Like so many biblical books, Judges reflects an editorial splicing together of disparate narrative materials. Some of these materials, at least in their oral origins, could conceivably go back to the last century of the second millennium B.C.E., incorporating memories, or rather legendary elaborations, of actual historical figures. In any case, the redaction and final literary formulation of these stories are much later—perhaps, as some scholars have inferred, toward the end of the eighth century B.C.E., some years after the destruction of the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. and before the reforms of King Josiah a century later.
The word shofet, traditionally translated as “judge,” has two different meanings—“judge” in the judicial sense and “leader” or “chieftain.” The latter sense is obviously the relevant one for this book, though the sole female judge, Deborah, in fact also acts as a judicial authority, sitting under the palm tree named after her. The narrative contexts make perfectly clear that these judges are ad hoc military leaders—in several instances, guerilla commanders—but it would have been a gratuitous confusion to readers to call this text the Book of Chieftains or even to designate these figures in the text proper as chieftains or leaders rather than judges.
The first two chapters are both a prologue to what follows and a bridge from the end of the Book of Joshua. They incorporate a report of Joshua’s death and an account of the incompletion of the conquest of the land, for which at least two rather different explanations are offered. The unconsummated conquest sets the stage for the sequence of stories in which Israel is sorely oppressed by enemies on all sides—the Philistines based on the coastal plain, the Midianites and the Moabites to the east, and the Canaanites in the heartland of the country. From the latter part of chapter 3 to the end of chapter 12, there is a formulaic rhythm of events: Israel’s disloyalty to its God, its oppression by enemies as punishment for the dereliction, the crying out to God by the Israelites, God’s raising up a judge to rescue them. This process of “raising up” leaders is what led Max Weber to borrow a term from the Greek and call a political system of this sort charismatic leadership. That is, the authority of the leader derives neither from a hereditary line nor from election by peers but comes about suddenly when the spirit of the LORD descends upon him: through this investiture, he is filled with a sense of power and urgency that is recognized by those around him, who thus become his followers.
The pattern remains the same, but for some of the Judges we have no more than a bare notice of their name and their rescuing Israel (see, for example, the very first judge, Othniel son of Kenaz, 3:9–10) whereas for others we are given a detailed report of an act of military prowess (Ehud) or a whole series of narrative episodes (Gideon, Jephthah). The story of the fratricidal Abimelech breaks the sequence of Judge narratives but provides foreshadowing of the bloody civil war at the end of the book.
The last in the series of Judges is Samson, who is in several ways quite unlike those who precede him. Only Samson is a figure announced by prenatal prophecy, with the full panoply of an annunciation type-scene. Only in the case of Samson is the first advent of the spirit of the LORD indicated not by a verb of descent (tsalaḥ) or investment (labash) but of violent pounding (paʿam). Unlike the other judges, Samson acts entirely alone, and his motive for devastating the Philistines is personal vengeance, not an effort of national liberation. Most strikingly, only Samson among all the Judges exercises supernatural power. It seems likely, as many scholars have concluded, that the sequence of episodes about Samson reflects folkloric traditions concerning a Herculean, quasimythological hero, though the narrative as it has been formulated shows evidence of subtle literary craft. In any case, the Samson stories, editorially placed as the last in the series of Judge narratives, exemplify the breakdown of the whole system of charismatic leadership. Samson, battling alone with unconventional weapons or with his bare hands, more drawn to the sexual arena than to national struggle, hostilely confronted by fellow Israelites, sowing destruction all around him to the very end, like the fire with which he is associated from before his conception, is a figure of anarchic impulse: the man in whom the spirit of the LORD pounds down enemies but offers no leadership at all for his people, which may be a final verdict on the whole system of governance by charismatic warriors represented in the preceding episodes of the book.
The Samson narrative suggests that the shape given to Judges by its editors may be more purposeful than is often assumed. What follows the Samson cycle is the bizarre story of Micah’s idol (chapters 17–18) and then the grisly tale of the concubine at Gibeah who is gang-raped to death by the local Benjaminites, leading to a costly civil war between Benjamin and the other tribes (chapters 19–21). These two blocks of material are often described as an appendix to the Book of Judges, and although it is true that they differ strikingly in subject matter and to some extent in style from the stories about the Judges, they also show significant connections as well both with the immediately preceding Samson narrative and with the book as a whole. Divisiveness in the Israelite community, adumbrated in Samson’s confrontation with the men of Judah, is vividly manifested both in the story of Micah and that of the concubine. Micah’s narrative begins with his stealing eleven hundred shekels (the exact amount that the Philistines offer to Delilah) from his mother. Part of this purloined fortune, returned to his mother, is used to create a molten image of dubious monotheistic provenance, which will then become an object of contention. The displaced Danites, arriving on the scene as a military contingent, have no compunction about confiscating a whole set of cultic objects and buying off the young Levite whom Micah has hired to minister in his private sanctuary. The Danites then go on to conquer a new northern town in which to settle their southern tribe, but this is hardly a story that ends with the land quiet for forty years: tensions, verging on a clash of arms, between Micah and the Danites; dishonesty and deception; venality and the ruthless pursuit of personal and tribal self-interest—such far-from-edifying behavior dominates the story from beginning to end.
The morality exhibited in the book’s concluding narrative is even worse. Another Levite, considerably more egregious than the one engaged by Micah, ends up reenacting the story of Sodom with a bitter reversal. In this tale devoid of divine intervention, there are no supernatural beings to blind the brutal sexual assailants; the Levite pushes his concubine out the door to be raped all night long; and when he finds her prostrate on the threshold in the morning, he brusquely orders her to get up so that they can continue their journey, not realizing at first that she has expired. His remedy for this atrocity is as bad as the violation itself: he butchers her body into twelve parts that he sends out to the sundry tribes to rouse their indignation against Benjamin, and the ensuing civil war, in which the other tribes suffer extensive casualties, comes close to wiping out the tribe of Benjamin. Unbridled lust, implacable hostility, and mutual mayhem provide ample warrant for the implicitly monarchist refrain of these chapters: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.”
Anarchy and lust link these stories directly with the Samson narrative. But the theme of violence, threatened in Micah’s story, shockingly realized in the narrative that follows, ties in the concluding chapters of Judges with everything that precedes them in the book. Judges represents, one might say, the Wild West era of the biblical story. Men are a law unto themselves—“Every man did what was right in his eyes.” There are warriors who can toss a stone from a slingshot at a hair and not miss; a bold left-handed assassin who deftly pulls out a short sword strapped to his right thigh to stab the Moabite king in the soft underbelly; another warrior-chieftain who panics the enemy camp in the middle of the night with the shock and awe of piercing ram’s horn blasts and smashed pitchers.
All this is certainly exciting in a way that is analogous to the gunslinger justice of the Wild West, but there is an implicit sense, which becomes explicit at the end of the book, that survival through violence, without a coherent and stable political framework, cannot be sustained and runs the danger of turning into sheer destruction. In the first chapter of the book, before any of the Judges are introduced, we are presented with the image of the conquered Canaanite king, Adoni-Bezek, whose thumbs and big toes are chopped off by his Judahite captors. This barbaric act of dismemberment, presumably intended to disable the king from any capacity for combat, presages a whole series of episodes in which body parts are hacked, mutilated, crushed. King Eglon’s death by Ehud’s hidden short sword is particularly grisly: his killer thrusts the weapon into his belly all the way up to the top of the hilt, and his death spasm grotesquely triggers the malodorous release of the anal sphincter. Women are also adept at this bloody work: there is a vividly concrete report of how Jael drives the tent peg through the temple of Sisera the Canaanite general and into the ground; another woman, this one anonymous, smashes the head of the nefarious Abimelech with a millstone she drops on him from her perch in a besieged tower. Samson’s slaughter of a thousand Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone is surely a messy business of smashing and mashing—no neat spear’s thrust here—though descriptive details are not offered. The grand finale of Samson’s story, in which thousands of Philistine men and women, together with the Israelite hero, are crushed by the toppling temple, is an even more extensive crushing and mangling of bodies.
Against this background, one can see a line of imagistic and thematic continuity from the maiming of Adoni-Bezek at the very beginning of the book to the dismembering of the concubine at the end. That act of chopping a body into pieces, of course, is intended as a means to unite the tribes against Benjamin and its murderous rapists, but there is a paradoxical tension between the project of unity—unity, however, for a violent purpose—and the butchering of the body, the violation of its integrity, which in the biblical world as in ours was supposed to be respected through burial. The famous lines that Yeats wrote at a moment of violent upheaval in European and Irish history precisely capture the thematic thrust of Judges:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed… .
After this dark impasse to which the Book of Judges comes, it will be the task of the next great narrative sequence, which is the Book of Samuel, concluding in the second chapter of 1 Kings, to imagine a political means to create a center and leash the anarchy. That goal is in part realized, but the undertaking itself is an arduous one; and because these stories turn increasingly from legend and lore to a tough engagement in history, even as a center begins to hold, the blood-dimmed tide is never stemmed.
1And it happened after the death of Joshua that the Israelites inquired of the LORD, saying, “Who will go up for us first against the Canaanite to do battle with him?” 2And the LORD said, “Judah shall go up. Look, I have given the land into his hand.” 3And Judah said to Simeon his brother, “Go up with me in my portion, and let us do battle with the Canaanite, and I, too, shall go with you in your portion.” And Simeon went with him. 4And Judah went up, and the LORD gave the Canaanite and the Perizzite into their hand, and they struck them down in Bezek—ten thousand men. 5And they found Adoni-Bezek in Bezek and did battle with him, and they struck down the Canaanite and the Perizzite. 6And Adoni-Bezek fled, and they pursued him and seized him, and they chopped off his thumbs and his big toes. 7And Adoni-Bezek said: “Seventy kings, their thumbs and their big toes chopped off, used to gather scraps under my table. As I have done, so has God paid me back.” And they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died there. 8And the Judahites did battle against Jerusalem, and they took it and struck it down with the edge of the sword, and the town they set on fire. 9And afterward the Judahites went down to do battle with the Canaanite dwelling in the high country and the Negeb and the lowland. 10And Judah went against the Canaanite dwelling in Hebron—and the name of Hebron was formerly Kiriath-Arba—and they struck down Sheshai and Achiman and Talmai. 11And they went from there against the inhabitants of Debir—and the name of Debir was formerly Kiriath-Sepher. 12And Caleb said, “Whoever strikes Kiriath-Sepher and takes it, to him I shall give Achsah my daughter as wife.” 13And Othniel son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother, took it, and he gave him Achsah as wife. 14And it happened when she came, that she enticed him to ask a field of her father, and she alighted from the donkey, and Caleb said to her, “What troubles you?” 15And she said to him, “Give me a present, for you have given me desert-land, and you should have given me springs of water.” And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the lower springs. 16And the sons of the Kenite, the father-in-law of Moses, came up from the Town of Palms with the Judahites from the Wilderness of Judah which is in the Negeb of Arad, and they went and dwelled with the people. 17And Judah went with Simeon his brother and they struck down the Canaanite dwelling in Zephath and put it under the ban, and they called the name of the town Hormah.
18And Judah took Gaza and its territory and Ashkelon and its territory and Ekron and its territory. 19And the LORD was with Judah, and he took possession of the high country, but he was not able to dispossess the inhabitants of the valley, for they had iron chariots. 20And they gave Hebron to Caleb as Moses had spoken, and he dispossessed from there the three sons of the giant. 21But the Jebusite dwelling in Jerusalem, the Benjaminites did not dispossess, and the Jebusite has been dwelling with the Benjaminites in Jerusalem to this day. 22And the sons of Joseph, too, went up to Bethel, and the LORD was with them. 23And the House of Joseph scouted out Bethel—and the name of the town was formerly Luz. 24And the lookout saw a man coming out of the town and said to him, “Show us, pray, the way into the town, and we shall deal kindly with you.” 25And he showed them the way into the town, and they struck the town by the edge of the sword, but the man and his clan they sent off. 26And the man went to the land of the Hittites and built a town and called its name Luz—that is its name to this day. 27And Manasseh did not take possession of Beth-Sheʾan and its hamlets nor Taanach and its hamlets nor the inhabitants of Dor and its hamlets nor the inhabitants of Ibleam and its hamlets nor the inhabitants of Megiddo and its hamlets, but the Canaanite went on dwelling in this land. 28And it happened, when Israel grew strong, that it put the Canaanite to forced labor, but it did not dispossess him. 29And Ephraim did not dispossess the Canaanite dwelling in Gezer, and the Canaanite dwelled in his midst in Gezer. 30Zebulun did not dispossess the inhabitants of Kitron, nor the inhabitants of Nahalal, and the Canaanite dwelled in his midst and did forced labor. 31Asher did not dispossess the inhabitants of Acco, nor the inhabitants of Sidon, Ahiab, Ach zib, Helbah, Aphek, and Rehob. 32And the Asherite dwelled in the midst of the Canaanites, inhabitants of the land, for he did not dispossess them. 33Naphtali did not dispossess the inhabitants of Beth-Shemesh and the inhabitants of Baal-Anath, and he dwelled amidst the Canaanites inhabitants of the land, and the inhabitants of Beth-Shemesh and of Beth-Anath did forced labor for them. 34And the Amorites drove the Danites into the high country, for they did not let them come down into the valley. 35And the Amorite continued to dwell in Mount Heres, in Ajalon, and in Shaalbim, but the hand of the house of Joseph lay heavy upon them, and they did forced labor. 36And the territory of the Amorites was from the Ascent of Akrabbim, from Sela on up.
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
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1. And it happened after the death of Joshua. These words are a pointed repetition of the formula that begins the Book of Joshua, “And it happened after the death of Moses.”
the Israelites inquired of the LORD. This idiom indicates inquiry of an oracle in all likelihood, the Urim and Thummim, which could be used to yield a yes-no answer or to select an individual from a group. Some commentators have suggested that after Joshua’s death, there was no longer a central leader with access to God and hence the oracular device was necessary.
2. Judah shall go up. The prominence of Judah in the vanguard of the conquest patently reflects a later period when Judah was the seat of the Davidic monarchy and the chief remaining tribe. The report here moves from Judah’s military success in the south to the failures of the other tribes in the north.
3. Simeon his brother. This indication of fraternity and military cooperation probably derives from a moment in later history when Simeon was closely allied with or assimilated in Judah.
4. ten thousand men. Like almost all numbers in biblical narrative, this is formulaic, meant to indicate a large group. The reference to “seventy kings” in verse 7 is similarly formulaic, although it does register the fact that Canaan was divided among many small city-kingdoms, which were often at war with one another.
5. Adoni-Bezek. This name, which means “master of Bezek,” appears to be a hereditary title rather than a proper noun.
6. they chopped off his thumbs and his big toes. The mutilation, which on the evidence of Adoni-Bezek’s own words in the next verse was evidently a common practice, is both a humiliation and a means of permanently preventing the captured leader from becoming a combatant again because he would be unable to wield a bow or sword or run on the battlefield. It should be observed, moreover, that this grisly detail is an apt thematic and imagistic introduction to Judges, the most violent of all the books of the Bible. In the stories that follow, swords will be thrust into bellies, tent pegs into heads; people will be variously mashed and crushed; and toward the end of the book, the dismembered parts of a murdered woman’s body will be sent out to the sundry tribes in order to ignite a civil war. The mutilation of the king, then, introduces us to a realm of political instability in which both people and groups are violently torn asunder.
7. And they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died there. This notation and the one in the next verse about the total destruction of Jerusalem by Judah are a puzzlement. It is contradicted here by verse 21, in which it is said that Judah was unable to drive out the Jebusites but continued to coexist with them. 2 Samuel 5 reports, with some historical plausibility, that it was David who conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites (almost two centuries after the putative time of the events in Judges). One suspects that the Judahite writer was swept up by the momentum of his own historical moment: Jerusalem had long been the capital city of the Davidic monarchy, and so it was difficult for the writer to imagine that it had not been part of the initial conquest of his tribe.
12. Whoever strikes Kiriath-Sepher and takes it, to him I shall give Achsah my daughter as wife. The story here, including the two previous verses, repeats in virtually identical language the story told in Joshua 15:13–19. The offer of the hand of the daughter to the victorious hero is an obvious folkloric motif and recurs in the episode of David and Goliath.
13. Othniel. He is to become the first judge.
15. desert-land. The term negev (rendered elsewhere in this translation as the place-name “Negeb”) means terrain that supports little or no vegetation, probably deriving from a verbal stem that means “dry” or “desolate.” The region in the southern part of the Land of Israel is that sort of terrain and hence is given the geographical name Negeb. Another term, midbar, is represented in this version, as it is in most English translations, as “wilderness” because it includes land in which animals can graze.
16. the Town of Palms. On the basis of other biblical occurrences, this is Jericho.
17. Hormah. The name puns on ḥerem, “ban.”
18. And Judah took Gaza and its territory. This verse is another instance in which the writer’s location in a time when the Philistine coastal enclave had long been subdued is retrojected to the period of the Judges. Here three of the five towns of the Philistine pentopolis are said to be conquered by Judah. But in the subsequent narrative, down to the time of David, the Philistines remain autonomous and a potent military threat; and in Judges itself, in the Samson story, Gaza is very much in the hands of the Philistines.
19. was not able. The Hebrew of the received text sounds odd at this point: “was not able” occurs in Onkelos’s Aramaic version.
20. the three sons of the giant. Though many interpreters prefer to understand the last term here, ʿanaq, as a proper noun, it does mean “giant,” and there is a clear tradition reflected in Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges that some of the indigenous inhabitants of the land were giants.
22. Bethel. The report now moves to the north. Bethel was to become a central cultic location in the northern kingdom of Israel after the split in the monarchy.
24. the way into the town. Yigal Yadin has cited archaeological evidence that some Canaanite towns had tunnels that provided secret access to them. That sounds plausible here because the lookouts are surely not asking directions to the main gate of the town.
28. Israel … put the Canaanite to forced labor, but it did not dispossess him. Whether this subjugation of the Canaanite population to the Israelites was a historical fact or is merely a face-saving formula for the failure of the conquest is uncertain. In any case, the chapter from this point on spells out a theme of incompletion that had fluctuated through the Book of Joshua. In the first half of Joshua, the conquest of the land appears to be comprehensive; in the second half, there are some indications that much remains to be conquered. Now we have a whole catalogue of failed conquests, all attributed to the northern tribes that would constitute the breakaway kingdom of Israel.
31. Acco … Sidon, Ahiab, Achzib. These coastal towns bring us far to the north, near present-day Haifa and beyond, with Sidon actually being a Phoenician city.
35. upon them. These words are merely implied in the Hebrew.
1And a messenger of the LORD came up from Gilgal to Bochim, and he said: “I have taken you up from Egypt and brought you to the land that I swore to your fathers, and I said, I will never break My covenant with you. 2As for you, you shall not seal a covenant with the inhabitants of this land—their altars you shall smash. And you did not heed My voice. What is this you have done? 3And I also said, ‘I will not drive them out before you, and they shall become thorns to you, and their gods shall become a snare for you.” 4And it happened, when the LORD’s messenger spoke these words to the Israelites, that the people raised their voices and wept. 5And they called the name of the place Bochim, and they sacrificed there to the LORD. 6And Joshua sent off the people, and the Israelites went every man to his estate to take hold of the land. 7And the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen the great acts of the LORD that He did for Israel. 8And Joshua son of Nun servant of the LORD died, a hundred ten years old. 9And they buried him in the territory of his estate, in Timnath-Heres in the high country of Ephraim north of Mount Gaash. 10And that whole generation as well was gathered to its fathers, and another generation arose after them that did not know the LORD or the acts He had done for Israel. 11And the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD, and they served the Baalim. 12And they forsook the LORD God of their fathers Who had brought them out of the land of Egypt, and they went after other gods, of the gods of the peoples that were all around them, and they bowed to them and vexed the LORD. 13And they forsook the LORD and served Baal and the Ashtoroth. 14And the LORD’s wrath flared up against Israel, and He gave them into the hand of plunderers who plundered them, and He handed them over to their enemies all around, and they were no longer able to stand up against their enemies. 15Whenever they sallied forth, the LORD’s hand was against them for harm, as the LORD had spoken and as the LORD had vowed to them, and they were in sore straits. 16And the LORD raised up judges and rescued them from their plunderers. 17And their judges, too, they did not heed, for they went whoring after other gods and bowed to them, they swerved quickly from the way in which their fathers had gone to heed the LORD’s command. They did not do so. 18And when the LORD raised up judges for them, the LORD was with the judge and rescued them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge, for the LORD felt regret for their groaning because of their oppressors and their harassers. 19And it happened, when the judge died, they went back and acted more ruinously than their fathers, to go after other gods, to serve them, to bow to them. They left off nothing of their actions and their stubborn way. 20And the LORD’s wrath flared up against Israel, and He said, “Because this nation has violated My covenant that I charged to their fathers and has not heeded My voice, 21I on my part will not continue to dispossess before them any of the nations that Joshua left when he died 22in order to test Israel through them, whether or not they will keep the LORD’s way to go in it.” 23And the LORD had left aside these nations, not dispossessing them quickly, and He had not given them into the hand of Joshua.
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
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1. Bochim. The name, which means “weepers,” is proleptic, and its origin will be explained in verses 5–6.
I have taken you up from Egypt. The LORD’s messenger is not speaking in his own person but is serving as God’s mouthpiece, quoting His words.
I said. This verb in Hebrew can also mean “I thought” (perhaps an ellipsis for “I said in my heart”), and it is not clear whether God actually addresses these words to Israel or merely thinks them. The same ambiguity hovers over “I also said” in verse 3.
2. their altars you shall smash. This is in keeping with the vehement antipagan agenda of Deuteronomy.
3. thorns. The Hebrew tsidim would appear to mean “sides.” A common expression in contexts like this one is “thorns [tsinim] in your side.” This might be an ellipsis here, or, more likely, the similarity of the two words might have led a scribe to inadvertently replace tsinim with tsidim.
6. And Joshua sent off the people. The appearance of Joshua makes it clear that this entire passage loops back chronologically to the end of the Book of Joshua (chapter 24), when Joshua addresses the people, perhaps not long before his death.
7. And the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua. This entire verse approximately repeats Joshua 24:31.
the great acts. The Hebrew uses a singular noun with collective force. The same usage occurs in verse 10.
11. they served the Baalim. This is the plural form of Baal, the Canaanite weather god and probably the most widely worshipped deity in the Canaanite pantheon. Many interpreters infer that the plural form indicates Baal and other pagan gods.
13. Baal and the Ashtoroth. Here “Baal” is singular and “Ashtoroth” shows a feminine plural ending (the singular in this traditional transliteration would be “Ashtoreth”). Ashtoreth is the Canaanite fertility goddess, though in some Ugaritic texts she appears also as a warrior-goddess. The plural form, as with Baalim in verse 11, may suggest that a variety of pagan goddesses is meant.
15. Whenever they sallied forth, the LORD’s hand was against them for harm. This whole passage articulates a clear-cut theological explanation for Israel’s failure to conquer the entire land: its swerve into idolatry enrages God and causes Him to bring about Israel’s defeat by its enemies.
16. judges. The Hebrew verbal noun shofet means both one who judges and one who rules, and the latter sense is more prominent here and in all that follows in this book. As a result, some modern translations opt for “chieftain” or an equivalent term. The shofet was an ad hoc military leader (in this regard, “chieftain,” suggesting a fixed and perhaps hereditary political institution, is misleading). From the subsequent narratives in this book, the Judge was seen by his followers—or, at any rate, by the writer—as a figure suddenly invested with a divine spirit that impelled him to action and enabled his success. It is precisely on the model of the biblical judges that Max Weber borrowed the term “charisma” from the Greek to indicate a purely personal political power.
