Roger Ryan on the Book of Judges

Roger Ryan, Judges, Readings: A New Biblical Commentary (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2007), x + 226pp., ISBN 1906055246.

I attended a day conference yesterday at which Roger Ryan presented a paper on Judges arguing against the consensus that the judge-deliverers are negative role models who contribute to Israel’s moral and spiritual decline. Instead, he insists, their role is militaristic, and they are successful when they deliver Israel from enemies; they are God’s gifts to Israel through whom he brings peace to the land.

He argues this thesis across the narrative as a whole in this commentary in which he invites us to ‘the dangerous world of biblical Israel inhabited by heroes, heroines, hissable villains, a chorus of naughty Israelites, countless silent victims and Yahweh the God of Israel who does whatever it takes to win his people back from the gods of Canaan to covenant loyalty’ (xi).

The commentary includes a lengthy ‘Afterword’ (169-221) in which Ryan engages more closely with scholarly literature on Judges. He sees the stories as ‘literature of hope’ written for Israelite refugees in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the sixth century bc, and highlights three aims of the storyteller: (1) reasons to be ashamed of their moral and religious behaviour; (2) cause for hope because of Yahweh’s repeated responses to the peoples’ cries for help; (3) a warning not to assimilate or fall away from the loyalty to the covenant (172).