Jeremy Rosen
Judges Who Did Not Judge

Jeremy Rosen - Judges Who Did Not Judge

- So good afternoon everybody. Glad to see you hanging in there. I’m going to talk about the period of the judges. The period that in many respects mirrors the state of Jewish life today, even though it goes back thousands of years. Which I’ve brought up on my screen a kind of a timeline of the period of the judges. It’s a timeline that starts, actually, I brought up the wrong one on my screen, but that doesn’t matter. Let me unshare that screen and try another one if I’ve got it. No, I don’t. Okay, so what I want to describe is a period of time, some three and a half thousand years ago. Now it’s true that we don’t have accurate archaeological evidence for the biblical period and the post biblical period. The first archaeological evidence that we have really is the period of the Kings, Solomon, to some extent David, but less so and King Hezekiah is the latest reiteration. But roughly the timeline coincides with what we know from other sources about upheaval in the Middle East at this period. And the Exodus, roughly if it happened, if roughly is dated roundabout 1,300 before the common era, which would be about three and a half thousand years ago. And whether or not it happened is not the point here because what we’re looking at essentially is a long ancient tradition that in conformity to all the norms of the Assyrian world in which it was written, genealogy is terribly important. It’s important as a way of justifying the king in his position, his status.

And genealogy runs right through the first part of the Bible, the five books of Moses, the genealogy of Adam and of Cain and then of Noah and then of Abraham. Genealogy matters. And so the records that are kept were probably passed down in Kunyah formal writing in some form, but we don’t have much of that now. Or at least we have later copies of the time or it was oral. And so I think we should treat this as an oral tradition and therefore what we want to know is how did they understand it at the time and whether it’s relevant to us today. So Moses ran the show. He was appointed by God. He combined the spiritual leadership with the physical leadership, with the political one. And when he died, he passed it straight on to Joshua. And Joshua combined the authority of Moses both religiously and politically, even though he was not in his league at all. And in the time of Joshua, the Israelites invaded Canaan. First of all the battle of Jericho and then they started moving up into the hill area where they had to encounter the Canaanites. And encountering the Canaanites they had a tremendous amount of difficulty, tremendous problems. They won some battles, they lost others. But they moved in and invaded as tribes. And after the initial invasion, the tribes began to take care of their own territory. Some tribes were more successful than others. Some tribes remained on the East Bank of the River Jordan. And on the West Bank they moved in initially under the leadership of the tribe of Judah.

Judah took the powerful main leadership entering the land and placed himself in the area of Jerusalem. Although they fought over Jerusalem for a while conquered it and then succeeded to lose it. So if you are interested in following this lecture that I’m going to do by referring to the original text, then I recommend that you open Sefaria and turn to the Book of Judges because after Joshua dies, there is a period known as the Period of the Judges. And this is a period in which the authority of the tribes is paramount. Tribes rival each other, they fight against local enemies. Whether it’s the Midianites or the Canaanites or the Amalekites. And not all the tribes join in, very often it’s just a handful of them. So here we are beginning to see the weakness of the tribal system. And so much so that the Book of Judges has a theme running through it, which is in those days there was no king in Israel. Each man did whatever he wanted to do. It’s clearly a statement like that was written later.

So it’s referring back to this earlier period. Must have been written during the period of the kings when they tried to suggest that that was a good safe time, which it wasn’t, we could come to that eventually. So the Judges start off with Joshua handing over to his friend Caleb, who was the other kalef, the other man who survived the 40 years in the wilderness. And Caleb has a son in law or it’s not clear if it was a son in law or a younger brother called Othniel Ben Knaz. There’s nothing told about Othniel Ben Knaz at all. But rabbinic literature later on turns him into the great rabbinic leader and says that when Moses died, thousands of laws that Moses knew were forgotten. That in itself is an amazing statement to make. And Othniel through his own brilliance, his own brain, was able to bring them back. Which marks an important distinction between the period of Moses the law giver, who was inspired by God, to Othniel the law giver who is human and developed through human capacity, Jewish law going forward from this particular moment. Othniel had to deal with the Canaanites. And when he died, it’s the Moabites who come and take over. And what happens is the Israelites seem to adopt whichever God of whichever tribe is winning. So if the Canaanite God is winning, they all go Canaanite. If the Moabite God is winning, they all go Moabite. Most people think they kept their Jewish gods too, but they wanted to cover their bets. And so Moab reaches a position where it is conquering the Israelites. And according to the Book of Judges, this is because the Israelites have abandoned not only God, but their whole tradition, they are assimilating.

