Series Editors’ Preface.
Preface.
Introduction.
Judges 1–3: Beginnings.
Ancient and Medieval.
Early Modern and Modern.
Judges 3: Ehud.
Ancient and Medieval.
Early Modern and Modern.
Judges 4–5: Deborah.
Ancient and Medieval.
Early Modern and Modern.
Deborah.
Barak, Sisera, and Sisera’s Mother.
Jael.
Recent Reception.
Judges 6–8: Gideon.
Ancient and Medieval.
Early Modern and Modern.
Allegorical, Typological, Literal.
Character.
Gideon Illustrated.
Recent Reception.
Judges 9: Abimelech.
Ancient and Medieval.
Early Modern and Modern.
Judges 10–12: Jephthah.
Ancient and Medieval.
Jewish.
Christian.
Death or Survival?.
Early Modern and Modern.
The Rash Vow.
Death or Survival?.
The story Illustrated.
The Daughter.
Recent Reception.
Judges 13–16: Samson.
Ancient and Medieval.
Jewish.
Christian.
Early Modern and Modern.
Typology.
Edifying History.
Manoah, his wife, and the angel.
The woman of Timnah.
The Lion.
Foxes and Fire.
Slaughter at Lehi.
Gaza.
Delilah.
Captivity and Death.
The Riddle of Samson.
Judges 17–18: Micah and the Danites.
Ancient and Medieval.
Early Modern and Modern.
Judges 19–21: The Levite and the Benjamites.
Ancient and Medieval.
The rape at Gibeah.
The Benjamite War.
The Aftermath.
Early Modern and Modern.
The rape at Gibeah.
The Benjamite War.
The Aftermath.
Recent Reception.
Postscript.
Bibliography.
Ancient and Medieval.
Early Modern and Modern.
Graphical.
List of Illustrations.
Glossary.
Biographies.
Name Index.
Subject Index.
David M. Gunn holds the A. A. Bradford Chair of Religion at Texas Christian University. His other books include Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (1993) and Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (1993), as co-author, and Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and the Book (1996) and “Imagining” Biblical Worlds: Spatial, Social and Historical Constructs (2002), as co-editor. He is also co-author of the article on Judges in the Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation (1999).
“A sometimes sober, sometimes whimsical, sometimes disturbing,
sometimes delightful, and always enlightening journey through the
centuries alongside all manner of Bible readers... Gunn has
attempted a large feat here – to provide readers with a meaningful
survey of over 2,000 years' worth of reception of the book of
Judges – and has succeeded admirably. Hopefully, other volumes in
the Blackwell series will live up to Gunn's example. This is an
engaging and enlightening commentary that deserves attention from
anyone interested in the history of the interpretation, use, and
influence of the book of Judges.” The Bible and Critical Theory
"In this first volume of the new Blackwell Bible Commentaries
series to treat a book from the Tanak, David M. Gunn has not only
provided a useful tool for students of the book of Judges but also
established a new standard for biblical commentaries in general."
Review of Biblical Literature
"If you want to know how learned rabbis and church fathers, Puritan
divines and rationalist skeptics, musicians, painters and graphic
artists, guardians of public morality and improvers of children’s
souls all wrested religious and moral significance from an unruly
Book of Judges, this is the book for you.
David Gunn selectively assembles some twenty centuries of
professional and popular interpreters of the Book of Judges and
provides a running commentary on how, in various times and places,
these readers found meaning and instruction from the Book of
Judges, often treasuring the book and sometimes recoiling from what
they found to be its alien ways. Writing with humor and verve, Gunn
provides thematic continuity among interpreters separated by
centuries and alludes to social and political issues that help
explain shifting interpretations. Mostly, however, David Gunn
allows his choir to sing and his artists to imagine. The voices and
illustrations have sometimes been univocal—as in consistently
holding up Delilah as femme fatale. Very often they have been
troubled and dissonant, finding conflicting allegories and
ambiguous moral instruction in hair, heroic militarism, rapacious
slaughter, sex, foxes, and sacrifice. Gunn, or rather the readers
he assembles, offer eye-opening testimony that the
Bible-as-cultural-force has never been a single thing, but a
malleable text which people have received quite variously,
depending on the changing circumstances in which they lived and the
social issues they sought to address." Burke O. Long, Bowdoin
College
"This is an exciting new commentary series, which presents a fresh
and stimulating approach to understanding biblical interpretation.
Leaving behind the verse by verse analysis typically found in
commentaries, this series focuses instead on the broad spectrum of
interpretations that have been applied to each story/textual unit
by Jews and Christians throughout the ages.
Gunn’s ground-breaking volume on Judges, the first in the series to
treat an Old Testament book, is filled with many new insights and
stimulating analyses. Gunn demonstrates very effectively that
surveying the reception history of a particular passage focuses
one’s attention on key issues in an intriguing and often
provocative way. Numerous perspectives for understanding each
narrative in Judges are compared in a lively manner that highlights
the many subtle nuances implicit in the text. Gunn’s volume is
thoroughly researched and exceptionally informative, and will
provide a stellar model for subsequent volumes to emulate." Alan J.
Hauser, Appalachian State University
"Gunn has attempted a large feat here - to provide readers with a
meaningful survey of over 2,000 years' worth of reception of the
book of Judges - and has succeeded admirably...This is an engaging
and enlightening commentary that deserves attention from anyone
interested in the history of the interpretation, use, and influence
of the book Judges." R.Christopher Heard, Pepperdine University
California
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