Judges.

Judges. By Serge Frolov. The Forms of the Old Testament Literature. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013. Pp. xv + 374. $55 (paper).

The biblical book of Judges deserves renewed and careful attention by scholars of religion and historians of the ancient Near East. The well-known yet still puzzling problems of its relation to the rest of the Hebrew Bible are manifold: the manifest parallels between Judges 19 and Genesis 19, the intention of which is evidently to portray the Israelites as having become no better than the Sodomites; the relation of the yet-to-be-accomplished conquest of the land as described in Judges 1-2 (especially beginning at 1:27) to the overall thrust of the book of Joshua (so, Joshua 11:23, 21:43-45)--a contrast presumably in the service of both criticizing northern Israel and establishing the theological framework (Judges 2:11-23) of the sequence of apostasy-oppression-repentance-deliverance to account for the Assyrian and Babylonian victories of 722 and 586, respectively; and so on.

Attendant compositional questions abound: how to account for the twice-recounted death of Joshua (Joshua 24:29, Judges 2:8); are we to understand the beginning of the narrative of the judges at 3:7 with the account of Othniel; does that narrative extend through Judges 16:31 with the death of Samson, followed by two appendices--the story of the Danites (Judges 17-18) and the outrage at Gibeah (19-21)--or should Judges 13 through 1 Samuel 7 be seen, as Serge Frolov argues, as a single literary unit of "the Philistine cycle" that has followed the earlier descriptions of the cycles of oppression by the Moabites, Midianites, and Ammonites; and so on.

These and other puzzling problems and compositional questions have, in turn, provoked further contested considerations. For the former, there was the earlier difference between William Foxwell Albright and Albrecht Alt over the character of the conquest, permutations of which continue today. For the latter compositional questions, how are we to understand the relation of Judges to the so-called Deuteronomistic Historian, as posited by Martin Noth and others? Do we have a large amount of preexisting material in Judges which has been literarily and theologically woven together by the editorial insertions of the redactor? If so, is the historian able to discern from that material the earlier reality, the Sitz im Leben, of, say, the Israel of the Merneptah stele (e.g., military tribal confederation(s), so Judges 4-5)? Or is it the case, as Frolov often concludes, that the Sitz im Leben of many of the units is its Sitz in der Literatur, that is, with the possible exception of a few accounts--specifically, the notices of Shamgar (3:31) and the other minor judges (10:1-5, 12:8-15), the fable of 9:8-15, and the Samson narrative (13:2-16:31)--"Judges is a predominately authorial creation" (p. 351)?

In other words, does the relative absence of Judah in Judges provide a window into the (memory of the) historical reality of pre-Davidic (northern) Israel; or is it a later, polemical device (of Jerusalem provenance) to indicate that Judah was not responsible for the crimes of the north? Similarly, does the absence from Judges of any mention of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria as oppressors of Israel indicate that one context of the various possibilities for its (layers of) composition may be conveyed by the political disarray described by the Babylonian "Erra Epic" that allowed for the emergence and consolidation of a number of smaller nations; or is that absence simply dictated by the flow of the biblical narrative composed by the royal scribes of the exiled King Jehoiachin (pp. 338-42)?

However one answers these and other questions, one unavoidable implication of the this-worldly orientation of the Hebrew Bible is political. This implication has occasionally been recognized, for example, earlier by Alt's "Die Staatenbildung der Israeliten in Palastina," in his Kleine Schriften (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1953); but, except for a few recent analyses, for example, Joshua Berman's Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), Yoram Hazony's Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), and the multi-volume Jewish Political Tradition (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000--), the political significance of the Hebrew Bible remains insufficiently addressed. Judges exposes this insufficiency as it poses point blank that significance; for, as Frolov rightly argues, certainly its concluding chapters (so, Judges 17:6, 18:1, 19:1, 21:25), likely the earlier narratives of Gideon and Abimelech, and perhaps even the notices of the minor judges (p. 97) are preludes to the establishment of monarchy.

Do we, as Frolov's argument implies, have in Judges a kind of Hobbesian political perspective that the only thing worse than having a king (= state) is not having one (p. 343)? But if this is indeed so, as it appears to be, is that perspective qualified both by Gideon's refusal to rule because the deity will rule over Israel (8:23)--"the first time in the entire Hebrew Bible designating] the deity as Israel's (potential) ruler" (p. 178)--and 1 Samuel 8? However those qualifications ought to be understood, about which more below, are they, in turn, undermined by the evidently recognized legitimacy of kingship, albeit and importantly limited, in Deuteronomy 17?

