The Book Of Judges
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The episodic structure of the book of Judges is one of its primary features and takes the place of a strong overarching narrative. In simplified form, that structure is: Israel turns away from God and does not obey him, God sends other people to oppress Israel, Israel cries out to God, God sends a strong leader who rallies Israel and delivers them from the oppressor. This general format is repeated several times with minor variations throughout the book. It thus stands in opposition to other books in the Tanach, whose narratives are more conventional and center around strong leaders, such as Joshua. As a result of their subject matter and the structure of their narratives, these books leave us with a sense of completion, of cohesiveness. In contrast, the major characteristics of Judges are the opposite. It is fractured, divided. It leaves us with a sense of disintegration, of things coming apart at the seams. We may be familiar with individual leaders in Judges, such as Samson or Gideon, but the way in which we are familiar with these stories is as isolated narratives with little or no connection to each other. As mentioned in the description of the episodic format above these mini-narratives all have happy endings: Israel is delivered from her oppressors. But then the book moves right into the next episode, which begins with a return to the conditions of the previous one. There seems to be no thread running through it all, uniting the disparate elements, causing them all to hang together. In the last episode, a man?s concubine is raped and murdered by a crowd who was angry about not being able to have sex with him. He then proceeds to cut up her body into several pieces, which he sends as messages to the different parts of the country. This unites all the Israelites against the tribe of Benjamin, who choose to defend the sodomizing rapists and go to war rather than give them up. In the process Benjamin is nearly wiped out as a tribe, but peace is restored while a tiny remnant of them still remains. A handy arrangement is worked out whereby the Benjamites can permissibly steal wives for themselves, since all the rest of Israel had sworn not to give their daughters to them ? and that?s the end. There is no sense of finality, of resolution. This lack of unity from a storytelling perspective, though, is the very thing that drives home the unity of the book from a thematic perspective. The narrative?s characteristics of brokenness, of chaos, of dysfunction, are the very things that the author wants to portray in Israelite society. Because they had forsaken God and turned to follow idols, everything broke down, nothing was working the way it was supposed to. The message of Judges is that structure comes from consistent obedience to God?s commands. That is the missing thread that should be running through it all, the element of the story we instinctively look for and don?t find.
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