Over two thousand years have passed and yet, Samson still remains a well-known and idealized character. Long, luxurious hair, strength and stature unmatched, blessed by God from birth and handpicked to be the leader of a blessed nation – it’s no wonder that today, Samson is remembered more for these qualities than the actual acts he is infamous for. In Judges 14, Samson shows blatant disregard for tradition, customs, sacrament, his parents, women, and people, as he kills over 30 people without a second thought, and yet we are to believe that he is the man who will lead Israel out of the hands of the Philistines. Was it God who really appointed him, or was the author of the text trying to make a point? It is my hypothesis that in the story of Samson and the lion and the woman of Timnah, the author is trying to convince the audience that simply having a leader, or a Judge, is not adequate to lead Israel; Israel needs a king, and that the women portrayed in the text are an example of how women should behave.
World Behind the Text: History and Social Location
In Judges, the author goes unnamed, but most scholars agree that the book was written around the 6th century B.C.E. (Knoppers 1). The book is set during the pre-monarchical period, but the author or authors are speculated to have probably lived well after that time (Brettler 398). The book was probably written in the community of Babylonian exile, a time where the Jewish people were being exiled from conquered Judah into Babylon (Knoppers 1).
There are no indications that the authors may have used written sources to create the text. There is, however, evidence that the book was edited, as the last 9 chapters of Judges have format changes significant enough to cause suspicion...
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Davis, John J. and Herbert Wolf. Judges Introduction and Annotations. Zondervan NIV Study Bible (Fully Revised). Ed. Kenneth L. Barker. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002. 326–363
Frolov, Serge. Judges. Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013. Print.
Knoppers, Gary (2000a). "Introduction". In Gary N. Knoppers, J. Gordon McConville. Reconsidering Israel and Judah: recent studies on the Deuteronomistic history. Eisenbrauns.
Malamat A. "Chapter VII: The Period of the Judges." Judges. The World History of the Jewish People. 3. Givatayim, Israel: Rutgers UP, 1971. pp. 129–163.
Schottroff, Luise, and Marie-Theres Wacker, eds. Feminist Biblical Interpretation. Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012. Print.
Walton, John H (2009). "The Deuteronomistic History". In Andrew E. Hill, John H. Walton. A Survey of the Old Testament. Zondervan.
Carson, D. A. New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition. 4th ed. Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994.
It is the reader and his or her interpretive community who attempts to impose a unified reading on a given text. Such readers may, and probably will, claim that the unity they find is in the text, but this claim is only a mask for the creative process actually going on. Even the most carefully designed text can not be unified; only the reader's attempted taming of it. Therefore, an attempt to use seams and shifts in the biblical text to discover its textual precursors is based on a fundamentally faulty assumption that one might recover a stage of the text that lacked such fractures (Carr 23-4).
Oxtoby, Willard Gurdon. "Jewish Traditions." World religions: western traditions. 1996. Reprint. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2011. 127-157. Print.
Neusner, Jacob. The Talmud of the Land of Israel: An Academic Commentary to 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Divisions, Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1998.
To further prove his point, he gives the testimony included in one of the books,
Jewry law was, like German medieval law in general, of a disintegrated nature (Kisch 1935: 69). It also frequently overlapped and contradicted itself, thanks to the wide range of sources from which it derived (Cohen 1994:31). Medieval Jewry law has been described as a ‘law of privilege made up of occasional favours and restrictions of various kinds without re...
New International Version. [Colorado Springs]: Biblica, 2011. BibleGateway.com. Web. 3 Mar 2011. Accessed 22 April 2014.
Scheindlin, Raymond P. "The Jews in the Islamic World: From the Rise of Islam to the end of the Middle Ages (632 to 1500)." In A Short History of the Jewish People: From Legendary Times to Modern Statehood. New York: Macmillan, 1998. 71-87.
In the opening paragraph of her article "Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation," Phyllis Trible says that the task she has set before herself, that of relating the words of Hebrew Scripture to the ideology of the Women's Liberation Movement, is considered by many to be "impossible and ill-advised." (Trible, "Depatriarchalizing," 30) Some would suggest, she supposes, that "[t]he two phenomena have nothing to say to each other." (Ibid.) She then quotes Kate Millet expressing one of the more radical views of feminism: that much of the body of scripture in question was written with the express intent of turning the female gender into scapegoats for the ills of the world.
Robinson, B. A. (2008, March 30). Books of the Hebrew Scripture . Retrieved May 7, 2011, from Religious Tolerance: http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_otb3.htm
The Old Testament and the Bible itself has been studied extensively for centuries. Archeologists and Scholars have labored and pondered over texts trying to decipher its clues. It does not matter how many times the Old Testament has been studied there will always be something new to learn about it or the history surrounding it. In the book Reading the Old Testament: an Introduction, the author Lawrence Boadt presents us with a few different authors of the Old Testament that used different names for God and had a unique insight into the texts. These four sources are titled P for priests, E for Elohim, J for Jehovah, and Y for Yahweh (95). These four unique sources help us realize that there is more than one author of the Pentateuch. These authors took the text and adapted for their culture. This independent source is used by scholars to help gain insight into what was behind the texts of the bible so we are not left with an incomplete picture of what went into the creation of the bible. Julius Wellhausen used these four sources to publish a book to able us to better understand the sources and to give it credibility with the Protestant scholars at the time (Boadt 94). These sources that is independent of the bible as in the DVD Who Wrote the Bible? and the Nova website aide in shedding light on the history that surrounded the writers who wrote the text and what inspired them to write it in the first place. The DVD shows the discovery of The Dead Sea Scrolls and the extensive history of the texts and all its sources in an effort to try to find exactly who wrote the bible (Who Wrote). These scrolls have aided scholars immensely by giving us some of the oldest known manuscripts of the bible in the world today. It shows that the bible w...
It is widely accepted through the theological study of the Bible that the gathering and the selection of information included in the final compilation was an extensive and controversial process. Specifically, the events and movements that were influential in the recognition of the canonical books. According to Britannica, the canonical books are recognized as the quintessential corner stone of the New Testament, which also means that they are a foundational part of the current beliefs and practices of most of today’s Christians. Even more important is the process, culmination, and the compilations of events that lead to what Christians currently accept as the Word of God.
The New Interpreter's Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. Nashville: Abingdon Press, ©2003.
Holy Bible: Contemporary English Version. New York: American Bible Society, 1995. Print. (BS195 .C66 1995)
The first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy contain the beginnings of the story of God and humanity. At a first glance each book seems not fully connect with all the others; yet with a closer look, the Pentateuch is one complete story to be read in unison. In fact, Gary Schnittjer would say that Genesis 1-12 stets the pattern for the rest of the Pentateuch’s story and form. Furthermore, the continuity between the five books raises the question of authorship. Was the Pentateuch the work of a sole-author—Moses, or is the Pentateuch a compilation of several writings put together in order to tell one story? Therefore, current scholarship on the authorship of the Pentateuch helps to answer that