Dismembering Judges

The proliferation of major publications on Judges in the last two decades has been nothing short of dramatic, even with the overall explosive burgeoning of biblical studies taken into account. Commentaries and monographs on the book as a whole were coming out between 1996 and 2015 at the average rate of more than one a year.¹ In addition, full-scale studies of individual Judges pericopes and even chapters, previously a rarity at best, began to appear regularly.² The reviewed volume, a long-awaited English translation of the author’s 2003 Hebrew dissertation, greatly expanded and improved, belongs to the latter group. I will start by summarizing the volume’s content, then evaluate the author’s arguments from the historical-critical standpoint, and conclude by offering critical reflections on this paradigm as exemplified by Edenburg’s work.

1. Overview

The book opens with a very brief introduction (pp. 1–7) that highlights the exegetical challenges presented by Judges 19–21 and outlines the structure of the monograph. Although some of the preceding scholarship is acknowledged, there is nothing even remotely resembling a Forschungsbericht. Chapter 1 (pp. 9–77) is devoted to the text’s composition history. Edenburg finds no evidence of diachronic development in Judg 19:1–30, ascribing the entire text, minus the three-word “editorial” comment on the absence of the monarchy in verse 1, to the original narrator whom she dubs N¹. In the rest of the fragment, she sees multiple traces of massive editorial intervention, such as inconsistencies, repetitions, stylistic shifts, and awkward phrasing. Ultimately, the following passages are deemed secondary: 20:3b–11, 16, 27b–28a, 31b–32a, 33a, 33bβ–36a, 45aα, 45bβ–46; 21:2–5, 8b, 10–11, 12b, 15–18, as well as scattered words and phrases in several additional verses. Edenburg ascribes them to a single editor, R² (the siglum obviously standing for “secondary redactor” rather than for the adorable robot from Star Wars) whose purpose was, first, to fill what he perceived as narrative gaps, and second, to emphasize “the ideal unity of all Israel” (p. 76). She also discerns fragments of a pre-existent poetic piece scattered in the account of the decisive battle between Benjamin and the rest of Israel (20:32b, 33bα, 37a, 39a–bα¹, 40a–bα, 41aβ–b, 42aβ–43, 45aβ–bα) and a few scribal errors, such as dittography in 20:15b and transposition of verses 22–23 in chapter 20. The author also touches upon the way in which the characters are portrayed, almost exclusively in chapter 19 (pp. 16–20), but that hardly ever comes up anywhere else in the monograph. Neither does Edenburg address the literary structure of the text in its received form, mostly sticking to the traditional chapter divisions but also splitting chapter 20, without discussion, into two parts, verses 1–13 and 14–48, and the latter into “the two preliminary battles” (vv. 14–28) and “the decisive battle” (vv. 29–48).³

The monograph’s second chapter (pp. 79–113) aims to anchor Judges 19–21 in the history of ancient Israel as it emerges from extra-biblical sources, mainly from archeological data on the sites featured in the narrative—especially Gibeah, Mizpah, and Bethel, but also Bethlehem, Jabesh-Gilead, the rock of Rimmon, and Shiloh. After reviewing these data and juxtaposing them with the pertinent biblical traditions, Edenburg concludes that “the combined reference to Bethlehem, Gibeah, Mizpah, and Bethel in Judg 19–21 may best reflect the circumstances existing in Judah during the period of Babylonian occupation and the beginning of the Persian period” (p. 111), particularly since Mizpah seems to have functioned at the time as an administrative center. Accordingly, the pericope must have come into being in the sixth or early fifth century b.c.e. The inference is further strengthened by the analysis of the text’s language and style in the third chapter...