Power Corrupts: Final Reflections on Judges

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

One of my friends has said that Judges was one of the greatest initial challenges to his faith in the Bible (a faith he's since lost, though not because of Judges). Another said the book made him feel sick. It's one of a very few passages in the Bible where conservative interpretations go out of their way to emphasize that the Bible isn't making moral judgements, just reporting the sinful excesses as they happen. It never made me sick when I used to read it, perhaps because I could comfort myself with the latter "interpretation" and also because too many years of political science and military history have thickened my skin when it comes to appalling human suffering.

Even in this reading, I've said some harsh things about the author of Judges. However, I've begun to change my mind. In retrospect, the author of Judges is actually quite skilled, if a bit morbid and gruesome. One of the biggest steps towards appreciating this is realizing that he is not really interested in providing a literal account of supposed history, nor is he all that interested in providing a story of how a powerful God is overseeing everything and making sure it all turns out for the better, complete with immediately obvious theological lessons for our lives today. Judges descends into moral lunacy if we hold the first of those views, and sheer absurdity if we hold the second. More so then any other book so far, we must read more carefully to see what is going on. When we do that, we see that the author of Judges is telling stories, not history - and is doing so to subvert and mock some fairly basic conservative ideas about God and society that have been taken for granted in Joshua, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

It's easy to draw simplistic moral and political lessons from Judges, and if we do that, the book turns out to be pretty conservative. Time and again, the Bible reminds us that "there was no king" in Israel at this time, which at first glance does seem to imply that if there was a king, everything would be ok. Too, when push comes to shove, God always comes to the aid of the Israelites against foreign enemies - so they are sinful people, but God's grace leads him to relent and help them despite their despicable evil.

For conservatives, the implications of this view are very, very convenient. The first leads to an unproblematic assertion that we need a worldly government - i.e. "a king," or the modern-day equivalent - to prevent moral decline. (You can see this today in the Western religious right, which is attempting to establish an authoritarian legal system to "maintain" moral order even while preaching the need for less public charity, lower taxes, and more rights to sinfully accumulate wealth and property.) The second reinforces the self-loathing inherent in evangelical Christianity: we are evil, we always sin, without God we do appalling things - but God is gracious and forgiving, and will be at our side when we repent and turn to him for help. (And indeed, God does seem to bless the Israelites when they go into battle.)

On the other hand, a more careful reading reveals that the author of Judges has no interest in either of these positions. He may say there is no king, but one of the basic premises of Judges is that everyone with power is corrupt and evil. Why a hypothetical king would be beyond this principle is beyond me - "power corrupts, but absolute power doesn't corrupt at all"? Look at the record in Judges: Gideon is given power to fight the Midianites, but then uses it to kill Israelites and build idols; Jepthah is given power to fight the Ammonites, but kills his own daughter and starts a murderous civil war; Samson is given power to fight the Philistines, but usually uses it fighting over women; and the whole of Israel is given power to punish Gibeah for the rape of the Levite's concubine, but they use it in a murderous rampage, and then, to make matters worse, try to paper over their sin by yet more killing and abducting of girls. Priests collaborate with the killers, the military engages in brutally excessive orgies of destruction, and the elders conspire and plot. The lesson of Judges is that authority exists to be abused.

The idea of a simple "us versus them" war in which God eventually comes down on the side of "us" in crushing "them" is also overly simplistic; the author of Judges deliberately and repeatedly subverts that simple dichotomy. In a way, despite his abhorrent subject matter, he's doing something that we still struggle with today: questioning the simple "inside/outside" propaganda strategies that go into justifying war. Again, this is a theme that isn't immediately obvious: the author of Judges deliberately frames the stories in ways that a simple reading permits a crudely moralistic conclusion that justifies military nationalism. But look below the surface, because the moral boundaries turn out to be pretty fluid in Judges:

- Deborah leads the Israelites in a heroic war to liberate themselves from the Canaanites. But, in doing so, she cruelly mocks the mother of an opposing general, whose son will never return from battle - and another "heroine" of the story, Jael, violates ancient sacred custom by failing to protect her houseguest, a refugee from the battle (not only does she not protect him, but she kills him herself with a tent peg through the skull).

- Gideon leads the Israelites in a heroic war against the Midianites. But, after doing so, he slaughters entire towns full of fellow Israelites, who have committed no sin worthy of death.

- Jephthah leads the Israelites in a heroic war against the Ammonites. But after doing so, he uses his forces against the Ephraimites, killing tens of thousands of fellow Israelites.

- Samson could have led the Israelites in a heroic war against the Philistines. But he preferred spending time with the Philistines himself, and when he is violent - usually brutally violent - it is for reasons entirely irrelevant to the well-being of Israel. He only kills Philistines for mistreating his Philistine wives.

- Israel punishes the Benjamites for raping a woman to death. But, regretting the extremism of their actions, they kill more of their own - families who had not sinned as the Benjamites did - and then abduct Israelite women into illegal sex slavery.

Throughout this whole process, the author of Judges plays fast and loose with the role of God. The "spirit" of God descends upon Israelite leaders and lets them win battles, but he spends most of his time lurking in the shadows as his children play. He basically just permits them to do evil. Not only do they repay him by worshiping idols, but they repay him by subverting his festivals to justify the abduction and enslavement of Israelite girls. God is either incredibly careless with his power, or the author of Judges is being deliberately sarcastic.

Today it's not uncommon for religious people to suggest that God's spirt "led" them to do something they were probably going to do anyway - like moving to a new city to take a higher-paying job. Pastors are notorious for this, but that's only because we listen to them at religious events more often: pay attention to the ways people legitimize decisions in religious circles, routinely attributing things to God for no other reason than that if something's happening, God must be behind it. The author of Judges may be deliberately mocking this silliness - or rather, the ancient Israelite equivalent of it - by claiming that the "spirit of God" is inspiring men when they perform even the most ridiculously and cartoonishly outrageous violence. This is most obvious in the story of Samson, in which Samson's God does nothing more than let him fly into a foaming rage and murder large numbers of random people.

Also, despite the extraordinary evil that is perpetrated in this book, often against people who have done nothing obviously wrong, the author displays a surprising ability to highlight, even briefly, both the suffering of those afflicted, and the righteousness of those who are traditionally silenced. Look at the Israelite women in this book: virtually all of them live up to some measure of righteousness. Not all of these measures are very liberating for them - the Levite's concubine, for example, displays her righteousness by returning to the master who let her be raped. Jephthah's daughter willingly submits to her own death to save her father's righteousness - she dies in order to save him from his own sin, and thus plays an early analogue of Christ in that story. Samson's mother recognizes God, but his father does not. At the end of the book, by the time the men of Israel have completely given themselves over into violent moral degeneracy, the women are still worshipping the Lord and keeping his festivals. We know they are, because the men use it to commit sexual violence against them. Here, the book closes on a note that is simultaneously dark and uplifting: the women suffer, but they do so because they have sided with God. The book of Judges is not just about immoral Israelites - there are moral ones, but they usually suffer immensely at the hands of those who are less restrained.

The themes in Judges can be seen more clearly when we realize that there are only a very small number of "story" elements in this book. It seems like we're progressing through a long period of history because the author retells them over and over, combining different elements each time and making each iteration progressively gorier, until the climax in the final chapters, when the Benjamites are slaughtered and there's a mass conspiracy of corrupted men against faithful women. (It's easy to be distracted by the brief and amusing little "judges" interspersed throughout the narrative, the ones with dozens of sons riding dozens of donkeys.)

We begin with a couple of righteous archetypes, ideal types put forward by Jewish militarism - Caleb, who treats his daughter "well" by giving her away to a victorious warrior; and Othniel, who defeats the Aramites - who are righteous men set up in opposition to the other stereotype of earlier books, the faithless and idolatrous masses of the average people. Then the author spins this out into successive retellings, each one more gruesome. Ehud's assasssination of Eglon is an exciting and somewhat amusing story of an Israelite hero leading his people to liberation. But then this becomes Deborah's and Jael's defeat of the Midianites - in which the Israelites still win against the foreigner, but in doing so must be led by women and violate a sacred ethical code. This becomes Gideon's defeat of the Midianites - in which the Israelites still win against the foreigner, but in doing so murder two of their own towns and build some false idols. This becomes Jephthah's defeat of the Ammonites - in which the Israelites still win against the foreigner, but then kill tens of thousands of their own in a limited civil war. Here, the author introduces a second element to the story: the betrayal of righteous women. This time, it's only one such woman: Jephthah's daughter is killed in a human sacrifice.