And then as in the tradition of the Book of Judges, somebody emerges who manages to save them. So we’re looking now at political leadership saving people from the enemy. And when you look through the Book of Judges it seems all about fighting and very little about what we would call spiritual. But I’m going to come to that. The first interesting character is a man called Ehud Ben Gera. Ehud, it says very clearly that he comes from a particular tribe, Benjamin. He is either left handed naturally or he taught himself to be left handed because he realised that the only way we are going to escape the domination of Moab is by cutting off the head of the snake. Because the tribes are divided. We have no army, we have no arms, we have no tools, we have no means of defending ourselves. The only way is through assassination. Having your sword being left handed is very important because in those days, most people were right handed. And when you wanted to draw your sword it was in a scabbard on your left side, you put your right hand down to left side and you pulled your sword out.

Because Ehud was left handed he had his scabbard on the right hand side so that his left hand could go in and bring out the sword. Ehud then asks for an appointment as the leader of an Israelite tribe to go and see the dominant King Eglon, his name was, and to bring him an official tribute to show that he was accepting his authority. And he turns up with his tribute and he asks to go and see King Eglon and they take him up to Eglon. Eglon is a remarkably fat man, a very, very fat man. Reminds you of Star Wars perhaps. And he is sitting there on his throne and in comes Ehud and says, dear Eglon, I would like to have a private interview with you because I’ve got something that only you should listen to. Okay, says Eglon, perfectly trusting, everybody out of the room out. Out and they go, the door is locked. Ehud takes his sword out. You see, when he passed through security, there was security. But the security for whatever reason, only bothered with checking the right side because they didn’t know there were people with swords on the left hand side, it seems. And so he passed through with his sword on the left hand side, his sword on the right hand side, left hand was able to take it out, he stabs Eglon through the stomach. And the Book of Judges explains that he was so fat that the sword, including the hilt, went all the way in. And he is dead.

Meanwhile, the door is locked. Ehud escapes through the window and runs home. Meanwhile, the guards outside are knocking on the door to find out what’s happening, what’s happening. Maybe he’s sitting on the toilet, maybe he’s done something, we don’t know. And therefore take some time before they can break in, by which time Ehud has gone. That’s the story of Ehud. Nothing else. We don’t know what kind of judge he was, whether he did a good job or a bad job. Was the job of a judge just military? Or was it as judge sounds to be the head of justice? There’s no reference to that at all, which is a problem. After Ehud, there was a man called Shamgar Ben Anath. And all we know about Shamgar Ben Anath are his children. riding on white assets and very little about what he did. The next major figure is my favourite, Deborah. And she’s my favourite for lots of different reasons. Not just because she was a woman. But she is the only one here who is described as a prophet. So clearly she had personal qualities. And these personal qualities enabled her to rise up the power system in this area of the tribes. But in fact, she wasn’t the boss of all the tribes. There were just three tribes, Zebulun, Naphtali, Ephraim, who accepted her authority. And they were being attacked by the Canaanites by a King called Jabin and his general called Sisera. And under this position, in this position, Deborah is the only one who can unite three tribes to come together to try to fight off the Canaanites. And she appoints a man called Barak Ben Avinoam.

Now Barak Ben Avinoam is a fighting man from the north. And he says to her, look, I understand you want me to lead the battle, but I’m not going to lead the battle if you don’t come with me. Deborah says, look, if I come with you, everybody’s going to give me credit, not you credit, which shows what a nice person she was. In the end they agree to go together. There is some dispute in the mid rush later on as to who Barak was and who actually Deborah was. Because Deborah is described as eshet lapidot, the wife of a guy called Lapidot. But Lapidot disappears. Lapidot also means the flame. And maybe it means she was wedded to the flame of the tabernacle. Maybe that’s how she was able to become who she was because she spent her time amongst the priests and the learned people around the tabernacle area. There’s no temple yet. And as a result, she gained confidence of people, but also knowledge. It’s so important, this leadership based on knowing other information about other people, other backgrounds and other ideas. But there are some people who say that actually Barak Ben Avinoam was a husband called Lapidot.

