Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roy L. Heller is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of two books on biblical interpretation, Narrative Structure and Discourse Constellations and Power, Politics, and Prophecy.

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CONVERSATIONS WITH SCRIPTURE

Morehouse Publishing

Contents

Introduction to the Series.......................................................ixAutobiographical Note............................................................xiiiCHAPTER ONE The Book of Judges as Tragedy........................................1CHAPTER TWO Back When Life Was Simple: The Introductions.........................21CHAPTER THREE Faithfulness and Fickleness: Othniel to Gideon.....................43CHAPTER FOUR The Downward Spiral: Abimelech to Samson............................61CHAPTER FIVE Things Fall Apart: The Conclusions..................................81CHAPTER SIX We Have Seen the Enemy: A Cautionary Tale............................97Acknowledgments..................................................................115Study Questions by Sharon Ely Pearson............................................117Suggestions for Further Reading..................................................131Notes............................................................................133About the Author.................................................................135

Chapter One

I was six years old the first time I was introduced to the book of Judges. Along with about half a dozen other children, I sat at a long, low table, crayon in hand, coloring a picture of a man with incredibly large muscles and incredibly long hair. We sat there, concentrating on our pictures, while the woman at the head of the table read from a Sunday school booklet about the exploits of Samson. We heard how Samson had been blessed by God with super-human strength in order to fight and defeat the evil Philistines. We listened intently to the story of how God had told Samson that the secret to his remarkable strength was found in his long hair, understanding that he must keep his secret and let his hair grow long in order to retain his strength and do all the courageous feats that God had planned for him. So we knew that when the Philistine woman called Delilah came into the story, she was not a good woman. We heard how she boldly cut Samson's hair while he slept and, therefore, robbed him of his power. But we also learned that Samson did not despair, but rather prayed to God for strength one last time and bravely defeated the Philistines by killing many of them in his death. That was how I was introduced to the book of Judges.

If, however, that was my introduction to the book, it was also, in many ways, my conclusion as well. Yes, every three years or so, we would hear the story of Samson again, but that was the only part of the book we ever learned anything about. I never understood why the book was not simply called "The Book of Samson," since he was, I assumed, the only main character in the book! It was not until almost twenty years later that I was introduced to the book for a second time. In my graduate program at Yale, I read Judges as if for the first time and realized not only that it was about a great deal more than Samson, but also that it was a bit more complex than simply the story of a strong man who loses his strength.

I begin this book with my own relationship with Judges because in many ways it parallels the relationship that the church has had with his remarkable book over the centuries. Like me, the church has largely not dealt—or even known—about the book of Judges as a whole, and this, I think, is a real pity. For Judges contains some of the oddest material in all of Scripture. For example, we read stories about military deliverers who often win the war by unusual and certainly unorthodox means. There is the story of Ehud, who secures a victory for Israel by stabbing an enemy king in his own bathroom, and then causes the king's attendants to be late in rounding up their troops; they have to wait until the king is no longer "indisposed." Then we read the story of Deborah who assures the military commander of Israel, Barak, that a victory would be brought about by the hand of a woman; the victory, however, is not won by Deborah herself, but rather by a non-Israelite woman who tricks and murders the enemy general in a most unusual way. After that there is Gideon, who wins a major battle against overwhelming odds by surrounding the enemy by night and breaking pots and lighting torches, which so unnerves the opposing forces that they essentially kill their own troops. Jephthah is so unsure of his ability to lead Israel to victory that he vows that he will sacrifice whatever comes out of his house when he returns victorious from the battle; unfortunately, his own daughter leads the triumphant procession from the house. And, of course, we read the story of Samson, the long-haired strong man who is shorn of both his hair and his strength and eventually kills himself along with a great number of Philistines as his dying act.

The individual characters and the individual stories in Judges are remarkable for their irony, pathos, and occasional humor, yet for the most part they have not been considered as particularly "theological" or "spiritual" when it comes to helping people live their lives. That is why when commentators are searching for the "important" portions of narrative in the Old Testament, they more readily turn to Genesis, Exodus, the words of the prophets, and the books of Samuel and Kings to write their works. Even though the organization of the book of Joshua readily lends itself to a multi-week study or sermon series, it is usually passed over in silence.

Overlooking Judges

The two great pillars of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin, wrote a great deal about Scripture and produced a vast amount of material commenting on the Bible. Yet, when it came to the book of Judges, neither of these proponents of the Protestant theology of sola scriptura—"Scripture alone"—wrote a commentary about it. A great number of theologians and scholars of the eighteenth through the twentieth century, many of them Anglican, attempted to read the Bible with an eye toward its moral lessons and spiritual teachings. But Judges, with its excessive violence and eccentricity, proved a difficult medium to work with.

Thomas Robinson, the rector of St. Mary's Church in Leicester, England, produced an extremely popular volume of sermons that he had preached in his parish during the 1780s. This book, Scripture Characters, was pirated and reprinted throughout the first half of the 1800s due to its fame. One of the best known religious books of its time, its sermons focused on biblical characters and were intended "for the serious inquirer after sacred truth." Robinson believed that Scripture's witness to us is largely composed of the wonderful array of characters of upstanding moral fiber, whom we are to imitate: "By looking at the excellencies of others, we are convinced of our own duty, and our sad declensions from it, much more forcibly than by the mere reading of precepts and directions." Scripture, according to Robinson, teaches us how we ought to live by giving us models to follow. Needless to say, when Robinson got around to preaching on the characters of Judges, he completely skipped the entire book and went from a sermon on Joshua, in the preceding book, to one on Eli, in the book of Samuel.

In 1896, Mrs. Annie R. White wrote a whole Bible commentary particularly for the purpose of training teachers of Sunday schools, which were...