Now we move on to the story of Samson, where a righteous woman (his mother) is ignored but not sacrificed; Samson has the opportunity to liberate the Israelites from the foreign Philistines but ultimately ends up not doing so, because he actually prefers the company of foreigners, especially their women. The penultimate tragedy begins with the story of the Levite, where again a righteous woman is sacrificed. This time, however, there is no more foreigner: the offenders are Israelites. That doesn't stop the Israelites from killing them anyways, combining the act of fighting the foreigner and fighting oneself. And finally, as they sit among the bloody remains of the Benjamite tribe, the regretful Israelites have no enemy to fight, so they create one by killing Gileadites, and then once again harm the righteous women (in this case, they enslave them rather than kill them, perhaps less morally outrageous but nevertheless blatantly illegal under the law of Moses). With each iteration of the basic story - righteous Israelites rise up against an enemy, but then indulge in sinful excesses - the author of Judges makes their actions a little more outrageous, and simultaneously takes away a few more potential rationalizations for their actions, until by the end of the book, there is nothing left but rigid oppression and pure evil.

Given the interpretation I've provided here, it's rather striking to see Judges at this position in the Bible. It seems like a deliberate rejection of Joshua's militarism and Numbers's and Deuteronomy's priestly elitism: in Judges, those with power are always corrupt, those who are righteous will be oppressed by those who are corrupt, and God will not always leap to the aid of the righteous. The fact that this message has to be concealed somewhat is telling about the politics of Biblical writing, but the fact that it's so clearly there speaks to an interesting measure of balance in the Bible. The Jewish Old Testament provides books which take very different positions on the relationship between Israel and the divine. The Biblical canon is politically and theologically balanced: fair representation for a number of diverse viewpoints. They say you can prove anything with the Bible - and you can, because the books of the Bible are making very different arguments. The book of Judges may contain some particularly bloody and disturbing stories, but to me, its scathing social criticism - of power, of religion, and of gender - makes it far more interesting than any of the preceding books.
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Sex and War, Part 3: Judges 21

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Whether or not going to war to honour the principle of women's sexual purity is probably debatable, but even so, the following story pretty much proves to me that the issue is once again one of protecting men's sexual and property rights, not one of protecting women, or even avenging them.

The Israelites assemble again at Bethel (the leaders go separately to Mizpah) and some people notice, as they "weep bitterly" about the battle, that one tribe is missing. They ask God why the tragedy has happened. Have they forgotten? They also vow not to give any of their daughters in marriage to the surviving Benjamites (as you may recall, there were a few hundred who managed to survive the fratricidal carnage in the previous chapter).

On the one hand, they want to punish the surviving Benjamites. On the other hand, at least some of those present, by the general crying and moaning, seem to regret indulging in mass murder. They feel sorry and want to somehow make up for their military excesses - today we'd call it ethnic cleansing - by taking care of the survivors. They want the Benjamite tribe to survive, even if in drastically reduced form, as a salve to their own consciences. So they decide on a novel and morally dubious solution.

The Gileadites, a quick count reveals, haven't sent anyone to either the memorial at Bethel or the summit at Mizpah. Therefore, the assembly rules, the Gileadites are no longer Israelites! They mobilize a new army of twelve thousand men and order them into Jabesh Gilead to kill everyone living there - "including the women and children," the Bible specifies helpfully. Only one group is permitted to survive: virgin girls. The army attacks, captures 400 girls, and brings them to the surviving Benjamites as wives.

It's a testament to the creativity of the author of Judges that this episode is not the most morally shocking moment in the chapter. The Israelites have killed the Benjamites, so they want to take care of the survivors. The way to do this is to give them females to have sex with - an incredibly ironic gift given that the war also started when someone gave the Benjamites a woman to have sex with. But they've taken an oath not to give their own daughters to the brothers of rapists. So the solution is to literally vote the Gileadites out of the tribe, thus making them legal foreigners, and thus subject to summary execution. Once they've been executed, there are some sex slaves freed up, which the Israelites can then give to the Benjamites. The morally twisted logic that allows the ritual banishment and complete slaughter of yet another clan simply to free up some unattached women is almost impossible to follow. This chatper doesn't mention the will of God, perhaps because even the author of Judges isn't willing to go so far as to suggest that "the spirit of the Lord" is descending on anyone in this fight.

But it's not enough! Only 400 girls survived the murder of the Gileadites, but there are 600 Benjamite men. So the Israelites need to find another 200 girls.

The elders therefore meet and decide on what can only be described as a covert black op. They note that there's an annual "festival of the Lord" which will be held in Shiloh in a few weeks, in which large numbers of girls are expected to come out and dance in the fields.

Now, the Israelites have agreed not to give their daughters in marriage to the Benjamites - but, the elders reason, abduction followed by marriage doesn't count as breaking the oath. So they secretly tell the Benjamites to wait in the fields and then, when the girls come out to dance and celebrate, rush in and carry off one girl each. In the meantime, the elders will pointedly look the other way. They fully expect other Israelites to be irate when their daughters are kidnapped, but they have an explanation ready: fathers and brothers will be "innocent" because they didn't "give" their daughters to the Israelites, they simply looked the other way while they were abducted and carried off into sex slavery.

Just as the slaughter of the Benjamites is a retelling of Jephthah's slaughter of the Ephraimites, so the abduction of the Israelite virgins is a retelling of Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter: the author of Judges is spinning out his story once again, trying to make it even more disturbing than the last time. This time, the entire leadership of Israel is complicit. It is quite literally a conspiracy of men against women.

There's no human sacrifice, but in a way, I think he's succeeded anyways. Every moral principle is subverted in this story except for the principle of men's ownership of women: the Israelites claim the non-existent right to banish clans from the nation for the dubious sin of failure to assemble in court (which isn't listed in the detailed commandments of the Torah, and certainly doesn't seem like a valid reason to engage in mass murder against an entire clan). They capture Israelites - women, granted, but still Israelites - as sex slaves, something that in theory can only be done to foreign women. They subvert the festivals of the Lord by using them as a means to engage in mass banditry, kidnapping innocent girls and carting them off into forced marriage. No one seems to care that the women are having their lives ruined in the process. The only things that remain intact in this sad story are men's ownership rights over women's bodies - and men's holy oaths.

When a man makes an oath, it is a sacred and holy thing. Much like in the Jephthah story, everything here can be explained by the Israelites' decision to swear an oath that they would not give their daughters to the surviving Benjamites. After making this foolish oath, they realize they don't want to let the Benjamite tribe die - so the Benjamites need wives. But they can't get wives because of the oath! So, the Israelite elders come up with a variety of creative ways to sneak girls to the Benjamites under the table, so to speak. First, they kill the men of Gilead - and with the men dead, no one is alive to "give" the women in marriage. They are captured, not given, and therefore no one has broken their promise. The price of the oath in this case is the lives of every man and almost every woman in Gilead.

That's not enough, so they plot a mass kidnapping of girls from Shiloh. Once again, the girls are abducted - their taken to marriage, not given by their fathers, and so therefore no one has broken their promise. In this case, however, the price of the oath is even higher: the men of Israel have conspired against the women of Israel and abused God's sacred festivals in order to do it. It is perhaps the most extreme and explicit example of the patriarchy using the divine to legitimize the oppression of women that we have yet come across in the Bible. By making that link the author of Judges also suggests that the men have, in the act of setting themselves against the women, also set themselves against God. On the other hand, God doesn't seem all that interested in coming to the women's defence.
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Sex and War, Part 2: Judges 20

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

The Levite has had his property violated, and it's time for revenge. The Israelites, in response to his rather provocative decision to cut up her body and send it around Israel on a grand tour, mobilize the largest army ever assembled in the Bible (at least the largest actually counted in a single show of force): four hundred thousand men-at-arms. The Levites denounces the Benjamites' rape of his woman as "lewd and disgraceful," conveniently omitting from his story that he was the one who gave her to the mob to begin with. The assembled force agrees to march on Gibeah and demand that the Benjamites surrender the rapists.

