Major Review: Judges

This is particularly obvious in the opening part: although titled “Theological Introduction,” it mostly goes through the typical motions of a critical commentary, introducing Judges as a whole, its canonical and historical context, literary structure (under the strange heading “The Immediate Context of Judges”), and history of its interpretation and reception. Moreover, much of it is secondary (the section on “Hearing Judges as Hebrew Narrative” comes entirely from Meir Sternberg’s oeuvre) or standard in recent scholarship (the division of Judges into two-part introduction, six cycles, and two-part conclusion). Other sections are desultory, such as “Hearing Others Hearing Judges,” where Beldman devotes less than two pages to diachronic approaches and never mentions Camille Saint-Saëns’s famous (and in some recent productions, controversial) opera Samson and Delilah under “Judges in Art, Music, and Theater.”