18. the LORD was with the judge and rescued them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. A theological reason is offered here for a continuing unstable military situation. The Judges were basically guerilla commanders. A judge, exercising personal magnetism and military prowess, could for a certain amount of time harass and drive back enemy forces that were probably superior in numbers and weaponry, but such successes were bound to be temporary. This fluctuating pattern is explained in terms of cultic loyalty and backsliding: under the charismatic influence of the Judge, the Israelites were faithful to their God; when the Judge died, they reverted to their pagan practices. Verse 17 suggests that they did not heed their judges, or only temporarily.
19. their actions. The implication in context is “evil actions,” though the Hebrew noun used is not intrinsically negative.
21–22. the nations that Joshua left when he died in order to test Israel through them. Here a new theological explanation of the incompleteness of the conquest is introduced. Joshua, given his sweeping military successes reported in Joshua 1–12, might well have conquered the entire land, but he left some of it in Canaanite hands in order to see whether future generations of Israel would be faithful to their God and thus be worthy of taking hold of the rest of the land. God’s words in these two verses affirm that the people has failed the test and so will not be able to complete the conquest. The next verse then makes clear that Joshua’s leaving part of the land unconquered was actually God’s devising.
1And these are the nations that the LORD left aside to test Israel through them—all who knew not the wars of Canaan, 2only so that the generations of Israel might know, to teach them warfare, which before they did not know: 3the five overlords of the Philistines and all the Canaanites and the Sidonites and the Hivvites dwelling in the high country of Lebanon from Mount Baal Hermon to Lebo-Hamath. 4And they came to test Israel through them, to know whether they would heed the command of the LORD with which He charged their fathers by Moses. 5And the Israelites dwelled in the midst of the Canaanites, the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Jebusites. 6And they took their daughters for themselves as wives, and their own daughters they gave to their sons, and they served their gods. 7And the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD, and they forgot the LORD their God, and they served the Baalim and the Asheroth. 8And the LORD’s wrath flared up against Israel, and He handed them over to Cushan Rishathaim king of Aram Naharaim, and the Israelites served Cushan Rishathaim eight years. 9And the Israelites cried out to the LORD, and the LORD raised up a rescuer for the Israelites, Othniel son of Kenaz, Caleb’s young brother, who rescued them. 10And the spirit of the LORD was upon him, and he led Israel and went out to battle, and the LORD gave into his hand Cushan Rishathaim king of Aram, and his hand was strong against Cushan Rishathaim. 11And the land was quiet forty years, and Othniel son of Kenaz died.
12And the Israelites continued to do evil in the eyes of the LORD, and the LORD strengthened Eglon king of Moab over Israel because they had done evil in the eyes of the LORD. 13And he gathered round him the Ammonites and the Amalekites, and he struck Israel and they took hold of the Town of Palms. 14And the Israelites served Eglon king of Moab eighteen years. 15And the Israelites cried out to the LORD, and the LORD raised up a rescuer for them, Ehud son of Gera the Benjaminite, a left-handed man. And the Israelites sent tribute in his hand to Eglon king of Moab. 16And Ehud made himself a double-edged sword, a gomed in length, and strapped it under his garments on his right thigh. 17And he presented the tribute to Eglon king of Moab, and Eglon was a very fat man. 18And it happened when he had finished presenting the tribute that he sent away the people bearing the tribute. 19And he had come back from Pesilim, which is by Gilgal. And he said, “A secret word I have for you, king.” And he said, “Silence!” And all those standing in attendance on him went out from his presence. 20When Ehud had come to him, he was sitting alone in the cool upper chamber that he had. And Ehud said, “A word of God I have for you.” And he rose from the seat. 21And Ehud reached with his left hand and took the sword from his right thigh and thrust it into his belly. 22And the hilt, too, went in after the blade and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not withdraw the sword from his belly, and the filth came out. 23And Ehud went out to the vestibule and closed the doors of the upper chamber and locked them. 24He had just gone out, when Eglon’s courtiers came and saw, and, look, the doors of the upper chamber were locked. And they said, “He must be relieving himself in the cool chamber.” 25And they waited a long while, and, look, no one was opening the doors of the upper chamber. And they took the key and opened them, and, look, their master was fallen to the ground, dead. 26And Ehud had escaped while they tarried, and he passed Pesilim and escaped to Seirah. 27And it happened when he came, that he blasted the ram’s horn in the high country of Ephraim, and the Israelites came down with him from the high country, and he was before them. 28And he said to them, “Come down after me, for the LORD has given your enemies, Moab, in your hand.” And they came down after him and took the fords of the Jordan from Moab, and they did not let anyone cross over. 29And at that time they struck down Moab, about ten thousand men, every stout fellow and every valiant man, and not a man escaped. 30And on that day Moab was laid low under the hand of Israel. And the land was quiet eighty years.
31And after him there was Shamgar son of Anath. And he struck down the Philistines, six hundred men, with an ox-goad, and he, too, rescued Israel.
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
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1. all who knew not the wars of Canaan. The translation mirrors the looseness of the Hebrew syntax, although this clause clearly modifies “Israel.”
2. to teach them warfare, which before they did not know. Here an entirely different reason for the incompleteness of the conquest is introduced: Israel had to learn the skills of war in gradual stages through conflict with the Canaanites before it was prepared to conquer them.
4. to test Israel … to know whether they would heed the command of the LORD. Now the writer reverts to the theological explanation for the incompleteness of the conquest put forth in 2:21–23.
7. the Asheroth. In the plural feminine form, a different Canaanite goddess is evoked, not Ashtoreth but Asherah, the consort of the sky god El.
8. Cushan Rishathaim king of Aram Naharaim. There are two oddities in this name and title. Rishathaim, which means “double-evil,” sounds more like a symbolic epithet than an actual name. Aram Naharaim is Mesopotamian Aram (there were Arameans closer to the eastern border of Israel), which would be a long distance from which to exert temporary dominance over any population west of the Jordan.
9. Othniel son of Kenaz, Caleb’s young brother. He has already figured in the narrative both in this book and in Joshua as the conqueror of Hebron. In that instance, however, his military prowess was not enabled by the descent of the spirit upon him, according to the pattern of the Judges. His appearance now as the first judge is no doubt intended to establish a bridge between the period of Joshua and the period of the Judges. All the elements of the Judge paradigm are evident: Israel’s defection, its subjugation, its crying out, God’s response in raising up a rescuer, the descent of the spirit, the ensuing victory. But only the outline of the pattern appears—no details are offered of Othniel’s exploits.
15. the Benjaminite. The tribe of Benjamin, as the subsequent narrative will affirm, was noted for its skill in battle.
a left-handed man. The literal sense of the Hebrew idiom is “a man impaired [or bound up] in his right hand.” Ehud’s left-handedness plays a crucial part in his assassination of Eglon.
in his hand. Though the idiom means “through his agency,” with verse 18 making clear that there are at least several people physically bearing the considerable tribute, the use of “hand” picks up the appearance of the ominous left hand in the previous verse and its lethal deployment in verse 21.
16. a gomed. This measure of length occurs only here, but it has an evident cognate, garmida, in rabbinic Aramaic, which is a cubit, about seventeen inches. This would be short enough to conceal the weapon strapped to the thigh. The double edge of the straight sword makes it a thrusting weapon. Typical swords of this period were single-edged and sickle-shaped and were wielded by slashing.
17. Eglon was a very fat man. The name Eglon strongly suggests ʾegel, “calf.” In this satiric view of the enemy, he is a gross fatted calf, ready for slaughter.
19. Pesilim. This appears to be a place-name, but it means “the idols” (there is a definite article), and so it is probably a cultic site.
Silence! The Hebrew hass is onomatopoeic, something like shhh! When Ehud tells Eglon that he has a secret to convey, these words elicit exactly the response intended by the assassin: the king doesn’t want anyone else to hear, so he tells Ehud to keep quiet and orders everyone else out of the chamber. It should be noted that Ehud’s words to the king are abrupt, lacking the language of deference (“my lord the king”) required when addressing a royal personage. Eglon, in his eagerness to hear the secret, takes no note of this.
20. A word of God. At first, Eglon might have thought that the secret word was some piece of military intelligence that this supposed collaborator was offering him. Now Ehud presents it as an oracle, something that would be especially likely if Eglon is aware that he has arrived by way of Pesilim. (In this second bit of dialogue, Ehud is even more abrupt, now omitting the title “king.”) Eglon rises either because this is the proper posture in which to receive an oracle or because of his eagerness to hear the “word of God” up close. By standing, of course, he makes himself a perfect target for the sword thrust.
21. Ehud reached with his left hand. Because Eglon does not see this as the weapon hand, Ehud gains a decisive moment as he whips out the sword before Eglon can make a move to evade it.
22. the hilt, too, went in after the blade. The image of the weapon entirely encased in Eglon’s corpulence is deliberately grotesque.
the filth. The Hebrew parshedonah clearly shows the element peresh, excrement. The anomalous ending of the word may be a scribal duplication of the ending of misderonah, “to the vestibule,” which is the third word after this one in the Hebrew text. The release of the anal sphincter in the death spasm adds a scatological note to the representation of the killing of Eglon.
23. Ehud went out to the vestibule. The exact meaning of the Hebrew noun is uncertain, and our knowledge of the floor plan of Moabite palaces remains imperfect in this regard, though one scholar, Baruch Halperin, has made a heroic effort to reconstruct the architectural scene. But this would have to be some sort of courtyard or rear chamber on the other side of the king’s special chamber from the anteroom in which his attendants await him. The closing and locking of the doors, then, would be pluperfect: Ehud locks them from within and goes out through another, unspecified, exit.
24. and, look, the doors of the upper chamber were locked. The use of the presentative hineh, “look,” to mark a shift to the characters’ point of view is tactically effective here and in what follows: the courtiers are confronted by locked doors, and perplexed.
He must be relieving himself. The scatological detail is comic here: they can clearly smell the consequences of the released sphincter, and they use their inference to explain both the locked doors and the long delay.
25. they took the key and opened them. These doors evidently can be locked or unlocked from either side.
and, look, their master was fallen to the ground, dead. The management of narrative point of view is both eloquent and dramatic. They look and first make out “their master” (which is how they would have silently referred to him), take in the fact that he is sprawled on the floor, and then realize, at the very end of the syntactic chain, that he is dead. (With the short sword entirely buried in his belly, it is possible that no blood would be visible.)
26. And Ehud had escaped while they tarried. The courtiers’ long wait while they supposed their king was relieving himself gives the assassin ample time to get away.
27. he blasted the ram’s horn. It often happens in biblical narrative that two juxtaposed scenes are linked by the repetition of a term, in a different sense. The verb taqa‘ means “to stab” or “to thrust” and is used for Ehud’s killing of Eglon. But it also means “to blast” (on a ram’s horn or trumpet), which is what he does now as a signal to rally fighters around him.
28. Come down after me. The received text says ridfu ʾaḥaray, which means “pursue me,” an idiom that always suggests hostile intent. The Septuagint reads redu, “come down,” and it is very likely that the extra consonant, generating a wrong meaning, was inadvertently introduced through scribal copying in the Masoretic Text.
29. every stout fellow. The Hebrew adjective shamen usually means “fat” but here has the sense of “stalwart” or “strong,” a double meaning also exhibited by the English term “stout.” Its use here, however, clearly plays back ironically against the corpulence of Eglon.
30. eighty years. In this case, it is twice the formulaic forty.
31. Shamgar son of Anath. Anath is the Canaanite warrior-goddess. Some scholars think Shamgar may incorporate the name of the Hurrian sun god. It is a puzzle that this judge should sport two eminently pagan names. It is possible that the folk-traditions on which the tales of the Judges draw might actually reflect a fluid and syncretic situation in this early period in which on occasion a warrior of Canaanite lineage might have fought alongside some Israelite group.
with an ox-goad. This unconventional weapon anticipates Samson’s slaying Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. The very oddness of this detail—the sole detail we are given about Shamgar’s exploits—might suggest an actual memory of a fighter who used an improvised destructive implement, though the number of six hundred killed (six hundred is a set figure for military contingents) is unlikely.
1And the Israelites continued to do evil in the eyes of the LORD—and Ehud had died. 2And the LORD handed them over to Jabin, king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor, and the commander of his army was Sisera, and he lived in Harosheth-Goiim. 3And the Israelites cried out to the LORD—for he had nine hundred iron chariots and he had oppressed the Israelites mightily for twenty years. 4And Deborah, a prophet-woman, wife of Lappidoth, she it was who judged Israel at that time. 5And she would sit under the Palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the high country of Ephraim, and the Israelites would come up to her for judgment. 6And she sent and called to Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh-Naphtali and said to him, “Has not the LORD God of Israel charged you: ‘Go, and draw around you on Mount Tabor and take with you ten thousand men from the Naphtalites and the Zebulunites. 7And I shall draw down to you at the Kishon Wadi Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army, and his chariots and his force, and I shall give him into your hand.’” 8And Barak said to her, “If you go with me, I will go, and if you do not go with me, I will not go.” 9And she said, “I will certainly go with you, but it will not be your glory on the way that you are going, for in the hand of a woman the LORD will deliver Sisera.” And Deborah rose and went with Barak to Kedesh. 10And Barak mustered Zebulun and Naphtali at Kedesh, and he brought up at his heels ten thousand men, and Deborah went up with him. 11And Heber the Kenite had separated from Kayin, from the sons of Hobeb father-in-law of Moses, and he pitched his tent at Elon-in-Zaananim, which is by Kedesh. 12And they told Sisera that Barak son of Abinoam had gone up to Mount Tabor. 13And Sisera mustered all his chariots, nine hundred iron chariots, and all the troops that were with him, from Harosheth-Goiim to the Kishon Wadi. 14And Deborah said to Barak, “Arise, for this is the day that the LORD has given Sisera into your hand. Has not the LORD sallied forth before you?” And Barak came down from Mount Tabor, and ten thousand men after him. 15And the LORD panicked Sisera and all the chariots and all the camp by the edge of the sword before Barak, and Sisera got down from the chariot and fled on foot. 16And Barak had pursued the chariots and the camp as far as Harosheth-Goiim, and all the camp of Sisera fell by the edge of the sword, not one remained. 17And Sisera had fled on foot to the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite, for there was peace between Jabin king of Hazor and the house of Heber the Kenite. 18And Jael came out to meet Sisera and said to him, “Turn aside, my lord, turn aside to me, do not fear.” And he turned aside to her, to the tent, and she covered him with a blanket. 19And he said to her, “Give me, pray, a bit of water to drink, for I am thirsty.” And she opened the skin of milk and gave him to drink and covered him. 20And he said to her, “Stand at the opening of the tent, and then, should a man come and ask you, ‘Is there a man here?,’ you shall say there is not.” 21And Jael wife of Heber took the tent peg and put a mallet in her hand and came to him stealthily and drove the peg through his temple and it sunk into the ground—as for him, he had been asleep, exhausted—and he died. 22And, look, Barak was pursuing Sisera, and Jael went out to meet him and said to him, “Come, that I may show you the man you seek.” And he went inside, and, look, Sisera was fallen, dead, the peg in his temple.
23And on that day God laid low Jabin king of Canaan before the Israelites. 24And the hand of the Israelites came down ever harder upon Jabin king of Canaan till they cut off Jabin king of Canaan.
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
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1. and Ehud had died. The Hebrew indicates a pluperfect by placing the subject before the verb and using the suffix conjugation (qatal) of the verb: Ehud’s death leaves a hiatus, and Israel reverts to its wayward behavior.
2. Jabin, king of Canaan. This designation is a kind of hyperbole because there was no single king of Canaan. Hazor, however, was an important city, and so its king would have exercised considerable power among the city-states of Canaan. Later in the chapter, Jabin is called “king of Hazor.”
3. iron chariots. As elsewhere, this characterization is an exaggeration, perhaps meant to emphasize the fearsome power of the chariots, because in this era the chariots were wooden, with at most iron reinforcing elements.
4. a prophet-woman. The translation mirrors the structure of the Hebrew, which does not say neviʾah (“prophetess”) but ’ishah neviʾah. The introduction of the “woman” component, which is not strictly required by idiomatic usage, highlights the prominence of woman vis-à-vis man that is evident both in Deborah’s relation to Barak and in the story of Jael and Sisera.
she it was who judged Israel at that time. The figure of Deborah manifests the ambiguity of the role of “judge,” shofet. She is called a prophet because she evidently has a direct line of intelligence about God’s strategic plans for Israel. In this, she resembles the martial judges, who are invested with the spirit of God. She is not called a judge, perhaps because she herself, as a woman, does not go out to the battlefield, but she is the subject of the verb “judge,” a capacity she exercises in the judicial sense, as becomes entirely clear in the next verse.
6. Has not the LORD God of Israel charged you. Deborah would know what God commands Barak because she is a prophet.
draw around you. The Hebrew verb says merely “draw,” although the evident meaning in context is to muster or rally. This verb is pointedly repeated in God’s speech in the next verse: Barak is to draw fighters around him, and God will then draw the enemy into a place where he will be defeated.
8. If you go with me, I will go. Barak’s hesitancy makes it evident that the male commander needs this woman behind him in order to go out to battle. Thus he becomes a kind of proxy for Deborah, who is to all intents and purposes also a “judge” in the military sense.
9. for in the hand of a woman the LORD will deliver Sisera. The sentence has a double meaning. The woman in the first instance is the “prophet-woman” Deborah, who can rightly take credit for the victory. It also turns out to be Jael, whose actual hand, driving in the tent peg, will finish off Sisera.
10. Zebulun and Naphtali. In this prose version, which is almost certainly later than the poetic version in chapter 5, there are only two tribes involved and not an alliance of several tribes.
at his heels. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “at his feet.”
11. Kayin. This name is conventionally represented as “Cain” but is here spelled as it is to indicate that the ethnic group is the same as Heber’s identifying ethnic tag, “the Kenite.”
14. Has not the LORD sallied forth before you? In almost all the reports of battle in the Deuteronomistic History, YHWH figures as the warrior-god who defeats the enemy, and there is little representation of human acts of martial prowess or strategic cunning. The next verse invokes a characteristic locution: the LORD “panics” the enemy, thus causing his defeat.
15. Sisera got down from the chariot. The same Hebrew verb is used here as when Barak “came down” from Mount Tabor: the first coming down is a rapid descent in an attack, and the second is a flight on foot from an encumbered or perhaps damaged chariot.
18. Turn aside, my lord, turn aside to me. Her words, with an alliteration of sibilants in the Hebrew (surah, ʾadoni, surah ʾelay), are soothingly reassuring, almost seductive.
19. she opened the skin of milk and gave him to drink. Sisera has asked for water; Jael in a gesture of hospitality offers him milk. The detail picks up a line from the poem (5:25), but whereas the poem, in an epic flourish, has her offering the milk in a “princely bowl,” the prose narrative turns this into the homey realistic receptacle of a skin bag. It also highlights, as the poem does not, the ironic suggestion of Jael’s playing a maternal role toward the man she is about to kill: first she covers him with a blanket, then she gives him milk to drink and readjusts the blanket.
20. should a man come and ask you, ‘Is there a man here?’ The repetition of “man” (’ish) plays against the previous repetitions of “woman” as the man speaking is about to be undone by a woman.
21. and it sunk into the ground. This grisly detail indicates that Jael has driven in the sharpened tent peg with terrific power.
22. Come, that I may show you the man you seek. She was instructed to answer the question “Is there a man here?” by saying “there is not.” Meeting Barak in front of her tent, she volunteers the information that there is a man within before being asked, but she withholds the fact that it is a dead man.
and, look, Sisera was fallen, dead, the peg in his temple. As with the report of the courtiers seeing the dead Eglon in chapter 3, the character’s visual point of view is marked by the presentative hineh, “look,” and the sequence of details follows his visual intake: the identity of the man, Sisera; the fact that he is lying on the ground; the fact that he is dead; the instrument of death thrust through his temple.
23. God laid low Jabin king of Canaan. Jabin had not taken part in the battle. Now, after the defeat of his principal force and his armored corps under the command of Sisera, he and his kingdom are laid low by the Israelites.
24. the hand of the Israelites came down ever harder. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “the hand of the Israelites went ever harder.”
1And Deborah sang, and Barak son of Abinoam with her on that day, saying:
2“When bonds were loosed in Israel,
when the people answered the call, bless the LORD!
3Hear, O kings, give ear, O chiefs—
I to the LORD, I shall sing.
I shall hymn to the LORD, God of Israel.
4O LORD, when You came forth from Seir,
when You strode from the fields of Edom,
the earth heaved, the very heavens dripped rain,
the clouds, O they dripped water.
5Mountains melted before the LORD—
He of Sinai—
before the LORD, God of Israel.
6In the days of Shamgar son of Anath,
in the days of Jael, the caravans ceased,
and wayfarers walked on roundabout paths.
7Unwalled cities ceased,
in Israel, they ceased,
till you arose, O mother in Israel.
8They chose new gods,
then was there war at the gates.
No shield nor lance was seen
amidst forty thousand of Israel.
9My heart to the leaders of Israel,
who answered the call for the people, bless the LORD!
10Riders on pure-white she-asses,
sitting on regal cloths.
O wayfarers, speak out,
11louder than the sound of archers,
by the watering places.
There let them retell the LORD’s bounties,
His bounties for unwalled cities in Israel.
Then the LORD’s people went down to the gates.
12Awake, awake, O Deborah,
awake, awake, O speak the song.
Arise, Barak,
take your captives, Abinoam’s son!
13Then the remnant of the mighty came down,
the LORD’s people came down from amidst the warriors.
14From Ephraim, their roots in Amalek.
After you, O Benjamin, with your forces!
From Machir the leaders came down,
and from Zebulun, wielders of the baton.
15And the commanders of Issachar with Deborah,
and Issachar like Barak, in the valley ran free.
In the clans of Reuben,
great were the heart’s probings.
16Why did you stay among the sheepfolds,
listening to the piping for the flocks?
In the clans of Reuben,
great were the heart’s probings.
17Gilead across the Jordan dwelled,
and Dan, why did he linger by the ships?
Asher stayed by the shore of the sea,
and by its inlets he dwelled.
18Zebulun, a people that challenged death,
and Naphtali on the heights of the field.
19Kings came, did battle,
then Canaan’s kings did battle,
in Taanach, by the waters of Megiddo,
no spoil of silver did they take.
20From the heavens the stars did battle,
from their course they did battle with Sisera.
21The Kishon Wadi swept them off,
an ancient wadi the Kishon Wadi.
March on, my being, in valor!
22The hooves of the horses hammered,
from the gallop, the gallop of his steeds.
23‘Curse Meroz,’ said the LORD’s messenger,
‘Curse, O curse its dwellers,
for they did not come to the aid of the LORD,
to the aid of the LORD midst the warriors.’
24Blessed above women Jael,
wife of Heber the Kenite,
above women in tents be she blessed.
25Water he asked for, milk did she give,
in a princely bowl she served him curds.
26Her hand for the tent peg reached out
and her right hand for the workman’s hammer.
And she hammered Sisera, cracked his head.
She smashed and pierced his temple.
27Between her legs he kneeled, fell, lay,
between her legs he kneeled, he fell,
where he kneeled he fell, destroyed.
28Through the window she looked out, moaned,
Sisera’s mother, through the lattice:
‘Why is his chariot so long in coming,
why so late the clatter of his cars?’
29The wisest of her ladies answer her,
she, too, replies on her own:
30‘Why, they will find and share out the spoils—
a damsel or two for every man.
Spoil of dyed stuff for Sisera,
spoil of dyed stuff,
dyed needlework,
needlework pairs for every neck.’
31Thus perish all Your enemies, O LORD!
And be His friends like the sun coming out in its might.”
And the land was quiet forty years.
CHAPTER 5 NOTES
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1. And Deborah sang, and Barak son of Abinoam with her. The use of a singular verb (feminine) followed by a compound subject is an indication in biblical grammar that the first of the subjects named is the primary actor and the second one ancillary to the action. Deborah is introduced as singer of the victory song, but that is not a claim of authorship, and elsewhere in the poem she is addressed in the second person. In any case, the scholarly consensus is that this is one of the oldest texts in the Bible, perhaps composed not long after the battle it reports, around 1100 B.C.E. Its language abounds in archaisms, many of them uncertain in meaning and probably some of them scrambled in scribal transmission.