The Benjamites mobilize their own force, though at 26 000 swordsmen it's only a fraction of the size of the Israelites'. The Bible makes the effort to say that 700 of these men were left-handed, which apparently made them excellent stone-slingers. They refuse to surrender the guilty men.

The Israelites respond by attacking, though apparently they really suck in battle. They get trounced twice, then retreat to Bethel for much prayer, fasting, and sacrifices to God in front of the Ark of the Covenant. Aaron's grandson Phinehas, who must be very old by now but apparently is considerably more righteous than Moses's grandson, the professional priest-for-hire described a couple chapters ago. Phinehas preaches holy war against the Benjamites in God's name, and this time God tells them to try again, and promises to "give over" the Benjamites.

This time, God answes their prayers in full. The Israelites then besiege Gibeah, and after losing an initial skirmish, they lure the Benjamite army into an ambush and kill almost the entire force. The Benjamite army thus disposed of, the Israelites storm Gibeah and murder everyone in the city. Six hundred Benjamites flee into the desert and survive as a sort of guerrilla force, but while they hide, the Israelite army sweeps back and forth through Benjamite territory, killing everyone they can find and destroying every city.

Here, after the cynicism about the priesthood in the previous story, we have some counterbalancing praise of the priesthood. The Israelite army actually asks God for advice twice before going to Bethel, and on both occasions the Benjamites defeat them handily. Forty thousand Israelites - ten percent of their army - is killed in these fights. God responded, and sent Israelites to their deaths. It is only when the priesthood intervenes that the divine will can be realized.

It would be easy to draw a simplistic moral lesson about the importance of truly turning our hearts to God - and in fact that is what is done by commentaries like this one, to cite one chosen just by my quick Google search just now, which proves that many Christians are in desperate need of a moral compass.

On the one hand, it's a thrilling tale of Israelite solidarity. A woman is raped in an appalling act of violence - and so the entire nation rises up in vengeance. On the other hand, that vengeance is based on a Levite's testimony, and he actively deceives them about what has happened. Even if he didn't deceive them, execution in capital punishment (according to the laws way back in Numbers and Deuteronomy) requires the testimony of multiple witnesses. Only the Levite testifies. Therefore according to the laws, this campaign would be illegal even if the slaughter was limited to the guilty parties.

And the slaughter isn't limited to the guilty parties. The Israelites respond by destroying every single person in the Benjamite tribe, except for those who escape into the desert as armed refugees. The nation of Israel is falling apart, and even though most of Judges is concerned with foreign invasions, the real damage is being done to themselves. The Gileadites kill 42 000 Ephraimites, and the other Israelites kill almost all the Benjamites. That makes two tribes down now.

Tellingly, God is silent when it comes to the slaughter of the civilian Benjamites. This is in some ways an exaggerated repetition of the story of Gideon, where God appeared to bless the military to begin with, but then let it rampage through Israelite towns without offering either guidance or protest; or the story of Jephthah, where much the same thing happened when the army raised to kill Ammonites ended up killing Ephraimites. The military is a dangerous weapon. God blesses the army, but it still cannot be trusted not to lose control and engage in unnecessary bloodbaths.
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Sex and War, Part 1: Judges 19

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

I wondered in the last post why the story of Micah kept repeating that "in those days Israel had no king," when this was never mentioned before. It crops up again in the final three chapters of the book, making me suspect rather that the author of the last third of Judges simply wasn't the same person as the author of the first two-thirds. With that out of the way, it's time to turn to what may be the most disturbing story in the book, Jephthah's human sacrifice possibly excepted. (Samson's massacres were also disturbing, but the suspension of disbelief required to read about that cartoonish episode softened the psychological blow.)

When the Bible really wants to talk about sexual violence against women, it's perfectly capable of doing so, at least for a few lucid verses. A Levite living in Ephraim buys a concubine in Judah and starts to head home when she escapes, running back to her father's house in Bethlehem. Judges says she was unfaithful, which given the context might mean she was adulterous, or could also simply mean that the act of escaping was the act of unfaithfulness. The Levite goes to Bethlehem and begs his wife to come back with him. The father-in-law initially welcomes the Levite but then seems kind of reluctant to let his daughter go. He plays a sort of Arabian Nights-esque delaying game, delaying the Levite with offers of food, drink, entertainment, and so on. After a few days, the Levite leaves anyway.

He, the woman, and his servant arrive at a town named Jebus (actually, this is Jerusalem), which at this point is supposedly populated by non-Israelites (even though the Israelites conquered the city decades ago). The servant wants to stop, but the Levite makes a fateful decision to keep going, since he reasons they will be safer with their friends the Benjamite Jews, who live in Gibeah.

It turns out to be a fateful decision. They are offered free lodging for the night by an old man, but "some wicked men of the city" came to the house and demanded that the old man give them the Levite so they can rape him. It's shades of Sodom and Gomorrah, but with actual human beings involved instead of mysterious angels, the narrative is a lot more painful. This time, the Levite throws his concubine out the door (helpfully, the old man offers a virgin daughter to the mob too, but apparently the Levite's woman is enough for them). She is gang-raped all night and then left laying at the door.

The Levite is notably unsympathetic. He finds the woman sprawled unconscious on the doorstep the next morning. He tells her to get up, "but there was no answer," so he puts her on his donkey and keeps going. At some point - the author of Judges doesn't say when - the woman passes away, so the Levite, in a gruesome and dubious rite, cuts her body up into pieces and sends them around Israel. He wants vengeance.

As usual, Judges takes no moral position on the incident except, it would seem, to imply that there is no moral behaviour. The Benjamites are supposed to have descended to the same level of general sexual depravity as the Sodomites. The Levite knew precisely what was going to happen when he handed over his concubine to the mob. Complaining after the fact that they committed a heinous crime seems a little ridiculous.

Only the concubine displays any degree of real personal loyalty - after being sent away to be raped, she tries to crawl home to the Levite, before collapsing by the door. (This is an interesting reversal of the incident at the beginning of the page, when she left him for several months and he came after her to get her back.)

Once again, the concubine doesn't even get a name in the narrative. She is simply an object to be fought over: it would appear that the Levite is more upset that his rights to her body have been violated than that she has suffered personally from being raped. The fact that he's willing to mutilate her remains is also exceptionally dubious; perhaps as a Levite he's been cutting up animal corpses so long that the mutilation of dead bodies has simply become second nature. I could comment on the sheer absurdity of a social order in which homeowners are expected to turn over their daughters to be raped, but I did that already months ago in the context of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Indeed, one can't help but wonder if the author of Judges is simply recycling that story in order to make a point about Israelite depravity.
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Priests and False Idols: Judges 17-18

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Okay, this one's kind of weird. Not crude or disturbing, just queer.

An Ephraimite named Micah - obviously one of the ones who escaped Jephthah's fratricidal slaughter along the Jordan river - recovers a large pile of silver which had been stolen by his mother and, in gratitude, she makes an idol for him. I'm sure the author of Judges considers blaming the whole thing on the woman, but then he adds that Micah already has a shrine and "some idols," as well as an ephod - a word we can't translate but which comes up every so often as some sort of special religious icon. So another idol, we can assume. We don't know who these idols are supposed to represent.

Micah finds a travelling Levite and hires him as his own personal priest. Eventually, however, a mob of homeless Danites come along and steals the idols. As they do tis they meet the priest, and take him with them. Micah protests that "you took the gods I made, and my priest, and went away," but the Danites threaten to kill him. They take the idols and th epriest and massacre a city, tear it down, rebuild it, and call it Dan. Then they set up the idols.

This story actually seems to take a position on the importance of government: twice, it states that "in those days Israel had no king and everyone did as he saw fit." The fact that the sentence is simply injected into the narrative at seemingly random intervals would make it seem like a later addition, except that clearly if it was a later addition, the person doing the adding was pretty lazy with their forging. It also doesn't make a great deal of sense given that all of the leaders in Judges thus far have been pretty useless. Is it an argument for a hereditary monarchy? So far God hasn't wanted one, but maybe by the time Judges was written there was pressure to legitimize one of the later Jewish monarchies.

