Reading Judges as Literature?

It is easy to imagine various reasons why the type of literary historical reading might be rejected out of hand by many biblical scholars. Some might argue, perhaps under the influence of the Copenhagen school, that there really is very little agreement about the “real” history of Israel, making this type of contextualized literary study impossible.(1) I disagree. More likely, sustained work will show that the Copenhagen school is using unrealistically stringent standards for reconstructing the history of antiquity.(2) Others might believe that reading is a fundamentally subjective venture. They might even point to the seemingly intractable debate between Meir Sternberg, and David Gunn and Dana Nolan Fewell on how a seemingly straightforward story, Genesis 34, should be read.(3) However, all is not in the eye of the beholder, or reader. I am not alone here; Paul Noble in his analysis of this debate concerning the interpretation of Genesis 34 notes: “by careful attention to the linguistic details one can move toward an objective, reader-independent understanding of the text.”(4) I concur. Methods which have competed in the past must now be used side-by-side, since “the Old Testament contains some very strange literature; perhaps it would not be surprising if it takes more than one kind of sensibility to understand it.” The utility of this eclectic method may be evaluated by others using at least two different criteria: Are the assumptions made about these texts reasonable? Are the readings that result from these assumptions at least as compelling as the alternative interpretations of other scholars?



-----------------------
(1)Marc Zvi Brettler, The Book of Judges, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 20.
(2)Ibid.
(3)Ibid.
(4)Ibid.