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CAPÍTULO 5
EL LIBRO DE LOS JUECES (IV)
UN LIBRO VIOLENTO Y CRUEL
The Book of Judges is about death. It is one of those numerous monuments of antiquity
that celebrate death and that we celebrate, because of their respectable old age, without
realizing that we celebrate death in the same move. It is, however, in the way we
celebrate it, read and misread it, that we can become aware of our own attitude toward
death. In Judges there is death in all forms, each violent. The book is full of murder:
public and private murder, war and individual murder. It openly celebrates murder. And
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murder, in this text, is related to gender. Men kill women, and women kill men. And
men kill men. The man-man murders are, with only one exception [Ehud-Eglon],
collective murders: wars. The woman-man murders are derived from that primary po-
litical kind of murder: women kill heroes and military leaders. The man-woman
murders are different. Men, mighty men, kill innocent young daughters. This
fundamental dissymmetry is the thread that will lead us through the labyrinth of the
confused, unclear, enigmatic Book of Judges.1
1
M. Bal, Death and Dissymmetry. The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago –
London 1988).
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It remains to consider whether these texts should be preached today. There are some
obvious reasons to say yes, including the fact that these stories are part of the "whole
counsel of God," or in view of the predilection of the Reformed tradition for lectio
continua After all, it is difficult to preach on the whole book of Judges without arriving,
sooner or later, at chapter 11, not to mention chapter 19. There is another reason to
preach on these stories, too, and that is the simple fact that our lives and our world are
often disrupted by the same kinds of terror depicted in these texts. Moreover, terror and
violence and violation in our world are too often met by a silence—sometimes from the
church—that communicates either blame for the victim or a lack of caring. To preach
on the texts of terror is to name that silence, to recognize the atrocity, and to open a
pathway for communication and healing 2.
En la exegesis ofreceré la bibliografía sobre los diversos episodios violentos. Ahora sólo recojo
algunos títulos.
2
Art. cit. 59.