2. When bonds were loosed in Israel. The Hebrew verb can mean undoing hair or casting off restraints. In the context here, it might refer to a time of wildness in military crisis when the ordinary social and political order was in abeyance.
when the people answered the call. The noun here (‘am) and the verbal stem n-d-b often occur as joined terms. The verb suggests volunteering or answering the call, but is also particularly associated with noblemen, who would be the ones to fling themselves into the fray as leaders with the rest of the people following them.
4. Seir … Edom. These places mark the route of conquest from the southeast toward Canaan reported in Numbers and Deuteronomy. YHWH as warrior god marches ahead of the people.
dripped rain. “Rain” is merely implied in the Hebrew.
6. In the days of Shamgar … in the days of Jael, the caravans ceased. Shamgar, the first of the Judges, is represented as chronologically overlapping with Jael, the heroine of the poem. Israelite caravans, according to the poem, were unable to journey safely because of the danger from Canaanite warriors.
7. Unwalled cities. There are wildly different interpretations of the obscure Hebrew noun perazon. This translation links it to the verbal stem p-r-ts, “to breach,” and understands it to indicate a town without walls. At a moment of grave military instability, Israelites could no longer live in such unprotected places.
ceased, / in Israel, they ceased. This pattern of incremental repetition (the increment here is “in Israel”) strongly marks this poem and is a hallmark of its archaic character. Incremental repetition is the most explicit form of development or intensification from the first half of the line to the second, a pattern in which something is literally added in the second verset.
till you arose, Deborah, / till you arose, O mother in Israel. This is another line built on incremental repetition. Although the ending of the verbs looks, according to later normative grammar, like a first-person singular, it is almost certainly an archaic second-person feminine ending.
8. They chose new gods. As in the prose narratives, cultic disloyalty leads to military catastrophe—“then was there war at the gates.”
9. who answered the call for the people. Here the association of the verbal stem n-d-b with nobility is made explicit because these are “the leaders of Israel.” The martial ethos of noble warriors prepared to risk all has a certain affinity with the Homeric poems.
10. Riders on pure-white she-asses. In this early period, these would be the mounts of noblemen or princes.
11. archers. Although this is a common understanding of meḥatsetsim, linking it to ḥets, “arrow,” widely different interpretations have been proposed. If in fact the word refers to archers, the sound would be the twanging of many bows and the whizzing of arrows as volleys are shot.
unwalled cities. This is the same word that is used in verse 7. God’s “bounties” would be in reestablishing a safe order for the tribes of Israel in which they could once more live in unfortified towns.
went down to the gates. Battle is often engaged before the gates of the city.
12. speak the song. Yairah Amit proposes that the choice of the verb “speak,” dabri, is motivated by a pun on the name Deborah. The phrase here is the increment in still another incremental repetition.
13. came down. The Masoretic vocalization yerad is anomalous and has led many interpreters to see an entirely different verb here. The most plausible construction, however, is to understand it as an archaic variant of yarad, “came down.” Since battle is joined at a wadi and the Israelite forces assemble in the hills, “came down” seems appropriate.
14. After you, O Benjamin, with your forces. The tribe of Benjamin, known for its military prowess, would be a likely candidate to lead the allied tribes into the fray.
15. great were the heart’s probings. The translation follows several variant manuscripts that show ḥiqrey, “probings,” as in the next verse, instead of ḥiqeqey, “rulings” (?). Given that Reuben is denounced in the next line for not joining the assembled tribes in battle, this phrase is probably sarcastic: the Reubenites give themselves to indecisive thought and speculation instead of marshaling their forces for battle. This entire verse and the next one reflect a real situation a century before the monarchy in which there is no central governing force and not all the tribes can be counted on to “answer the call” in a time of crisis.
17. Dan, why did he linger by the ships? The reference is puzzling because Dan did not occupy coastal territory either in its early phase east of the Philistines or in its later migration to the north.
18. challenged death. Literally, “exposed its life to death.”
19. Kings came, did battle, / then Canaan’s kings did battle. This is another fine flourish of incremental repetition. “Then” is repeated through the poem, marking its narrative momentum. Unlike the narrative version of this story in chapter 4, which has only one enemy king, Jabin, the Canaanite forces here are led more plausibly by an alliance of kings.
no spoil of silver did they take. This is the first clear indication that they are defeated. It also anticipates the self-deluding notion of the Canaanite noblewomen at the end of the poem that their men are about to bring home an abundance of spoils.
20. From the heavens the stars did battle. This is a characteristic move of Israelite war poetry: no feats of valor on the battlefield are reported, for the victory comes from divine intervention. The fact that in Hebrew idiom the clustered stars are referred to as the “army” or “host” (tzava’) of the heavens encourages this representation of the stars battling on behalf of Israel.
21. The Kishon Wadi swept them off. Although the poem’s narrative report here is highly elliptical, it looks as though there is an evocation of the victory at the Sea of Reeds: perhaps here, too, the chariots are disabled in the muck of the wadi, which might be the concrete manifestation of the stars’ battling for Israel.
22. The hooves of the horses hammered. This pounding of hoofbeats steps up the “march” or “tread,” of the preceding line. The entire line in Hebrew is strongly alliterative and onomatopoeic, an effect the translation seeks to emulate.
23. Curse Meroz. Nothing is known about this particular town other than its representation in the poem as a place of egregious failure to join the general effort of battle.
the aid of the LORD midst the warriors. In this incremental repetition, it is evident that YHWH needs His human warriors in order to be victorious. The poem wavers in this fashion between understanding victory as a miraculous event and as the accomplishment of heroic deeds by brave warriors. Jael at the end certainly needs no divine assistance.
24. above women in tents be she blessed. This incremental repetition, by introducing an ostensibly automatic epithet for women with their domestic sphere, “in tents,” sets the scene for the killing with the tent peg.
25. Water he asked for, milk did she give. Unlike the prose narrative, there is no dialogue, with its delineation of interaction of characters, only a series of gestures and acts.
in a princely bowl she served him curds. This is an eloquent flourish and heightening of the giving of milk in the first verset. At the same time, the offering of the bowl to Sisera (who has not yet been named) focuses visual attention on the hands of the woman bearing the bowl, and in the next line those hands will be murderous.
26. Her hand for the tent peg reached out. This would have to be her left hand. In the elliptical narrative report of the poem, we are not told that Sisera has fallen asleep, although the understanding of the prose story that this is the case sounds plausible. Alternatively, as he was drinking, his face deep in the bowl, she might have attacked him from behind, though he appears to be facing her when he falls.
she hammered Sisera, cracked his head. / She smashed and pierced his temple. The noun “hammer” at the end of the previous line now becomes a verb. In a related way, the entire report of the killing uses sequences of overlapping verbs, like cinematic frames one after the other—here: hammered, cracked, smashed, pierced. The verb “hammered” was previously applied to hoofbeats.
27. Between her legs he kneeled, fell, lay. His death agony is a kind of grotesque parody and reversal of sexual assault, a common practice in warfare, as we are reminded at the beginning of verse 30. This triadic line is one of the most brilliant deployments of incremental repetition in the poem, culminating in the climactic increment “destroyed” at the end.
28. Through the window she looked out. In a maneuver akin to cinematic faux raccord, we do not yet know that the “she” is Sisera’s mother, and for a moment we might even imagine that the poem is referring to Jael, though the window could not belong in a tent.
moaned. The Hebrew verbal stem y-b-b appears only here in the biblical corpus, and so one must surmise from context that it is some sort of lament, moan, or complaint.
window … lattice. It then becomes apparent that the scene has switched from the simple setting of a tent to a luxurious palace.
the clatter of his cars. The term “clatter” is more literally “pounding” and thus picks up the hammering hoofbeats of verse 22.
30. they will find and share out the spoils. The reason for the delayed return, they imagine, is that the victorious warriors are taking time to gather booty.
a damsel or two. The Hebrew raḥam is an archaic term, with a cognate that figures in Ugaritic texts, hence the choice of “damsel.” But it is transparently linked with reḥem, “womb,” and so might conceivably be a coarser term for a captive woman. In this warrior culture, the women unquestionably assume that it is the prerogative of the men to bring back fresh bedmates for themselves—even two to a customer—from the conquered enemy.
spoil of dyed stuff. But the women can anticipate their own special share in the spoils—gorgeous embroidered cloth taken from the women of the enemy. If this is the raiment of the captive women, they will have no need of such finery as sex slaves of their captors.
1And the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD, and He gave them into the hand of Midian seven years. 2And the hand of Midian was strong over Israel. Because of Midian the Israelites made themselves the dugouts that are in the mountains and the caves and the strongholds. 3And it happened when Israel planted, that Midian and Amalek and the Easterners came up against them. 4And they encamped against them and destroyed the yield of the land all the way to Gaza, and they would not leave a source of livelihood in Israel, nor sheep nor ox nor donkey. 5For they with their flocks and tents would come up, like locusts in multitude, and they and their camels were beyond numbering, and they came into the land to destroy it. 6And Israel was sorely impoverished because of Midian, and the Israelites cried out to the LORD. 7And it happened, when the Israelites cried out to the LORD about Midian, 8that the LORD sent a prophet-man to the Israelites, and he said to them, “Thus said the LORD God of Israel, ‘It is I Who brought you up from Egypt and brought you out from the house of slaves. 9And I saved you from the hand of Egypt and from the hand of all your oppressors, and I drove them out before you and I gave you their land. 10And I said to you—I am the LORD your God. You shall not revere the gods of the Amorite in whose land you dwell. And you did not heed My voice.’” 11And the LORD’s messenger came and sat under the terebinth that is in Ophrah, which belongs to Joash the Abiezerite, and Gideon his son was threshing wheat in the winepress to conceal it from Midian. 12And the LORD’s messenger appeared to him and said, “The LORD is with you, valiant warrior.” 13And Gideon said to him, “Please, my lord, if the LORD is with us, why has all this overtaken us, and where are all His wonders of which our fathers told us, saying, ‘Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt?’ And now the LORD has abandoned us and given us into the grip of Midian.” 14And the LORD’s messenger turned to him and said, “Go in this power of yours and rescue Israel from the grip of Midian. Have I not sent you?” 15And he said to him, “Please, my lord, how shall I rescue Israel? Look, my clan is poor in Manasseh, and I am the youngest in my father’s house.” 16And the LORD’s messenger said to him, “For I shall be with you, and you will strike down Midian as a single man.” 17And he said to him, “If, pray, I have found favor in your eyes, give me a sign that you are speaking with me. 18Pray, do not move from here until I come to you and bring out my offering and set it before you.” And he said, “I shall sit here until you return.” 19And Gideon had gone and prepared a kid and an ephah worth of flour of flatbread. He put the meat in a basket and the broth in a pot, and he brought it out to him under the terebinth and brought it forward. 20And God’s messenger said to him, “Take the meat and the flatbread, and set them on yonder crag, and pour out the broth.” And so he did. 21And the LORD’s messenger reached out with the tip of the walking stick that was in his hand and touched the meat and the flatbread, and fire went up from the rock and consumed the meat and the flatbread. And the LORD’s messenger went from his sight. 22And Gideon saw that he was a messenger of the LORD. And Gideon said, “Alas, LORD my Master, for I indeed have seen a messenger of the LORD face-to-face.” 23And the LORD said to him, “It is well with you. Do not fear. You shall not die.” 24And Gideon built there an altar to the LORD, and called it YHWH Shalom. To this day it is still in Ophrah of the Abiezerites. 25And it happened on that night that the LORD said to him, “Take the bull which is your father’s and the second bull, seven years old, and you shall destroy the altar of Baal which is your father’s, and the cultic pole that is on it you shall cut down. 26And you shall build an altar to the LORD your God on top of this stronghold on the surface, and you shall take the second bull and offer it up as a burnt offering on the wood of the cultic pole that you cut down.” 27And Gideon took ten men of his servants and did as the LORD had spoken to him. And it happened as his father’s household and the men of the town feared to do it by day, that he did it at night. 28And the men of the town rose early in the morning, and, look, the altar of Baal was shattered and the cultic pole that was on it was cut down, and the second bull was offered up on the altar that had been built. 29And every man said to his fellow, “Who has done this thing?” And they inquired and sought out, and they said, “Gideon son of Joash has done this thing.” 30And the men of the town said to Joash, “Bring out your son that he may die, for he has shattered the altar of Baal and cut down the cultic pole that was on it.” 31And Joash said to all who stood round him, “Will you contend for Baal, will you rescue him? Let he who would contend for him be put to death by morning. If he is a god, he will contend for himself, for his altar has been shattered.” 32And he was called on that day Jerubaal, which is to say, “Let him contend for himself, for his altar has been shattered.”
33And all of Midian and Amalek and the Easterners gathered together, and they crossed over and camped in the Valley of Jezreel. 34And the spirit of the LORD invested Gideon, and he blasted the ram’s horn, and Abiezer was mustered behind him. 35And he sent messengers throughout Manasseh, and it, too, was mustered behind him. And he sent messengers in Asher and in Zebulun and in Naphtali, and they went up to meet them. 36And Gideon said to God, “If You are going to rescue Israel by my hand as You have spoken, 37look, I am about to place a fleece of wool on the threshing floor. If there is dew on the fleece alone but on the ground it is dry, I shall know that You will rescue Israel by my hand as You have spoken.” 38And so it was: he rose early the next day and squeezed the fleece and wrung out dew from the fleece, a bowlful of water. 39And Gideon said to God, “Let Your wrath not flare up against me. I would speak just this one time more and I would make a trial, pray, just this one time more with the fleece. Let it be dry on the fleece alone, and on the ground let there be dew.” 40And, so God did on that night, and it was dry on the fleece alone and on all the ground there was dew.
CHAPTER 6 NOTES
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1. Midian. The Midianites, unlike the indigenous peoples of Canaan confronted by Deborah and Barak, are nomads whose chief territory is east of the Jordan.
2. the dugouts. On the basis of an Arab cognate, the term probably refers to some sort of man-made trench. In modern Hebrew, this word, minharah, is used for “tunnel.”
strongholds. These would not be architectural structures but the tops of crags that are adapted as fortifications.
4. destroyed the yield of the land. The Midianites are not an invading army but ruthless marauders, and so they pillage the fields or use them for grazing and confiscate the Israelites’ livestock.
5. camels. These beasts, only recently domesticated toward the end of the second millennium B.C.E., were the distinctive mounts of the desert-dwelling Midianites. The Israelites for the most part used donkeys.
11. Gideon. The name transparently derives from the verbal stem g-d-ʿ, which means “to hack down.” Since the name appears to be a consequence of his first act in the story, one might guess that his original name was actually the pagan name Jerubaal, which would mean, “Baal contends [for his loyal worshippers],” and not, as verse 32 suggests, “Let Baal contend for himself,” or perhaps, referring to Gideon, “he contends with Baal.”
12. the LORD’S messenger. The Masoretic Text reads “the LORD,” but some Hebrew manuscripts have “the LORD’s messenger.” The same problem occurs in verse 16. There are scholars who think “messenger” was piously added earlier and later in the passage in order to avoid excessive anthropomorphism, but, on the other hand, the image of God Himself poking at something with the tip of a walking stick (verse 21) would be anomalous, and so it seems wiser to assume that the interlocutor throughout is a divine emissary, not the divinity.
valiant warrior. He has not yet earned this epithet, which is thus predictive, and in fact he seems, as Yairah Amit has observed, a rather fearful man.
14. Go in this power of yours. This phrase probably suggests that the LORD’s messenger is conferring power on Gideon.
15. my clan is poor … I am the youngest. Such professions of inadequacy regularly occur in the call narratives of the prophets, and they are evident in Moses’s call narrative—that is, the call to prophecy. In fact, the possession of numerous servants (or, perhaps, slaves) indicates that Gideon’s family is well off.
20. pour out the broth. Though the liquid in question is not conventional in the cult, this looks like a libation.
21. And the LORD’s messenger went from his sight. Given the fact that he has just miraculously ignited a fire on the rock, it is likely that his going away is equally miraculous—a sudden vanishing.
22. Alas, LORD my Master. Here the direct reference to God is appropriate because one would pray to God, not to a divine emissary. But Gideon fears that beholding even a messenger of God could mean death for him.
24. YHWH Shalom. That is, “the LORD—it is well,” the words God spoke to Gideon.
25. the second bull. This second bull is a puzzle because nothing afterward is done in the story with what appears to be a first bull. Some scholars solve the problem by emending sheini, “second,” to shamen, “fat,” thus eliminating the multiplicity of bulls.
26. this stronghold. See the comment on verse 2.
on the surface. The Hebrew maʿarakhah is a little odd. It usually refers to anything arrayed in a set order, like the items in a sacrifice or troops in an army. Perhaps here it is a kind of metonymy, as David Kimchi surmised, indicating the flat surface of the rock on which the sacrifice is to be laid out.
27. the men of the town feared to do it by day. Here the fearful ones are Gideon’s subordinates, not Gideon himself. This nocturnal act is of a piece with the clandestine threshing of wheat in a winepress. However, the people feared here are not Midianite marauders but the Israelite inhabitants of the town, who have made Baal worship the official cult there, as we see vividly in their resolution to execute Gideon for having desecrated the altar of Baal.
31. Let he who would contend for him be put to death. Joash shrewdly argues that if Baal has real power as a god, he will fight his own battles and exact punishment from the person who violated his altar. If he does not do that, he is not worthy of worship.
33. crossed over. The term indicates crossing the Jordan from their habitual territory to the east.
34. blasted the ram’s horn. As in the Ehud story, this is a call to arms.
37. I am about to place a fleece of wool. Moses, too, was given signs before the beginning of his mission, but the apprehensive Gideon sets up an elaborate test for a sign and then reverses its terms for a second test.
39. Let Your wrath not flare up. Gideon obviously feels he is pushing matters with God, but he nevertheless requires an additional proof that God will be with him when he leads the insurrection against the powerful Midianites.
Let it be dry on the fleece alone, and on the ground let there be dew. This is a more miraculous outcome than the first test because fleece would naturally absorb moisture that might well evaporate from the ground.
1And Jerubaal, that is, Gideon, rose early, and all the troops that were with him, and they camped by Ein Harod. And the camp of Midian was north of Gibeath Hamoreh in the valley. 2And the LORD said to Gideon, “The troops that are with you are too many for Me to give Midian into their hand, lest Israel boast to Me saying, ‘My own hand made me victorious.’ 3And, now, call out, pray, in the hearing of the troops, saying: ‘Whoever is fearful and trembling, let him turn round from Mount Gilead.’” And twenty-two thousand turned back from the troops, and ten thousand remained. 4And the LORD said to Gideon, “The troops are still too many. Bring them down to the water and I shall sift them out for you there. And so, of whom I say to you, ‘This one shall go with you,’ he shall go with you, and all of whom I say, ‘This one shall not go with you,’ he shall not go.” 5And he brought the troops down to the water. And the LORD said to Gideon, “Whoever laps the water with his tongue, as a dog laps, set him apart, and whoever kneels on his knees to drink, set him apart.” 6And the number of those lapping from their hand to their mouth came to three hundred men. And all the rest of the troops kneeled on their knees to drink water. 7And the LORD said to Gideon, “With the three hundred men who lapped I shall make you victorious and give Midian into your hand, and let all the other troops go each to his place. 8And they took the provisions of the troops in their hand as well as their ram’s horns, and he sent off all the men of Israel each to his tent, and he held onto the three hundred men. And the camp of Midian was below him in the valley. 9And it happened on that night that the LORD said to him, “Arise. Go down into the camp, for I have given it into your hand. 10And if you are afraid to go down, go down both you and Purah your lad. 11And you shall listen to what they say, and then your hands will be strengthened and you shall go down into the camp.” And he went down, and Purah his lad with him, to the edge of the armed men who were in the camp. 12And Midian and Amalek and all the Easterners lay along the valley, like locusts in multitude, and their camels were beyond numbering, like the sand that is on the shore of the sea in multitude. 13And Gideon came, and, look, a man was recounting a dream to his fellow, and he said, “Look, I dreamed a dream, and, look, a loaf of barley bread was rolling over through the camp of Midian and came up to the tent and struck it and overturned it and the tent fell.” 14And his fellow answered and said, “That could only be the sword of Gideon son of Joash man of Israel. God has given into his hand Midian and all its camp.” 15And it happened, when Gideon heard the recounting of the dream and its explanation, that he bowed down and went back to the camp of Israel and said, “Arise, for the LORD has given into your hand the camp of Midian.” 16And he split the three hundred men into three columns and put ram’s horns in everyone’s hand and empty pitchers with torches inside the pitchers. 17And he said to them, “Look to me and do the same, and just when I come to the edge of the camp, so as I do, do the same. 18And when I blast on the ram’s horn, and all those by me, you too shall blast on the ram’s horns all round the camp and say, ‘For the LORD and for Gideon!’” 19And Gideon came, and the hundred men who were with him, to the edge of the camp, at the beginning of the middle watch—they had just then posted the watchmen—and they blasted on the ram’s horns and smashed the pitchers that were in their hands. 20And the three columns blasted on the ram’s horns and broke the pitchers and held the torches with their left hand, and their right hand the ram’s horns to blast on, and called out: “Sword for the LORD and for Gideon!” 21And each one stood in his place all round the camp. And all the camp ran off and shouted and fled. 22And they blasted on the three hundred ram’s horns and the LORD set every man’s sword against his fellow throughout the camp, and the camp fled to Beth-Shittah, toward Sererah, to the banks of the Meholah brook by Tabbath. 23And the men of Israel rallied, from Naphtali and from Asher and from all Manasseh, and they pursued Midian. 24And Gideon sent messengers throughout the high country of Ephraim, saying, “Come down to meet Midian and take from them the water sources, as far as Beth-Barah, and the Jordan.” And all the men of Ephraim rallied and took the water sources as far as Beth-Barah, and the Jordan. 25And they took the two Midianite commanders, Oreb and Zeeb, and they killed Oreb at the Rock of Oreb, and Zeeb they killed in the Winepress of Zeeb, and they pursued Midian. And the heads of Oreb and Zeeb they brought to Gideon from across the Jordan.
CHAPTER 7 NOTES
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2. The troops that are with you are too many. One suspects that behind this tale of a test that eliminates the vast majority of the fighting men there may lie a historical memory of a small group of guerillas that defeated numerically superior Midianite forces in a surprise attack.
3. turn round. The verb ts-p-r is unusual and the meaning uncertain, but there is a noun derived from this root that suggests going around.
5. Whoever laps the water with his tongue, as a dog laps. The point of the first of the two winnowing procedures—sending home whoever is afraid—is self-evident. This second elimination procedure is at first blush peculiar because similarity to a dog—in general a reviled animal in the biblical world—might not appear to be a recommendation for a good soldier. The lapping of the water, as the next verse clarifies, is not done by putting face to water source but rather by scooping up water in one’s palm and then lapping it. The fighters who drink in this way remain alert and ready for combat even as they drink, unlike those who kneel to drink. Perhaps the feral and dangerous connotations of “dog” in Hebrew usage are also invoked here.
8. of the troops. The troops in question would have to be those who were sent back, leaving their provisions and ram’s horns (which in this context serve as battle horns) behind.
10. if you are afraid to go down. God has already experienced Gideon’s hesitancy in the two miraculous signs Gideon asked of Him.
your lad. The all-purpose noun na‘ar in this context clearly indicates a function like “attendant” or even “armor bearer.”
12. like locusts in multitude … beyond numbering, like the sand that is on the shore of the sea. This repetition of the vastness of the Midianite forces is an obvious counterpoint to the bare three hundred men whom Gideon now leads. The Hebrew writer evinces a special fascination with the numerous camels, the unfamiliar mounts of the Midianite marauders.