In the tradition of Hermann Gunkel's and Hugo Gressman's "form criticism," Frolov's commentary on Judges admirably takes on these and many other puzzling problems and compositional questions. Appropriate for a form-critical study, each of the book's fourteen chapters is divided into an examination of the respective literary unit's textual variants, outline and discussion of the unit's structure, genre, setting, intention, and a concluding bibliography for each unit. The volume concludes with two stimulating appendices: on the composition, likely setting, and intention of the Enneateuch (Genesis--2 Kings), and a discussion of synchronic and diachronic analyses of Judges.

The difficulty of ascertaining the extent to which earlier traditions, insofar as they are discernable, have been qualitatively transformed by subsequent compositional activity is likely intractable. One may readily agree with Frolov about the literary cohesiveness of the Enneateuch that can, in turn, be classified by various genres; nevertheless, there remains the question of the existence and scope of earlier material or traditions that have still been drawn upon. For example, while "the end product [of Judges 1:1-26] is a literate, scribal creation" (p. 43), its being so does not necessarily negate reference to earlier traditions, however transformed to serve some later historiographical purpose. It is otherwise difficult to understand, for example, the description in Judges 1 of pre-Davidic Israel's lack of control of the valleys and coasts, even if that description has subsequently been adapted to indict Ephraim and Manasseh; or the notice of Shamgar (3:31).

It may be, as Frolov argues, that the accounts of the left-handed Ehud (3:12-30) or Jael's murder of Sisera (Judges 4-5) or Gideon (Judges 6-9), as we have them before us, do not clearly indicate a local or tribal setting or oral storytelling (pp. 111, 135, 141, 148); but might their transmission have been through the traditions of the trans-local provenance of the northern kingdom in the aftermath of 722? After all, how are we to account for the Elijah and Elisha cycles and, in particular, the possibility of Elijah being described as a kind of northern Moses (1 Kings 19)? In response to questions like these and the literary difficulties that force their formulation, is Frolov's proposed setting of the entourage of the exiled Jehoiachin for the composition of the Judges of the Enneateuch, whatever its merit, nevertheless too neat-and-tidy an explanation?

Having noted this reservation above to Frolov's analysis to admittedly intractable problems, productively provocative and insightful are his analyses of the narrative of Gideon and the structure of the Enneateuch. If, in fact, Judges is both a prelude to and an apologia for monarchy (requiring an interpretation of Jotham's discourse, 9:7-15, different from what one usually finds; see pp. 194-95), then the appraisal of Gideon's refusal of the kingship becomes quite provocative. Since that refusal led to the disaster of Abimelech's reign, Gideon was guilty of a "misplaced zealotry on kingship [that] cost Israel dearly: the people could have been spared much bloodshed and avoided further bouts of apostasy had he accepted the crown (with YHWH's blessing) and, more importantly, designated a successor" (p. 197).

Particularly insightful is Frolov's analysis of Judges within the structure and intention of the Enneauteuch. According to Frolov, Judges 1 "snaps the Enneateuch's ascending macrosegment, beginning with Abraham (if not the creation of the world) and bringing his descendants in Joshua to the land promised to them already in Genesis 12:7, and sends the narrative on a never-ending downhill slide" (p. 22). Thus, Judges becomes the structural fulcrum of the Enneateuch. Furthermore, "the sequence of the cycles of apostasy, oppression, repentance, and deliverance that dominates Judges not only extends well into 1 Samuel but also subsumes the entire account of the monarchic Israel" (p. 335). This insightful possibility of the compositional significance of Judges within the Enneateuch will necessarily raise a number of interpretative problems, for example, the evaluation of 1 Samuel 8 and 2 Samuel 7. Be that as it may, the possibility of this significance clearly brings Judges front and center, thereby requiring the kind of renewed and careful attention provided by Frolov.

STEVEN GROSBY

CLEMSON UNIVERSITY

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Author:	Grosby, Steven
Publication:	The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Article Type:	Book review
Date:	Jan 1, 2016
Words:	1562
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