The sudden regret about the lack of a king is coupled with contempt for the priesthood. This meandering Levite is an utterly useless figure as a religious leader. He sells his services to Micah, thus falling into idol worship. When the Danites come along to steal from Micah, the priest "was glad" and readily agreed to come with them. Later, the Danites are said to have a chief piest who is Jonathan the grandson of Moses, and while it's not made clear, the narrative seems to imply that the priest has been this grandson of Moses all along. It didn't take long for the core of the high priesthood to fall into mercenary paganism.
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More Exciting Stories of Raging Samson: Judges 16

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Samson's in trouble again (of course). Fortunately, the spirit of the Lord is still with him (also of course). So he continues to behave like a villain from a children's cartoon (except for the whores, I guess).

One day, Samson visits Gaza and sleeps with a prostitute. For some reason the people of Gaza hate him so they decide to kill him in the morning, but Samson leaves the brothel in the middle of the night. For some reason, instead of fighting them, he simply walks to the town gate, tears away the doors and gateposts, and carries the whole mass on his shoulders up to the top of a nearby hill. There's no apparent reason for the author to even include this brief little anecdote, except I guess to prove that Samson still possesses his monstrous strength, and is basically addicted to foreign women (so much for the obeying the laws of Moses).

A while later, Samson meets another Philistine woman named Delilah, frm the valley of Sorek. This one is a honeytrap: the Philistine rulers offer her an enormous pile of silver in exchange for seducing Samson and getting him to tell her "the secret of his great strength." Samson lies - and lies badly - by claiming that if he's tied up by seven bowstrings he'll lose all of his strength. Delilah tells the Philistines and then ties him up while he's asleep, but Samson snaps the ropes.

You'd think this would be enough for Samson to dump Delilah, but apparently the "spirit of the Lord" has made him stupid. Instead, it's Delilah who's angry at this turn of events: she accuses him of lying to her. So Samson tells her another lie: that he must be tied with virgin ropes. So Delilah ties him up again, calls the Philistines, but Samson snaps the ropes again. Rinse and repeat: Delilah is angry, Samson comes up another strange lie (that his hair must be woven into fabric by a loom while he sleeps), and she "captures" him again. This time, Samson wakes up and lifts the entire loom up off the ground by his hair.

Finally, Samson tells Delilah the truth. You have to wonder why he'd bother at this point, but Delilah promptly has his hair cut off while he sleeps, and this time, Samson really is captured.

The Philistines gouge out Samson's eyes and set him to forced labour, but for some reason they let his hair grow back. One day they hold a great festival for their god Dagon and bring out Samson, but he walks to the side of the Philistine temple, pushes it over, and crushes three thousand people, including himself. This is the one and only time Samson is recorded praying with any sort of humility, but he's still blatantly self-interested: "let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes." Basically Samson is the first suicide bomber. He shows no interest whatever in actually liberating Israel from Philistine rule; he's just continuing his personal vendetta.

Where before the Israelite military was an unreliable instrument claiming divine blessing, now that divine blessing is reduced to an absurd magic strength charm. Samson doesn't even pretend to serve God. He spends more time with the Philistines than his own people, and his entire life (at least as described here) revolves around chasing down one woman or another. He doesn't care about Israel, and if God cares about him, it's only because he doesn't cut his hair. My Man's Bible valiantly tries to draw moral lessons from this story about how pride causes "great men" like Samson to fall into sin, but Samson was never particularly great at anything except killing men and (apparently) sleeping with women.

Aside from the obvious fact that the author of Judges is seemingly contemptuous of holy violence, divine intervention, and even the Nazirite vows in this story - all of them come off looking quite ridiculous, after all - I think the story of Samson, more than any other in Judges, has to be enough to make it foolish to take this book as some sort of literal account of Israelite history.
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The Irrational Rage of the "Spirit of the Lord": Judges 14-15

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Samson is referred to later on as a judge or leader of Israel, which makes no sense at all, because he's never shown leading or judging anything. He was also supposed to be a Nazirite, so holy that even his mother wasn't allowed to drink during the pregnancy, but by the time he's grown up clearly that's gone by the wayside.

The author of Judges seems to have decided to begin deliberately mocking the supposed connection between the powerful Israelite soldier and his God. Before, it was merely subverted; now, it's a joke. Whenever Samson begins to fight, the author solemnly pronounces that "the spirit of the Lord came upon him," whereupon he performs stunning feats of physical might and destroys Israel's enemies, usually the Philistines. On the one hand, this is not a story about the dangers of the unchecked Israelite military. On the other, it is apparently a story about the dangers of the unchecked violent power of the divine. Has the author of Judges moved from criticizing the military to criticizing God?

Samson is in town one day and sees a cute Philistine girl who he decides to marry. In theory this is forbidden for any Israelite, and certainly for a Nazirite one, but Samson doesn't give a damn. He orders his parents to "get her for me as my wife." They protest, not on moral grounds but quite literally by voicing aloud why he couldn't find a nice Jewish girl instead. Eventually he gets his way.

On his way back to Timnah to pick up his girlfriend, Samson is challenged by a lion in the middle of a vineyard. This seems mildly implausible, but never fear! The "spirit of the Lord" descends upon Samson, and he tears the lion apart with his bare hands, "as he might have torn apart a young goat." What fun!

Samson gets engaged to the girl, and on the way to the wedding, he visits the rotting carcass of the lion, which some honeybees have turned into a nest. Samson makes up a riddle about this which he tells to 30 men present at the wedding, none of whom are able to guess the answer. The men get progressively more upset at being stymied until they go to his new wife and threaten to burn her alive unless she tells them the answer. Eventually she gets the answer from him, and immediately tells the other Philistines.

The Philistines tell Samson, and he flies off the handle. Once again, "the spirit of the Lord" descends upon Samson. He goes to another town, named Ashkelon, and kills thirty men at random. Then he takes their clothes and carries them back to Timnah as "prizes" for the men who solved his riddle. He also seems to believe they've had sex with his wife, because he accuses them of getting the answer to the riddle by "plowing with my heifer." His fiancée's father, understandably concerned at the maniac his daughter is engaged to, withdraws his permission for the wedding and promises the girl to Samson's best man.

The only obvious characteristics of the "spirit of the Lord" in this story are that it is irrational and prone to extreme violence. The lion story could go either way, but it's hard to believe "the Lord" would be interested in random mass murder over a riddle. Especially seeing as how Samson's marriage to a Philistine was legally illegitimate in the first place.

The story becomes even more ridiculous. Samson arrives at his would-be wife's house and goes into get her, but her father blocks his way. He says he thinks Samson hates her. Samson decides he has "a right" to revenge, so he gets 300 foxes from somewhere, ties torches to their tails, and chases them into the Philistines' grain fields, causing massive fires and wiping out their crops.

The Philistines retaliate for this act of terrorism by killing Samson's woman, as well as her father. Samson then vows revenge and begins to "attack viciously and slaughter" large numbers of Philistines. Eventually a large group comes up into Judah to arrest Samson. The Judeans tell Samson he should know better than to challenge the Philistines, tie him up, and hand him over.

The Philistines come to pick up the prisoner, but once again, "the spirit of the Lord" descends upon Samson. He breaks the ropes. Absurdly, he continues his drunken rage by picking up a donkey's jawbone and killing one thousand men with it. Then he orders God to give him free water, so God gives him some water to regain his strength.

The marriage massacre was extreme, but the violence in this one is almost cartoonish in its ridiculous extremes. Supposedly it comes from God, but Samson doesn't serve God in any obvious way. He drinks and parties with Philistines, which he shouldn't be doing as a Nazrite. He even tries to marry one, which God says is a death penalty offence for all Israelites. He doesn't worship pagan idols - but that's largely because he doesn't worship anything, including God. All of this mad random violence is perpetrated by Samson in retaliation for what he perceives as the Philistines harming his woman - but that woman is also a Philistine! Samson isn't protecting Israel from foreigners: he's motivated purely by rage and a desire for personal vengeance. He's a brutally violent, possibly insane individual whom God repeatedly bestows with magic strength in order to perform impossible and grossly immoral deeds.
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Prelude to Samson: Judges 13

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

We've almost made it to the story of Samson, which I've been looking forward to for a while. To balance out the ridiculously chauvinist elements of that story, however, the author of Judges begins with a few anecdotes about his mother and father.

