The Book of Judges contains some of the most dramatic episodes in the Hebrew Bible. It is part of the Deuteronomic history that begins with Deuteronomy itself and continues through Second Kings, with the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the Davidic monarchy.
Judges begins with the Israelite tribes united under the leadership of Joshua. In a series of short stories and cycles of sinning, punishment and forgiveness, it tells how, after Joshua’s death, the tribes display increasing disorder, violence, kidnapping, murder, rape, vengeance and civil war, culminating in their cry for a king. The course will examine the authorship of Judges and its structure by reading selected passages, including the enigmatic Gideon and Samson sagas and the horrific events that led to the civil war. The goals of the course are to engage in a close reading of the texts and to discover a hidden political agenda that underlies much of the Hebrew Bible.
Daniel Deykin, M.D., is an emeritus professor of medicine and public health at Boston University. He has been a member of Temple Ohabei Shalom for more than 50 years. He and a group of fellow Me’ah graduates have met weekly studying Jewish texts with teachers drawn from the Greater Boston religious community. He recently led a seminar on the Book of Judges at the Harvard
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