13. loaf. The meaning of the Hebrew tselil is disputed. Some interpreters link it to the root ts-l-l, which means to make a ringing noise and thus understand it to have a sense like “commotion” or “noise.” Rolling noise, however, is a problematic notion. Many medieval Hebrew commentators derive it, plausibly, from tseli, “roast,” construing it as a term for a round flat loaf baked over coals, which in fact is how Bedouins to this day make their pittah. It remains a puzzle as to why bread, and specifically barley bread, is the instrument of destruction in the dream, other than its being totally unexpected in this function, like Gideon’s strategy with the horns and the torches. It might be linked with the first image of Gideon threshing grain.
15. he bowed down. This may be a gesture of obeisance to God, Who, as he now confidently knows, is about to make him triumph.
16. he split the three hundred men into three columns. This move makes it possible for Gideon’s men to come down on the Midianite from three sides. Perhaps four sides would have been even more strategically effective, but that consideration is trumped by the numerical neatness of three hundred divided by three.
17. Look to me and do the same. In the Hebrew, the force of this command is underscored by a rhyme: mimeni tirʾu wekhein taʿasu.
18. and all those by me. These would be the one hundred men in the column headed by Gideon, as we see in the next verse.
For the LORD and for Gideon. Some Hebrew manuscripts and two ancient versions show “sword for the LORD,” as in verse 20.
19. at the beginning of the middle watch. The night was divided into three watches (which here neatly correspond to the tripartite division of Gideon’s fighters), so this would be sometime approaching midnight, when the Midianite troops were deep in slumber.
they had just then posted the watchmen. Either they have not yet settled into their positions of observation or they are not yet fully alert because they have just been wakened to take up their watch.
20. held the torches with their left hand, and their right hand the ram’s horns. Presumably, their swords remained strapped to their sides as they rely entirely on the effect of panic caused by the sudden blaring sound and the torchlight.
21. each one stood in his place. These are the horn-blowing, torch-wielding Israelites.
22. the LORD set every man’s sword against his fellow. In other accounts of Israelite victories, we are told that the LORD “panicked” the enemy. Only here do we get the mechanism of the panic, which in fact is a stratagem devised by Gideon to terrorize the sleeping army.
brook. Though most translations treat ʾavel as a proper noun (“Abel”), it means “brook,” being an alternate form of the more common yuval. Representing it as “brook” clarifies the meaning of “banks” (the Hebrew sefat is a singular noun).
24. Gideon sent messengers. Having routed the large Midianite army with only three hundred men, he now rallies behind him a much larger force to pursue the fleeing enemy.
took the water sources. In the first instance, they take hold of brooks to the west of the Jordan, where they can readily cut down the Midianites seeking to ford the streams, and then they take hold of the fords of the Jordan itself. The prominence of bodies of water in the destruction of the Midianites loops back to the test of how the Israelite fighters drink water from a stream.
25. Oreb and Zeeb. The two names mean, respectively, “raven” and “wolf.” Animal names were common among the Northwest Semites, including the Israelites.
they brought to Gideon from across the Jordan. The fleeing Midianite commanders are overtaken and killed east of the Jordan, having eluded the Israelite forces holding the fords. Gideon himself is still on the west side of the Jordan. He will cross it in the next episode in pursuit of the enemy.
1And the men of Ephraim said to him, “What is this thing you have done to us, not to call us when you went to do battle with Midian?” And they contended vehemently with him. 2And he said to them, “What have I done now to you? Are not the gleanings of Ephraim’s grapes better than the vintage of Abiezer? 3Into your hand God gave the commanders of Midian, Oreb and Zeeb, and what could I have done like you?” Then their anger against him abated when he spoke this thing. 4And Gideon came to the Jordan, about to cross over, he and the three hundred men who were with him, famished and in pursuit. 5And he said to the men of Succoth, “Give, pray, some loaves of bread to the troops that are at my heels, for they are famished, and I am pursuing Zebah and Zalmunna, the Midianite kings.” 6And the notables of Succoth said, “Is the palm of Zebah and Zalmunna already in your hand that we should give bread to your army?” 7And Gideon said, “Then when the LORD gives Zebah and Zalmunna into my hand, I will harrow your flesh with the thorns and thistles of the wilderness!” 8And he went up from there to Penuel, and he spoke to them in the same fashion, and the men of Penuel answered him as the men of Succoth had answered. 9And he said as well to the men of Penuel, saying, “When I come back safe and sound, I will smash this tower!” 10And Zebah and Zalmunna were in Karkor and their camps with them, about fifteen thousand, all who remained from all the Easterners, and their fallen were a hundred fifty thousand sword-wielding men. 11And Gideon went up on the road of the tent dwellers east of Nobah and Jogbahah, and he struck the camp when the camp thought itself secure. 12And Zebah and Zalmunna fled, and he pursued them and took the two Midianite kings, Zebah and Zalmunna, and he made all the camp tremble. 13And Gideon son of Joash came back from the battle at Heres Ascent. 14And he caught a lad from the men of Succoth, and questioned him and the lad wrote down for him the notables and the elders of Succoth, seventy-seven men. 15And he came to the men of Succoth and said, “Here are Zebah and Zalmunna about whom you insulted me saying, ‘Is the palm of Zebah and Zalmunna already in your hand that we should give bread to your famished men?’” 16And he took the elders of the town and the thorns and the thistles of the wilderness and harrowed with them the men of Succoth. 17And the tower of Penuel he smashed, and he killed the men of the town. 18And he said to Zebah and Zalmunna, “Who are the men whom you killed in Tabor?” And they said, “They were just like you, like princes in their features.” 19And he said, “They were my brothers, my mother’s sons. By the LORD, had you let them live, I would not kill you.” 20And he said to Jether his firstborn, “Rise, kill them!” And the lad did not draw his sword, for he was afraid, for he was still a lad. 21And Zebah and Zalmunna said, “You rise and stab us, for as the man, so is his valor.” And Gideon rose and killed Zebah and Zalmunna, and he took the crescent ornaments that were on the necks of their camels. 22And the men of Israel said, “Rule over us, you and also your son and also your son’s son, for you have rescued us from the hand of Midian.” 23And Gideon said to them, “I will not rule over you nor will my son rule over you. The LORD will rule over you.” 24And Gideon said to them, “Let me ask something of you—give me, every man of you, his ring taken as booty,” for they had golden rings, as they were Ishmaelites. 25And they said, “We will certainly give.” And they spread out a cloak, and each man flung there his ring taken as booty. 26And the weight of the golden rings for which he had asked came to seventeen hundred shekels of gold, besides the pendants and the garments of purple that had been on the Midianite kings and besides the collars that were on the necks of their camels. 27And Gideon made them into an ephod and set it out in his town, in Ophrah, and all Israel went whoring after it there, and it became a snare for Gideon and for his household. 28And Midian was laid low before Israel, and they no longer lifted their heads, and the land was quiet forty years. 29And Jerubaal son of Joash went and returned to his house. 30And Gideon had seventy sons, issue of his loins, for he had many wives. 31And his concubine who was in Shechem also bore him a son, and he named him Abimelech. 32And Gideon son of Joash died in ripe old age and was buried in the grave of Joash his father the Abiezerite in Ophrah. 33And it happened when Gideon died that the Israelites again went whoring after the Baalim, and they made Baal-Berith their god. 34And the Israelites did not recall the LORD their God Who had saved them from the hand of all their enemies round about. 35And they did not do kindness with the house of Jerubaal-Gideon as all the good he had done for Israel.
CHAPTER 8 NOTES
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2. What have I done now to you? The received text says “like you,” but many manuscripts show “to” (literally, “in” or “against”). An error in copying may have been triggered by “what could I have done like you” in verse 3.
Are not the gleanings of Ephraim’s grapes better than the vintage of Abiezer? Gideon now exhibits a new skill as a leader—the shrewd use of persuasive rhetoric. The Ephraimites had been resentful because Gideon did not summon them to fight in the first stage of the conflict with Midian. He responds with a pointed aphorism that would have spoken to any viticulturist: Ephraim, having been responsible for the capture and execution of Oreb and Zeeb, is so much superior to Gideon’s clan, Abiezer, that the stray grapes it leaves behind in the harvest are better than what Abiezer actually harvests in the vineyard.
5. the Midianite kings. It is improbable that Midian would have more than one king, so the term appears to be used loosely here to mean “leader.”
6. Is the palm of Zebah and Zalmunna already in your hand. Given the extended period during which the Israelites were painfully vulnerable to the Midianites, the town elders don’t really believe that Gideon will subdue this enemy, and so, in fear of Midianite retribution, they do not want to offer him aid. Amit proposes that the palm is mentioned because of a practice, attested among the Egyptians, of slicing off the palms of a defeated enemy.
7. I will harrow your flesh with the thorns. This fierce declaration—the literal sense of the Hebrew verb used is “thresh”—and of the matching one to the elders of Penuel is less a matter of personal vengeance than of military justice: the failure to give provisions to an army that is in desperate need is an act of treason and will be punished as such.
11. the road of the tent dwellers. These would be encampments of nomads (still evident in the Jordan Valley)—Gideon is heading into desert country.
thought itself secure. “Thought itself” is merely implied in the Hebrew.
14. the lad wrote down for him the notables and the elders of Succoth. The captive boy is constrained to be an informer. Though it is likely that literacy at this moment in the history of Israel was limited to a privileged elite, the writer evidently assumed that it was sufficiently widespread that he could attribute the skill of writing to a random lad seized by Gideon.
15. give bread to your famished men. Gideon, in his verbatim repetition of the words of the notables, adds a single telling word, “famished,” which was used by the narrator but not by them, and changes “army” to “men.” That is to say: to famished fighting men you were brazen enough to deny food.
16. harrowed with them the men of Succoth. Given that he goes on to kill the elders of Penuel, we may infer that the same fatal result is achieved at Succoth by the harrowing—a slow and painful death. In the Masoretic Text, the verb used appears to mean “cause to know” (hence the bizarre King James Version, in which Gideon “taught” the elders with thorns and thistle). The Septuagint shows “harrowed” (a difference of one consonant in the Hebrew), which is the likely reading.
18. They were just like you, like princes in their features. The Midianite kings imagine that they are flattering Gideon, but in divulging the family resemblance, they pronounce their own death sentence. By the ethic of family blood vengeance, he now feels obliged to kill them.
19. my mother’s sons. And not the sons of any other of my father’s wives. The connection, then, with Gideon is a strong one because these were not merely half brothers.
20. Jether his firstborn. Blood vengeance is a family affair, and so Gideon wants his firstborn to carry out the sentence. He may also want to toughen him to killing, which is, in a sense, the family business.
he was afraid. He was afraid, of course, not of the captive (and probably fettered) kings but of the act of stabbing them.
21. You rise and stab us, for as the man, so is his valor. Killing is a grown man’s business for both sides in the martial code of this story. They also may assume that a proven warrior like Gideon will finish them off with one swift blow.
the crescent ornaments. This detail is proleptic of the agreement to which he comes with his men.
23. I will not rule over you nor will my son rule over you. The LORD will rule over you. This emphatic repetition of their proposal that he establish a dynasty reflects an ideology circulating in premonarchic Israel, and which will still be maintained by the prophet Samuel. The vehicle of the LORD’s rule is the spirit, or charisma, with which He invests the ad hoc leaders of Israel.
24. And Gideon said to them. This repetition of the formula for introducing dialogue without an intervening response from the second party in the dialogue indicates that they are baffled, or perhaps even angered, by his refusal to accept their offer of kingship. Gideon realizes that he now has to propose something to placate or reassure them, but what he proposes proves to be disastrous.
rings. These are earrings or nose-rings, not rings worn on the finger.
as they were Ishmaelites. Ishmaelite and Midianite are often interchangeable terms. These semi-nomadic folk were evidently known for wearing golden ornaments.
27. Gideon made them into an ephod. The clear allusion in this episode is to Aaron’s fashioning the Golden Calf from the golden ornaments that he collects from the Israelites. In other contexts, the ephod is a priestly breastplate or an oracular device. The latter function may come into play here. In any case, the declaration that Israel “went whoring after it” clearly indicates it was treated as a sacred icon to be worshipped instead of God.
31. Abimelech. This name, which had some general currency (see Genesis 20), incorporates the element melekh, “king,” the very role that Gideon rejected when it was offered but that this reprobate son will try to arrogate for himself. Although Gideon himself dies in ripe old age, retribution, perhaps for making the ephod, overtakes his offspring through the malefic agency of Abimelech.
1And Abimelech son of Jerubaal went to his mother’s brothers and to all the clan of his mother’s patriarchal house, saying, 2“Speak, pray, in the hearing of all the notables of Shechem: ‘What is better for you, that seventy men should rule over you, all the sons of Jerubaal, or that one man should rule over you? And you should remember that I am your bone and your flesh.’” 3And his mother’s brothers spoke about him all these words in the hearing of the notables of Shechem and their heart was swayed to follow Abimelech, for they said, “He is our kinsman.” 4And they gave him seventy shekels of silver from the house of Baal-Berith, and Abimelech hired with them no-account reckless men, and they followed him. 5And he came to his father’s house in Ophrah and killed his brothers, the sons of Jerubaal, seventy men on one stone, and Jotham the youngest son of Jerubaal was left, for he had hidden. 6And all the notables of Shechem and all Beth-Millo gathered and proclaimed Abimelech king by the standing terebinth which is in Shechem. 7And they told Jotham, and he went and stood on the top of Mount Gerizim, and he raised his voice and called out and said to them: “Listen to me, O notables of Shechem, that God may listen to you. 8Once upon a time the trees went to anoint a king over them. And they said to the olive tree, ‘Reign over us.’ 9And the olive tree said, ‘Have I left off my rich oil, for which God and men honor me, that I should go sway over the trees?’ 10And the trees said to the fig tree, ‘Go, you, reign over us.’ 11And the fig tree said to them, ‘Have I left off my sweetness and my goodly yield that I should go sway over the trees?’ 12And the trees said to the vine, ‘Go, you, reign over us.’ 13And the vine said to them, ‘Have I left off my new wine, that gladdens God and men, that I should go sway over the trees?’ 14And all the trees said to the thornbush, ‘Go, you, reign over us.’ 15And the thornbush said to the trees, ‘If you are really about to anoint me king over you, come shelter in my shade. And if not, a fire shall come out from the thornbush and consume the cedars of Lebanon.’ 16And now, if you have acted truly and honestly in making Abimelech king over you and if you have acted well toward Jerubaal and his house and have acted toward him as he deserves, 17for my father fought for you and risked his life and saved you from the hand of Midian, 18yet you rose up against my father’s house today and killed seventy men on one stone and made Abimelech the son of his slavegirl king over the notables of Shechem, for he was your kinsman. 19And if you have acted truly and honestly toward Jerubaal and toward his house on this day, rejoice in Abimelech and let him, too, rejoice in you. 20And if not, let a fire come out from Abimelech and consume the notables of Shechem and Beth-Millo, and let a fire come out from the notables of Shechem and from Beth-Millo and consume Abimelech.” 21And Jotham fled and ran off and went to Beer and stayed there because of Abimelech his brother. 22And Abimelech lorded it over Israel three years. 23And God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the notables of Shechem, and the notables of Shechem betrayed Abimelech, 24that the outage of the seventy sons of Jerubaal and their blood should come upon Abimelech their brother, who killed them, and upon the notables of Shechem, who abetted him in killing his brothers. 25And the notables of Shechem laid ambushes for him on the mountaintops, and they robbed whoever passed over them on the way. And it was told to Abimelech. 26And Gaal son of Ebed came with his kinsmen and passed through Shechem, and the notables of Shechem trusted him. 27And they went out to the field and harvested their vineyards and trod the vintage and held a celebration and came to the house of their god and ate and drank and reviled Abimelech. 28And Gaal son of Ebed said, “Who is Abimelech and who the men of Shechem that we should be subject to them? Were not the son of Jerubaal and Zebul his officer subject to the men of Hamor father of Shechem? So why should we be subject to him? 29Would that this people were in my hands. I would remove Abimelech, and I would say to Abimelech, ‘Muster the full strength of your army and sally forth.’” 30And Zebul, the commander of the town, heard the words of Gaal son of Ebed, and his wrath flared. 31And he sent messengers to Abimelech in Arumah, saying, “Look, Gaal son of Ebed and his kinsmen are coming to Shechem, and they are about to turn the town against you. 32And now rise in the night, you and the troops who are with you, and lie in ambush in the field. 33And so, in the morning, as the sun comes up, rise early and attack the town, and, look, he and the troops who are with him will be coming out toward you, and you shall do whatever you are able.” 34And Abimelech rose, and all the troops who were with him, in the night, and they lay in ambush against Shechem in four columns. 35And Gaal son of Ebed came out and stood at the entrance of the gate of the town, and Abimelech and the troops who were with him rose up from the ambush. 36And Gaal saw the troops and said to Zebul, “Look, troops are coming down from the mountaintops.” And Zebul said to him, “You are seeing the shadows of the mountains as though they were men.” 37And Gaal spoke again and said, “Look, troops are coming down from the heartland and one column is coming from Elon Meonenim.” 38And Zebul said to him, “Where then is your big mouth that you should have said, ‘Who is Abimelech that we should be subject to him?’ Are not these the troops whom you scorned? Sally forth now, pray, and do battle with them.” 39And Gaal sallied forth before the notables of Shechem and did battle with Abimelech. 40And Abimelech pursued him, and he fled from him, and many slain fell as far as the entrance of the gate. 41And Abimelech stayed in Arumah, and Zebul drove out Gaal and his kinsmen from dwelling in Shechem. 42And it happened the next day that the troops sallied forth to the field, and they told Abimelech. 43And he took his troops and split them into three columns and lay in ambush in the field. And he saw and, look, the troops were sallying forth from the town, and he rose against them and struck them. 44And Abimelech and the column that was with him attacked and took a stance at the entrance of the town’s gate, and the two columns attacked whoever was in the field. 45And Abimelech did battle with the town all that day, and he took the town and killed the people who were in it and smashed the town and sowed it with salt. 46And all the notables of Shechem Tower heard, and they went into the redoubt of the house of El-Berith. 47And it was told to Abimelech that all the notables of Shechem Tower had gathered together. 48And Abimelech went up Mount Zalmon, he and all the troops who were with him, and he took one of the axes in his hand and cut down a bough and lifted it up and put it on his shoulder. And he said to the troops who were with him, “What you saw me doing, quick, do as I do.” 49And all the troops cut down each one his bough and followed Abimelech and put them against the redoubt and set fire with them to the redoubt. And all the people of Shechem Tower died, about a thousand men and women. 50And Abimelech went to Thebez and camped against Thebez and took it. 51And there was a tower stronghold within the town, and all the men and women and all the notables of the town fled there and shut themselves in and went up on the roof of the tower. 52And Abimelech came up to the tower and did battle against it. And he approached the entrance of the tower to burn it in fire. 53And a certain woman flung down an upper millstone on Abimelech’s head and shattered his skull. 54And he called quickly to the lad who was his armor bearer and said to him, “Draw your sword and put me to death lest they say, ‘A woman killed him.’” And his lad ran him through and he died. 55And the men of Israel saw that Abimelech had died and each man went back to his place. 56And God turned back the evil of Abimelech that he had done to his father to kill his seventy brothers. 57And all the evil of the men of Shechem God turned back on their heads, and the curse of Jotham son of Jerubaal came down upon them.
CHAPTER 9 NOTES
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1. to his mother’s brothers and to all the clan of his mother’s patriarchal house. The initial base of support that he enlists is his relatives—first his uncles and then the larger clan.
2. that one man should rule over you. His language takes us back to the proposal of Gideon’s warriors that he rule over them, with the scoundrel Abimelech obviously assuming the opposite view from Gideon’s about the advisability of monarchic rule.
4. the house of Baal-Berith. This is the local pagan temple. One should keep in mind throughout this story that the principal actors are Canaanites, not Israelites, and that Abimelech, though his father was an Israelite, shows no allegiance to the people or the God of Israel.
5. on one stone. This detail, which is repeated in the story, suggests an execution-style killing: first he captures and fetters his brothers, then murders them one by one, probably either by stabbing or beheading.
6. the standing terebinth. Though this is a reasonable construction of the two Hebrew words, they look odd syntactically.
8. Once upon a time. The Hebrew formula hayoh hayah signals the beginning of a parable. The attempts of some scholars to scan it as formal verse are unconvincing, but its rhythmic character and its use of stylized repetition, with the three-plus-one folktale structure, set it apart formally from the surrounding narrative.
13. gladdens God and men. This might also justifiably be construed as “gladdens gods and men,” reflecting a mythological background in which the gods, as in Greek tradition, quaff wine.
15. come shelter in my shade. This is, of course, sarcastic—the lowly thornbush gives no shade. The argument of the parable works both against Abimelech—a low and prickly character—and against the institution of kingship: only a nasty and unproductive type would aspire to the power of a king.
a fire shall come out. It is in the nature of kings to broadcast destruction, as Abimelech has already done in murdering his seventy brothers and as he will do much more extensively. In the last moments of his lethal career, he will in fact use fire as a weapon.
18. the son of his slavegirl. Jotham chooses a term of opprobrium for the concubine, just as Sarah does for Hagar in Genesis 21:10.
24. abetted him. Literally, “strengthened his hands.”
25. they robbed whoever passed. Despoiling wayfarers is hardly required to combat Abimelech, and so it is a sign that the notables of Shechem are as scurrilous as he, and both parties will come to a bad end. In fact, these depredations may be what gives away to Abimelech their location on the heights.
26. Gaal son of Ebed. The patronymic means either “son of a slave” or Ebed is a shortened form for “Obadiah,” which means “slave/servant of God.”
27. held a celebration. The vintage celebration involves drinking, and it is in a state of drunkenness that Gaal can confidently incite the celebrants to rebel against Abimelech, who is, after all, a ruthless killer and also, as will become clear, a savvy military commander.
28. Were not the son of Jerubaal and Zebul his officer subject to … Hamor father of Shechem? Abimelech is the son of an Israelite father who was not a native of Shechem. As such, he has no legitimate claim to dominate the Shechemites.
29. Muster the full strength of your army. Literally, “multiply your army,” the idea being: show me all you have—I can handle it.
31. Arumah. The received text says Tormah, but Abimelech is in Arumah.
36. the shadows of the mountains. The Hebrew has a singular “shadow.” Zebul’s canny strategem is to make Gaal think there is no army swooping down on him until it is too late. Given that it is very early in the morning, mountains to the east would cast long shadows.
37. troops are coming down from the heartland. Some time has elapsed, and Gaal now can clearly see that these are troops, and that one column is headed toward him from a particular place, Elon Meonenim (which means “Soothsayers’ Terebinth”). The exact meaning of tabur haʾarets, translated here as “heartland,” is uncertain because tabur appears only here and in Ezekiel 38:12. The Septuagint renders it as “navel of the land,” and in later Hebrew this was taken up as the word for “navel.”
38. your big mouth. The Hebrew says only “your mouth,” but a sarcastic sense of this sort is strongly implied.
42. the troops. These troops are the armed men of Shechem.
44. the column. The Masoretic Text shows a plural, but Abimelech would have to be leading only one of the three columns, and the singular is reflected in one version of the Septuagint.
45. sowed it with salt. Although there is some dispute about the meaning of this gesture, sowing a field with salt would make it infertile, so the likely intention is to mark the site as a place of eternal desolation.
46. Shechem Tower. In all likelihood this name indicates a place close to Shechem but not part of it.
the redoubt. The Hebrew tsariaḥ is a rare term, and its exact meaning is uncertain. Its occurrence in 1 Samuel 13:6 suggests it was some sort of fortified underground structure.
the house of El-Berith. The god to which this temple is dedicated is probably the same as Baal-Berith, mentioned in verse 4.
48. one of the axes. The received text reads “the axes,” but the Septuagint appears to have used a Hebrew text that showed “one of the axes.”
