Eminently readable, exegetically thorough, and written in an emotionally warm style that flows from his keen sensitivity to the text, Barry Webb’s commentary on Judges is just what is needed to properly engage a dynamic, narrative work like the book of Judges. It discusses not only unique features of the stories themselves but also such issues as the violent nature of Judges, how women are portrayed in it, and how it relates to the Christian gospel of the New Testament. Webb concentrates throughout on what the biblical text itself throws into prominence, giving space to background issues only when they cast significant light on the foreground. For those who want more, the footnotes and bibliography provide helpful guidance. The end result is a welcome resource for interpreting one of the most challenging books in the Old Testament.

Using a combination of literary theory and the tools of biblical criticism, this original and thought-provoking study investigates the book of Judges as an example of the art of editing in the Hebrew Bible. Judges is shown to have been composed in its parts, and as a whole, according to particular integrative principles. The study not only sheds new light on the redaction of Judges, but opens a new window on biblical historiography as a whole. Responding to calls in the scholarly literature for its translation from Hebrew, this publication makes Amit's fine study available to a wider audience.

An expository guide to Judges which will excite ordinary Christians in their faith and equip teachers and preachers in their work. Timothy Keller's Judges For You walks you through the book of Judges, showing how the flawless God is at work in the most flawed situations and the most failing people. Combining a close attention to the detail of the text with Timothy Keller's trademark gift for clear explanation and compelling insights, this resource will both engage your mind and stir your heart. "Judges has only one hero-God. And as we read this as an account of how he works in history, it comes alive. This book is not an easy read. But living in the times we do, it is an essential one." - Timothy Keller Judges for You is a uniquely flexible resource. It can simply be read as a book; used as a daily devotional, complete with reflection questions; or utilised by anyone who has a teaching ministry, to help small-group leaders understand and apply the text, and to give preachers helpful ways of connecting timeless Bible truths to today's world. Judges for You is designed to work alongside The flawed and the flawless, Timothy Keller's Bible study resource for small groups and individuals.

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made. The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

This volume describes how the rhetorical devices used in Judges inspire its readers to support a divinely appointed Judahite king who endorses the deuteronomic agenda to rid the land of foreigners, to maintain inter-tribal loyalty to YHWH's cult, and to uphold social justice. Matters of rhetorical concern interpreted here include the superimposed cycle-motif and tribal-political schemata, concerns reflected in the plot-layers of each hero story, the force of narrative analogy for characterization, the strategy of entrapment which foreshadows portrayals of Saul and David in 1 Samuel, and the relation between Judges' implied situation of composition and its compiler's intention. In addition to offering new insights into the rhetorical strategy of the Judges compiler, this book illustrates a new method for understanding how plot-layered stories work.

A comic novel about a Midwestern professor who tries to prop up his failing prospects for happiness by setting out on the Journey of a Lifetime. Louie Hake is forty-three and teaches architectural history at a third-rate college in Michigan. His second marriage is collapsing, and he's facing a potentially disastrous medical diagnosis. In an attempt to fend off what has become a soul-crushing existential crisis, he decides to treat himself to a tour of the world's most breathtaking architectural sites. Perhaps not surprisingly, Louie gets waylaid on his very first stop in Rome--ludicrously, spectacularly so--and fails to reach most of his other destinations. He embarks on a doomed romance with a jilted bride celebrating her ruined marriage plans alone in London. And in the Arctic he finds that turf houses and aluminum sheds don't amount to much of an architectural tradition. But it turns out that there's another sort of architecture there: icebergs the size of cathedrals, bobbing beside a strange and wondrous landscape. It soon becomes clear that Louie's grand journey is less about where his wanderings have taken him and more about where his past encounters with romance have not. Whether pursuing his first wife, or his estranged current wife, or the older woman he kissed just once a quarter-century ago, Louie reveals himself to be endearing, deeply touching, wonderfully ridiculous . . . and destined to find love in all the wrong places.

This volume represents an inductive, literary/rhetorical analysis of the book of Judges to determine whether recent synchronic approaches that read the book as an integrated whole are indeed justified. As possible rhetorical links connecting Judges' prologue (1:1-2:5), epilogue (17:1-21:25), and central section (2:6-16:31) are examined in detail and the implications of such links carefully considered, the author concludes that, contrary to the consensus view that sees the central section of Judges as a part of Deuteronomistic History and the prologue and epilogue as later additions, the book in its current form may have been a unified composition of a single creative author. If so, not only does this have significant implications for the validity of the Deuteronomistic History Hypothesis, a new possibility also emerges which sees the interpretive key to the book as residing in the prologue and epilogue rather than the central section.

A woman called blessed for killing a Canaanite general; another called "Mother in Israel" for leading troops into war; several other mothers absent when their children need them; a judge, Deborah, with a proper name and a recognized place for public counseling; a single woman, Delilah, who seduces and conquers Samson. The book of Judges features an outstanding number of women, named and unnamed, in family roles and also active in society, mostly objects of violent dealings between men. This volume looks not only at women in their traditional roles (daughter, wife, mother) but also at how society at large deals with women (and with men) in war, in strife, and sometimes in peace.

A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Richard A. Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases. When conventional legal materials enable judges to ascertain the true facts of a case and apply clear pre-existing legal rules to them, Posner argues, they do so straightforwardly; that is the domain of legalist reasoning. However, in non-routine cases, the conventional materials run out and judges are on their own, navigating uncharted seas with equipment consisting of experience, emotions, and often unconscious beliefs. In doing so, they take on a legislative role, though one that is confined by internal and external constraints, such as professional ethics, opinions of respected colleagues, and limitations imposed by other branches of government on freewheeling judicial discretion. Occasional legislators, judges are motivated by political considerations in a broad and sometimes a narrow sense of that term. In that open area, most American judges are legal pragmatists. Legal pragmatism is forward-looking and policy-based. It focuses on the consequences of a decision in both the short and the long term, rather than on its antecedent logic. Legal pragmatism so understood is really just a form of ordinary practical reasoning, rather than some special kind of legal reasoning. Supreme Court justices are uniquely free from the constraints on ordinary judges and uniquely tempted to engage in legislative forms of adjudication. More than any other court, the Supreme Court is best understood as a political court.

The book of Judges is full of characters of ambivalent moral integrity and acts of dubious propriety, such as Jael's murder of Sisera and the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter. And yet the terse narrative and the reticent narrator frequently leave the ethical character of these actions in doubt. In order to avoid reading contemporary worldviews and ethics into this ancient text, Mary L. Conway applies a blend of narrative and functional linguistic theories to her analysis of the stories of the six major judges in an effort to more accurately identify the unifying ideological stance of the book. Using an interdisciplinary approach that employs the concepts of narrative perspective alongside appraisal theory, Conway evaluates the judges within their historical context in order to determine whether their actions are normative or aberrant. The lexicogrammatical and ideational evidence produced by this methodology reveals contrasts and trajectories within and across the narratives that, Conway argues, give insight into the character and actions of the Israelites and YHWH and the relationship between the Israelite people and their God. In this trailblazing study, Conway models a new approach to biblical interpretation that lays bare the ethics of the book of Judges. This study will be of interest to biblical studies scholars, in particular Old Testament scholars, as well as seminary students and pastors.