And because he was a flaming hero, that’s why he was given the name Lapidot. Others suggest that she married a wealthy man and it was through his wealth that he came to power. But none of this is clear in black and white in the text, just that she was the wife of Lapidot. She calls Barak together, they manage to gather everybody round and they go off to fight the vastly superior Canaanites in roughly where the Valley of Jezreel is today. And outnumbered and terrified they face on this mountain overlooking the valley, the invading Canaanites who come with their chariots as they are facing this rebellion by these Israelite tribes and they have to squash them. Then God intervenes. And as these chariots are coming down the valley, there’s a thunderstorm and a rainstorm and it catches all the chariots, there’s a wadi that suddenly flows. The Haggai throws them, sort of swamps them completely and they are totally defeated, totally chaotic. The Israelites come down from the dry mountain, pursue them, Sisera, the general escapes. And he goes into a tent of what he thinks is an ally, the Canaanites who are descended from Jethro, who seem to be allies with a Canaanites and allies with the Israelites, a kind of a neutral position.

He comes in there exhausted and there’s this woman, Jael ready to meet him and as he comes in she says, come down, lie down, have a nice time, take it easy, I’ll give you some refreshment and you’ll sleep. And he says, make sure nobody knows that I’m here. She feeds him, he falls asleep. And while he is asleep she takes a tent peg and smashes it through his head, smashes it with aggression as though she had something personal against him. He might have captured her or raped her or Lord knows what. But she smashes him. And then when Barak comes looking and forces her she opens the tent and says, here’s the man you’re looking for. And so they won the battle and won the day. Deborah then composes a beautiful poem. It’s the only significant poem in this whole text. And it recounts her triumph and how she was able to overcome the enemy and how some of the tribes were terrible because they didn’t come to her help and only certain tribes were able to. But nevertheless we were able to defeat our enemies. So Deborah, who was a nevia, she was a prophet and she sat under this palm tree and she judged and people to came to her with all the complaints. There you have the example of a spiritual leader, but she’s a woman and in addition she’s prepared to go out and join the fight where necessary.

So in that sense, she’s my hero both because she’s a woman and because of combining this spiritual element of prophecy with all these other guys around who we are going to see who are just big bullies as far as the text seems to indicate. So there’s Deborah. The next famous man you know is Gideon. And Gideon also comes from a relatively small unimportant tribe. And at his day he now has to defeat the Midianites and the Amalekites. And he is an ordinary guy at home and he too has problems with the idols. Everybody’s worshipping idols. He gets really pissed off about it, he smashes the idols. The locals want to kill him because they’re offending the gods. His father, Joash, stands up for him and manages to protect him a little bit. And slowly he grows in stature to the point where the tribes are prepared to ask him to lead them in battle against the Midianites and the Amalekites. And this is the calling that Gideon gets to take on the authority. And there are a series of nice little stories. He wanted to know if God was on his side. And so he asked God for a kind of a test.

If I put my sheepskin on the floor and in the morning there is only dew around and nothing on the sheepskin, that’s test number one. Test number two is how about the other way round that I ask the Jew to be on the sheepskin one time, off the sheepskin the next time, both things happen. So he takes it upon himself and he calls everybody together from the tribes, Naphtali, Asher, Manasseh. And he gets some 20,000 people who are prepared to come and start the battle. And at that moment God appears to him and says, no, I don’t want them, I don’t want them. I want you to take them all down to the water, get them all to drink. Those who kneel down and drink, it’s a sign to me that they’re used to kneeling down to idols. But those who put their face flat into the water and lap it up like a dog, they’re the ones you’re going to take. And now out of the 20,000 there are only 300, which would seem to indicate that most Jews, again, had assimilated other in a national sense. And so with 300 sure you know the story, he divides into three groups. They surround the Midianites at night, they have pitchers. And within the pitcher they have a torch, they have a chafer with them. And at the sign given from Gideon all of them charged out, smash that the pitchers charged down with the tents in the middle of the night. The Midianites are totally surprised, they dunno what to do, they flee and Gideon wins the battle. Gideon actually had 70 children.

