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Overview
Throughout its history Judges has both entertained and appalled readers some read it as a series of simple stories about faithfulness and some as a brutal and bloodthirsty book. Heller explores how Judges can shape our understanding of our world, our relationships, and can provide a path to a deeper appreciation of the ways of God among people. Far from seeing the book as either simplistic or cruel, Heller allows this odd text to speak to us anew about God, sin, relationships, and justice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819227560 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2011 |
| Series: | Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars |
| Pages: | 152 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CONVERSATIONS WITH SCRIPTURE
THE BOOK OF JUDGESBy ROY L. HELLER
Morehouse Publishing
Copyright © 2011 Roy L. HellerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2756-0
Chapter One
The Book of Judges as Tragedy
I was six years old the first time I was introduced to the book of Judges. Along with about half a dozen other children, I sat at a long, low table, crayon in hand, coloring a picture of a man with incredibly large muscles and incredibly long hair. We sat there, concentrating on our pictures, while the woman at the head of the table read from a Sunday school booklet about the exploits of Samson. We heard how Samson had been blessed by God with super-human strength in order to fight and defeat the evil Philistines. We listened intently to the story of how God had told Samson that the secret to his remarkable strength was found in his long hair, understanding that he must keep his secret and let his hair grow long in order to retain his strength and do all the courageous feats that God had planned for him. So we knew that when the Philistine woman called Delilah came into the story, she was not a good woman. We heard how she boldly cut Samson's hair while he slept and, therefore, robbed him of his power. But we also learned that Samson did not despair, but rather prayed to God for strength one last time and bravely defeated the Philistines by killing many of them in his death. That was how I was introduced to the book of Judges.
If, however, that was my introduction to the book, it was also, in many ways, my conclusion as well. Yes, every three years or so, we would hear the story of Samson again, but that was the only part of the book we ever learned anything about. I never understood why the book was not simply called "The Book of Samson," since he was, I assumed, the only main character in the book! It was not until almost twenty years later that I was introduced to the book for a second time. In my graduate program at Yale, I read Judges as if for the first time and realized not only that it was about a great deal more than Samson, but also that it was a bit more complex than simply the story of a strong man who loses his strength.
I begin this book with my own relationship with Judges because in many ways it parallels the relationship that the church has had with his remarkable book over the centuries. Like me, the church has largely not dealt—or even known—about the book of Judges as a whole, and this, I think, is a real pity. For Judges contains some of the oddest material in all of Scripture. For example, we read stories about military deliverers who often win the war by unusual and certainly unorthodox means. There is the story of Ehud, who secures a victory for Israel by stabbing an enemy king in his own bathroom, and then causes the king's attendants to be late in rounding up their troops; they have to wait until the king is no longer "indisposed." Then we read the story of Deborah who assures the military commander of Israel, Barak, that a victory would be brought about by the hand of a woman; the victory, however, is not won by Deborah herself, but rather by a non-Israelite woman who tricks and murders the enemy general in a most unusual way. After that there is Gideon, who wins a major battle against overwhelming odds by surrounding the enemy by night and breaking pots and lighting torches, which so unnerves the opposing forces that they essentially kill their own troops. Jephthah is so unsure of his ability to lead Israel to victory that he vows that he will sacrifice whatever comes out of his house when he returns victorious from the battle; unfortunately, his own daughter leads the triumphant procession from the house. And, of course, we read the story of Samson, the long-haired strong man who is shorn of both his hair and his strength and eventually kills himself along with a great number of Philistines as his dying act.
The individual characters and the individual stories in Judges are remarkable for their irony, pathos, and occasional humor, yet for the most part they have not been considered as particularly "theological" or "spiritual" when it comes to helping people live their lives. That is why when commentators are searching for the "important" portions of narrative in the Old Testament, they more readily turn to Genesis, Exodus, the words of the prophets, and the books of Samuel and Kings to write their works. Even though the organization of the book of Joshua readily lends itself to a multi-week study or sermon series, it is usually passed over in silence.
Overlooking Judges
The two great pillars of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin, wrote a great deal about Scripture and produced a vast amount of material commenting on the Bible. Yet, when it came to the book of Judges, neither of these proponents of the Protestant theology of sola scriptura—"Scripture alone"—wrote a commentary about it. A great number of theologians and scholars of the eighteenth through the twentieth century, many of them Anglican, attempted to read the Bible with an eye toward its moral lessons and spiritual teachings. But Judges, with its excessive violence and eccentricity, proved a difficult medium to work with.
