Judges 19 as Wisdom: Sitting with the Wise in Ambivalence and Discontinuity

Andrew Judd, ‘Judges 19 as Wisdom: Sitting with the Wise in Ambivalence and Discontinuity’, in Honoring the Wise: Wisdom in Scripture, Ministry, and Life; Celebrating Lindsay Wilson’s Thirty Years at Ridley, Australian College of Theology Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2022), 15–27.

Of all the horrors told in Judges, it is chapter 19 and the rape and murder of an innocent woman while her husband sleeps soundly inside that raises perhaps the most unsettling questions for interpreters. It marks the beginning of the end of a process we have been watching with increasing discomfort since the opening of Judges; the threat of the Canaanite “other” has gradually been displaced by an even more terrifying darkness within. That the Levite and his wife meet such a fate in Benjamin—having chosen, in a terrible moment of irony, not to lodge in a Canaanite town—shows that the “Canaanization” of Israel is complete. Genre-wise, there are many ways that we could take this story: as straight historical narration of an unhappy period; as prophetic commentary on pre-monarchical Israel; or perhaps even as a kind of ancient horror film, designed to shock the audience with the monsters within. The theme of this Festschrift, however, suggests a different—and, I think, productive— lens. My point of departure is modern genre theory’s observation that texts do not “belong” to a single genre but have relationships with many genres. Readers use genres heuristically, forming a genre hypothesis and testing “alternative readings of the text as different genres.” In part one, I test a reading of Judges 19 as if it were a wisdom text. What features stand out when we understand the chapter as something akin to Proverbs, Job, or Ecclesiastes? In part two, I explore how the wisdom genre helps us reconceive the discontinuities of the story—particularly in the disturbing bargain with the sons of Belial—as features, not flaws. Every genre requires something different from us as readers, and reading Judges 19 as a wisdom text demands that we sit with its discontinuities for longer than we might otherwise be comfort- able. By refusing flat characterisation and trite moralizing, the text forces us live with ambivalence—which is where wisdom is often to be found.