1 - Methods, Considerations and Recent Approaches to Judges 21

Summary

Introduction: Judges 19–21

The stories that we tell about our own and others’ lives are a pervasive form of text through which we construct, interpret, and share experience: “we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative”.

(Hardy 1968:5)

As Hardy illustrates, in its myriad manifestations, storytelling is a singularly privileged vehicle and tool for the search, construction, negotiation and expression of personal, as well as collective, identity (cf. Fagundes and Blayer 2007:1). However, the narrative in Judges 21 appears so far from our own modern Western value systems that valuations of the text are often negative and are far from describing it as expressing identity. As Lindars asks, ‘should it perhaps be banned from liturgical use on the grounds that it does nothing to promote faith and Christian living?’ (Lindars 1995:1). Similarly, Gnuse reduces the text to a story about mass rape, ‘a hideous story’ (Gnuse 2007:231). Instead of simply dismissing the narrative in this way, this monograph aims to recontextualise the story by highlighting the many correlations which exist between the text and modern examples of marriage by capture. Another aim of this monograph is to take seriously the fact that our evidence comes in the form of an ancient text, which has been edited, possibly from various sources. What possible motivation, aside from antiquarian interests, could an editor have had for crafting such a story, and how might it have functioned for those who were listening to it? Numerous answers to these important questions emerge from the research which follows. Initially, we must acknowledge the possibility that marriage by capture probably occurred in Ancient Israel, and that early audiences who received the text would have been aware of the practice and of its implications. Second, the narrative is not simply a couple of descriptions of marriage by capture which are retold in the language, and against the fluid exegetical matrix, of other Yahwistic Hebrew texts. Rather, the narrative speaks to a specific community whose identity is threatened by that of a rival ethnic group who have a claim to the same title, “Israel”.