Joshua and Judges

7. Women Frame the Book of Judges—How and Why?

7 Women Frame the Book of Judges—How and Why? Athalya Brenner Disclaimer: Context This article was originally written for a Festschrift in honor of my friend and colleague Yairah Amit, published in 2012. Hence, its contents and context are primarily academic: the wish to honor a colleague, as is so often done, by presenting a piece of writing within that colleague’s expertise, and utilizing her own scholarship for that purpose. But even at the original time of writing, in 2011, I intended to rewrite and expand it for the planned Texts@Contexts volume on Joshua and Judges. Subsequently a version of this essay was delivered as a paper in an SBL session of the Contextual Interpretation Consultation in San Francisco, in November 2011, and I thank the participants in the discussion for helping me crystallize my thoughts further on the topic. Why write about women in Judges? Ostensibly Judges is a book about men, or mostly about men. Military men, so called “saviors.” Male rulers. Excluding some female figures, of course. When you read the book, this is your first impression: a men’s book. However, this impression cannot last for long. There are plenty of woman figures in Judges. Here as in other biblical passages, the overt and covert links made in the Hebrew bible between female figures and the Hochpolitik of government, nationalism, and territory do not cease to amaze me. On the one hand, at least theoretically, women are by and large removed from the political arena. On the other hand, they are described as saviors in cases of extreme urgency—or as victims in cases of a lost social order. In other words, they symbolize the social order that envelops them to the point of exclusion. A curious paradox, certainly. Clearly, not all is confident and self-assured in the patriarchal world order that we often watch in the biblical stories, as if we were in a film unfolding 125 unexpectedly to display (male) heroes and antiheroes as dependents, and politically active females as either non-females (non-mothers) or else as ethically deficient, even when they operate on “our” side. And also, somehow, somewhere, there is a nagging voice that tells me, pesters me, that similar paradoxical views of social maleness and femaleness are still inherent in my own culture, in your culture, at least to a degree, in spite of variances in time, space, and mentality. So please do help me, from your own contexts: why do women, actually female figures, mainly a certain type of female figures, actually daughters, frame the book of Judges at both ends and feature in its center, for better or—more often—for worse? Ostensibly, the book of Judges is about “judges.” These “judges,” ‫שופטים‬ (shophetim), as is widely demonstrated in the book, are persons who effect collective deliverance from (military) danger1 more than, as more usual for the verb ‫שפט‬ (sh-ph-t) Qal and its nominal derivatives, they engage in legislative and juridical activities.2 Mostly the stories and short[er] notes about “judges” in this book, apart from one, are about male judges and their escapades. However, as has been noticed by many scholars, the book begins and ends with stories about women.3 From Achsah (Judg. 1:12-15) and a reference to the Kenites (1:16) and to Jael’s group, which will come to fruition in chapters 4–5, through to the abducted Shiloh women in chapter 21, woman figures are depicted again and again as major linchpins in the evolving drama of local stories made national: the drama of attempts to move from local leadership and its overriding discontents, in spite of occasional successes, to a more central government that would generate a greater success rate and greater security for its subjects, or partners. The roles woman figures fulfill in the individual sections (such as the Achsah story) or in larger units (Samson’s biography, chs. 13–16), as well as in the overriding plan of the book, the ideological “national” framework, vary. The figures may be defined in traditional terms, that is, as daughters, wives, or mothers; that is, as male-relational figures. Achsah, Jephthah’s daughter, and the young women of Shiloh/Jabesh Gilead are introduced as daughters, as are Samson’s Timnite wife and her sister, and the Levi’s runaway wife (ch. 19). The latter is primarily a wife, albeit a secondary one ‫פילגש‬, pilegesh); also wives are Achsah, Jael, Gideon’s Shechemite wife (also defined as a...