53. a certain woman. It is noteworthy that in this book based on a male warrior culture, first Jael and now this anonymous woman of Thebez deliver deathblows to an enemy. In a more seductive feminine mode, Delilah will bring down the Israelite hero Samson.
an upper millstone. This is the lighter of the two millstones and therefore feasible for a woman to lift up and drop from the tower.
54. lest they say, “A woman killed him.” In 2 Samuel 11:21, we learn from Joab’s words to the messenger that in fact Abimelech’s death by the hand of a woman had become proverbial. His last wish, then, is frustrated.
1And after Abimelech Tola son of Pua, son of Dodo, a man of Issachar, arose to rescue Israel, and he dwelled in Shamir in the high country of Ephraim. 2And he led Israel twenty-three years, and he died and was buried in Shamir. 3And after him Jair the Gileadite arose and led Israel twenty-two years. 4And he had thirty sons who rode on thirty donkeys, and they had thirty towns. They call them Jair’s Hamlets to this day, which are in the land of Gilead. 5And Jair died and was buried in Camon.
6And the Israelites once again did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baalim and the Ashtaroth and the gods of Aram and the gods of Sidon and the gods of Moab and the gods of the Ammonites and the gods of the Philistines. And they forsook the LORD and did not serve Him. 7And the LORD’s wrath flared against Israel, and He handed them over to the Philistines and to the Ammonites. 8And they smashed and shattered the Israelites in that year—eighteen years, all the Israelites who were across the Jordan in the land of the Amorites which is in Gilead. 9And the Ammonites crossed the Jordan to do battle as well with Judah and Benjamin and the house of Ephraim, and Israel was sorely distressed. 10And the Israelites cried out to the LORD, saying, “We have offended against you and we have forsaken our God and served the Baalim.” 11And the LORD said to the Israelites, “Was it not from Egypt and from the Amorites and from the Ammonites and from the Philistines, 12and the Sidonites and Amalek and Maon—they oppressed you and you cried out to me and I rescued you from their hand? 13But you forsook Me and served other gods. Therefore I will no longer rescue you. 14Go, cry out to the gods you have chosen. Let them rescue you in the hour of your distress.” 15And the Israelites said to the LORD, “We have offended. Do to us whatever is good in Your eyes, but save us, pray, this day.” 16And they removed the alien gods from their midst and served the LORD, and He could not bear the misery of Israel.
17And the Ammonites were mustered and camped in Gilead, and the Israelites gathered and camped at Mizpah. 18And the troops, the commanders of Gilead, said to each other, “Whoever the man who begins to do battle with the Ammonites, he shall become chief of all the inhabitants of Gilead.”
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
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1. after Abimelech. This is merely an indication of chronology since Abimelech was no rescuer of Israel.
Tola son of Pua, son of Dodo. The first five verses of this chapter are devoted to bare notices of two judges, Tola and Jair, with no accompanying narrative material. The number of years of their leadership, respectively, twenty-three and twenty-two, are not formulaic, which could conceivably mean that they record actual historical memory.
4. he had thirty sons who rode on thirty donkeys. In this period, donkeys, not horses, were the usual mounts for nobility. The number of sons, donkeys, and towns looks formulaic, but the detail about riding is odd enough that it might reflect a remembered historical fact.
6. served the Baalim and the Ashtaroth and the gods of Aram. The first two items are generic terms for pagan gods and goddesses, respectively; adding the gods of the five surrounding peoples mentioned here, one comes to the formulaic number seven.
7. to the Philistines and to the Ammonites. These are enemies to the southwest and to the northeast of the major concentration of Israelite population.
8. in that year—eighteen years. If the received text is correct (some manuscripts of the Septuagint do not show “in that year”), this would mean that the Philistines and the Ammonites battered Israel in direct assaults for a year and continued to dominate them for eighteen years.
11. Was it not from Egypt. The syntax is a little odd, but this is probably best construed as a periodic sentence continuing to the end of verse 12 with the verb “rescued” referring back to the chain of nations, most of which are preceded by “from.” Rashi neatly observes, “Seven rescues appear here corresponding to the seven idolatries that they practiced.”
15. We have offended. God’s sarcastic invitation to Israel to turn for help to the gods it has worshipped drives home to them the point that only He can save them from their enemies.
Do to us whatever is good in Your eyes. The Hebrew uses an emphatic form, literally, “You, do to us.” What they are saying is that they are ready to submit to punishment for their defection, but they nevertheless implore God to rescue them from oppression, which is too unbearable a punishment.
17. And the Ammonites were mustered. A new unit begins here: the circumstances for the impending battle with the Ammonites are established, and the need for a military leader sets the stage for the appearance of Jephthah.
18. the troops, the commanders of Gilead. Perhaps ʿam here means “people.” The appositional phrase “the commanders of Gilead” is awkward and might be a scribal gloss.
the man who begins to do battle. They scarcely permit themselves to imagine victory but are prepared to proclaim as chief whoever will dare to fight the Ammonites.
1And Jephthah the Gileadite was a valiant warrior, and he was the son of a whore-woman, and Gilead had begotten Jephthah. 2And Gilead’s wife bore him sons, and the wife’s sons grew up and they drove Jephthah out and said to him, “You shall not inherit in our father’s house, for you are the son of another woman.” 3And Jephthah fled from his brothers and dwelled in the land of Tob, and no-account men drew round Jephthah and sallied forth with him. 4And it happened after a time that the Ammonites did battle with Israel. 5And it happened when the Ammonites did battle with Israel, that the elders of Gilead went to take Jephthah from the land of Tob. 6And they said to Jephthah, “Come, be our captain, that we may do battle with the Ammonites.” 7And Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, “Did you not hate me and drive me out from my father’s house, and why do you come to me now when you are in distress?” 8And the elders of Gilead said to Jephthah, “Therefore now we have come back to you, and you shall go with us and do battle with the Ammonites, and you shall become chief for us, for all the inhabitants of Gilead.” 9And Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, “If you bring me back to do battle with the Ammonites and the LORD gives them to me, it is I who will be your chief.” 10And the elders of Gilead said to Jephthah, “May the LORD be witness between us that we will surely do according to your word.” 11And Jephthah went with the elders of Gilead, and the people set him over them as chief and captain, and Jephthah spoke all his words before the LORD at Mizpah.
12And Jephthah sent messengers to the king of the Ammonites, saying, “What is between you and me that you have come to do battle in my land?” 13And the king of the Ammonites said to Jephthah’s messengers, “For Israel took my land when it came up from Egypt, from the Arnon to the Jabbok and to the Jordan. And now, give them back in peace.” 14And Jephthah again sent messengers to the king of the Ammonites, 15and he said to him, “Thus says Jephthah: Israel did not take the land of Moab and the land of the Ammonites, 16but when it came up from Egypt, Israel went in the wilderness as far as the Sea of Reeds and came to Kadesh. 17And Israel sent messengers to the king of Edom, saying, ‘Let me pass, pray, through your land,’ and the king of Edom did not listen. And to the king of Moab, too, they sent and he would not agree. And Israel stayed in Kadesh. 18And they went through the wilderness and swung round the land of Edom and the land of Moab and came from the east of the land of Moab and camped across the Arnon and did not come into the territory of Moab because the Arnon is the border of Moab. 19And Israel sent messengers to Sihon king of the Amorites, king of Heshbon, and said to him, ‘Let us pass, pray, through your land to our place.’ 20And Sihon did not trust Israel to pass through his territory, and Sihon gathered all his troops, and they camped at Jahaz and did battle with Israel. 21And the LORD God of Israel gave Sihon and all his troops into the hand of Israel, and they struck them down, and Israel took hold of all the land of the Amorites, the inhabitants of that land. 22And they took hold of all the territory of the Amorites from the Arnon to the Jabbok and from the wilderness to the Jordan. 23And so, the LORD God of Israel dispossessed the Amorites before His people Israel, and would you possess it? 24Do you not take possession of what Chemosh your god gives you to possess? And all that the LORD our God has given us to possess, of that we shall take possession. 25And now, are you really better than Balak son of Zippor king of Moab? Did he strive with Israel, did he do battle with them? 26When Israel dwelled in Heshbon and in its hamlets and in Aroer and in its hamlets and in all the towns that are along the Arnon three hundred years, why did you not recover them in all that time? 27I on my part have committed no offense against you, yet you are doing evil to battle with me. Let the LORD, Who is judge, judge today between the Israelites and the Moabites.” 28But the king of the Ammonites did not listen to Jephthah’s words that he had sent him.
29And the spirit of the LORD was upon Jephthah, and he passed through Gilead and Manasseh and passed through Mizpeh Gilead, and from Mizpeh Gilead he passed on to the Ammonites. 30And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD and said, “If You indeed give the Ammonites into my hand, 31it shall be that whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return safe and sound from the Ammonites shall be the LORD’s, and I shall offer it up as a burnt offering.” 32And Jephthah crossed over to the Ammonites to do battle with them, and the LORD gave them into his hand. 33And he struck them from Aroer to where you come to Minnith, twenty towns, and to Abel Ceramim, a very great blow, and the Ammonites were laid low before Israel. 34And Jephthah came to his house at Mizpah, and, look, his daughter was coming out to meet him with timbrels and with dances, and she was an only child—besides her, he had neither son nor daughter. 35And it happened when he saw her, that he rent his garments, and he said, “Alas, my daughter, you have indeed laid me low and you have joined ranks with my troublers, for I myself have opened my mouth to the LORD, and I cannot turn back.” 36And she said to him, “My father, you have opened your mouth to the LORD. Do to me as it came out from your mouth, after the LORD has wreaked vengeance for you from your enemies, from the Ammonites.” 37And she said to her father, “Let this thing be done for me: let me be for two months, that I may go and weep on the mountains and keen for my maidenhood, I and my companions.” 38And he said, “Go.” And he sent her off for two months, her and her companions, and she keened for her maidenhood on the mountains. 39And it happened at the end of the two months, that she came back to her father, and he did to her as he had vowed, and she had known no man. And it became a fixed practice in Israel 40that each year the daughters of Israel would go to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in the year.
CHAPTER 11 NOTES
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2. Gilead’s wife bore him sons. The probable, though not inevitable, inference is that the legitimate sons were born after Jephthah, he belonging to his father’s wild-oats phase.
You shall not inherit in our father’s house. This declaration, accompanied by the banishment, appears to be a performative speech-act with legal force.
for you are the son of another woman. They don’t dare call his mother a whore to his face, and so they use a euphemism. Their behavior toward him, however, is brutal (in this regard, see the next comment).
3. And Jephthah fled from his brothers. The fact that he has to flee suggests that their driving him out was implemented with a threat of doing him bodily harm.
the land of Tob. This is a remote region in the northeastern sector of Gilead.
no-account men. The same term, reiqim (literally, “empty”) is also used for the mercenaries hired by Abimelech. It probably refers to men without property, on the margins of society, who have nothing to lose and readily join a band of guerillas or bandits. The young David also puts together a private militia of this sort when he flees from Saul.
5. the elders of Gilead went to take Jephthah from the land of Tob. Their going to seek him out in the badlands where he has located with his fighters obviously reflects the dire straits in which they find themselves.
6. Come, be our captain. Their initial speech to him is brusque, devoid of deference or diplomatic gesture. The position they offer him is military commander, qatsin.
7. Did you not hate me and drive me out from my father’s house. We now learn something new about the banishment: the brothers’ harsh act either had the tacit endorsement of the elders or was actively abetted by them.
8. Therefore now we have come back to you. The “therefore” amounts to a concession on their part: precisely because we were complicit in your banishment, we now come to you to make amends. “Come back” or “bring back” is a thematic key word in this story.
chief. Now they up the political ante: he will not be merely a captain but chief, or head, roʿsh, of the whole community.
9. If you bring me back. The man who was driven out now contemplates being brought back, as the elders have “come back” to him. Instead of accepting the immediate offer to be chief, he stipulates that he will assume that position only if he is victorious in battle, but he would have to become captain in order to undertake the battle.
it is I. The Hebrew puts the pronoun “I,” usually not needed, before the conjugated verb in a structure of emphasis.
10. May the LORD be witness. Literally, “May the LORD listen.”
11. the people set him over them as chief and captain. In the event, both positions are conferred on him before the battle.
Jephthah spoke all his words before the LORD. This is a prayer before the battle or perhaps an inquiry of an oracle.
12. And Jephthah sent messengers to the king of the Ammonites. The scholarly consensus is that this entire passage of attempted diplomatic negotiation has been spliced in from another source. According to the account in Numbers 20 and 33, it is Moab, not Ammon, that refuses right of transit to Israel, and, in fact, Moab is mentioned first here (verse 15) and more often, together with Edom and the Amorites. “The land of the Ammonites” may well be an editorial addition intended to link this passage with the surrounding narrative. Chemosh, the deity mentioned in verse 24, is the national god of the Moabites, whereas the Ammonite god would be Milcom.
24. Do you not take possession of what Chemosh your god gives you to possess? The theological assumption of this statement is perfectly characteristic of this early period of Israelite history. Israel has its own God, YHWH (“the LORD”), believed to be more powerful than other gods, but each nation has its guiding deity, assumed to look after the national destiny.
25. Did he strive with Israel, did he do battle with them? In fact, he fought against Israel, as is reported in Numbers 22, but to no avail, for YHWH caused him to be defeated.
29. And the spirit of the LORD was upon Jephthah. Only now, when Jephthah actually leads his troops into battle, do we have the formula of the investment by the divine spirit, the leader’s charisma, that is used for most of the other judges.
31. whatever comes out of the door of the house to meet me. The Hebrew is ambiguous: it could mean “whatever” or “whoever.” Some scholars have argued for the latter because “to meet” seems to imply a person, but the Hebrew, which is in fact a preposition and not a verb, has the sense of “toward,” and it seems unlikely that Jephthah would have deliberately envisaged human sacrifice from the start. In any case, it is a rash vow: the Midrash Tanhuma shrewdly notes that the first creature out of the house could have been a dog or a pig, animals unfit for sacrifice. The vow focuses on the act of return to the house, but the killing of Jephthah’s only child will mean the destruction of his house in the extended sense of the term.
32. the LORD gave them into his hand. This is all we are provided by way of a description of the battle.
34. and, look. As repeatedly used elsewhere, the presentative term marks the switch to the visual point of view of the character.
with timbrels and with dances. It was the role of young women to celebrate the victory in this fashion. The dance of joy will immediately turn into lamentation.
35. my daughter. This is an affectionate form of address, like “child.”
for I myself have opened my mouth to the LORD. The Hebrew incorporates a crucial pun. Jephthah’s name, yiftaḥ, means “he opens.” The verb used here, patsah, is slightly different from the verb pataḥ on which the name is based, but it is a close phonetic and semantic cousin. The belief shared by father and daughter is that vows to God are irrevocable and nonnegotiable: what comes out of the mouth cannot be brought back (“I cannot turn back,” a locution heavy with ironic resonances in light of Jephthah’s attempt to come back to the house from which he was driven).
36. Do to me as it came out from your mouth. Neither she nor her father can bring themselves to mention explicitly the horrific content of the vow. She speaks almost as though the vow were an autonomous agent that came out of her father’s mouth and cannot be called back.
37. And she said to her father. This is one of the most arresting instances of the convention of repeating the formula for the introduction of speech with no intervening answer in order to indicate a difficulty in responding on the part of the interlocutor in the dialogue. Jephthah, hearing his daughter’s declaration that she is willing to become a burnt offering in fulfillment of the vow, is dumbfounded and doesn’t know what to say. His daughter then goes on to add her special request to the affirmation of compliance she has just uttered.
weep. The Hebrew verb weyaradti in the form in which it appears would normally mean “and I shall go down,” but going down upon mountains doesn’t make much sense. The least strained solution is to assume it is a scrambling of ʾarid, which in Psalm 55:3 is a verb associated with weeping or complaint. Another possibility is to link the term here with the rare verbal stem r-w-d, which probably means something like “wander.”
38. And he said, “Go.” Jephthah’s extreme brevity of response suggests a man choked with emotion, barely able to speak.
her and her companions. Here and in the previous verse, it is unambiguous in the Hebrew that the companions are female—nubile young women like Jephthah’s daughter.
39. he did to her as he had vowed. The narrator, like father and daughter in the dialogue, avoids spelling out the terrible act of child sacrifice. This whole story has parallels elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, the most obvious being Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in order to obtain favorable winds to sail to the Trojan war. The parallel episode within the Bible is the Binding of Isaac, but here, in contrast to Genesis 22, the ending is tragic.
and she had known no man. This concluding note about her virginity underscores the point of keening for her maidenhood: she is cut off from the living without ever having had the opportunity to enjoy the fulfillment that life has in store for a woman.
40. each year the daughters of Israel would go to lament the daughter of Jephthah. The long-standing scholarly hypothesis that this is an etiological tale to explain an annual ritual still seems valid: one suspects a pagan practice in which young women go off to mourn the descent into the underworld each year of a vegetation goddess, a virgin like themselves, roughly analogous to the Greek Persephone and to the Mesopotamian male vegetation god, Tammuz.
1And the men of Ephraim were mustered and they crossed over northward and said to Jephthah, “Why did you cross over to do battle with the Ammonites, but us you did not call to go with you? We will burn down your house upon you.” 2And Jephthah said to them, “I and my people were in strife and the Ammonites sorely afflicted me, and I summoned you, but you did not rescue me from their hand. 3And I saw that you were not about to rescue me, and I put my life at risk and crossed over to the Ammonites, and the LORD gave them into my hand. And why have you come up to me this day to do battle with me?” 4And Jephthah gathered all the men of Gilead and did battle with Ephraim, and the men of Gilead struck down Ephraim, for Ephraim’s fugitives had said, “You, Gilead, are in the midst of Ephraim, in the midst of Manasseh.” 5And Gilead took the fords of the Jordan from Ephraim, and it happened when a fugitive of Ephraim would say, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead would say to him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” and he would say “No.” 6And they would say to him, “Say, pray, shibboleth,” and he would say “sibboleth,” and he would not manage to pronounce it right, and they would seize him and slaughter him at the fords of the Jordan. And at that time forty-two thousand of Ephraim fell. 7And Jephthah led Israel six years, and Jephthah the Gileadite died and was buried in his town, in Gilead.
8And after him Ibzan from Bethlehem led Israel. 9And he had thirty sons, and thirty daughters he sent outside, and thirty girls he brought for his sons from outside. And he led Israel seven years. 10And Ibzan died and was buried in Bethlehem. 11And after him Elon the Zebulunite led Israel ten years. 12And Elon the Zebulunite died and was buried in Ajalon in the land of Zebulun. 13And after him Abdon son of Hillel the Pirathonite led Israel. 14And he had forty sons and thirty grandsons who rode on seventy donkeys. And he led Israel eight years. And Abdon son of Hillel the Pirathonite died and was buried in Pirathon in the land of Ephraim in the high country of the Amalekite.
CHAPTER 12 NOTES
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1. they crossed over. This verb—Hebrew ʿavar—is a key word in the episode. In their challenge to Jephthah, they will say, “Why did you cross over?” These occurrences prepare the way for the testing of the Ephraimite fugitives who seek to cross over the Jordan at the fords (the Hebrew noun for “ford” derives from this same verb, ʿavar).
We will burn down your house. Jephthah, who was driven from his father’s house and whose familial house has been destroyed in the sacrifice of his daughter, is now threatened with the destruction of his physical house.
2. I and my people were in strife and the Ammonites sorely afflicted me. The received text is syntactically distorted here, reading: “I and my people were in strife with the Ammonites very.” The translation adopts a reading attested in several versions of the Septuagint, which appear to have used a Hebrew text that had one additional word, ʿinuni, “they afflicted me” before “very” (or “very much”).
4. Ephraim’s fugitives had said, “You, Gilead, are in the midst of Ephraim, in the midst of Manasseh.” The obscure wording here has given rise to conflicting interpretations. The one followed in this translation is Rashi’s proposal: even the least important, the fugitives, of Ephraim tell the Gileadites that they are no more than a tolerated presence in the midst of Ephraim and its brother tribe, Manasseh. In the denouement of the civil war, all the Ephraimite warriors will become fugitives to be slaughtered at the fords of the Jordan.
6. shibboleth … sibboleth. In contrast to the English use of “shibboleth,” here it is a password. The necessary inference is that in the dialect of Hebrew spoken by the Ephraimites, sh was pronounced as s. The Hebrew word can mean either “stream” or “stalk of grain,” but, given the proximity to the Jordan, the former sense is more likely. One might note that what comes out of the mouth of the fugitives leads to death, as was the case with Jephthah’s vow.
forty-two thousand. As with numbers elsewhere, this is hardly realistic.
7. in his town, in Gilead. The Masoretic Text reads “in the towns of Gilead,” but the Septuagint shows the reading adopted here.
9. outside. The probable meaning is “outside the clan.”
14. who rode on seventy donkeys. See the comment on 10:4.
1And the Israelites once more did evil in the eyes of the LORD, and He gave them into the hand of the Philistines for forty years.
2And there was a man from Zorah from the clan of the Danite, and his name was Manoah. And his woman was barren, she had born no child. 3And a messenger of the LORD appeared to the woman and said to her, “Look, pray, you are barren and have born no child. But you shall conceive and bear a son. 4And now, guard yourself, pray, and drink no wine or strong drink and eat no unclean thing. 5For you are about to conceive and bear a son, and no razor shall touch his head, for the lad shall be a nazirite of God from the womb. And he shall begin to rescue Israel from the hand of the Philistines.” 6And the woman came and said to her husband, saying, “A man of God came to me, and his appearance was like the appearance of a messenger of God, very fearsome. And I did not ask him from where he was, and his name he did not tell me. 7And he said to me, ‘You are about to conceive and bear a son. And now, drink no wine or strong drink and eat no unclean thing, for the lad shall be a nazirite of God from the womb till his dying day.’” 8And Manoah entreated the LORD and said, “Please, my Master, the man of God whom you sent, let him, pray, come again to us and teach us what we should do for the lad who is to be born.” 9And God heeded Manoah’s voice, and the messenger of God came again to the woman, when she was sitting in the field and Manoah her husband was not with her. 10And the woman hurried and ran and told her husband and said to him, “Look, the man that came to me during the day has appeared to me.” 11And Manoah arose and went after his wife and came to the man and said to him, “Are you the man who spoke to the woman?” And he said, “I am.” 12And Manoah said, “Now, may your word come true! What shall be the conduct of the lad and his acts?” 13And the LORD’s messenger said to Manoah, “From all that I said to the woman she must guard herself. 14From all that comes from the vine she shall not eat, and wine and strong drink she shall not drink, and no unclean thing shall she eat. All that I charged her she must keep.” 15And Manoah said to the LORD’s messenger, “Let us detain you, pray, and we shall prepare a kid for you.” 16And the LORD’s messenger said to Manoah, “If you detain me, I cannot eat of your food, and if you prepare a burnt offering, to the LORD you shall offer it up.” For Manoah did not know that he was a messenger of the LORD. 17And Manoah said to the LORD’s messenger, “What is your name? When your word comes true, we shall honor you.” 18And the LORD’s messenger said to him, “Why do you ask my name when it is a mystery?” 19And Manoah took the kid and the grain offering and offered them up on a rock to the LORD, and the other was performing a wonder, with Manoah and his woman watching. 20And it happened when the flame went up from the altar to the heavens, that the LORD’s messenger went up in the flame of the altar, with Manoah and his woman watching, and they fell on their faces to the ground. 21And the LORD’s messenger appeared no more to Manoah and to his woman. Then Manoah knew that he was a messenger of the LORD. 22And Manoah said to his woman, “We are doomed to die, for we have seen God.” 23And his woman said to him, “Had the LORD desired to put us to death, He would not have taken from our hand burnt offering and grain offering, nor would He have shown us all these things and at this time instructed us in this manner.” 24And the woman bore a son, and she called his name Samson, and the lad grew up, and the LORD blessed him. 25And the spirit of the LORD began to drive him in the camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol.