God appears to Samson's mother, who, as is typical in this book, actually has no name. This is unfortunate, but the fact that God has appeared to her is unusual and worth noting. On the other hand, virtually the only time women get to see an angel is when it involves some element of conception and pregnancy.

The angel tells Manoah's wife that she's going to have a kid who God wants to be a Nazirite. To ensure his Nazirite purity, the mother must also take a Nazirite vow: she must not drink any alcohol or eat any unclean food during pregnancy. I think the former is a rule that people still follow today, though for slightly different reasons.

Predictably, Manoah doesn't believe his wife when she comes to tell him of the encounter. So Manoah asks the angel to come back and talk to both of them. The angel comes back, but once again only to the wife. She rushes to get Manoah and initially Manoah doesn't believe it's an angel. Instead he seems to think that the man is some sort of prophet, and he offers to prepare a meal for him. Instead, the angel demands a burnt offering, and once Manoah has got the fire going, the angel "ascends in the flame" and disappears.

Manoah reaches the strange and somewhat inexplicable conclusion that this means they are going to die. His wife, rather more sensible, tells him to stop being an idiot: if God were going to kill them, he wouldn't have appeared to them and told them about the boy.
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Civil War Doesn't Take Much in Israel: Judges 12

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

That crack about thirty sons riding thirty donkeys and owning thirty towns has been trumped! Ibzan of Bethlehem becomes judge; he has thirty sons and thirty daughters, and uses his sons to get thirty daughters-in-law. And then, even better, there's Abdon of Hillel, who has forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rude on seventy donkeys. I'm convinced we're missing some puns here. But more importantly....

It's Jephthah again! He gets a second section because this is a fundamentally different story than the last one. Also disturbing, but in quite a different way.

Once again, the Israelites' out-of-control warmongering turns inward. The Ephraimites didn't get to go with Jephthah to the battle against the Ammonites, and they're hopping mad about it. Tensions escalate quickly and the Ephraimites tell Jephthah that they intend to "burn down your house over your head." Jephthah says this is ridiculous, but his Gileadites mobilize their forces anyway and the two sides start to fight.

The fighting soon becomes a massacre. Ambushing enormous numbers of Ephraimites at some strategic fords of the Jordan river, the Gileadites kill a stunning 42 000 Ephraimites. It's a hideous slaughter considering that these are fellow Israelites and the initial offence was that they didn't get to join a raiding party.

Adding insult to dishonour is that the author of Judges records some ridiculous tales about hunting down Ephraimites based on their accents. See, it turns out that they can't pronounce "Sh" properly. So Jephthah's forces start challenging everyone along the Jordan to say "Shibboleth." If the challenged man answers with "Sibboleth" instead, he's instantly executed as a suspected Ephraimite.

Unless the Israelites have somehow developed notably different regional accents by now (which I suppose is at least possible), this basic test makes about as much sense as identifying German Jews by measuring their noses. The level of violence done here is truly appalling.

Once again, there is no one righteous in Judges - and perhaps this is the point. The Ephraimites are irrationally upset over missing out on holy war with the Ammonites. They threaten to attack the Gileadites. In response, the Gileadites massacre all the Ephraimites they can find. Despite the fact that Jephthah is supposedly the "judge" of all Israel, clearly the Israelites feel no particular loyalty or kinship with one another. They kill the Ephraimites at least as zealously as they do non-Israelites - and they ever make silly linguistic jokes about it, too.
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Human Sacrifice for God: Judges 10-11

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Arguably this is the most disturbing moment in Judges. I can explain it with my theory of female property, which is more than a lot of people can manage - but the fact that God's on side with it then makes the story all the more disturbing.

The author of Judges throws us a couple of meaningless judges by way of a breather before moving on to the next bloodbath: Tola of Puah (whose grandfather was Dodo!), and Jair of Gilead. There's probably a pun in the original Hebrew here, which is yet another reason why we should always bear in mind that Biblical language is made stilted by the need for a "faithfully" literal translation: Jair "had thirty sons who rode thirty donkeys. They owned thirty town."

It will come as no surprise that, once again, the Israelites have begun to worship foreign gods. Actually, it's not really clear whether they ever stopped, beginning with Gideon's idol at Ophrah. The Philistines and Ammonites promptly invade and "shatter and crush" the Israelites for 18 years. The people repent again, but this time, God is exasperated and bitter. He tells the Israelites he's not going to save them this time. He taunts them to beg their other gods for assistance instead. But the Israelites keep praying, so God changes his mind and agrees to save them.

Which brings us to Jephthah of Gilead, and another opportunity to berate the NIV translators. Jehpthah, Judges begins, "was a mighty warrior." Then it discusses his background, which is somewhat less than mighty: the illegitimate son of a Gileadite and a prostitute, shunned by his family and forced to become a criminal. He gathers a group of bandits, which for some inane reason the NIV calls a company of "adventurers." Adventurers? Really? Come on. What the hell's the point of that?

Inexplicably, the Gileadites decide that Jephthah is the natural leader for a revolt against the Ammonites. Jephthah correctly reasons that this is a strange request to a banished bastard. Jephthah agrees and sends an extraordinarily lengthy message to the Ammonites, basically a history of Israel combined with a warning that many of the Israelites' previous enemies have wound up dead. Interestingly, the Ammonites suggest that they're interested only in a limited territorial dispute, but Jephthah either doesn't believe them or doesn't care. They go to war and Jephthah wins handily, massacring the inhabiants of twenty cities.

In the meantime, however, Jephthah has made a dangerous promise: he will sacrifice the first living thing he sees upon his return home, in gratitude for the victory. Surprise! It's his only child, his daughter. He confesses what he's done and she agrees to let him kill her, but first he lets her spend two months with her friends, allegedly mourning the fact that she will never marry. She comes back after the two months and is killed. The Bible carefully specifies that she died as a virgin.

If for some strange reason my previous posts haven't convinced you, this chapter should: any notion that the Israelites in the narrative continuously cherished the sanctity of life dies with Judges 11, in which a man's need to keep his oath is worth more than the life of his own daughter. It is either a testament to her devotion or a sad fact of oppression that his daughter consents to her own murder - for that is what this is. Even more painfully, the Bible does not even give this daughter a name. She is simply "the virgin."

It should come as no surprise that the response of many modern Christian readers has been to look for an exemption, an exception, some minor translation error. The fact that the Mosaic law flatly bans human sacrifice of children, and provides no guidance for how to conduct a ritual, helps this. So, oddly, does the Judges focus on virginity, which leads people to conclude that what "sacrifice" in this contact really meant was that she had to live out her life as a virgin. I hate to say it, but that strikes me as an idiotic suggestion, given the context: Jephthah says he will sacrifice her as a burnt offering, and Judges says he "did to her as he had vowed." The virginity in this context, I think, is used by the author of Judges to highlight the severity of the tragedy. The alternative notion is touching but kind of silly - the Jews didn't have any ritual guidance for lifetime sexual abstinence in place of sacrifice at the time either, nor did Jephthah's own distress at his predicament suggest he's worried about not being able to give away his daughter's virginity properly. The fact hat the ancient Israelite women apparently honoured the story of Jephthah's daughter with a four-day memorial every year is also suggestive of the real sacrifice interpretation.

The notion that Jephthah could vow to sacrifice his daughter simply cements in my mind the fact that to the ancient Jews, women were owned property - the fact that Jephthah seems upset about what he must do doesn't change that fact. At no time does he decide that breaking his oath, and thus sinning himself, would be preferable to human sacrifice. This is certainly an extreme case, but all attempts to apply the Jewish laws to our context today must consider this fact. Is Jephthah righteous for upholding his oath, or wicked for sacrificing his daughter? Did he commit murder - and if so, why is he not punished for it?

It's hard to say, because the author of Judges doesn't give an explicit answer to these questions, but it certainly doesn't condemn Jephthah for his actions. Jephthah remains the loyal and righteous judge of Israel. What he has done is horrendous, and something that should never have happened, but Jephthah remains respected for upholding his oath. The apparent lesson here is not to make foolish oaths - and, by implication, that even a foolish oath is worth more than the life of a fellow human being. Oaths have power. Jephthah's actions are terrible but he does right by keeping his oath.