Thomas Robinson, the rector of St. Mary's Church in Leicester, England, produced an extremely popular volume of sermons that he had preached in his parish during the 1780s. This book, Scripture Characters, was pirated and reprinted throughout the first half of the 1800s due to its fame. One of the best known religious books of its time, its sermons focused on biblical characters and were intended "for the serious inquirer after sacred truth." Robinson believed that Scripture's witness to us is largely composed of the wonderful array of characters of upstanding moral fiber, whom we are to imitate: "By looking at the excellencies of others, we are convinced of our own duty, and our sad declensions from it, much more forcibly than by the mere reading of precepts and directions." Scripture, according to Robinson, teaches us how we ought to live by giving us models to follow. Needless to say, when Robinson got around to preaching on the characters of Judges, he completely skipped the entire book and went from a sermon on Joshua, in the preceding book, to one on Eli, in the book of Samuel.
In 1896, Mrs. Annie R. White wrote a whole Bible commentary particularly for the purpose of training teachers of Sunday schools, which were becoming increasingly important both in England and in the United States. Her volume, Easy Steps for Little Feet: From Genesis to Revelation, likewise completely leaves out Judges. It would seem as though that book provided too treacherous a path on which "little feet" could take "easy steps." These examples represent literally dozens and dozens of examples of biblical treatises that attempt to read the Bible devotionally or spiritually, but completely pass over Judges.
Judges as Moral Exemplar
When Judges has been dealt with from a practical, spiritual, or theological point of view, the message of the book has usually been exactly what I heard sitting at that long, low table many years ago. Judges is about the stories of people, like Samson, who were "faithful and brave and true," in the words of the hymn, "I Sing a Song of the Saints of God." Their stories relate how these remarkable people serve as examples and models for us to imitate. If Samson was courageous and did not despair in the midst of trouble, then I should remember him when I am feeling afraid or hopeless. This type of "virtue modeling" has long been a standard way of dealing with biblical stories, particularly those of the Old Testament. It is, therefore, no surprise that it was applied to the characters in Judges, even when such an interpretation must completely change the nature of the characters' stories.
The earliest example of this way of dealing with Judges is found in the New Testament itself. In Hebrews 11, the author provides a series of illustrations of the consequences of living faithfully before God. After a general introduction to the subject of faithfulness (11:1–3), the writer concentrates largely upon—in chronological order—Abel, Enoch, Noah (vv. 4–7), Abraham (vv. 8–22), and Moses (vv. 23–28). The passage then turns to the period of the judges, but does not provide any details about them as it did with the previous "heroes of faith." Instead, the writer provides a passing reference to some of the individual judges and winds up explaining not only the purpose of their stories, but the rest of the Old Testament as a whole:
And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets—who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight (Heb. 11:32–34).
In short, the stories of the judges—according to the writer of Hebrews—tell of the mighty exploits of these Israelite men, who performed all of their remarkable, heroic deeds "through faith." Because they remained faithful to God, they can serve as examples to us to remain faithful. And furthermore, the author of Hebrews goes on to argue, by our following their examples and the example of Christ, we in fact fulfill their stories, we make their stories "perfect" (vv. 39–40).
This way of understanding the purpose of Judges is found throughout Christian history. In the early church, seeing the judges as moral exemplars was common, even when it strained credulity. I have already mentioned Jephthah, for example, who sacrifices his own daughter because of a vow that he had made beforehand in the midst of a battle. The leaders of the early church found this story particularly troubling, as indeed it is; the preacher John Chrysostom, however, wrote that the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter was
a striking example of providence and clemency; and that it was in care of our race that [God] did not prevent that sacrifice. For if after that vow and promise [God] had forbidden the sacrifice, many also who were subsequent to Jephthah, in the expectation that God would not receive their vows, would have increased the number of such vows, and proceeding on their way would have fallen into child murder. But now, by suffering this vow to be actually fulfilled, [God] put a stop to all such cases in the future."
Chrysostom commends Jephthah for his sacrifice of this daughter because of the far-sightedness of his action, but needless to say, Chrysostom's praise of Jephthah's action is rarely seen as an appropriate perspective on this episode.
Seeing the characters of Judges as providing role-models for our own lives continues even to the present day. In his recent commentary on Judges, Roger Ryan attempts to "give positive readings of the characters of judge-deliverers (chs. 3–16) against the consensus of scholars who generally understand them to be negative role models and anti-heroes." Yet, even with this commendable goal, Ryan often seems to struggle with the material that he has to work with. The characters of the individual judges often seem too chaotic and violent to serve as models for our everyday lives in the twenty-first century. The invitation to "go and do likewise" seems unwise in dealing with Judges.
If it does not tell of the lives of easy, commendable characters whom the reader is to emulate, then what good is the book at all? How can a violent, blood-soaked narrative of morally ambiguous characters be read spiritually, devotionally, or theologically? How, in short, can the book of Judges be read as the Word of God? Does it, to use the words of the Book of Common Prayer, contain anything "necessary to salvation"? I believe that it does, and the goal of this book is to lay out the way in which I see its value for the reader individually and for the whole church generally. But, first, let us understand broadly what the book is about.