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
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2. his woman was barren. The Hebrew noun ʾishah, like femme in French, can mean either “woman” or “wife.” This translation renders it as “woman” throughout the chapter because it is a thematic key word that sets the stage for the story of Samson and his involvement with women. Indeed, the reason that she is not given a name, in contrast to her husband, may be to enable the narrator to repeat the word “woman” again and again in this episode.
his woman was barren, she had born no child. These words signal the inception of the annunciation type-scene. Of all the Judges, only Samson is accorded this scene, which, as we shall see, has several features that distinguish it from the other annunciations.
4. strong drink. The indication in verse 14 that specifically products of the vine are prohibited is evidence that this is liquor, sheikhar, derived from grapes, a form of grappa.
5. touch his head. Literally, “go up on his head.”
nazirite. The nazirite (see Numbers 6) is a person who takes on himself special vows of abstinence. The noun derives from a verbal stem that means to be separated or set apart.
he shall begin to rescue Israel. The divine messenger chooses his words carefully: any victory Samson achieves over the Philistines will be incomplete.
6. A man of God. Since he appears to her in human form, however “fearsome,” she has no reason to assume that he is a divine being, though he might seem to resemble one.
7. drink no wine or strong drink. Since the fetus feeds from the mother, the clear implication is that this prohibition, which begins in her pregnancy, will also be obligatory for the future nazirite. Nazirites in general refrain from alcoholic beverages. It is noteworthy that she says nothing about the ban on cutting the hair, which is another general practice for nazirites.
till his dying day. For the divine messenger’s “will begin to rescue Israel,” she substitutes this phrase, ominously introducing the idea of Samson’s death into the story before he is even conceived.
9. And God heeded Manoah’s voice, and the messenger of God came again to the woman. In fact, God does not send a response to the two of them (“come again to us”) as Manoah asked but only to the woman who is alone in the field. This version of the annunciation type-scene systematically sidelines the man, who really doesn’t grasp what is going on.
10. during the day. This slightly obscure phrase evidently refers to the day before.
12. his acts. The Hebrew uses a singular.
13. From all that I said to the woman she must guard herself. There is a little note of annoyance in these words: after all, I already explained to your wife what should be done about the child, and so why are you being so obtuse as to ask me to repeat myself? As a matter of fact, the celestial messenger does not directly answer Manoah’s question about what will be the conduct of the child because everything he says pertains to the restrictions that the future mother must observe. It is probably implied that all these restrictions must be followed by the son as well. The most striking aspect of this response to Manoah is a crucial omission: no word is said about not cutting the hair, as though this were a secret shared between the divine messenger and the woman that neither will entrust to Manoah. In the ensuing story, it is the secret of Samson’s indomitable strength that, when revealed to a woman, brings about his downfall.
16. I cannot eat of your food. The word for “food” here is literally “bread,” but because the proffered meal is kid’s meat, the literal translation could be confusing. The alimentary ground rules, one should note, for divine beings have changed: in Genesis 18, God and His two supernatural companions partake of the feast that Abraham prepares for them.
For Manoah did not know. Even at this late point in the story, he still doesn’t get it. And thus he goes on to ask for the name of the mysterious stranger, so that after the birth of the child he can find a way to pay honor to the bearer of the good tidings.
18. a mystery. The Hebrew root of this term is the same as the verb for performing a wonder in the next verse.
19. the other. The Hebrew simply says “he.” This translation is meant to avoid the erroneous notion that it is Manoah who is performing the wonder.
20. the LORD’s messenger went up in the flame of the altar. Of all the annunciation scenes, only here does the bringer of the annunciation disappear into the heavens in a column of flame. That pyrotechnic exit of course points to the supernatural character of the child to be born, but, even more strategically, it announces the motif of fire that will recur in Samson’s story. At the end, even when fire is not present either literally or in the figurative language of the story, it remains as a powerful analogue for Samson, the hero who blindly sows destruction, like fire.
21. And the LORD’s messenger appeared no more. This clause could equally mean that he disappeared from their sight and that he did not again come to them.
Then Manoah knew. It takes all this to get him finally to recognize the real identity of the bearer of the tidings.
23. Had the LORD desired to put us to death, He would not have taken from our hand burnt offering and grain offering, nor would He have shown us all these things. As her husband quails in terror, she calmly points out to him with impeccable logic that God could scarcely have intended to kill them (for beholding a divine creature) if He went to all the trouble of conveying to them instructions about their promised son. The annunciation type-scene is fundamentally matriarchal, the revelations being vouchsafed to the future mother, but here we are given a virtually satiric version of the annunciation, highlighting male obtuseness and the good sense of the woman. This scene thus becomes a perfect prelude to the story of a brawny male hero whose lapses of judgment in regard to women entangle him in repeated difficulties and ultimately destroy him.
24. Samson. Alhough the –on suffix of the Hebrew Shimshon is used for quite a few biblical names, it could also be related to ʾon, “potency,” making the name suggest “sun of potency.” Some scholars have conjectured that behind this figure there might be traditions about a solar deity. In any case, the link with the sun is another warrant for the fire motif. In terms of mythological patterns, this figure also bears some resemblance to Hercules, a muscular hero who performs arduous labors.
25. drive him. Now, at last, we get the descent of the spirit on the Judge. But the carefully chosen verb is unique to Samson: it means, more literally, “to pound/pulsate [within]” him, and neatly adumbrates his career of intermittent violent action.
1And Samson went down to Timnah and saw a woman in Timnah of the daughters of the Philistines. 2And he went up and told his father and his mother and said, “A woman I have seen in Timnah of the daughters of the Philistines, and now, take her for me as a wife.” 3And his father and his mother said to him, “Is there no woman among your kinsmen’s daughters or in all my people that you should go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?” And Samson said to his father, “Her take for me because she pleases me.” 4But his father and his mother did not know that it was from the LORD, for He sought a pretext from the Philistines, and at that time the Philistines were ruling over Israel. 5And Samson went down, and his father and his mother with him, to Timnah, and they came as far as the vineyards of Timnah, and, look, a young lion came roaring at him. 6And the spirit of the LORD seized him, and he ripped it apart as one would rip apart a kid, with nothing in his hand, and he did not tell his father and his mother what he had done. 7And he went down and spoke to the woman, and she pleased Samson. 8And he came back after a time to marry her and turned aside to see the place where the lion had fallen, and, look, there was a swarm of bees in the lion’s carcass, and honey. 9And he scooped it up into his palms and went off eating as he went, and he went to his father and to his mother and gave them, and they ate. And he did not tell them that he had scooped up the honey from the lion’s carcass. 10And his father went down to the woman, and Samson made a feast there, for thus did the young men do. 11And it happened when they saw him, that they took thirty companions to be with him. 12And Samson said to them, “Let me pose you a riddle. If you actually explain it to me during the seven days of the feast and find the solution, I shall give you thirty fine cloths and thirty changes of garment. 13And if you are not able to explain it to me, you shall give me thirty fine cloths and thirty changes of garment.” And they said to him, “Pose your riddle, that we may hear it.” 14And he said to them:
“From the eater food came forth,
and from the strong sweet came forth.”
And they could not explain the riddle for three days. 15And it happened on the fourth day that they said to Samson’s wife, “Entice your husband that he explain the riddle or we will burn you and your father’s house in fire. Did the two of you call us here to beggar us?” 16And Samson’s wife wept before him and said, “You only hate me and don’t love me. You posed a riddle to my countrymen, but to me you did not explain it.” And he said to her, “Look, to my father and my mother I did not explain it, and shall I explain it to you?” 17And she wept before him the seven days that they had the feast, and it happened on the seventh day, that he explained it to her, for she had badgered him. And she explained the riddle to her countrymen. 18And the townsmen said to him on the seventh day before the sun went down:
“What is sweeter than honey,
and what is stronger than a lion?”
And he said to them:
“Had you not plowed with my heifer,
you would not have solved my riddle.”
19And the spirit of the LORD seized him, and he went down to Ashkelon and struck down from among them thirty men and took their armor, and he gave the changes of garment to the explainers of the riddle. And his wrath flared, and he went up to his father’s house. 20And Samson’s wife was given to one of his companions who had been in his company.
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
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1. Samson went down to Timnah and saw a woman. The first common noun that appears in the Samson narrative is “woman,” a word that will be reiterated and that picks up the repeated use of “woman” in the annunciation scene. “Woman” is also the very first word of dialogue assigned to Samson (and for that reason, this translation follows the syntactic order of the Hebrew).
3. my people. Some scholars emend this to “your people.”
the uncircumcised Philistines. This is a recurrent epithet for the Philistines, a people of Hellenic origin, and is not used for the Canaanites, who in some instances may have possibly practiced circumcision. The foreskin is an obvious mark of difference but it also focuses a sense of sexual recoil: the Philistine woman, whom Samson would have as a sexual partner, belongs to an uncircumcised people and was begotten by an uncircumcised male.
because she pleases me. The literal sense is “because she is right in my eyes.” Since there is no indication that Samson has exchanged a single word with the woman, we may infer that his only reason for wanting her as wife is physical attraction—what he has seen.
4. it was from the LORD. The theological explanation is a little shaky: God knows that the only way to get this particular hero to act against the Philistines is to involve him with a woman, which will lead to his being tricked by her countrymen, which then will provoke him to vengeance.
5. and, look, a young lion came roaring at him. The shift of perspective marked by “look” is of course to Samson’s viewpoint. At this moment, though he has been accompanied by his parents, he is clearly separated from them, and they do not witness the killing of the lion. Arnold Ehrlich proposes that Samson, as an energetic young man, has bounded far ahead of his parents, who are walking slowly on the path to Timnah.
6. And the spirit of the LORD seized him. In Samson’s case, the divine afflatus enables violent action by the hero and is not the charisma of an ad hoc military leader. All his heroic acts are performed by him alone.
he did not tell his father and his mother. Samson has a penchant for secrets, but he gets himself in trouble when he reveals his secrets to women.
7. he went down and spoke to the woman. The verb “spoke” here, as in some other contexts, is probably a technical term for a proposal of marriage.
9. And he scooped it up into his palms. It should be noted that carcasses are considered to be ritually unclean, so that by taking food from the lion’s bones Samson is violating one of the terms of the nazirite vow. The setting, moreover, is a vineyard, although he does not touch the grapes.
11. companions. They are, in effect, designated companions for the bridegroom during the seven days of the feast, though Samson has no personal relationship with them.
12. find the solution. The Hebrew uses an ellipsis, merely the verb “find.”
I shall give you thirty fine cloths and thirty changes of garment. The confident Samson takes on himself an indemnity in the bet thirty times that of each of the Philistine men.
14. From the eater food came forth. The Hebrew uses cognate terms: from the eater what-is-eaten came forth. The riddle, as is appropriate for riddles, is cast in a line of verse. It is, of course, an unfair riddle (hence Samson’s confidence) because it depends on unique circumstances known only to the riddler, and nothing in its formulation provides a clue to the solution.
15. on the fourth day. The translation follows the Septuagint; the Masoretic Text reads “on the seventh day,” but it is not credible that they would have waited until the very last moment, and this would also contradict the report that she pestered him for the solution day after day. There remains some problem about the number of days because in verse 17 she is said to have been weeping before Samson seven days, not four.
Entice. The Hebrew verb in context means something like “cajole” or “coax,” but it also has a sexual connotation, “entice” or “seduce,” and the Philistine men are clearly suggesting that she use her feminine wiles on her husband.
or we will burn you and your father’s house in fire. Here the fire motif introduced in the annunciation scene enters the story proper. This is, of course, an offer that the woman cannot refuse.
Did the two of you call us here to beggar us? The Hebrew conjugates the verb “call” (in the sense of “invite”) in the plural, and the translation uses “the two of you” to make that clear: in effect, they are angrily accusing the woman of conspiring against them with her Israelite husband.
here. Reading halom, with the Septuagint, for the Masoretic halo’.
16. You only hate me and don’t love me. Here the dialogue has a sharp edge of realism: if you really loved me, you wouldn’t keep secrets from me. And her speech, moreover, is accompanied by tears. Samson tries to resist and hold on to the secret, as we see in his immediate response, but in the end he succumbs to her persistent tears and imploring.
18. before the sun went down. They wait until the last possible moment to spring the answer on him, an effect perhaps highlighted here by the use of a quasi-epic flourish beterem yavoʾ haḥarsah in which the word for sun, ḥarsah, is archaic and poetic instead of the standard shemesh.
Had you not plowed with my heifer, / you would not have solved my riddle. Their statement of the solution to the riddle, like the riddle itself, is cast in a line of verse with three accents in each verset. Samson’s response is equally a 3/3 line, although he also uses rhyme (an occasional occurrence in biblical poetry): ʿeglati / ḥidati. The plowing image is obviously sexual: if you had not played around with my wife, she would not have revealed the secret to you. Thus, Samson has no notion that his wife acted under a death threat but instead imagines that she has been unfaithful to him—perhaps, with thirty different men! He therefore departs enraged not only against the thirty “companions” but also against his wife.
19. he went down to Ashkelon. Timnah is a small Philistine town in the lowlands (Shephelah), whereas Ashkelon is one of the five principal Philistine towns on the Mediterranean coast.
their armor. From the one other biblical occurrence of this term, ḥalitsah, in 2 Samuel 2:21, it is clear that it refers to armor, not clothing in general. Samson, then, chooses to confront and kill armed warriors. It is probably the armor that he sends as “changes of garment” to the thirty men who were at his wedding: this would be an act of defiance, demonstrating to them the bold and deadly thing he has done. No mention is made of the fine cloths, perhaps because the armor is far more than the equivalent in value of fine cloth and garment.
20. Samson’s wife was given to one of his companions. The marriage is in effect annulled, and the plowing with Samson’s heifer takes place after the fact of his mentioning it to the companions.
one of his companions who had been in his company. The Hebrew uses a cognate noun and verb and literally says, “his companion.” The subject and object of the verb are ambiguous: it could be read either as “he [the companion] befriended/was companion to him [Samson]” or “he [Samson] befriended/was companion to him [the companion].”
1And after a time, in the days of the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a kid, and he said, “Let me come to my wife in the chamber,” and her father would not let him come in. 2And her father said, “I surely thought that you altogether hated her, and I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Let her be yours instead of her.” 3And Samson said to them, “This time I am clear of the Philistines, for I am about to do harm to them.” 4And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes and took torches and turned tail to tail and put one torch between each two tails. 5And he set fire to the torches and sent them into the Philistines’ standing grain and set fire to the stacked grain and the standing grain and the vineyards and the olive trees. 6And the Philistines said, “Who did this?” And they said, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, for he took his wife and gave her to his companion.” And the Philistines came up and burned her and her father in fire. 7And Samson said to them, “If this is what you do, I will be avenged of you, and then I will stop.” 8And he struck them a great blow, hip on thigh, and went down and stayed in the crevice of the rock of Eitam. 9And the Philistines came up and camped in Judah and deployed at Lehi. 10And the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” And they said, “We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he has done to us.” 11And three thousand men of Judah went down to the crevice of the rock of Eitam and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines rule over us? And what have you done to us?” And he said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.” 12And they said to him, “We have come down to bind you, to give you into the hand of the Philistines.” And Samson said to them, “Vow to me that you yourselves will not harm me.” 13And they said to him, “No, for we will certainly bind you and give you into their hand, but we will not put you to death.” And they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock. 14He was coming up to Lehi when the Philistines shouted to greet him, and the spirit of the LORD seized him, and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax burning in fire, and his bonds fell apart from upon his hands. 15And he found the fresh jawbone of a donkey and reached out his hand and took it, and he struck down a thousand men with it. 16And Samson said:
mound upon mound,
With a donkey’s jawbone,
I struck down a thousand men.”
17And it happened when he finished speaking, that he flung the jawbone from his hand, and he called that place Ramath Lehi. 18And he was very thirsty, and he called out to the LORD: “You Yourself gave a great victory in the hand of your servant, and now should I die from thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?” 19And God split open the hollow that was in Lehi, and water came out of it, and he drank and his spirit returned and he revived. Therefore has its name been called Ein Hakkore to this day. 20And he led Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.
CHAPTER 15 NOTES
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1. Let me come to my wife in the chamber. What he has in mind is obviously sex, and, in fact, the initial verb could also be construed as “let me come to bed with my wife.”
2. I surely thought that you altogether hated her. He has two good reasons for thinking this: Samson’s angry declaration that his wife has been unfaithful to him with the thirty companions (14:18) and his abrupt return to his own father’s house.
3. to them. Evidently, he is addressing not only his father-in-law but other Philistines he views as complicit in wronging him.
This time I am clear of the Philistines. I am clear of guilt for what I will do to them, seeing as how they have behaved toward me. The emphasis on “this time” returns later in the story.
4. caught three hundred foxes. Most of the numbers in the story are multiples of three. Samson, himself a feral hero, is repeatedly involved with animals: the lion, the foxes, and then the jawbone of a donkey. The foxes, running wild through the fields with fire at their tails, are an effective delivery system for spreading incendiary destruction.
5. the stacked grain and the standing grain and the vineyards and the olive trees. These items cover most of the principal products of agriculture in this region, and, moreover, the wheat harvest is just taking place, so the overall destruction is devastating.
6. burned her and her father in fire. Many manuscripts and two ancient translations read “her and her father’s house.” Fire answers fire now, and it is in the nature of fire uncontrolled to destroy everything in its path, much like Samson.
7. If this is what you do, I will be avenged of you. The Philistine retaliation leads to a second round of vengeance for Samson.
8. he struck them a great blow, hip on thigh. The implication is that he battered down a large throng of Philistines, though the number in this case is not specified. The word for “hip” actually means “leg” or “calf of the leg,” but “hip on thigh” is a fine old locution coined by the King James translators that effectively conveys the intended sense of a murderous thrashing.
9. Lehi. As elsewhere, the name, which means “jawbone,” is proleptic, and is explained in verse 17.
10. to bind Samson. He is such a lethally powerful adversary that before they can think of killing him, they have to imagine immobilizing him by trussing him up. The notion of binding Samson will return in Delilah’s dealings with him.
11. three thousand men. This is still another multiple of three.
As they did to me, so I have done to them. This unbending code of vengeful retaliation is fully shared by Samson and the Philistines. Compare verse 10.
12. Vow to me that you yourselves will not harm me. He uses the emphatic pronoun before the conjugated verb to make sure that they are not the ones who intend to harm him. If they were, he would have to exert his power and wreak havoc among his countrymen, which he wants to avoid. On this condition, he allows himself to be bound.
14. the ropes that were on his arms became like flax burning in fire. The fire motif is continued here in a simile, as it will be in Delilah’s failed attempts to have him bound. New ropes also occur in the Delilah episode, the idea being that new ropes are in no way worn or frayed and so are very hard to break.
fell apart. Literally, “melted.”
15. the fresh jawbone of a donkey. The skeletal remains of the beast are relatively new, and so the jawbone would not be dry and brittle. As before, Samson fights with an improvised and unconventional weapon. This is the second time he comes in contact with what is left of an animal carcass—an unclean object: the first time, he draws out something sweet; now, antithetically, he finds a weapon.
16. With a donkey’s jawbone, / mound upon mound. Samson seals his conquest, like Lamech in Genesis 4, with an exulting poem of triumph. The meaning of the second verset of this line is not certain. A long tradition of interpretation understands it as “mounds”—perhaps, the mounds of bodies of the slain. In that case, the two Hebrew words ḥamor ḥamoratayim would be a pun on ḥamor, “donkey.” But the word for “mound” requires different vowels, so it is possible that the phrase is actually an incremental repetition of “donkey” in the first verset and means “a donkey, a pair.”
17. Ramath Lehi. The name means “casting of the jawbone.”
19. hollow. The Hebrew makhteish means “mortar” (as in mortar and pestle) and by extension a concave formation in rock.
Ein Hakkore. In this etiology of the name, it is understood to mean “the spring of the one who calls out.” But the Hebrew qoreiʾ, one who calls out, has a homonym that means “partridge,” and it is likely that a place originally called Partridge Spring, because partridges frequented the area, was given this new narrative explanation for its name.
20. And he led Israel … twenty years. This notice of the length of Samson’s career seems out of place because further episodes of his story follow. The statement is repeated at the very end of his story, where we would expect it, with the verb “led” (or “judged”) in the pluperfect.
1And Samson went to Gaza, and he saw there a whore-woman and came to bed with her. 2And it was told to the Gazites saying, “Samson has come here.” And they lay in ambush for him all night long at the town gate, and they plotted together all night long, saying, “At morning’s light, we shall kill him.” 3And Samson lay till midnight, and he arose at midnight and seized the doors of the town’s gate and the two doorposts and pulled them free with the bolt and put them on his shoulders and took them up to the top of the mountain that faces Hebron.
4And it happened afterward that he loved a woman in Nahal Sorek, and her name was Delilah. 5And the Philistine overlords went up to her and said to her, “Entice him and see in what his great power lies and with what we can prevail against him and bind him to torture him. As for us, each of us will give you eleven hundred silver shekels.” 6And Delilah said to Samson, “Tell me, pray, in what your great power lies, and with what could you be bound to be tortured?” 7And Samson said, “If they were to bind me with seven moist thongs that had not been dried out, I would be weakened and become like any man.” 8And the Philistine overlords brought up to her seven moist thongs that had not been dried out, and she bound him with them. 9And the ambush was laid in her chamber. And she said to him, “Philistines are upon you, Samson!” And he snapped the cords as the wick of tow snaps when it touches fire, and the secret of his power was not known. 10And Delilah said to Samson, “Look, you have mocked me and spoken lies to me. Now, tell me, pray, with what could you be bound?” 11And he said to her, “If they make sure to bind me with new ropes with which no task has been done, I would be weakened and become like any man.” 12And Delilah took new ropes and bound him with them, and she said to him, “Philistines are upon you, Samson!” And the ambush was laid in the chamber. And he snapped them from his arms like a thread. 13And Delilah said, “Until now you have mocked me and spoken lies to me. Tell me, with what could you be bound?” And he said to her, “If you weave my head’s seven tresses together with the web and drive them with a peg into the wall, I would be weakened and become like any man.” 14And she drove them with a peg into the wall, and she said to him, “Philistines are upon you, Samson!” And he awoke from his sleep and pulled free the peg and the loom and the web. 15And she said to him, “You only say ‘I love you,’ but your heart is not with me. Three times now you have mocked me and have not told me in what lies your great power.” 16And it happened when she badgered him with her words day after day and beleaguered him, that he was vexed unto the death. 17And he told her all that was in his heart, and he said, “No razor has touched my head, for I have been a nazirite of God from my mother’s womb. Were I shaven, my power would turn away from me and I would be weakened and become like any man.” 18And Delilah saw that he had told her all that was in his heart, and she sent and called the Philistine overlords, saying, “Come up, for he has told me all that is in his heart.” And the Philistine overlords came up to her and brought the silver in their hand. 19And she put him to sleep on her knees and called the man and shaved his head’s seven tresses, and she began to torture him, and his power turned away from him. 20And she said, “Philistines are upon you, Samson!” And he awoke from his sleep, and said, “I will go out as all the other times and shake myself loose,” but he did not know that the LORD had turned away from him. 21And the Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes. And they brought him down to Gaza and bound him in fetters, and he was put to grinding in the prison. 22And the hair of his head began to grow as soon as it was shaven. 23And the Philistine overlords had gathered to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their god and to celebrate, and they said, “Our god has given into our hand Samson our enemy.” 24And the people saw him and praised their god, for they said, “Our god has given into our hand our enemy, the destroyer of our land, him who brought down many victims among us.” 25And it happened when they were merry that they said, “Call Samson, that he may play for us.” And they called Samson from the prison, and he played before them, and they set him between the pillars. 26And Samson said to the lad who was holding his hand, “Let me rest and feel the pillars on which the temple stands, that I may lean on them.” 27And the temple was filled with men and women, and all the Philistine overlords were there, and on the roof about three thousand men and women watching as Samson played. 28And Samson called to the LORD and said “My Master, LORD, recall me, pray, and strengthen me just this time, O God, that I may avenge myself in one act of vengeance from the Philistines for my two eyes.” 29And Samson grasped the two central pillars on which the temple stood and pushed against them, one with his right hand and one with his left hand. 30And Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!,” and he pushed powerfully, and the temple fell on the overlords and on all the people who were in it. And the dead that he killed in his death were more than he had killed in his life. 31And his kinsmen and all his father’s household came down and bore him off and buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol in the grave of Manoah his father. And he had led Israel twenty years.