Tellingly, God is silent throughout the story. Judges says that the Lord was on their side in the initial victory against the Ammonites, but for the most part, the author of Judges knows fuck-all about God. God has stepped out for most of Judges; he only rarely speaks, and this notion of battle-as-oracle is frankly unconvincing. The author of Judges clearly thinks that what Jephthah did was right, but on this occasion if no other, we must begin to question how closely we really do agree with the authors of the Bible on basic moral issues, and, for that matter, how closely they agree with God.

You don't have to accept that point, of course. You could accept that God really did bless Jephthah for his oath and permit him victory over the Ammonites. In that case, however, you're going to have to explain why an all-knowing God sanctioned human sacrifice in order to buy Israel a military victory. In that case, why would God not redeem Jephthah's daughter the way he redeemed Abraham's son? Is it merely because she is female?

A final possibility, it occurs to me, is to accept that the author of Judges actually intends to write a story in which events are deliberately morally complex. There is, on reflection, perhaps no such thing as righteousness in Judges. Gideon builds an idol, Jephthah murders his daughter. This is not about the xenophobic military propaganda of Joshua, the priestly arrogance of Numbers, or the liberation of Exodus. Is the story of Jephthah, with God's suspicious silence, a celebration of a system in which a man's oath trumps human life - or is it a veiled criticism of that ethical system in which such ridiculous extremes would be legally justifiable? It can only be the latter if the author of Judges is being deliberately flexible about God's "role" in battle, I suppose, but it does offer something in the way of an alternative explanation. Thus the problem, or perhaps the point, of Judges is that there is no victory, no divine liberation, no promise, no hope: even the apparent defeat of foreigners is tainted by the repugnance of the Israelites who are carrying out the battle in the name of the Lord.

Judges is by design and intent the greyest book in what is supposedly a very black and white Bible, and that, perhaps, is what makes it most difficult to read.
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Divine "Punishments" for Ruffian Kings: Judges 9

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

This story is bizarre and, I think, represents yet another stage in the decline of Israeli military society.

Gideon, who takes the new name Jerub-Baal to symbolize his defiant opposition to Baal, has a pile of sons, a bunch of whom live in Shechem. As soon as I read that sentence at the beginning of chapter 9, I knew there would be trouble, because Shechem last featured way back in Genesis when the sons of Israel, upset that the local prince's son was dating their sister, dishonoured their covenant with God by demanding the men of the town be circumcised, then rushing in and killing them all as they recovered and were "weakened" from the impromptu surgery.

This time, Gideon's son Abimelech arrives in Shechem. Abimelech is the son of one of Gideon's mistresses, not one of his wives, so he walks into Shechem and tells the people they would prefer the single rule of a single son of Gideon - in other words, him - rather than all 70 of the legitimate ones. Some of the people agree and give him 70 shekels of silver - the original 30 pieces of silver - drawn from Baal's temple treasury, and he uses the money to hire some bandits which the Bible charitably calls "reckless adventurers" (ha!). His crew attempts to murder all the other Gideonites, but one escapes: young son Jotham. Jotham conducts a public protest: he climbs up onto a hill and shouts to his fellow citizens, telling them a strange parable about trees and bushes, the upshot of which is that the people should rise up and get rid of Abimelech because he is evil. Having made his announcement, Jotham flees for his life.

Abimelech reigns as king for several years, then God "sends an evil spirit" to cause dissension in the land. (How literalists interest this strange phrasing I'm very curious to know.) Amidst the turmoil, a new challenger arrives, seemingly out of nowhere: Gaal son of Ebed (sounds very heroic). Gaal foments rebellion against Abimelech and his men take over Shechem while Abimelech is away. However, Abimelech, apparently an easily superior tactician, arrives with four companies of soldiers armed for a night raid, and after much bloody fighting, Gaal's group is driven away. The next day, the Shechemites go out to work in the fields, and while they're away, Abimelech takes some of his men and kills them.

Next, Abimelech besieges the temple of El-Berith, where the citizens have taken sanctuary. He and his men cut branches from trees, pile them up around the temple, and fire it, killing the thousand or so people hiding inside.

Abimelech moves on to besiege another rebellious town, Thebez, and he apparently intends to perform the same sort of massacre, but just as he's walking up to the tower to survey routes of access, a woman drops a rock on his head. Mortally wounded, he asks his servant to kill him so that at least he won't be killed by a woman. Once his army sees that he's fallen, they lift the siege and go home.

After this strangley disjointed story, the author of Judges concluded that this was how "God repaid the wickedness that Abimelech had done to his father by murdering his seventy brothers. God also made the men of Shechem pay for all their wickedness." This is a rather strange conclusion. A long series of seemingly chance events occur, and because most of the people involved are dead by the end, the natural conclusion is that God must have "punished" everyone?

I'll try and follow the twisted logic. Abimelech must be "punished" by God because usurps the power of the real brothers. The people must be "punished" for siding with him. Gaal must be "punished" for worshipping pagans. So, God "punishes" Gaal by having Abimelech kill him. Then God "punishes" the Shechemites by having Abimelech kill him. And finally, God completes the circle by "punishing" Abimelech, killing him.

Abimelech's death confirms my earlier suspicions about the story of Deborah not being particularly empowering. Being attacked by a woman is morally and socially disgraceful in Israel. Thus Abimelech is so shamed by being struck by a woman that he begs his aide to euthanize him so that, at the very least, he will have been killed by a man.

Most of Judges - and most remarks about Judges - seems to be focused on the evils of an anarchic society. But one could just as easily look at it another way: kings aren't very productive or useful either. Abimelech is the first of the kings in Judges - "king" apparently being a different title than "judge" - although even the "judges" weren't necessarily sound. Look at Gideon, for example. Pretty much everything in the Israelite society of Judges is evil and corrupted - and that which isn't, inevitably becomes so within a generation.
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Gideon and the Dangers of Militarism: Judges 6-8

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Pretty much everyone in Canada must have seen a Gideons Bible of some sort at one point or another. If not, just visit a hotel - most of them still have Gideon Bibles, I think. I couldn't remember Gideon at all in the Bible before and I'm not sure what I was expecting to find this time, but it wasn't this, certainly. The Gideon of Judges doesn't seem like a particularly fine role model for a charity that gives out free Bibles, but I suppose they can choose whichever inspirational idol they wish.

The Israelites start worshipping pagan gods again, and so they get raided by the Midianites - yet another group which was supposed to have been massacred earlier, and has now returned from the dead. Initially, many of the Israelites manage to escape death or captivity by making fortifications in the mountains, but their crops are repeatedly returned. So, once again, the Israelites turn to the Lord and repent.

God sends an angel to Gideon, who at the time is threshing wheat in a winepress. (This is yet another example of God choosing people of low birth and social status as his emissaries, which is what makes the hereditary institutions created within the priesthood seem even more unusual.) Gideon asks some very valid and pointed questions of the angel: If God is with the Israelites (as the angel at once proclaims), why are they repeatedly subjugated by foreigners? And if this is a turning point in that sorry history, why should God begin by turning to an obscure family of the Manasseh tribe? He demands a sign, and then, in a stunning move, actually turns around and walks away, apparently to prepare some food for the angel. Gideon returns, and God sets his lunch on fire. This is apparently enough to convince Gideon.

Gideon begins honourably, taking some servants and cutting down his father's altar to Baal. In a midnight ceremony, they hastily build a new altar and sacrifice a bull. The townspeople are confused when they get up in the morning to see the results of God's little black op, but the culprit is soon identified. (The Bible doesn't say how or who investigates.) Gideon's father Joash is told by the townsmen that the young man must be surrendered for execution. Joash takes his son's side - a stunning move for someone who owned the destroyed pagan altar - and suggests Baal himself should do the killing, if any killing is to be done. Gideon then summons the armies of Israel to battle, though before going on campaign, he demands two more miracles from God, solely for his personal private use: one that God will keep his fleece dry from dew overnight, and another that God will let only his fleece get wet with due overnight.

Gideon's assembled army eventually totals 32 000 soldiers, and God decides on a gratuitous miracle, just to prove his might: he tells Gideon there are "too many" soldiers now, and they dismiss 22 000 who admitted to being fearful. Ten thousand is still too many, God complains, so they weed out another 9700 who drink water the wrong way (depending on the translation, which way is the wrong way and which way is the right way may differ!). Gideon takes the 300 and raids the Midianite camp; the enemies of Israel flee in terror.

