{"id":54889,"date":"2019-05-05T10:18:33","date_gmt":"2019-05-05T07:18:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=54889"},"modified":"2019-05-05T10:18:33","modified_gmt":"2019-05-05T07:18:33","slug":"welcome-to-the-book-of-judges-unbridled-lust-implacable-hostility-mutual-mayhem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/welcome-to-the-book-of-judges-unbridled-lust-implacable-hostility-mutual-mayhem\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome To The Book of Judges: &#8220;Unbridled Lust, Implacable Hostility, Mutual Mayhem&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-content\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[],"acf":{"old_id":"54889","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":54356,"related_cahpter":"212","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"\"In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.\"\r\n","content":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Judges represents, one might say, the Wild West era of the biblical story\u2026.There are warriors who can toss a stone from a slingshot at a hair and not miss; a bold left-handed assassin who deftly pulls out a short sword strapped to his right thigh to stab the Moabite king in the soft underbelly; another warrior-chieftain who panics the enemy camp in the middle of the night with the shock and awe of piercing ram&#8217;s horn blasts and smashed pitchers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All this is certainly exciting in a way that is analogous to the gunslinger justice of the Wild West, but there is an implicit sense, which becomes explicit at the end of the book, that survival through violence, without a coherent and stable political framework, cannot be sustained and runs the danger of turning into sheer destruction. In the first chapter of the book, before any of the Judges are introduced, we are presented with the image of the conquered Canaanite king, Adoni-Bezek, whose thumbs and big toes are chopped off by his Judahite captors. This barbaric act of dismemberment, presumably intended to disable the king from any capacity for combat, presages a whole series of episodes in which body parts are hacked, mutilated, crushed. King Eglon&#8217;s death by Ehud&#8217;s hidden sword is particularly grisly: his killer thrusts the weapon into his belly all the way up to the top of the hilt, and his death spasm grotesquely triggers the malodorous release of the anal sphincter. Women are also adept at this bloody work: there is a vividly concrete report of how Jael drives the tent-peg through the Temple of Sisera the Canaanite general and into the ground; another woman, this one anonymous, smashes the head of the nefarious Abimelech with a millstone she drops on him from her perch in a besieged tower\u2026The grand finale of Samson&#8217;s story, in which thousands of Philistine men and women, together with the Israelite hero, are crushed by the toppling temple, is an even more extensive crushing and mangling of bodies.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Against this background, one can see a line of imagistic and thematic continuity from the maiming of Adoni-Bezek at the very beginning of the book to the dismembering of the concubine at the end [see chapter 19]. That act of chopping a body into pieces, of course, is intended as a means to unite the tribes against Benjamin and its murderous rapists, but there is a paradoxical tension between the project of unity \u2013 unity, however, for a violent purpose \u2013 and the butchering of the body, the violation of its integrity, which in the biblical world as in ours was supposed to be respected through burial\u2026 After this dark impasse to which the Book of Judges comes, it will be the task of the next great narrative sequence, which is the Book of Samuel, concluding in the second chapter of 1 Kings, \u00a0to imagine a political means to create a center and lease the anarchy. That goal is in part realized, but\u2026 the blood-dimmed tide is never stemmed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From: Robert Alter, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Hebrew Bible, <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">vol. 2: Prophets, W. W. Norton &amp; Co., 2019, pp. 80-81<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","image":{"ID":54890,"id":54890,"title":"Alter-Cover","filename":"Alter-Cover.jpg","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Alter-Cover.jpg","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/welcome-to-the-book-of-judges-unbridled-lust-implacable-hostility-mutual-mayhem\/alter-cover\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"alter-cover","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":54889,"date":"2019-05-05 07:18:18","modified":"2022-01-31 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From Robert Alter's Hebrew Bible Translation and Commentary","main_caption":"Welcome To The Book of Judges: \"Unbridled Lust, Implacable Hostility, Mutual Mayhem\"","main_caption_size":"1","sub_caption":"It's the original Game of Thrones \u2013 but without a throne\u2026","preview_embedded":"","preview_image":{"ID":54890,"id":54890,"title":"Alter-Cover","filename":"Alter-Cover.jpg","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Alter-Cover.jpg","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/welcome-to-the-book-of-judges-unbridled-lust-implacable-hostility-mutual-mayhem\/alter-cover\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"alter-cover","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":54889,"date":"2019-05-05 07:18:18","modified":"2022-01-31 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