CHAPTER 16 NOTES
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1. he saw there a whore-woman. This is a precise verbal echo of his first encounter with a Philistine woman, only the professional designation “whore” being added. There is a certain parallel with the story of the two spies who came to Jericho to Rahab the whore, but Samson comes only for his own pleasure, avails himself of the woman’s services, and does not have to hide or flee because he can rely on his strength.
2. And it was told. Those words are added from the Septuagint.
3. seized the doors of the town’s gate. In this provocative act, he not only asserts his invulnerability but also leaves the town exposed.
4. he loved a woman in Nahal Sorek. In this climactic episode in the series of three women with whom Samson is involved, we are told that he actually loves the woman, and of the three, only Delilah is given a name. Nahal Sorek (Wadi of the Vine) is in Israelite territory, and Delilah may well be an Israelite woman.
5. the Philistine overlords. The term seranim always appears in the plural and is the title of the rulers of the five towns that make up the Philistine pentapolis. Many scholars think it is cognate with the Greek tyrranos. The fact that the overlords themselves should come to make the appeal to Delilah reflects the importance they attach to the capture of this deadly Israelite adversary.
bind him to torture him. They are frank about their brutal intentions toward Samson: instead of killing him on the spot, they want him rendered helpless so that they can torment and abuse this despised enemy who has wreaked such havoc among them.
eleven hundred silver shekels. This is a vast sum—5500 shekels all told—and so more than enough to appeal to her mercenary impulses.
6. with what could you be bound to be tortured. In repeating the words of the overlords, Delilah does not hesitate to speak openly of torture. Presumably, she is putting this to Samson as a merely hypothetical condition, although the talk of binding and torture also makes this sound like a perverse sex game they are playing.
7. moist thongs. These are either animal tendons or cords plaited from leather—in either case, still moist so that they are very hard to tear apart.
9. when it touches fire. The fire motif returns in the simile.
12. Delilah took new ropes. Here the aid of the Philistine overlords is not mentioned, though it may be implied.
13. If you weave my head’s seven tresses together with the web. Only now do we learn how Samson wears his uncut hair (and one should note the magical number seven). In the third of his three false explanations, he edges toward the real secret because his hair is involved. This version also comes close to his actual predicament because it conjures up entanglement in a woman’s instrument, the loom.
and drive them with a peg into the wall, I would be weakened and become like any man. Both these clauses are absent in the Masoretic Text, which is manifestly incomplete here, but they appear in the Septuagint, in the Targum Yonatan, and in the Peshitta.
14. And she drove them with a peg into the wall. “Into the wall” is supplied from the Septuagint. The driving of the peg recalls Jael and Sisera, but in this instance the woman’s deadly intent is not realized.
15. You only say “I love you.” She uses the same feminine argument as Samson’s first wife.
Three times now. The folktale pattern of three times—in this case, three times with a fourth time that swerves to a new outcome—is made an object of deliberate attention. The story as a whole is organized around threes—three women, and the multiples of three killed by Samson.
17. all that was in his heart. Literally, “all his heart.”
19. she put him to sleep on her knees. This is, of course, necessary so that his hair can be cut, but it is also a powerful image of the seductive woman lulling the mighty hero and reducing him to a baby in her lap.
called the man and shaved his head’s seven tresses. The verb “shaved” is conjugated in the feminine. Some emend it to a masculine form; others claim, with little philological warrant, that it means “caused him to be shaved.” It makes more sense to assume that Delilah, who can’t very well move with Samson asleep on her knees, calls the man to bring her a razor so that she can then shave Samson’s head. Her performance of the act herself is thematically and psychologically apt: the seductress cuts away the source of Samson’s potency.
she began to torture him. She is the very first to torment him in an appropriately sadistic move.
20. as all the other times. The times motif recurs here (the Hebrew, kefaʿam befaʿam, doubles the word “time”).
21. gouged out his eyes. A Freudian would see an upward displacement of castration in this act, but it should be noted that these were the eyes that saw the women who led to all the trouble. Gouging out the eyes was also a punishment for a rebellious vassal (compare the blinding of Zedekiah by the Babylonians, 2 Kings 25:7).
25. that he may play for us. The playing might be dancing or, more likely, blindly stumbling about, while the audience laughs (the same Hebrew verb as “play”).
26. Let me rest. This might also be construed to mean “lead me.”
27. all the Philistine overlords were there. So that Samson’s vengeance may be complete, the rulers of the five Philistine towns, the very men who plotted his blinding and captivity, are present.
on the roof about three thousand men and women. Again, we have a multiple of three. It is clearly implied that there are many more people in the main space of the temple.
28. just this time. At the penultimate moment of the story, the thematically fraught word pa‘am, “time,” appears again. It shows, pointedly, the same root as the verb “drive” or “pound” in 13:25 that marks the beginning of Samson’s narrative.
that I may avenge myself in one act of vengeance from the Philistines. It is true that Samson in his last moment turns in prayer to God—perhaps feeling that his great strength has returned but not being quite sure and in any case recognizing that its ultimate source is God. But even now, his motive is personal vengeance: one sees why the messenger of the LORD prophesied that Samson would no more than “begin” to rescue Israel from the Philistines.
30. And the dead that he killed in his death were more than he had killed in his life. Samson’s career as an Israelite champion ends in an act of wholesale destruction in which he, too, dies, like fire that consumes everything in its path and eventually itself as well.
1There was a man from the high country of Ephraim, and his name was Micayhu. 2And he said to his mother, “The eleven hundred silver shekels that were taken from you, and you yourself uttered a curse and even said it in my hearing—look, the silver is with me, it is I who took it.” And his mother said, “Blessed are you, my son, to the LORD.” 3And he gave back the eleven hundred silver shekels to his mother, and his mother said, “I had solemnly dedicated the silver to the LORD from my hand to my son, to make a statue and molten image, and now I give it back to you.” 4And he gave the silver to his mother, and his mother took two hundred silver shekels and gave them to the silversmith, and he made out of it a statue and molten image. And they were in the house of Micayhu. 5And the man Micah had a house God, and he made an ephod and teraphim and installed one of his sons, and he became a priest for him. 6In those days there was no king in Israel, every man did what was right in his eyes. 7And there was a lad from the town of Bethlehem in Judah from the clan of Judah, and he was a Levite, and he sojourned there. 8And the man went from the town, from Bethlehem in Judah, to sojourn wherever he chanced, and he came to the high country of Ephraim to the house of Micah, wending his way. 9And Micah said to him, “From where do you come?” And the Levite said to him, “I am from Bethlehem in Judah, and I go to sojourn wherever I chance.” 10And Micah said to him, “Stay with me, and be father and priest for me, and I on my part will give you ten silver shekels a year and a set of clothing and your board.” And the Levite went, 11and the Levite agreed to stay with the man, and the lad became for him like one of his sons. 12And Micah installed the Levite, and the lad became a priest for him, and he was in Micah’s house. 13And Micah said, “Now I know that the LORD will deal well with me, for the Levite has become my priest.”
CHAPTER 17 NOTES
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1. There was a man from the high country of Ephraim. This formula signals the beginning of a story that does not involve a judge. The two narratives that unfold respectively in chapters 17–18 and 19–21 constitute a kind of epilogue to the Book of Judges, illustrating the general condition of moral and political anarchy in the period before the monarchy.
Micayhu. Later in the story, the name appears without the theophoric ending as “Micah.”
2. the eleven hundred silver shekels. Rashi shrewdly observes that this is the precise amount that each of the Philistine overlords paid Delilah: “The episodes are linked through the evil silver equal in amount, and in both cases it is a kind of silver that leads to disaster.”
you yourself uttered a curse. She pronounced a curse on whoever stole the silver.
look, the silver is with me. He evidently is frightened by the curse and so is ready to admit he has “taken” (he avoids saying “stolen”) the silver and will now give it back.
Blessed are you. Ehrlich suggests that by these words she seeks to reverse the curse.
3. to make a statue and molten image. Amit argues that this is a hendiadys—a statue that is a molten image, though in 18:20 they are separated syntactically by ephod and teraphim. In any case, although the mother dedicates the silver to the LORD, this expression has a strong association with idolatry.
and now I give it back to you. If the received text is correct, the silver passes back and forth: he takes it from her, gives it back to her; she gives it to him; he gives it back to her. This rapid exchange may be intentional: it is “hot” treasure, first stolen by the son from his mother, then earmarked for a questionable end.
4. two hundred silver shekels. Either this is the payment for the silversmith’s work and the remaining nine hundred shekels are used to fashion the statue, or she has quietly pocketed nine hundred, despite her pious vow.
5. an ephod and teraphim. These are both divinatory devices, the latter term used elsewhere to designate household idols. Micah is clearly setting up shop in his little house of God, probably with the intention of exacting payment for rendering sundry cultic services.
6. every man did what was right in his eyes. The last phrase here is the same one used in 14:3 by Samson in relation to the Philistine woman he sees in Timnah, but there it is translated as “pleases me” because the character is referring to a woman he finds attractive.
7. Bethlehem in Judah. There was another Bethlehem (“house of bread”) in Zebulun.
from the clan of Judah. This looks like a contradiction because he is a Levite. It has been proposed that the story harks back to an early moment in Israelite history when the Levites’ tribal identity may not have crystallized and “Levite” might be the designation of a cultic officiant.
sojourned. This is a term of temporary residence, and as the story unfolds, it is evident that the Levite is an itinerant.
10. father and priest. “Father” here means someone in a position of authority. In fact, the Levite is a “lad,” a generation younger than Micah, as one may infer from verse 12. Micah had already installed one of his sons to act as priest, but he prefers to have the Levite because he is a cultic professional (whether hereditary or not is unclear).
ten silver shekels a year. If this is a reasonable annual income, the amount of eleven hundred shekels would have been enormous.
And the Levite went. This brief clause (two Hebrew words) seems extraneous, and some textual critics propose deleting it.
12. and he was in Micah’s house. The blandness of the verb “to be” here—not “he dwelled/stayed” or “he sojourned”—introduces a hint of ambiguity about his relation to Micah’s house. In the event, he will betray Micah and move on.
1In those days there was no king in Israel. And in those days the tribe of the Danites was seeking an estate for itself in which to dwell, for till that day no estate had fallen to it in the midst of the tribes of Israel. 2And the Danites sent out from their clans, from the pick of them, five men who were valiant warriors from Zorah and from Eshtaol to spy out the land and to search it, and they said to them, “Go, search the land.” And they came to the high country of Ephraim to Micah’s house, and they spent the night there. 3They were at Micah’s house, and they recognized the voice of the Levite lad and turned aside there and said to him, “Who brought you here, and what are you doing in this place, and what do you have here?” 4And he said to them, “Thus and so has Micah done for me, and he has hired me, and I have become a priest for him.” 5And they said to him, “Inquire, pray, of God, that we may know whether our way on which we go will prosper.” 6And the priest said to them, “Go in peace—before the LORD is your way on which you go.” 7And the five men went and came to Laish, and they saw the people within it dwelling secure in the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and secure, and no one in the land troubled them, and there was no heir to the throne, and they were far off from the Sidonians, nor did they have any dealings with other people. 8And they came back to their kinsmen in Zorah and Eshtaol, and their kinsmen said to them, “How is it with you?” 9And they said, “Arise, and let us go up against them, for we have seen the land, and, look, it is very good, and you remain silent! Do not be idle about going to come and take hold of the land. 10When you come, you will come to a people that dwells secure, and the land is spacious—why, God has given it into your hand!—a place in which nothing on earth is lacking.” 11And the six hundred men from the tribe of the Danites, from Zorah and Eshtaol, girded in battle gear, journeyed from there. 12And they went up and camped at Kiriath-Jearim in Judah. Therefore have they called that place the Camp of Dan to this day—there it is, west of Kiriath-Jearim. 13And they passed on from there to the high country of Ephraim and came to Micah’s house. 14And the five men who had gone to spy out the land of Laish spoke up and said to their kinsmen, “Did you know that in these houses there are an ephod and teraphim and a statue and molten image? And now, know what you should do.” 15And they turned aside there and came to the house of the Levite lad, at Micah’s house, and asked him how he fared. 16And the six hundred men girded in their battle gear, who were from the Danites, stationed themselves at the entrance of the gate. 17And the five men who had gone to spy out the land came in there, took the statue and the ephod and the teraphim and the molten image, and the priest was stationed at the entrance to the gate, and the six hundred men girded in battle gear. 18And the former group had come into Micah’s house and taken the statue and the ephod and the teraphim and the molten image. And the priest said to them, “What are you doing?” 19And they said to him, “Be quiet! Put your hand over your mouth and go with us and be father and priest for us. Is it better for you to be priest for the house of one man or to be priest for a tribe and clan in Israel?” 20And the priest was pleased, and he took the ephod and the teraphim and the statue, and joined the troops. 21And they turned and went, and they put before them the little ones and the cattle and the heavy goods. 22They had gone a distance from Micah’s house when the people in the houses that were by Micah’s house were mustered, and they overtook the Danites. 23And they called out to the Danites, and they turned round and said to Micah, “What’s the matter with you that you have mustered?” 24And he said, “My god that I made you have taken and the priest, and you have gone off. And what else do I have, and how is this you say to me, ‘What’s the matter with you’?” 25And the Danites said to him, “Don’t raise your voice to us, lest embittered men assault you and you lose your life and the lives of your household.” 26And the Danites went on their way, and Micah saw that they were stronger than he, and he turned and went back to his house. 27And they had taken what Micah made and the priest that he had. And they came against Laish, against a quiet and secure people, and they struck them down with the sword, and the town they burned in fire. 28And there was none to save it, for it was far off from Sidon, nor did they have any dealings with other people. And it was in the Valley of Beth-Rehob. And they rebuilt the town and dwelled in it. 29And they called the town Dan, like the name of Dan their forefather who was born to Israel, but Laish was the name of the town at first. 30And the Danites set up the statue for themselves, and Jonathan son of Gershom son of Moses, he and his sons were priests for the tribe of the Danites till the day the land went into exile. 31And they set out for themselves Micah’s statue that he had made all the days that the house of God was in Shiloh.
CHAPTER 18 NOTES
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1. till that day no estate had fallen to it in the midst of the tribes of Israel. This formulation gives the impression that no tribal territory was assigned to the Danites. The actual case was that they were not able to hold their own against their Philistine neighbors and the local Canaanites and so were driven to migrate. The Philistine pressure on Dan is evident in the Samson narrative, which immediately precedes this story.
3. they recognized the voice of the Levite lad. Given his itinerancy, they may have actually run across him somewhere else in the south. Others conjecture that they detect a Judahite accent.
4. Thus and so has Micah done for me. This summarizing formula, which one would not find in novelistic dialogue, is occasionally introduced into biblical dialogue. “Thus and so” obviously refers to the Levite’s appointment as priest with the annual stipend.
5. Inquire, pray, of God. This idiom indicates inquiry of an oracle; the probable instrument would have been the ephod.
6. before the LORD is your way on which you go. Though the burden of this clause is that God will favor their endeavor, the formulation is a bit vague and even ambiguous: like oracles everywhere, the Levite is hedging his bets.
7. dwelling secure in the manner of the Sidonians. The inhabitants of the Phoenician city of Sidon, to the north on the Mediterranean coast, were evidently thought to live relatively free of fear from foreign attacks.
they were far off from the Sidonians, nor did they have any dealings with other people. Although the gist of these two clauses is that Laish was isolated and had no allies on which to rely, the wording—especially of the second clause—is somewhat obscure.
10. a people that dwells secure. As the use of this phrase in verse 7 makes clear, the gist is that this people lives in a sense of security, not suspecting that they will be attacked.
11. six hundred men. As the recurrence of this number in military contexts in the Book of Samuel suggests, this is the fixed size of a combat unit, something like a battalion.
14. these houses. From the plural, one infers that Micah’s house was part of a small compound.
And now, know what you should do. Anticipating the conquest of Laish, they want to acquire the paraphernalia to set up a cult there after they take the town.
16. the six hundred men … stationed themselves at the entrance of the gate. The five spies, whom the Levite already knows, are sent in to parlay with him, while the armed enforcers wait at the gate.
17. took the statue and the ephod and the teraphim and the molten image. They immediately seize the cultic objects, not asking the Levite, who is in no position to resist.
18. And the former group. The Hebrew says merely “and these,” but it has to refer to the five spies in contradistinction to the six hundred men.
19. Put your hand over your mouth and go with us and be father and priest for us. They follow an implied threat—shut up, if you know what is good for you—with the inducement of an offered position.
20. And the priest was pleased. Nobody in this story, beginning with Micah and his mother, has noble motives. The Levite immediately recognizes that this new position, priest for a tribe, is a considerable advancement, no doubt with a larger salary, and so he happily colludes in the theft of the cultic articles.
21. they put before them the little ones and the cattle and the heavy goods. Only now do we learn that the six hundred warriors are not just a raiding party but the first wave of a tribal migration, having brought with them their children (and presumably their wives) and their possessions. They put all these in front of them because the attack they anticipate would come from the rear, from a pursuing party of Micah and his men.
24. My god that I made. His language here, in keeping with “statue” and “molten image,” is frankly pagan. No one in this story appears to be a serious monotheist. Even though the narrative was composed late (see the comment on verse 30), the whole bizarre story appears to be an authentic reflection of an early moment in premonotheistic Israelite history when the exclusive worship of YHWH was not generally established.
25. embittered men. This is their condition because they have been displaced from their tribal territory and are for the moment homeless.
26. Micah saw that they were stronger than he. The story plays out through force. Micah can scarcely contend with six hundred heavily armed ruthless men who have just threatened to kill him and his whole household, and so he has to let them keep the precious objects they have stolen from him, which he had fashioned with silver he originally stole from his mother.
27. they struck them down with the sword. No moral considerations are involved. These people have attractive land; Dan needs land; the Danites slaughter the inhabitants of Laish and build their own town there.
29. like the name. The Masoretic Text reads “in the name,” but many Hebrew manuscripts show the standard idiom “like the name.”
who was born to Israel. The reference is to Jacob, not to the nation.
30. Jonathan son of Gershom son of Moses. At the very end, we are given the name and genealogy of the Levite. The Masoretic Text inserts a superscript nun in Moshe, Moses, turning it into Menashe, Manasseh, but this can’t be right because Gershom was the son of Moses and Manasseh is not a priestly tribe. Rashi aptly explains the orthographic oddity: “Out of respect for Moses, a nun is inscribed in order to change the name.” The genealogy marks a steep decline: Moses’s own grandson is a base sacerdotal mercenary, officiating in a cult that is at the very least semipagan. Placing the Levite just two generations after Moses would mean that the whole story is supposed to take place very early, at the beginning of the twelfth century B.C.E., a temporal location that has the inconvenient consequence of putting the Danite migration before the time of Samson, a Danite living in the south near the Philistines.
till the day the land went into exile. The reference is to the exile of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 721 B.C.E., which means that the story, at least in its final formulation, had to be composed after that date, unless this final notation is a later editorial addition.
31. all the days that the house of God was in Shiloh. The anomalous introduction of this reference to the Shiloh sanctuary at the very end of the story is in all likelihood, as Yair Zakovitch has argued, an editorial move to link the material here with the beginning of the Book of Samuel, where Shiloh plays a central role.
1And it happened in those days, when there was no king in Israel, that a Levite man was sojourning in the far reaches of the high country of Ephraim, and he took for himself a concubine-woman from Bethlehem in Judah. 2And his concubine played the whore against him and went away from him to her father’s house in Bethlehem in Judah, and she was there for a while, four months. 3And her husband arose and went after her to speak to her heart to bring her back, and his lad was with him and a pair of donkeys. And she brought him into her father’s house, and the young woman’s father saw him and rejoiced to greet him. 4And his father-in-law, the young woman’s father, entreated him, and he stayed with him three days, and they ate and drank and lodged there. 5And it happened on the fourth day that they rose early in the morning, and he got up to go, and the young woman’s father said to his son-in-law, “Refresh yourself with a morsel of bread, and afterward you may both go.” 6And the two of them sat and ate together, and the young woman’s father said to the man, “Consent, pray, to spend the night, that you may enjoy good cheer.” 7And the man got up to go, and his father-in-law pressed him and he stayed and spent the night there. 8And he rose early in the morning on the fifth day to go, and the young woman’s father said, “Refresh yourself, pray.” And they lingered till the day was waning, and the two of them ate. 9And the man got up to go, he and his concubine and his lad. And his father-in-law, the young woman’s father, said to him, “Look, the day is declining toward evening. Spend the night, pray. Look, the day is gone. Spend the night here, that you may enjoy good cheer, and tomorrow you both will rise early on your way, and you will go to your tent.” 10But the man did not want to spend the night, and he arose and went and came opposite Jebus, which is to say, Jerusalem, and with him were the pair of saddled donkeys and his concubine with him. 11They were by Jebus, and the day was very far spent, and his lad said to his master, “Come, pray, and let us turn aside to this town of the Jebusites that we may spend the night there.” 12And his master said to him, “We shall not turn aside to a town of strangers who are not of the Israelites. Let us pass on as far as Gibeah.” 13And he said to his lad, “Come and let us approach one of the places, and we shall spend the night in Gibeah or in Ramah.” 14And they passed on and went, and the sun set on them by Gibeah, which is Benjamin’s. 15And they turned aside to come to spend the night, and he came and sat in the town square, but there was no man to take them in to spend the night. 16And, look, an old man was coming from his work in the field in the evening. And the man was from the high country of Ephraim and he was sojourning in Gibeah, but the people of the place were Benjaminites. 17And he raised his eyes and saw the wayfaring man in the town square, and the old man said, “Where are you going and from where do you come?” 18And he said to him, “We are passing from Bethlehem in Judah to the far reaches of the high country of Ephraim—I am from there, and I have gone to Bethlehem in Judah—and I am going to the house of the LORD, but no man is taking me in. 19And there is even straw and provender for our donkeys, and there is even bread and wine for me and for your slavegirl and for the lad who is with your servant. Nothing is lacking.” 20And the old man said to him. “It is well with you. Only all your lack is upon me. Only do not spend the night in the square.” 21And he brought him into his house and mixed fodder for the donkeys, and they washed their feet and ate and drank. 22They were making good cheer when, look, the men of the town, worthless men, drew round the house, pounding on the door, and they said to the old man who was master of the house, saying, “Bring out the man that has come to your house that we may know him.” 23And the man who was master of the house went out to them and said, “No, my brothers, no, pray, do no harm. Seeing that this man has come into my house, do not do this scurrilous thing. 24Here are my virgin daughter and his concubine. Let me, pray, bring them out, and rape them and do to them whatever you want. But to this man do not do this scurrilous act.” 25But the men did not want to listen to him, and the man seized his concubine and brought her out to them. And they knew her and abused her all night long till morning, and they let her go at daybreak. 26And the woman came toward morning and fell at the entrance to the house of the man where her master was as the light was coming up. 27And her master arose in the morning and opened the doors of the house and went out to go on his way. And, look, the woman, his concubine, was fallen at the entrance of the house, her hands on the threshold. 28And he said to her, “Get up, and let us go.” And there was no answer. And he took her on his donkey, and the man arose and went to his place. 29And he came into his house and took a cleaver and held his concubine and cut her up limb by limb into twelve pieces, and he sent her through all the territory of Israel. 30And so whoever saw her would say, “There has not been nor has there been seen such a thing from the day the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt to this day. Pay heed about her, take counsel, and speak.”