The story of Gideon is once again a brief resurgence of Israelite militarism, carried out under the cloak of divine blessing. This is true right to the end, where Israel concludes from Gideon's success in battle that he ought to be their ruler (to his credit, he refuses) and he subsequently gains considerable wealth and privilege from his war exploits (including enough wives to produce no less than seventy sons!) Nevertheless, the story ends on a more ambivalent note: Gideon suggests that his battle prowess does not actually qualify him to rule Israel, and, like Cincinnatus in Roman mythology, after saving the nation he simply returned home. On the other hand, before doing so, he asks for a handsome retirement gift from the Israelite assembly: twenty kilograms of gold, along with assorted other plunder from the Midianite wars. At today's gold prices, Gideon has been paid the equivalent of $600 000 in plunder, plus all the girls he gets as wives and concubines.

Despite the apparent renewal of Israelite militarism, there are a couple of dark moments in the story which I think illustrate the potential excesses of Gideon's new militarism, so that the ultimate conclusion of the story is fairly ambiguous so far as combat goes. Gideon may annihilate the initial Midianite army with God's assistance, but he carries on afterwards with great success - and, significantly, without any more references to the divine.

First, Gideon murders two Midianite kings, Zebah and Zalmunna, after a long chase from the battlefields in Israel. They are captured and brought before him well after the Midianites have been reduced beyond any chance of resistance, and decides to execute them in vengeance for the deaths of Israelites. This is not a legal procedure nor one ordered by God. He strikes them down and then snatches some "ornaments" from them and from their camels, which he pockets for himself. Even Gideon's own son refuses to take part in this execution, though the Bible claims this is because of fearful youth.

Second, and perhaps more significantly, this story is the first by my count to see Israelites slaughter other Israelites in battle (with the exception of Moses' ritual bloodbath following the golden calf episode, if that can be considered a battle). During the unsanctioned pursuit of the defeated Midianites, Gideon and his men demand food from two towns: Succoth and Peniel. These are significant places: Peniel is where Jacob wrestled with God and became Israel, and Succoth is where Jacob-Israel first lived after his reconciliation with his brother Esau.

Gideon isn't particularly concerned about the historical significance. The two towns refuse him food and, outraged, he vows revenge. After the execution of the Midianite kings, Gideon's forces return and sack the towns. What happens at Succoth is unclear - Gideon's force gathers desert thorns and briers and then, depending on your translation, either "tramples," "teaches," or "punishes" the men of Succoth. What happens at Peniel is more explicit, however: the Gideonites swarm the town, tear down its defences, and kill all the men in the city. This seems like considerably more than an overreaction for the refusal of food. Obviously this was not an act of charity, but it's also not clear what law has been violated. The right to sustenance and supplies from the civilian population, taken through force if necessary, is one that has been claimed by military forces in varying ways for thousands of years. But that right is not found in the Israelite laws given by God - according to those laws, only the priests, the poor, and foreigners have such a right. Gideon is arrogating to his military forces powers and rights never bestowed upon them by God.

Gideon's sin deepens in the following section when he takes all of the gold paid to him in tribute by the other Israelites - gold, not incidentally, which comes largely from gold earrings plundered from pagans slain in battle - and makes an "ephod" out of it. What exactly an ephod is remains unclear, but the Gideon ephod is turned into an altar at which the Israelites worship and "prostitute themselves." God may have called Gideon's military into being, but he turns its back on Gideon as that very military then engages in some of the customary excesses one might expect from a strongly militarist culture.
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Women Get to Kill, Too: Judges 4-5

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Ehud dies and without a proper father figure, the Israelites return to their evil-doing ways. The lord therefore permits them to be enslaved by a Canaanite king named Jabin, and his chief general, Sisera. Sisera's forces are numerically impressive - among other things, he has no less than 900 chariots - and they "cruelly oppress the Israelites" for 20 years.

God's next judge is a woman named Deborah - actually, she's the wife of a judge named Lappidoth, but in a truly bizarre twist, God doesn't talk about Lappidoth very much at all. Deborah "holds court" under a palm tree, of all places (we veered from Jewish into Buddhist mythology for a moment there). She summons Barak from the Naphtali and orders him to raise 10 000 soldiers and fight Sisera's forces for all Israel.

Eventually Barak does this and forces battle with Sisera, in which the Lord sides with Israel and gives them a resounding victory. (Actually, I think 10 000 men could hold their own against 900 chariots even without divine assistance, provided they were well trained with their spears, but that's another matter). Sisera loses his chariot in the battle and flees alone, eventually reaching the Kenites and seeking aid from Jael.

This section is also fascinating because, once again, it's another woman: Jael is the wife of Heber, who, like Lappidoth, doesn't feature in this story as more than a name on the page. Jael gives Sisera water and rest. In theory this was a pretty important social custom in the ancient Middle East, and it would be grossly immoral for Jael to let harm come to Sisera while under her roof. But this time goes quite differently: Jael waits until Sisera has fallen asleep, then takes a tent peg and hammers it through his skull. Deborah and Barak eventually track down Sisera's corpse and sing a celebratory song, after which Israel has 40 years of peace.

Once again we have a captivating story with some grisly elements, like the tent peg-through-the-head scene. And there are elements of the song that are rather disturbing as well. After cheering Sisera's death in cheerful poetic fashion:

At her feet he sank,
he fell; there he lay.
At her feet he sank, he fell;
where he sank, there he fell - dead.

Actually, it seems a trifle repetitive. But what follows seems stranger; the final verse is about Sisera's mother anxiously waiting for her son to return and deluding herself about his violent fate.

This story is interesting because it seems to thoroughly subvert Israel's gender order. Deborah, not her husband, delivers the word of the Lord. At one point, when Barak seems reluctant to go into battle, Deborah taunts him by saying that she will lead the forces herself, but because she does, God will let it be known that "the Lord will hand Sisera over to a woman." That the honour is being stolen by her specifically as a woman broadens the insult from Barak to all of the other male leaders under him. Eventually, the sole survivor - Sisera - is also murdered in bloody fashion by a woman acting without any guidance from her husband.

On the one hand, this implicates women in Israelite militarism. On the other, I have to wonder, given the underlying sexism of the Old Testament, what the real purpose of this passage is. I could easily interpret this as an isolated but emancipating story about women leading Israel. However, I have to wonder whether the symbolic purpose of the original authors was to emphasize just how far into sin the country had fallen. The priesthood has failed; the military generals have failed; the men in general have failed; and now, finally, it falls to the women to do the job all the others should have been doing. Fortunately for the future of Israel, the faith of marginalized women seems stronger than anyone else's. But there is no lasting social change here; it may be simply that Deborah performs a masculine role for a while in the absence of qualified men. Obviously the Israelites see no reason to respond to this episode by adjusting the way gender determines social relations in their society, because women fall out of the narrative again after chapter 5.

Still, the overarching theme of Judges is that the Israelites are utterly incapable of organizing or maintaining their society along morally righteous lines. The story is somewhat positive, even if the limit of its emancipation of Deborah and to some extent Jael is that in the absence of qualified men they are able to perform traditionally masculine roles as prophet of God and slayer of pagans. But there is still an underlying implication that Israelite women would be capable of religious leadership, but have only now been called on to fulfill that role.

This leads to some interesting implications for the treatment of women in churches today. God doesn't seem to mind that Israel is being led by a woman - indeed, he seems to approve. Should we take that as a model for today? The alternative, which presumably sexist churches would have to cling to, is that for some inexplicable reason only Deborah is qualified to play a traditionally masculine role and now that that sorry episode is done with, we can return to proper patriarchy. But the androcentric social order being returned to here in Judges is a demonstrable failure - indeed, that inevitable and dismal failure of the system is the entire point of the Book of Judges - and presumably this behooves us to consider alternative forms of social organization.
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Spies and Assassins: Judges 3:7-31

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

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Special Note: A Lesson in Translations. I know I'm giving away the ending a bit here, but there's an incident in this chapter where an evil king is killed by a sinister left-handed assassin. This gives me an opportunity to remark upon conservative efforts to censor the Bible - an incredibly ironic thing to do given their proposed "faithfulness" to the text. Judges 3:22 describes the death of the evil king with considerable detail, right down to the fact that the killer can't get his sword out because the king is so fat.