He judged and he ruled for a period at a time. But he made one very big mistake. His big mistake was as a sign of his victory of the Midianites, he decided to gather up all the gold they’d gathered and turn it into a kind of statue to commemorate. And unfortunately that turned in time to become, if you like, a seduction to the Israelites who started worshipping this particular Ephod as it was called. Ephod has two meanings in the Bible. One of them is just something the priest wears. Another is that it’s an object. When Gideon died, 70 sons, Abimelech, one of them decides to kill all the brothers and take over control. And leaves out one little brother called Jotham. Jotham is missed out of this whole thing, is left out. And Abimelech goes to Shechem, which is the main capital city takes it over. Jotham stands on a hill overlooking and he says to everybody, you are making a big mistake. And he gives this famous story about the trees. The trees want to appoint a king and they go first of all to the fig tree and say fig tree with your fruit, be our king. And the fig tree says, no, I don’t want to lose my fruitfulness. They go to the vine and they ask the vine. The vine says, I don’t want to give up my juice and become your king. They ask the seed of the big trees and none of them want to do it. In the end, the only tree left is the brown ball. And the brown ball turns to all the trees and says, sure, I’ll be your king, but I want you to know that I catch fire easily and my fire can destroy you all. And that essentially was what Jotham was trying to say.

That this guy Abimelech, he was a murderous guy he took over, he took over Shechem. He got involved in fights and battles with his own people, with other people. There was in a case of a battle going on, which reminded them all of the battle against city of I where somebody comes out of the city attacks the people, who are attacking it, defeat them, then retreat to the city. And so then they try a second time, they divide into two parts. One part goes up to the city and when the citizens come out to attack them, they run away. And while they’re attacking the runaway, the other half come out from the high dark and come in and sack the city. That story is actually told three times between the Book of Joshua, the Book of Judges in itself, two occasions. And in the end Abimelech meets a sticky end. He ends up destroying Shechem. He goes for a town called Thebez and he’s besieging Thebez. And in Thebez there is a very clever woman who calls out from the tower and says, Abimelech, I need to speak to you. I’ve got something important to tell you, we can negotiate. And he comes forward to the tower to talk to her and she drops a heavy millstone down on his head and kills him. And that’s the end of Abimelech. You may well ask what’s uplifting about this story? And the answer is not very much because this was not a period of great spiritual inspiration. The amazing thing is that anything managed to happen at all. And so we carry on from Abimelech who wasn’t a judge, but plays an important role in the book to two men called Tola Ben Puar and Jair Gileadi.

And we’re told nothing about these guys, other than that there was peace in their time. So they managed to achieve something that in itself I suppose was a welcome break. And then comes the famous story of Jephthah or Jephthah, the famous story of Jephthah and his daughter. And Jephthah is a bit of a lad. His being driven out, his set up a bunch of gangsters for highway robbery and make a living. But nevertheless, when the tribe, the people of Ammon attack the Israelites, he’s called to try to save them. Jephthah or Jephthah, interestingly enough, starts by negotiation and borrows the same language and tactic as Moses did when he began the invasion of Canaan when he approached the different nations and he said, look, I don’t want war, let’s make peace, let’s negotiate. And they said get lost and so there was war. So first of all, he negotiates. When he doesn’t manage to negotiate, he again gathers a couple of the tribes together, not all of them and goes to war. But before he goes to war, he takes a vow to God because they still want help from God. And he says, dear God, if I come back victorious, whatever comes out from my house, first thing I’m going to sacrifice. Lovely. In one sense it’s understandable. Unfortunately what happens is the first thing that comes out when he comes home for victory is his daughter. So he has to sacrifice her.

Now this is a problem. It’s a problem because sacrifice, human sacrifice is forbidden. It’s absolutely forbidden by the Torah. Not only is it absolutely forbidden by the Torah, but in addition to that the Torah already has rules that if you take a vow and you realise you made a mistake, there are ways of escaping from your obligation. Not least of which is when the vow is something which is based on chance. And he didn’t say, I will give an animal which I have and that’s going to be the sacrifice. He left it a chance, either or. So what happens, that’s a bit like gambling, like going to the stock market or going to the casino. And there was at the time a man from the house, from the priestly house called Phinehas, he could have gone to him to negotiate. Why didn’t he? So the result is that he says, I have to carry out my vow. So I’m giving you a year to rejoice with your friends and your sisters and then you are going to go away. And the official traditional view of this is that going away means she never gets married and she goes to weep her virginity. So she goes into isolation and she’s not killed. That’s the official party line when it comes to Jephthah’s daughter.

