Introduction to the Book of Judges by Robert Alter

Like so many biblical books, Judges reflects the editorial splicing together of disparate narrative material. 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 was much later – perhaps, as some scholars have inferred, towards 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 sensed 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 the readers to call this the Book of Chieftains or even to designate these figures in the text 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[1]. They incorporate a report of Joshua’s death an account of the incompletion of the conquest of the land, for which at least two rather different explanations are offered. The unconsummated conquests  sets the stage for a sequence of stories in which Israel is sorely oppressed by its 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 three  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 dereliction, the crying out to God by the Israelites, God’s raising up of a judge to rescue them.

This process of ‘raising up’ leader 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 leaders derives neither from a hereditary line nor from election by peers but comes suddenly when the spirit of he 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 whereas for others we are given a detailed report of an act of military prowess or a whole series of narrative episodes. 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 prophesy, with a 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 (tsalah) or investment (labash) but of violent pounding (pa’am). 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, quasi-mythological 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 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 more purposeful than is often assumed. What  follows the Samson cycle is the bizarre story of Micah’s idol and then the grisly tale oft he 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. 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 begin with his stealing eleven hundred shekels (the exact amount that the Philistines offered 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 cultish objects and buying off the young Levite whom Micah has hired to minister to 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 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 sundry tribes to arouse indignation against Benjamin ,and the ensuing civil war in which the other tribes suffer extensive casualties, comes close to wiping out of the tribe of Benjamin. Unbridled lust, implacable hostility, and mutual mayhem provide ample warrant for the implicitly monarchist refrain from 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 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 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 horns 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 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 sword is particularly grisly: his killer thrust the weapon into his belly all the way to the top of its 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 women, this one anonymous, smashes the head of the nefarious Abimelech with a millstone she drops on  him from her porch 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 a 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 beginning of the book to the dismembering of the concubine at the end. The act of chopping a body into pieces, of course, is intended as a means to unit 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 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 center 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, will be the task of the great narrative sequence, which is the book of Samuel, concluding in the second chapter of 1 Kings, to imagine a political means to create center and leash the anarchy. The 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 the center begins to hold, the blood-dimmed tide is never stemmed.

[1] In my view the most interesting event in the Book of Joshua, chapter 20, v. 1-6, is:

And the Lord spoke of Joshua, saying: ‘Speak to the Israelites, saying, Set aside for yourselves the towns of asylum about which I spoke to you through Moses [Numbers 35, Deuteronomy 19] where a murderer, one who strikes down a person in errance, without intending, may flee, and they will be an asylum for you from he blood avenger. And he may flee to one of these towns and stand at the gateway to the town and speak his words in the hearing of the elders of that town, and they will take him to them into that town and give him a place and he will dwell with them. And should the blood avenger pursue him, they will not hand the murderer over to him, for he has struck his fellow man without intending, and he had not been his enemy in times past. And he shall dwell in that town until he stands before the community in judgment . . .

Alter comments that role the high priest would perform in this rudimentary judicial process involves the provision of amnesty but in the text the conditions or limits of this amnesty are ambiguous [ . . .]. The writer  ‘wanted to emphasize that the fugitive’s innocence had to be determined by judicial proceedings’.