Jack M. Sasson

Those familiar with the Anchor Bible will know that it was originally meant to be a series of short commentaries, but the books grew and grew until the earlier and later volumes of the original series hardly conformed to the same criteria. That, plus advances in scholarship, caused the editors to start a new series.

This is the first half of the "New Judges," and it certainly has the heft of the newer texts in the series. And yet, I can't help but think that this book left out the most show more important parts.

The crucial point, to my mind, is that Judges is an historical book. I won't say that it's true history, because it is so strongly filtered through a theological lens, but the events supposedly happened. And they happened over a long, long time -- at least 200 years by all reckonings, and more than 400 according to traditional calculations. That means that there must have been different sources that were combined to produce the current book. If we are to understand Judges, we really need to look at those sources. And yet Sasson, apart from a few minor cases such as the "Song of Deborah," ignores the question of sources.

Making this even worse is his refusal to try to edit the text. He simply bases his commentary on the Received Hebrew text, even though this almost certainly isn't the original. Yes, that Hebrew text (hereafter MT) is what Jews now use, and many Christian translations, including the King James Bible, are based on it. But there are strong hints in the Greek versions that the current MT is not the same as the original. And how the bleep-bleep are you supposed to get at the history that Judges is describing if you don't even try to get at what the original author wrote.

Sasson also completely misunderstands the whole idea of folklore -- important, since much of Judges is probably based on oral tradition. He does note that Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter resembles other tales such as Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, then sneers, "All of the above examples from the classics are interesting in a Stith Thompson Motif-Index sort of way, but... hardly the stuff that might seriously contribute to shaping a Hebraic tale."

Dr. Sasson, please get your head out of your rear end and take a basic folktale course. There is a reason why there are tales of parents sacrificing relatives, whether Jephthah killing his daughter or Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia or the slayer of the Lambton Worm killing his father -- and the reason is that such tales so horrify us. If Jephthah had sacrificed, say, a pigeon, would anyone notice? No; the story survives because it was his daughter. And the fact that there are so many other variations on this tale tells us how deeply people feel the tale. If you don't understand the folklore, you can't judge the full significance of Jephthah's woe.

Or compare Jotham's Fable. Sasson correctly notes that the Fable is a little odd in its context. The likely reason is that the Fable existed independently of the story of Abimelech, and was fitted in imperfectly. Understanding the way that folktales evolve would help Dr. Sasson to figure this out. (I wonder a little if Jotham's Fable was actually about Jephthah rather than Abimelech; it fits that situation perfectly.)

There are other oddities. Sasson (p. 408 and elsewhere) refers to only five minor judges, not six; somehow Shamgar has become something else, even though Shamgar gets only a couple of verses.

Or take the story of Adoni-bezeq at the very beginning of Judges (Judges 1:7). Adoni-bezek is taken to Jerusalem, where he dies. But on p. 134, Sasson says Adoni-bezeq died from his wounds. Huh? The text says merely that he died. Maybe he did bleed to death or something, but the text doesn't say so.

So: You can't trust the history in this book. You can't trust the text. You can't trust the folklore analysis. Most Anchor Bible volumes are good pieces of work. But this one is a true clunker. show less