriend, Delilah, to come. Here, so you can verify that we're not talking about figures the stature of Abraham and Moses, is the roll call of the judges: Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, Deborah, Gideon, Abimelech, Jair, Jephthah, Samson. I'm probably forgetting a few but I can't stand the thought of combing through the drear text again.
The problem, at a high level, is the consistent difficulty of comprehending what's going on. Stories of war and battle possess inherent human interest, but in Judges you feel as if you are viewing it through frosted glass a half hour past sunset. Is it the reader's fault? No, I think the issue has to do with the text, which is a messy amalgam that doesn't hang together very well. That you might credit this opinion, here is a passage, by no means unique in character, from the section on Judges in Peake's Commentary on the Bible--it's the commentator's introductory remark to chapters 6 through 8, about Gideon:
It is clear that, as in [chapter] 4, two different stories have been combined, but there is also much evidence of editorial additions, often obscured in [the Revised Standard Version] by inconsistency in translation of singulars and plurals.
This business about two stories is perhaps "clear" only to scholars, but it helps account for the unmerry slog through Judges. I always wonder what those who regard every word of the Bible as the inerrant and infallible word of God make of the conclusions of scholarship--in this case, that we have before us for long stretches in Judges an ineptly knit conglomeration of stories, augmented by tenuously related "additions," with an overlay supplied by editors with yet other concerns, all of which is then inexpertly translated (though, in fairness, an intermittently incoherent text confronts the translator with an Olympian degree of difficulty). This brings up another question relating to chronology. According to I Kings 6:1, the fourth year of Solomon's reign was the 480th year after the exodus from Egypt. Since the text of Judges painstakingly sets out the number of years between sequential events, the sum of which is 410, to which must be added not only the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness but also the years of Joshua's activity, and of the reigns of kings preceding Solomon--you see that this is leading to a problem for our friends, the fighting fundamentalists, whose resultant legerdemain is more proof of the general principle holding that simple explanations are to be preferred to ones that have a lot of moving parts. The simple explanation is that the Bible isn't a divinely inspired, inerrant transcript from the mind of God. (There is no book like that.)
For those not predisposed toward veneration, there is a continuing problem relating to the character of God. If you have ever wondered, while listening to a baseball player thank God for allowing him to hit a homer, whether the pitcher who served up the hanging curve is a Hindoo, or a campaigning atheist, then you have an idea what I'm talking about. The God of the Book of Judges is Israel's God. When His people listen to Him, they are rewarded with victory; and, when they don't, the fight turns in favor of the Moabites and Ammonites and Amalekites and Midianites and assorted other Canaanites, all ciphers who seem to exist only so that Israel can be alternately elevated or laid low. You really cannot read the biblical story of Israel's conquest of "the promised land" without thinking of the current situation in Gaza, the occupied territories on the west bank of the Jordan, and politicians such as Benjamin Netanyahu. "A land without people for a people without land"--but then who were all the above-named defeated and slaughtered -ites? the ancestors of the non-persons crowded together in Gaza?
There isn't a single coherent biblical teaching or tradition. What a distance it is between what we read in Joshua and Judges and, say:
When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 29:33-34).
On the evidence set out in the Bible, however, you'd have to conclude that Israel fared better under Pharaoh than did the Canaanites who found themselves under attack by Joshua and the judges.
The Samson story, in chapters 13 to 16, seems discontinuous from the rest of the book, mainly because he is not a military leader and his tribulations are personal rather than connected to the fate of a people. In some respects, it's not a very artful story. After a whole chapter given over to the events preceding his birth (to a barren mother, a continuing theme), he is without warning suddenly a young adult insisting that his parents assist in his first conquest:
Then he came up, and told his father and mother, "I saw one of the daughters of the Philistines at Timnah; now get her for me for a wife."
Such a fine way of talking to the 'rents! In his defense, the narrative has elements of the tall tale, what with the supernatural powers that eventually permit him to pull down whole buildings with his bare hands (if his hair is long), so we need not be offended by the insolence of an actual historical person. There I go again! The background to the story, I hasten to add, in which the Hebrews appear to be living uneasily beside the Philistines, who entered Palestine from the west at about the same time Israel was infiltrating from the east, matches what we think we know about the history of the region early in the eleventh century B.C. For students of English literature, there is a question about why John Milton would choose a galoot like Samson for the subject of a tragic drama. The only thing I can think of is that he (Milton) was attracted to stories in which men fall after being beguiled by the women in their lives.