There’s one other interesting thing about the Jephthah story and that is he didn’t get the tribe of Ephraim on his side. And the tribe of Ephraim tried to undermine his position. And after he came back for victory, he went to attack the tribe of Ephraim. The tribe of Ephraim started to escape across the river. On the crossing of the river was the Gileadites. And the Gileadites didn’t let anybody through, across who was from the tribe of Ephraim. And so the Ephraimites it seemed had a lisp. And they couldn’t pronounce the word shibboleth, which simply means a sheaf of corn. They said sibbolet. So anybody who came across the river and couldn’t say shibboleth had his throat cut. And that was a nice thing that happened to the Ephraimites. Again, it’s blood thirsty, it’s horrible. If you think the mood in the Knesset is murderous today, it’s not nearly as bad as that was then. And then after Jephthah you have a range of other men who are mentioned, but we don’t know anything about them. Other than that for a while they were in charge and they managed to run things. There was a man called Ibzan from Bethlehem. A man called Elon Herzvuloli. There was Abdon Ben Pira Hil Pirathon. All mentioned, but nothing other than they managed to achieve some sort of peace for a period of time. And then we come to the famous Samson. Samson who looks like just a big yob, is considered a great leader. Samson’s mother couldn’t have children, so the story goes.

And one day when she’s in the field, a man appears to her and says, you’re going to have a son and your son is going to be a Nazarite. Now a Nazarite, according to the law of the Torah is some who doesn’t cut his hair, doesn’t drink wine, is supposed to live on a higher level of spirituality. So she immediately runs back to her husband and says to her husband, I met a man in the field. The husband gets very suspicious. What do you mean a man in the field? A man? Well I don’t know, he said he seemed like a man of God. Said he was and giving me promises about what I’m going to have a son and going to have children, a son who’s going to be a Nazarite. So off the husband, Manoah is his name, goes after his wife into the field and there’s this guy still standing there. And he says, you know, what you doing? And he says, well, I’m telling you, I have come with a message. And the message is that your wife’s going to have a son and he’s going to be a Nazarite. And they’re very happy. And they take him for some some sort of Godly man and say, you look so nice and let’s sit down, have a meal together. Let’s thank you for this. No, says the angel, I don’t eat, I’m some sort of supernatural being. And he says, tell me your name, what’s your name? I want to know what your name is. He says, no, no, no, I can’t tell you what my name. My name is a special name Peli.

Which actually became adopted by somebody who was a great lecture in Israel Pinchespeli at the Ben-Gurion University, who actually changed his name to Peli. His name was really Hakoen and he changed it to Peli because he wanted to remain anonymous because he became an editor of a scurrilous magazine and he thought anonymity would protect him, unfortunately it didn’t. But that’s Peli the name there, anyway. Samson grows up, he becomes strong. And one day he goes down to the Philistine, town of Timnah, sees a good looking woman, goes home and tells his parents, I want to marry her. Very strange you might think. This is supposed to be a religious leader, a judge, accepted in the Book of Judges, there in the Holy Book and he wants to marry a Philistine girl, weird. Well, so the parents, sure, why not? Let’s go down and negotiate. Of course the official party line is that God told him to do this because this was his way of managing to infiltrate into the Philistines in order to undermine them. So he goes down, speaks to Timnah’s parents, they agree to a marriage. Just before he gets there on the way down from the hill, he comes across the carcass of a dead lion with bees building their hive inside the lion. He noticed it, goes down, goes down to this young lady and they’re having a feast. And the men of the Philistines, set a challenge to Samson to see if he can give them a riddle that they can’t answer.

And if they can’t answer, they will give him clothes and gifts. And if he can then, sorry, I put this wrong around. If they can’t get the riddle, they have to pay him. And if on the other hand, if they do get the riddle, Samson will have to pay them. So he asks them, he asks them this simple riddle, what is it that is strong but sweet? What is it that is dead but alive? Or that good can come from strength or sweetness can come from aggression. So he’s obviously thinking of the bees in the lions. Well they say, okay, fair enough, give us 24 hours. During this 24 hour period, the wife, the Philistine on the side of the Philistines, says to Samson, please tell me if you really love me, tell me what the answer to the riddle is. And he says to her, silly man, oh, the riddle’s very simple. It’s as long as you don’t tell them, I’ll tell you.

