Reading Judges: A Literary and Theological Commentary

Biddle’s Reading Judges is readable and often stimulating, but suffers from methodological inconsistencies, weak exegesis on key passages, and — most troublingly for a theological commentary — a recurrently diminished portrayal of God. Biddle pledges to read the text “on its own terms” yet describes Samson’s Spirit-empowered killing of thirty Philistines as an act that “would place Samson prominently in a modern list of mass murderers” — a nakedly anachronistic 21st-century category that directly contradicts his own stated principle. His treatment of God is the deeper problem. Across multiple sections, Biddle’s own language reduces YHWH to a passive, reactive figure: God “need only nudge things along” in the Samson cycle; his purpose in using Samson’s lust is glossed as an “excuse” (Biddle’s own parenthetical addition to the text’s neutral word “occasion”); his behavior in the Benjamin war is described, via Biddle’s approving translation of a German scholar, as “obscure” and “irritating”; and in the Jephthah cycle God “only reacts to human initiative,” functioning as little more than a rubber stamp. These characterizations are exegetically unjustified. Block (NAC) identifies the book’s true subject as “Yahweh’s gracious determination to preserve his people,” not the anti-heroes’ failures, and states that “apart from the Spirit of Yahweh, Samson has neither the authority nor the power to act” — language of sovereign divine agency simply incompatible with Biddle’s “nudge.” Boda and Conway (ZECOT, 2022) demonstrate from Hebrew discourse analysis that the Spirit’s empowerment of Jephthah in 11:29 precedes the vow structurally, meaning God is already actively delivering Israel when Jephthah bargains — God is leading, not ratifying. Block further shows the vow was not rash, as Biddle claims, but deliberate and “outrightly pagan,” its form matching Carthaginian child-sacrifice votive inscriptions, its purpose being not faith but the attempted binding of God — the inverse of Abraham’s sacrifice in Genesis 22. Chisholm (KEL) adds that the theological climax of Judg 20:35 uses the verb נגף, identical to God’s plague on Egypt’s firstborn in Exodus 12, identifying YHWH as the battle’s decisive actor, not a reluctantly-engaged deity offering “qualified support”; and he shows that the catastrophes of chapter 21 result from Israel’s deliberate failure to consult God — a structural pattern Biddle’s “near silence of God” reading entirely misreads. Methodologically, Biddle’s “BLT sandwich” approach promises balance between synchronic and diachronic reading but in practice applies source-critical distinctions opportunistically — an inconsistency none of his peers (Butler, Niditch, Boda and Conway, Block, Chisholm) share. His predetermined “downward spiral” framework resolves every ambiguity negatively, causing him to miss, among other things, that Barak’s insistence on Deborah’s presence reflects not insecurity but the theologically coherent recognition — paralleled in Moses’s refusal to proceed without God’s presence in Exodus 33 — that the prophetess guarantees divine access. He also systematically retreats into an “interesting ambiguity” evasion, leaving resolvable questions open when closer attention to lexical parallels and discourse structure would settle them. Biddle is at his best as a literary guide to narrative artistry, but readers seeking rigorous exegesis, methodological consistency, or a theologically confident portrait of God in Judges will be better served by Block, Chisholm, Boda and Conway, or Niditch.