A Feminist Companion to Judges [Paperback]

The book of Judges is replete with female figurations, and has, therefore, received a lot of attention from feminist critics. This volume of essays, however, changes the motivation behind this apparent centrality of female figures, claiming that in fact strong androcentric premises underlie the texts. The overall theme of this sparkling collection focusses on wives, daughters and mothers, and their relationships. An introductory section surveys the women of Judges, investigation satire, paradigm and deviation and the midrashic sources; Brenner and Van Dyck investigate the story and song of Deborah; Fuchs and Exum turn their attention to Jephthah's daughter; Amit and Reinhartz look at women in the Samson story. Finally, three essays, including one by Mieke Bal, deal with the brutal finale of the book in chapters 19-21.

Abbreviations/ Acknowledgements/Athalya Brenner/ Introduction/ In General: Women and [Hi]story/Lillian R. Klein/ A Spectrum of Female Characters/Adrien Janis Bledstein/ Is Judges a Woman's Satire on Men Who Play God?/Lillian R. Klein/ The Book of Judges: Paradigm and Deviation in Images of Women/Leila Leah Bronner/ Valorized or Vilified? The Women of Judges in Midrashic Sources/ Part II/ On Text Authority in Judges 4-5/Athalya Brenner/ A Triangle and a Rhombus in Narrative Structure: A Proposed Integrative Reading of Judges 4 and 5/ ?Fokkelien Van Dijk-Hemmes/ Mothers and a Mediator in the Song of Deborah/ Part III/ On Relational Women: A Daughter/Esther Fuchs/ Marginalization, Ambiguity, Silencing: The Silence of Jephthah's Daughter/J. Cheryl Exum/ On Judges 11/ Part IV/ On Relational Women: A Mother and Wife/Yairah Amit/ 'Manoah Promptly Followed his Wife' (Judges 13:11): On the Place of the Woman in Birth Narratives/Adele Reinhartz/ Samson's Mother: An unnamed Protagonist/ Part V/ On Relational Women: A Wife/Koala Jones-Warsaw/ Toward a Woman Hermeneutic: A Readinglª