There was a lion who is strong, there was a bee in it that was building something out of death and sweetness came from strength. And so naturally enough she goes and tells them, they come with the answer, he’s furious. And he lets out his fury on everybody who’s around there. And he manages to get all their clothes and everything from the people he attacked and hand them to these relatives of his woman and then goes away in disgust. So already we’ve seen that he is easily gulled by a woman. He shows his strength by carting off the gates of Gaza on his back. And then he falls in love with the famous Delilah. Now it’s interesting, Delilah, the night Lila Knight comes from the night. Shimshon, Samson comes from shimmish, the sum. It’s all symbolical or is it not? You might have heard of the famous pagan goddess, Lilith, who is the goddess of night who’s only mentioned once and not as a goddess, but as night in the Thanah.

But here, Delilah, everybody knows who Delilah is. Tom Jones for certain. And you know the story, but I repeat it again just in its context that they are drinking and having a wonderful time. And the elders of the Philistines come to Delilah and say, look, this guy’s such a threat to us. You are one of us. You’ve got to find out the secret of his strength. How come he can kill hundreds of us, thousands of us and it says nothing and we can’t even touch him. And so she lies one night in bed with Samson and says to Samson, what’s the secret of your strength? And he says, well, secret of my strength is really very simple, all you have to do is take seven fresh twines and twine them around me. And never been used on anything before and that will hold me down. So she ties him down with seven twines and yells out Samson, the Philistines are coming and up he gets and throws off the twines.

Oh, she’s very upset. Second night she says, oh, you can’t do this to me if you love me, if you really love me, tell me what the secret is. Well, he says, yes, if you get new ropes that have never been used on anybody else and tie the new ropes, then that will do it. And she tells the Philistines. And again they come in and she says, the Philistines are upon you and he gets up and throw it off his own. Nothing matters at all. And then he goes again and he says to her, look, tie my hair with seven ropes and that will do. And she does and that doesn’t work either. And finally he gives in and tells her, look at my secret lies in my hair. I’ve grown my hair ever since childhood. I’ve never shaved it. That’s what gives me my strength. Maybe he meant spiritually instead of physically. Anyway, they cut his hair, they come in, they strap him down and they blind him. And course Samson is carted off to the Philistine temple to be made fun of. And then he’s there in the temple being made fun of. We dunno the time lag. But then he prays to God and says, please may I die with the Philistines, just let my hair grow. And they ask, he’s blinded the young man to lead him towards the two pillars, he stands between pillars, pushes them apart, the roof falls down, kills everybody there. More than anybody he killed before. And that’s the end of Samson. And so again, you are going to ask yourself, but goodness me, I mean this is all fighting stuff.

This doesn’t sound to me like a spiritual leader, just as someone who managed to get rid of the Philistines for a while. And this period now after the initial collapse of the Philistines becomes a period of political chaos. And this begins to hint at what the serious message of this book is going to be, this constant movement towards idolatry. And so there’s a story about a man called Micah who manages to set up a special idolatrous centre in the north. And manages to get a young Levite from the south to come up to the north to be his priest. And there he has this pagan sanctuary. But then he gets caught up in nomadic Israelites of different tribes. The tribe of Dan that is looking for somewhere to settle. And they come across this and they say, oh, you’ve got a nice little setup here, we wouldn’t mind this. And they take it over and they instal their priest. And interestingly enough, the priest that they instal is somebody called Gershom Ben Manashe. Now Manashe can also be another way of saying it’s Gershom Ben Moshe. And according to rabbinic interpretation, it was Moses’s grandson, the grandson of Moses, who became head of this pagan cult up in the north. What a catastrophe. What a collapse after Mosaic authority to see that his grandson does this. Of course the Rabbi say, this is what happens when you’re great leader. You’ve got no time for your family, you abandon them or you neglect them. And this is what happened.