The Tragedy of the Book of Judges
Of the two options that I encountered in my own early life with Judges and their parallels in the life of the church with Judges—either by ignoring the book completely or by using it as a straightforward model for faithful living—the former is much easier to do than the second. It is easy to see why Judges has been neither a favorite subject of study in Sunday school rooms nor a compelling topic for sermons. Even a cursory glance through the book reveals that it contains a great deal of violence; in every chapter a war is being waged against some enemy. Even my childhood Sunday school lesson could not evade the fact that Samson was called by God to defeat (and we all knew that was a way of saying "to kill") the Philistines. As the book progresses, in fact, the amount of violence seems to grow from simple statements about skirmishes in the first chapter, all the way to inter-tribal genocide in the final chapter.
The characters in the book, furthermore, when their stories are read apart from our assumptions about the supposed "moral" of these stories, often do not appear heroic at all. In fact they sometimes appear not just fearful, but cowardly. They often are underhanded or dishonest. The violence that they perpetrate against the "enemy" often breaks out against their own friends and families (as with Jephthah), usually with far-reaching results. We may try to read the stories of the judges as examples of "faithfulness," but in order to do so we must also do what the author of Hebrews does and pass over the majority of the book.
How can a violent, blood-soaked narrative of morally ambiguous characters be read spiritually, devotionally, or theologically? Judges is not a book about promise or fulfillment. It is a story of going from "riches to rags" rather than the other way around. It has moments of greatness, no doubt, and scenes of heroism and self-sacrifice. There are also passages that show remarkable humor and a keen sense of irony. But, all in all, the narrative of the book of Judges is a tragedy, rather than a comedy. It stands beside those other great tragedies that we are familiar with in the west: Oedipus the King, Agamemnon, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and, more recently, the stories found in Equus, Death of a Salesman, and Citizen Kane. Yet simply because a story does not have a happy ending does not mean it is a bad story, or that its message is unimportant. In fact, tragedies have a great deal to tell us about what it means to be human.
It seems to me that there are a couple of different ways in which "theological writing" is done in the Bible. One example is the prophetic book of Second Isaiah (chapters 40–55), which makes certain claims about God and wears its theology "on its sleeve." Such a biblical book says that God is compassionate and that, because of that divine compassion, humanity's future is hopeful. The meaning of the book as a whole is tied to such themes; in a sense, Second Isaiah's message is found in what it says directly.
But another way that biblical texts do theology is more oblique. Some portions of Scripture may make very explicit claims, here and there, about who God is and what God does. These texts, however, aren't primarily concerned with proving or defending those claims. They tell stories with beginnings, middles, and ends; through the reading of those stories, the reader is brought to not just a fuller and deeper knowledge of God, but an emotional and moving experience as well. It seems to me that this is what the gospels do—and also what I think Judges does. If the book is seen as an anthology of separate hero tales, then the order does not matter and the "point" of any particular story can be boiled down and made explicit. But, against the grain of much older historical-critical interpretations, I do not think that's what Judges is about at all. The order and progression and "flow" of the book as a whole is, in a sense, its message.
By dealing with the book of Judges as a tragedy, in its literary and classical sense, I think we can engage with it as a whole and deal with the violence of the book, particularly the final horrific chapters, in a way that is helpful and theologically relevant. For example, if the final chapters of the book are read all on their own, I would be among the first to say that they are not only extremely pessimistic about Israel's future, but theologically empty and worthless as well. But when seen as the last, pitiful gasp of the downfall of the character of Israel—after a series of truly tragic downward turns—then their cautionary (and theological) meaning comes to the fore. I also believe that reading the book of Judges as a tragedy enables us, as contemporary readers, to make sense of the book as a whole, which is how we usually read things of this nature anyway.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CONVERSATIONS WITH SCRIPTURE by ROY L. HELLER Copyright © 2011 by Roy L. Heller. Excerpted by permission of Morehouse Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction to the Series....................ixAutobiographical Note....................xiii
CHAPTER ONE The Book of Judges as Tragedy....................1
CHAPTER TWO Back When Life Was Simple: The Introductions....................21
CHAPTER THREE Faithfulness and Fickleness: Othniel to Gideon....................43
CHAPTER FOUR The Downward Spiral: Abimelech to Samson....................61
CHAPTER FIVE Things Fall Apart: The Conclusions....................81
CHAPTER SIX We Have Seen the Enemy: A Cautionary Tale....................97
Acknowledgments....................115
Study Questions by Sharon Ely Pearson....................117
Suggestions for Further Reading....................131
Notes....................133
About the Author....................135