Then comes the interesting point. The NIV translation, for example, just stops at that point. Some other, apparently more faithful explanations, add the final component of the king's grisly demise: variously, "and the refuse came out" (NASB), "the dirt came out" (KJV), "the excrements of the belly came out" (Douay-Rheims English), and "it came out behind" (Darby, WEB). "Dirt" and "refuse" are euphemisms, of course, but even that (or maybe especially that) is way too crude for the NIV, so they just leave it out. It doesn't even merit a footnote!

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The third chapter of Judges gives us our first samples of the, well, judges. The Israelites start going to some Baal and the Asherahs concerts, just what they weren't supposed to do, and so God lets them be captured by the Aram Naharimites and held as subjects for eight years. Then they're liberated by Othniel, the nephew of Caleb who came up before.

That story's kind of boring, bereft of interesting details. Slightly better is Shamgar of Anath, who apparently led a rebellion against the Philistines. The details are bereft, except for one fascinating claim, which is that he personally slaughtered 600 of the Philistine soldiers using an oxgoad. Now an oxgoad is basically a long stick that use to poke oxen with, so basically, Shamgar is killing people by the hundreds using only a quarterstaff. It's a feat worthy of fantasy.

On another occasion, God lets the Moabites - who are still alive despite being wiped out in previous genocides - along with the Ammonites and Amalekites. King Eglon takes the City of Palms - that is, Jericho, which must have been rebuilt in the meantime, even though this was never mentioned and even though God explicitly ordered the Israelites never to do so. However, the Israelites repent and cry for mercy, and God raises up a new judge named Ehud the Benjamite.

Ehud is everything you want in a pre-medieval James Bond: suicide attacker, assassin, sharp wit, and impressive sneaking skills. He's even, according to the Bible, left-handed - a strange addition, but one I as a left-hander must appreciate! Ehud ties a sword to his thigh under his clothing and marches straight into Eglon's palace, declaring that he plans to present a tribute. Eglon's security guards fail to frisk Ehud, because they haven't yet received the appropriate guidelines from CATSA or the TSA. Ehud manages to get close to Eglon by announcing he has a secret message which must be delivered only to the king.

This is when things get really cool, and we see that the writer of Judges has a sharp wit, too. In a practice subsequently replicated by 3000 years of action film heroes, Ehud walks up to the king in his private chambers, solemnly announces "I have a message from God for you," draws his secret sword, and assassinates the king. With gloriously excessive language, Judges solemnly pronounces that poor Eglon is so fat that when he's stabbed his rolls of body fat close over the sword, so that Ehud can't pull it out again.

Fortunately, Ehud doesn't need the sword again; he just sneaks out and blows a trumpet once he's passed the gates. The servants don't come in to stop him; Judges's hilarious explanation for this failure on their part is that they assume Eglon wants privacy while he relieves himself!

Ehud isn't done - he leads an uprising which kills ten thousand Moabites and wins Israel its freedom for 80 years.

Other than being good fun stories, I'm not sure what to make of these early "judges." We haven't yet reached the hideous moral degeneracy of some of the following chapters. Even so, it's worth pointing that there isn't a lot of judging going on in Judges. This book lacks the proud, almost propagandistic militarism of Joshua, but God's will remains known largely - or even solely - through Israel's violent relations with neighbouring nations. Pessimism about the faith of the people - who without a permanent leadership are utterly incapable of anything other than pure evil and idol worship - is combined with the fall of the priestly and military institutions (something I noted earlier) to form an extremely negative view of anarchical society in God's promised land.
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The Youth Today Just Aren't As Self-Controlled As We Were!: Judges 1 - 3:6

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Editorial note: I've finished Judges after writing this entry, but I'm not going to revise it, because it would be dishonest to the purpose of this commentary, which is to think as I go. I will say, however, that a critical reading of Judges can give the book a lot more credit than I gave it when I started out. You'll have to wait until the final reflections, in a week or so, to find out why.

Judges appears to start off in the same militarist vein as Joshua. The Judeans and Simeonites promptly atack some Canaanites and Perizzites, killing 10 000 in a single battle; they capture king Adoni-Bezek and cut off his thumbs and big toes. (They do not, however, execute him; they take him back to the fired ruins of Jerusalem and "he died there.") Incidentally, the Judeans have taken Jerusalem! For such an important moment in continuing politics in the Middle East, it merits only a passing reference - indeed, just two sentences in verse 8.

Without Joshua, however, militarism appears to have lost its luster. He's been replaced as general of the army by Caleb, but Caleb, rather than appealing to the glory of the Lord, starts offering extra incentives for warriors - whoever leads the attack on Kiriath Sepher, for example, is to win the hand of his daughter in marriage. As it turns out, his nephew Kenaz leads the charge; so Kenaz gets Caleb's daughter, Acsah. Acsah and Kenaz also get some nice lands as gifts from Caleb.

It's not clear precisely when God withdraws his blessing from the new military order. They're besieging and killing and massacring very successfully, then all of a sudden, for some reason Manasseh decides not to finish the job by killing the last of the Canaanites in Beth Shan, Taanach, and a few other places. Instead, some of the Canaanites are enslaved, but Israel "never drove them out completely." Several other tribes also leave pockets of Canaanite resistance relatively unharmed. Even the Amorites, surprisingly, are still around after multiple genocidal campaigns against them; these Amorites, it turns out, hold the plains with large and competent forces, so the Israelites in that area, the Danites, are confined to the hilly regions. Eventually these Amorites too are supposedly pressed into slavery, but not killed off.

God is most upset that the genocide was interrupted and sends his angels to deliver a judgement. This represents a shift back towards a very pessimistic view of the people, something that wasn't really central to Joshua (except for his closing speech, I suppose) but certainly was to Numbers, in which faithless Israelites can barely last a week without worshipping one foreign god or another. An angel descends to several places and proclaims that the Israelites have disobeyed God: they have failed to kill the people or smash the altars. Therefore God will no longer assist in driving out the pagans: he will permit them to stay in the promised land, as a thorn in Israel's sides.

The people weep at this terrible news and offer sacrifices, apparently to no effect. Nevertheless, they continue to serve God more or less faithfully for many years; according to chapter 2, the entire generation of those who invaded with Joshua "served the Lord" throughout their lives.

Judges explains the coming degradation of Israelite society by resorting to an argument that has subsequently been used by every single generation up to the present: the youth today, they just aren't as self-controlled, enterprising, or morally upright as we were! The new generation, Judges compains, "knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel." Why this is so is not immediately apparent. Were they not taught? Has God stopped performing miracles for some unstated reason?

Whatever the reason, the people promptly start serving other gods again. The Bible names some of them - Baal and the Ashtoreths, which sounds like a bad cover band. In language resemblent of Numbers, God grows very angry and permits raiders to plunder the Israelite settlements, and causes defeat in battle. Here we have the vestiges of Joshua's militarism: God still makes his will known through the success or failure of the military, but now the military has abandoned God and largely demobilized, so principally God makes his will known by letting the Israelites lose wars. The genocidal mission of the military, however, has vanished. Judges reaches the striking conclusion that God changed his mind about killing off all the natives: he decided to keep them around after all so that they would "teach warfare to the descendants of the Israelites who had not had previous battle experience." The moment at which God reached the momentous decision to reverse his reasoning is unclear.

As a stopgap measure, God begins to "raise up judges." My footnote says the alternative for this translation is "leader," which makes considerably more sense than "judge": the principal role appears to be to "save [the Israelites] to of the hands of these raiders." But the judges, Judges says, don't work: the Israelites ignore them and continue to worship other gods, because (and I'm adding this now) the Israelites are a stupid and stubborn people.

We have a strange situation here. The central role of the Israelite priesthood was abolished by Joshua, and the central role of the military was abandoned by Joshua's successors. What's left is a sort of anarchy - anarchy, but not really anarchism; there's no thoughts (from God or anyone else) as to how the Israelites might continue to live in such a state of affairs, no apparent debate or discussion about how to live peacefully or securely or morally without some sort of centralized hierarchy. Instead the Israelites, and apparently God himself, can think of nothing better than to occasionally raise up temporary military and political leaders, who briefly restore some balance and order, but then die or retire or abdicate or some such, leaving the Israelites back where they started.
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