But this then leads up to the final narrative of the Book of Judges. And this is a story about a man who has a concubine. And it’s called the Pilegesh B'Givah, the Pilegesh, the concubine in Givah. And there’s a little bit of a family breakdown between the Pilegesh, the concubine and the husband. And she runs away. And she runs away to her family in Benjamin. The husband starts heading off to bring her back. And he goes to the father in law’s house and they sit down and they have a meal and they negotiate and they make peace and he starts to head home. Heading home, unfortunately, there’s no hotels in those days. He has to stop by somebody near at hand. And so what happens is that as he is in this lodging place at night, the home is attacked by Benjamin knights. His concubine is taken, she is gang raped. And by the morning he looks out through the door and there she is dead on the doorstep. What he does is to cut up her body into little pieces and send these little pieces round to every one of the tribes, saying, look, this is what the men of Benjamin have done, this is what they did. You’ve got to do something about this. And the rest of the tribes all gathered together and say, yes, we can’t have one tribe behaving in this corrupt way.

So you can see there was disagreement about them. But anyway, the tribes gather together. And they approach Benjamin. And they say to Benjamin, produce for us the men who are responsible for this atrocity. They produce them, the men from this atrocity. And they say, look, these are the men, but we’re not going to hand them over to you. We have a right to run our own affairs and we’re not going to be dictated to by anybody. Okay, said the others, this means war. And so with large numbers they attack the Benjamin Knights. And the Benjamin Knights win. They manage the small tribe of Benjamin to defeat all the other tribes put together. They have a council of war. They dunno what to do. They try again and they fail again. Finally, they take a vow. They gather at mitzvah and they take a vow and they say, whatever happens, we will never allow any one of our daughters to marry a Benjamin Knights, they are so corrupt, we want to have nothing to do with them at all. This time they actually win. They defeat the Benjamin Knights catastrophically. They push them back again, back across the river. They try to escape to Transjordan across the the other side. They attack them and they’re left with mainly 300 Benjamin Knights hiding in a cave.

And all of a sudden the tribes get together and say, look, we have virtually eradicated one tribe. We can’t allow this to happen. This is a blot on our reputation. So they negotiate peace with the remnants. But then everybody’s being killed. It seems they’ve killed off all the women, the wives and everything like that. There’s no way for them to rebuild a tribe again. And so they attack a local non Jewish town. They manage to capture a couple of hundred girls and they bring them over, marry them off to the Benjamin Knights. And that’s how they manage to start rebuilding the tribe. But they’re still a hundred short. And so what happens is they go back to everybody and say to everybody, look, we’ve got to find wives for these people. I know you’ve taken a vow and I know you’re not willingly going to hand your daughters over to them, but at least we’ve got to find a solution. And they come up with a solution, strange solution. The tabernacle is at Shiloh. On certain times of the year at Shiloh, the maidens go dancing in the vineyards for young men to choose husbands. In fact, this is mentioned in the Talmud as a very important festival that celebrates this occasion when eventually tribes were allowed to intermarry because initially it seems you could only marry within your tribe in order to keep the property within the hands of the tribe.

And so they advised the young men from Benjamin who didn’t have wives to lie and wait when the girls went out dancing, grab a suitable wife. And that would solve the problem because the other tribes hadn’t actually agreed to handing over a daughter. It would be taken by force. And this was the solution. It sounds very strange, it sounds very improbable. But this whole issue shows A, the corruption amongst the tribes, the disagreement amongst the tribes. And the catastrophic chaos that existed so that it becomes clear that this Book of Judges is in fact the first book of the Jewish political theory. What is a political theory? A political theory essentially is look, we’ve got our community, we’ve got our tribe, we’ve got our hierarchy, but we don’t know what the best way of running it is. What is the best form of government? The first form of government we had was a theocracy. It was Moses and that carried on to Joshua. But clearly that didn’t work. So we tried another form of government, a much more democratic one in a sense that each tribe should run its own affairs and be responsible for its own activity.

And responsible for its religious life and for its material, physical and political life. So this period is an examination of the strengths and the weaknesses of when you have a decentralised, localised form of government as opposed to strong, central government. It’s a debate that still goes on to this day. So this is the beginnings of a discussion about political theory. It’s also a discussion about the nature of your God. Is your God a territorial God? Or is he not a territorial God? And can you combine if he is territorial, your God with another God and still be faithful to your God? In other words, if you like, can you still be absolutely committed to mammon and making a success of your life and still at the same time be a good ethical moral person? And then it also raises the issue of meritocracy because the Bible seems to put emphasis on the priesthood as being the ideal form of government, but priesthood was hereditary. Now we have and male only. Here’s a book in which we experiment with female rule and put that as another option and a possibility for governance. So that’s also an innovation. But then we have the issue of, what is the role of God in all this? And what this is telling us is every time you guys, that’s to say the Israelites screw up, you suffer. And yet every time God comes back to the rescue. Or if we want to interpret it in a different way, you can come back from the crisis if you put things right. But for as long as things are wrong, you are going to suffer.

