William G. Dever states in this paper with regard to the Book of Judges: The continuing struggle with the surviving Canaanite culture in the period of the Judges can now be documented in extraordinary detail. The book of Joshua is largely a foundation myth; but the immediately following (!) book of Judges has the ring…

Origins 📜Chapter 21, “Son of God? The Suspicious Story of Samson’s Birth” from the book From Gods to God , by Yair Zakovitch and Avigdor Shinan, discusses the birth and possible links to Greek mythology in the Samson story. They discuss the possibility that the original story, perhaps cleaned-up a bit by the final editors…

pp 83 & 84:Some Non-literary Readings of Judges 19 The subtitle of Trible’s book is Literary–Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, which I take to mean readings of texts about and/or for women, using the tools of literary criticism. This goal is different from what I am suggesting in at least two ways: (1) Her reading…

In their Hermeneia commentary, Mark S. Smith and Elizabeth M. Bloch-Smith noted three things about this verse. First is that the phrase “Yahweh was with x” implies divine favor and so Judah enjoys full support from Yahweh in their conquest of the hill country. Also this is the only example of this construction with את…

From Robert Alter’s commentary:The narrator, like father and daughter in the dialogue, avoids spelling out the terrible act of child sacrifice. This whole story has parallels elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, the most obvious being Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in order to obtain favorable winds to sail to the Trojan war. The…

Dating 📜According to the Jewish Study Bible (JSB), “there is widespread agreement” that Judges is a collection of tribal stories redacted to include “a national-religious character, and fitted the whole into the great Deuteronomistic work that describes history” from Deuteronomy to Kings (JSB). This classification as Deuteronomistic redaction generally dated to the exile, 6th century…

Hawkins (2013) notes that Kathleen Kenyon found archaeological evidence for a Late Bronze Age settlement at Jericho, and that this settlement eventually came to an end by destruction. The narratives of Joshua’s conquest are not historical in Prof. Nigro’s opinion. See most notably p204 of The Italian-Palestinian Expedition to Tell es-Sultan, Ancient Jericho (1997–2015): Archaeology…

Several scholars have noted that many elements of Joshua 10 imitate Neo-Assyrian conquest accounts, including elements that are clear exaggerations as well as supernatural interventions by the patron deity. Joshua’s campaign in southern Canaan in particular seems to reflect the campaign fought by Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE. Numerous fortified cities were captured and…

The crossing of the Jordan is part of the Conquest narrative created by later Israelites, perhaps in an attempt to differentiate themselves from their Canaanite brethren. One of the scholarly hypothesis current among academics (although it’s been a while since I’ve done any reading in this area) is that the Israelites were indigenous Canaanites. In…