CHAPTER 19 NOTES
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1. a Levite. Though nothing further is made in the story of his status as Levite, and no reference is made to any sacerdotal function performed by him, there is an obvious link with the morally dubious Levite lad in the immediately preceding story. Hereditary connection with the cult is clearly no guarantee of character.
2. played the whore against him. Given that a man and his concubine are involved, this could refer to sexual infidelity, but the fact that she goes off to her father’s house and that he wants her back argues for the metaphorical sense of this idiom: she pulled away from him, no longer wanted to remain with him.
3. his lad was with him and a pair of donkeys. Both servant and donkey will have a role to play as the story darkens.
the young woman’s. The fact that she is young, a naʿarah, will make what ensues all the more painful.
rejoiced to greet him. The rejoicing may be from the father’s perception that his daughter and the Levite will now be reconciled, but there is an odd emphasis in the story that the father is somehow smitten with the Levite, to the exclusion of concern for his daughter.
5. a morsel of bread. This is a polite understatement for a full meal.
6. enjoy good cheer. This mood idiom usually implies feasting and drinking.
7. his father-in-law pressed him and he stayed. In this story that turns on the refusal and then violation of hospitality, the father-in-law’s importuning of his guest looks in its exaggeration like a grotesque parody of hospitality.
8–9. the day was waning … the day is declining toward evening. This proliferation of expressions for the approach of night underscores the zone of danger into which the Levite and his concubine will enter as night falls.
8. the two of them ate. The Levite and his father-in-law. The concubine is not part of the feast.
10. the pair of saddled donkeys. At the end of the story, one of them will carry a grisly load on its back.
12. We shall not turn aside to a town of strangers. In the event, this consideration proves to be a bitter delusion because Israelites will behave more barbarically to them than any strangers.
13. And he said to his lad. The repetition of the formula for introducing speech indicates that the servant is perplexed or disturbed by what his master says but has no way of answering him: why, he must be thinking, does he insist that we move on when the only reasonable thing to do would be to seek refuge in this nearby Jebusite town?
15. but there was no man to take them in. This is the first signal of the network of allusions to the story of the visit of the two divine messengers to Sodom in Genesis 19.
16. the man was from the high country of Ephraim. Pointedly, the sole person in Gibeah prepared to honor the civilized obligation of hospitality is not a Benjaminite.
18. to the house of the LORD. This is a little odd because there is no indication that he lives in a sanctuary back in the far reaches of the high country of Ephraim. Also, instead of the preposition ʾel, “to,” the text shows an accusative particle, ʾet. Many, following the Septuagint, emend the two Hebrew words here to read, “to my house.”
20. Only all your lack is upon me. The old man refuses the Levite’s offer to bring his own provisions into the house.
Only do not spend the night in the square. The old man knows how dangerous it would be to spend the night outside exposed to the lubricious townsmen. The parallel with the story of Lot and his two daughters begins to become explicit.
22. They were making good cheer. As before, this is a mood idiom associated with eating and drinking.
worthless men. This judgmental phrase is added to the near verbatim quotation from Genesis 19:4.
Bring out the man … that we may know him. This is a direct quotation of Genesis 19:5, except that there the plural “men” appears because there are two of them. The gang-rapists’ initial preference is homosexual, but they clearly would also have been aware that the stranger was traveling with a young woman.
23. No, my brothers, no, pray, do no harm. These words are quoted from Genesis 19.8.
scurrilous thing. The Hebrew nevalah is a term generally used for shameful sexual acts.
24. Here are my virgin daughter and his concubine. This replicates Lot’s offer of his two virgin daughters to the rapists (Genesis 19:8). One does not know which is the more outrageous proposal, offering his daughter to be gang-raped or his guest’s concubine, over whom he surely does not have jurisdiction.
rape them and do to them whatever you want. The parallel text in Genesis 19:8 lacks the brutally direct “rape” (or “abuse”). Its insertion makes us wonder all the more what kind of father the old man is and what kind of host he is to the young woman, whom he appears to regard as a piece of disposable property.
25. the man seized his concubine and brought her out to them. In the event, it is the Levite, prepared to do anything to save his own skin, who thrusts his concubine into the clutches of the rapists. No action follows on the old man’s offer of his daughter to the rapists. Perhaps, seeing the Levite thrust his concubine outside, he concludes that one victim will suffice.
And they knew her and abused her all night long till morning. The source story in Genesis takes place in legendary times when there was supernatural intervention in human affairs. The two strangers, because they are divine beings, blind the would-be rapists and secure the safety of those within the house. In the latter-day era of the present story, there is no miraculous intervention—the female victim is gang-raped all night long and dies at daybreak from the prolonged violent abuse.
26. fell at the entrance to the house. She expires in this liminal space, her arms stretching out across the threshold of the house where she might have been safe, her body sprawled on the ground before the house, which is the outside zone of anarchic and destructive lust.
27. her master. Only at the end of the story is he called, repeatedly and almost ironically, “her master.”
arose … and opened the doors of the house and went out to go on his way. He is all brisk business and seems unconcerned about the fate of his concubine.
And, look, the woman, his concubine. Only now does he look down and see her brutalized body, identifying her first as a woman and then as his concubine.
28. Get up, and let us go. He at first does not realize that she is dead. This brusque command reveals his utter moral callousness: he expects the woman, after having been gang-raped hour after hour, to pick herself up quickly and join him on the journey back.
he took her on his donkey. At first, we may think he means to give her a decent burial near his home.
29. took a cleaver and held his concubine and cut her up limb by limb into twelve pieces. Although the intention is to trigger outrage in all the tribes—the number twelve is automatic, but it would actually be eleven, because Benjamin is excluded—over the atrocity that has been perpetrated, the act itself is barbaric, and in biblical terms, it is a desecration of the human body. It should be said, moreover, that the Levite until this point has himself been singularly lacking in outrage over the gang-rape of his concubine. In any case, the butchering of her body completes the set of images of mutilation and other violence done to the body that begins in the opening chapter of Judges with the chopping off of the thumbs and big toes of the captured king Adoni-Bezek.
1And all the Israelites went out, and the community assembled as one man from Dan to Beersheba in the land of Gilead before the LORD at Mizpah. 2And all the leaders of the people, all the tribes of Israel in the assembly of God’s people, took their stance, four hundred thousand sword-wielding foot soldiers. 3And the Benjaminites heard that the Israelites had gone up to Mizpah. And the Israelites said, “Speak! How did this evil come about?” 4And the Levite man, husband of the murdered woman, answered and said, “I came with my concubine to Gibeah to spend the night. 5And the notables of Gibeah rose against me and surrounded the house upon me at night. Me they thought to kill, and my concubine they raped, and she died. 6And I seized my concubine and cut her up and sent her through all the lands of Israel’s estate, for they did a foul and scurrilous thing in Israel. 7Look, you are all Israelites. Offer a word of counsel here.” 8And the whole people rose as one man, saying, “We will not go each to his tent and we will not turn aside each to his home! 9And now, this is the thing we shall do to Gibeah: we shall go up against it by lot. 10And we shall take ten men out of a hundred from all the tribes of Israel and a hundred out of a thousand and a thousand out of ten thousand to take provisions for the troops, to do for those coming to Benjamin’s Gibeah, according to all the scurrilous thing they did in Israel.” 11And all the men of Israel gathered at the town, joined as one man. 12And the tribes of Israel sent throughout the tribe of Benjamin, saying, “What is this evil that has come about among you? 13And now, give over the worthless men who are in Gibeah that we may put them to death and root out the evil from Israel.” But the Benjaminites did not want to heed the voice of their Israelite brothers. 14And the Benjaminites gathered from the towns at Gibeah to go out to battle with the Israelites. 15And the Benjaminites from the towns mustered on that day twenty-six thousand sword-wielding men, besides the inhabitants of Gibeah who mustered seven hundred picked men. 16From all these troops there were seven hundred picked men, left-handers; every one of them could sling a stone at a hair and not miss. 17And the men of Israel, except for Benjamin, mustered four hundred thousand sword-wielding men, every one of them a man of war. 18And they arose and went up to Bethel and inquired of God, and the Israelites said, “Who shall go up first for us in battle with the Benjaminites?” and the LORD said, “Judah first.” 19And the Israelites arose in the morning and encamped against Gibeah. 20And the men of Israel went out to battle with Benjamin, and the men of Israel were arrayed for battle with them at Gibeah. 21And the Benjaminites sallied forth from Gibeah, and they laid waste among Israel on that day twenty-two thousand men. 22And the troops of the men of Israel summoned their strength and once again were arrayed for battle in the place where they had been arrayed on the first day. 23And the Israelites went up and wept before the LORD till evening, and they inquired of the LORD, saying, “Shall I once again join battle with my Benjaminite brother?” And the LORD said, “Go up against him.” 24And the Israelites drew near to the Benjaminites on the second day. 25And Benjamin sallied forth to meet them from Gibeah on the second day, and they laid waste among the Israelites another eighteen thousand men, all of them sword-wielding. 26And the Israelites and all the troops went up and came to Bethel and wept, and they sat there before the LORD and fasted on that day till evening, and they offered up burnt offerings and well-being sacrifices before the LORD. 27And the Israelites inquired of the LORD—and in those days the Ark of God’s Covenant was there, 28and Phineas son of Eleazar son of Aaron was in attendance before Him in those days—saying, “Shall I once again sally forth in battle with my Benjaminite brother or shall I leave off?” And the LORD said, “Go up, for tomorrow I shall give him into your hand.” 29And Israel placed ambushers round about Gibeah. 30And the Israelites went up against the Benjaminites on the third day and were arrayed against Gibeah as on the times before. 31And the Benjaminites sallied forth to meet the troops, they were drawn away from the town, and they began to strike down from the troops, as on the times before, on the highways, one going up to Bethel and one to Gibeah, about thirty men of Israel. 32And the Benjaminites thought, “They are routed before us as before.” But the Israelites had said, “Let us flee and draw them away from the town to the highways.” 33And all the men of Israel had arisen from their place and were arrayed in Baal-Tamar, and the Israelite ambush was emerging from its place west of Gibeah. 34And ten thousand picked men from all Israel came opposite Gibeah, and the battle was fierce, but the Benjaminites did not know that harm was about to touch them. 35And the LORD routed Benjamin before Israel, and the Israelites laid waste among Benjamin on that day twenty-five thousand one hundred men, all of them sword-wielding. 36And the Benjaminites saw that they were routed. And the men of Israel gave ground before Benjamin, for they trusted the ambush that they had set for Gibeah. 37And the ambushers rushed out and assaulted Gibeah, and the ambushers drew together and struck the whole town with the edge of the sword. 38And the time that had been set for the men of Israel with the ambushers was when they sent up a column of smoke from the town, 39the men of Israel were to turn round in the battle. And Benjamin had begun to strike down among the men of Israel about thirty men, for they thought, “Why, he is surely routed before us as in the first battle.” 40And the column began to go up from the town, a pillar of smoke, and Benjamin turned around to its rear and, look, the entire town had gone up in smoke to the heavens. 41And the men of Israel turned round, and the men of Benjamin panicked, for they saw that harm had touched them. 42And they turned from before the men of Israel to the wilderness road, but the battle overtook both them and the ones from the town. They were laying waste to them within it. 43They had encircled Benjamin, pursued him to Menuhah, led him to a point over against Gibeah from the east. 44And eighteen thousand men of Benjamin fell, all of them valiant men. 45And they turned and fled to the wilderness to the Rock of Rimmon, but they picked off five thousand men of them on the highways, and they overtook them at Gidom and struck down two thousand men of them. 46And all those who fell of Benjamin on that day came to twenty-five thousand sword-wielding men, all of them valiant men. 47And six hundred men turned and fled to the wilderness to the Rock of Rimmon and stayed at the Rock of Rimmon four months. 48And the men of Israel had turned back against the Benjaminites, and they struck them by the edge of the sword from the town, from man to beast, whatever was there. All the towns, too, that were there they set on fire.
CHAPTER 20 NOTES
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1. as one man. This phrase recurs in the story, emphasizing the solidarity of the eleven tribes in their opposition to Benjamin.
2. four hundred thousand sword-wielding foot soldiers. Although military numbers in all these stories are exaggerated, this figure is especially fantastic. At no time in the history of ancient Israel could the nation have deployed this large an army.
4. husband of the murdered woman. Only now does the narrative spell out that the night-long gang-rape is tantamount to murder.
I came with my concubine. The Hebrew uses “I came” in the singular, followed by a second grammatical subject of the verb “my concubine,” a form that indicates that the first subject of the verb is primary. The Levite remains true to character, making the woman ancillary to himself.
5. Me they thought to kill. In fact, the men of Gibeah sought to have sex with him, a detail the Levite prefers not to mention, substituting for it a purported direct threat to his life.
and my concubine they raped. He says nothing about the fact that he himself thrust her out the door into the hands of the rapists.
6. I seized my concubine and cut her up. He has already said that she died, but this way of putting it creates the macabre impression of his cutting up the person, not the corpse.
7. Offer a word of counsel here. Obviously, the word he assumes his tale will elicit is a resolution of vengeance.
10. ten men out of a hundred. Though it seems evident that 10 percent of the assembled troops are to provide logistical support to the warriors, the wording—ten out of a hundred, a hundred out of a thousand, a thousand out of ten thousand—is a bit confusing.
for those coming to Benjamin’s Gibeah. The translation follows the reading in the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text looks garbled here: “for their coming.”
12. the tribe of Benjamin. The received text shows, illogically, a plural, “tribes,” but both the Septuagint and the Vulgate have a singular noun.
13. But the Benjaminites did not want to heed the voice of their Israelite brothers. The Israelites at first sought to punish only the perpetrators of the murderous sex crime. The refusal of the Benjaminites to hand them over then sets the stage for the bloody civil war.
14. gathered from the towns. These would have to be the sundry towns besides Gibeah that were in the tribal territory of Benjamin.
15. twenty-six thousand sword-wielding men. There is an unresolved discrepancy between this number and verse 35, where the total number of Benjaminite fighting men is given as 25,100.
16. left-handers. This might have been a genetic trait common among the Benjaminites, or they might have trained themselves to use their left hand in combat, like the great tennis player Rafael Nadal. One recalls that the Benjaminite Ehud used his left-handed prowess to take Eglon by surprise.
every one of them could sling a stone at a hair and not miss. Thus the Benjaminites, although vastly outnumbered, are formidable warriors. The large casualties they inflict on the first two days of battle may be because they can accurately strike their enemies from a distance, with a weapon that has a greater range than a spear and can be deployed more mobilely than a bow.
18. inquired of God. It was standard procedure throughout the ancient Near East to inquire of an oracle before battle.
Judah first. The oracle is extremely terse, and it offers no guidance as to how to conduct the battle.
21. laid waste. This is an unusual idiom for killing enemies in battle (the literal sense is: “waste to the ground”). It is possible that the usage, repeated several times in the story, is intended to evoke an association of cutting off progeny because it is precisely the idiom used to describe Onan’s practice of coitus interruptus (Genesis 38:9). The question of progeny and the survival of Benjamin becomes urgent in the next chapter.
23. Go up against him. Again, the oracle offers no counsel or prediction about the battle.
27. in those days the Ark of God’s Covenant was there. This clause and the next, which runs through the first half of verse 28, are an editorial interpolation intended to explain to a later audience why the Israelites had come to Bethel to inquire of the oracle.
28. Go up, for tomorrow I shall give him into your hand. Following the familiar folktale pattern of three repetitions with a reversal the third time, God now assures the Israelites that this time they will be victorious. Some interpreters see a contradiction between God’s granting the victory and its achievement through a military stratagem—the ambush and the false retreat—but this account is actually in keeping with the system of dual causation one often finds in biblical narrative: events are attributed to divine intervention but are implemented by human initiative.
31. the highways. Unlike derekh, which is any kind of road or way, these mesilot are paved roads.
about thirty men. In this third battle, the casualties they inflict before they are trapped and overwhelmed are insignificant.
37. the ambushers drew together and struck the whole town with the edge of the sword. The stratagem used here to capture and destroy the town is identical with the one deployed by the Israelite forces against Ai in Joshua 8. Many scholars think that the writer in Joshua drew on this story.
38. the time that had been set for the men of Israel with the ambushers was when they sent up a column of smoke. In the parallel episode in Joshua, it is Joshua who gives the signal by raising his javelin, as Moses raised his staff against Amalek. Here we have the more likely military device of a signal fire. The Masoretic Text has an anomalous word herev (“much”?) after “the ambushers,” but this is in all likelihood a dittography for haʾorev, “the ambushers,” and so it has been deleted in the translation.
39. And Benjamin had begun to strike down among the men of Israel about thirty men. This duplicates verse 31 and may reflect an editorial glitch.
41. they saw that harm had touched them. They now realize that they are caught in a pincer move between the ambushers and the main Israelite force.
42. They were laying waste to them within it. The wording of the Hebrew is somewhat crabbed, and this trait is reflected in the translation.
47. six hundred men … stayed at the Rock of Rimmon. It seems unlikely that this wilderness crag was either impregnable or invisible to the pursuing army, so the Israelites may have made a decision to spare some remnant of the Benjaminite fighting men.
48. they struck them by the edge of the sword from the town, from man to beast. This formulation would seem to suggest that Gibeah and the other Benjaminite towns were put under the ban, the ḥerem. For the phrase “from man to beast,” the translation, following some manuscripts and two ancient versions, reads mimetim (literally, “from people”) rather than the Masoretic metom (“unwounded spot”).
1And the men of Israel had vowed at Mizpah, saying, “No man of us will give his daughter as wife to Benjamin.” 2And the people came to Bethel and stayed there till evening before God, and they raised their voice and wept bitterly. 3And they said, “Why, O LORD God of Israel, has this come about in Israel, that today one tribe should be missing from Israel?” 4And it happened on the next day that the people rose early and built an altar there and offered up burnt offerings and well-being offerings. 5And the Israelites said, “Who has not come up in the assembly to the LORD from all the tribes of Israel?”—for great was the vow concerning whoever had not gone up to the LORD at Mizpah, saying, “He is doomed to die.” 6And the Israelites were regretful about Benjamin their brother, and they said, “Today one tribe has been cut off from Israel. 7What shall we do for wives for those who remain, as we have vowed to the LORD not to give our daughters to them as wives?” 8And they said, “Which is the one of the tribes of Israel that did not come up to the LORD at Mizpah?” And, look, not a man had come to the camp from Jabesh-Gilead to the assembly. 9And the troops were mustered, and, look, there was no man there from the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead. 10And the community sent there twelve thousand of the valiant men and charged them, saying, “Go and strike down the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead by the edge of the sword, and the women and the little ones. 11And this is the thing that you shall do: every male and every woman who has lain with a male you shall put under the ban.” 12And they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead four hundred young virgin women who had not lain with a male, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan. 13And all the community sent and spoke to the Benjaminites who were at the Rock of Rimmon, and they declared peace with them. 14And Benjamin came back at that time, and they gave them the women that they had kept alive from the women of Jabesh-Gilead, but they did not find enough for them. 15And the people had become regretful concerning Benjamin, for the LORD had made a breach in the tribes of Israel. 16And the elders of the community said, “What shall we do for wives for those left, for the women of Benjamin have been destroyed?” 17And they said, “How will a remnant be left for Benjamin, that a tribe not be wiped out from Israel, 18and we cannot give them wives from our daughters, for the Israelites vowed, saying, ‘Cursed be he who gives a wife to Benjamin’?” 19And they said, “Look, there is a festival to the LORD every year in Shiloh, which is north of Bethel, east of the highway that goes up from Bethel to Shechem and south of Lebonah.” 20And they charged the Benjaminites, saying, “Go and lie in wait in the vineyards. 21And when you see that, look, the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance, you shall snatch each of you his wife from the daughters of Shiloh, and you shall go to the land of Benjamin. 22And should their fathers or their brothers come in dispute to us, we shall say to them, ‘We showed mercy to them, for no man of them took his wife in battle, for it was not you who gave to them. Now should you bear guilt?’” 23And thus the Benjaminites did, and they took wives according to their number from the dancing girls whom they stole away, and they returned to their estate and rebuilt the towns and dwelled within them. 24And the Israelites went off from there at that time each man to his tribe and to his clan, and they went out from there each man to his estate.
25In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.
CHAPTER 21 NOTES
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1. the men of Israel had vowed at Mizpah. The Hebrew indicates a pluperfect because this solemn vow was taken before the beginning of the war with Benjamin.
3. Why … has this come about in Israel. Now, after the victory, the people are confronted with a dilemma because of their binding vow, for its consequence will be the elimination of one of the twelve tribes of Israel.
5. for great was the vow. This second vow, to destroy whoever held back from joining in the war against Benjamin, will be used to find a way out of the first vow.
6. cut off. The Hebrew uses a rather violent verb, nigdaʿ (literally, “hacked off”), instead of the usual nikhrat. Some scholars prefer to read nigraʿ, “is taken away,” which would be in keeping with “missing” in verse 3.
8. Jabesh-Gilead. This northern territory to the east of the Jordan was allied with Benjamin, as will be clear in the story of Saul in 1 Samuel. Many have inferred that the whole story of the civil war and of the place of Jabesh-Gilead in its aftermath is meant to discredit Benjamin, Saul’s tribe.
10. Go and strike down the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead. Jabesh-Gilead is to be put under the ban, all its population except for female virgins to be massacred. It is historically unlikely that the ḥerem was practiced by one set of Israelites on another, and as Amit points out, it would have been a singularly bad solution to the dilemma of Benjamin’s survival to achieve it by wiping out a whole group of Israelites, men, women, and children.
12. they brought them to the camp at Shiloh. The setting now shifts from Bethel to Shiloh, laying the ground for the opening chapters of the Book of Samuel, which are centered in Shiloh.
14. but they did not find enough for them. There are six hundred Benjaminites at the Rock of Rimmon, so the shortfall in brides is two hundred. But in all likelihood, the story of the delivery of the four hundred young women from Jabesh-Gilead and the story of the snatching of the dancing girls in the vineyards are two different versions of how the surviving Benjaminites got their brides that have been edited together, with the numerical deficiency introduced in the first story so that it can be made up in the second.
19. there is a festival to the LORD every year in Shiloh. The name and nature of the festival are unspecified. The fact that it is said to be in Shiloh might encourage the inference that it was a special local celebration at Shiloh. On the other hand, the Mishnah (Taʿanit 4:8) reports a practice on the fifteenth of Av and on Yom Kippur in which the nubile young women went out dancing in the vineyards in borrowed white garments to be chosen as wives by the young men of the community.
21. you shall snatch each of you his wife from the daughters of Shiloh. What is involved is a kind of abduction, not rape, or, if the report in the Mishnah is historically grounded, a collective mating ceremony. This odd tale of snatching brides during the celebration of a festival has parallels in Herodotus (where it is a festival honoring Artemis) and in Livy’s well-known story of the abduction of the Sabine women (where the festival is dedicated to Neptune). In any case, the Book of Judges, which begins in violence and is dominated by violence, ends here on an upbeat note with dancing girls and the taking of brides.
22. We showed mercy to them, for no man of them took his wife in battle. This whole speech is somewhat garbled (and the verb that means “show mercy” is conjugated in an untenable way in the Masoretic Text). The received text has “we took,” but three ancient versions read “they took.” The sense one can extract, without entirely rewriting the verse, is: The Benjaminites did not take these young women as war captives; we showed mercy to them and arranged for the taking of brides; you yourselves did not give the girls as brides, for the vow against doing that was incumbent on you. Now why should you oppose our proper procedure and incur guilt?
23. stole away. The Hebrew verb gazal, it should be said, generally indicates the illicit appropriation of someone else’s possessions.
25. In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. This refrain is now inserted at the end as a kind of epilogue to the Book of Judges. The state of political anarchy has been especially manifest in the story of the concubine at Gibeah and the civil war it triggers, and perhaps in the war’s aftermath as well. The refrain sets the stage for the Book of Samuel, which will move in swift steps to the founding of the monarchy.