And this message has run right through the Jewish tradition. We have been on the brink of extinction of exile every time. And every time saves the rabbis of the Talmud it’s because we abandoned our religious mission. We did not behave honourably, ethically to people. We focused on mightiest right on power and not on ethics. We made the wrong decisions. And that’s why we brought this all on ourselves. And yet through it all there was God. Now you can understand God as being one of two things. You can understand God as being superman, this superior power who runs the universe according to God’s own scheme of things and intervenes when it’s necessary to put it right. Or for those of you who have trouble with the idea of God, it could mean an ethical standard. This ethical standard has to be there. And every time we abandon it, we cause chaos. And the only way of making up for the chaos is to return to an ethical standard. And it is this ethical, moral standard that God represents that we have to find our way back to. So history goes through cycles. It does progress to some extent, but we have this capacity to halt the progress and go backwards.

And this is a challenge that we are facing at this moment. Whether it’s climate change, whether it’s to do with Israel and the occupation, whatever, it’s to do with, how we treat our neighbours, ourselves, the world is the overriding responsibility, which was if you like, imposed upon us by our original text, our original Constitution, the Torah. So that is what I take this book to be. It is a lesson in ineffective government, in internal corruption of disaster. And yet somehow, even without saying so, there is a strong religious thread running through it that is constantly subject to attack and disintegration, but somehow manages to survive. And so having now dealt with that issue, let’s go on to the question and answer.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Mike Dahan, where’s it written human sacrifice is forbidden?

A: Abraham did not forbid it.

Q: Why, Abraham didn’t kill his son?

A: Abraham didn’t kill his son. On the contrary, he was told this was not what God wants. Apart from the fact that by the time you come to the 10 Commandments, it says clearly you may not kill. And it specifies what the sacrifices are to be, they are or animal, bird, vegetable. And you have these options. Nowhere is it mentioned that you can kill a human being. That’s what the Greeks did in the way to go to Troy. And that was much later. And that was still part of their tradition.

You also ask Mike, following many angels appearances in Torah and Kings, surprise a baby is born. Well yes, there’s amid Joshua, which says, yes, maybe these angels did interact with humans. And there you’ve got with the idea where virgin birth comes from. But really the truth of the matter is wherever the term angel appears in the Bible, it could be a human being. And it’s a human being who plays a part in the procedure of history coming to fruition. Whether it’s playing a part in describing the catastrophe of Sodom. Whether it’s coming to describe Jacob’s struggles with the future. Whether it’s a man directing Joseph to go in the right direction. Wherever you have the term malach in the Bible, it can be translated as a messenger, as a human being, not as an angel. And that’s precisely why the husband Samson runs out because he thinks it’s a man there and maybe this man is trying to make off with his wife.

And then Mike says it was common for man to marry out. This changed 2 BC for the woman to do religion. No, it didn’t change 2 BC. The woman defined religion already at the time of the Bible, the time of Moses, when the son of an Israelite woman, an Egyptian man was allowed to be part of the Jewish people. It was the tribe that was defined by men and there was this dual form of identity. So there’s a debate, of course there’s a debate. The reform community wants to suggest that patrilineal is equal to matrilineal. but that was not historically the case, I’m afraid.

Q: Did Samson says, Ellie ever sit in judgement ?

A: There’s no record. In theory, a judge should have said sat in judgement . But there’s no record of it. So we can only speculate.

Q: Was Delilah the Philistine woman that Samson wanted to marry or another lover?

A: No, there was another one. There was this woman in Timnah was the first one he wanted to marry. Delilah actually came from another town not far from Gaza. And so she was his second wife, life. Sorry he didn’t marry her. His great love, if you like. Please give chapter verse that Samson hair grew back. Well, I will get there in a minute and I’ll tell you the exact verse where it says it in the Book of Judges. Let me get that, won’t take me a minute to get there. Judges Samson, Timnah, his first wife. And then the other and.