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Judges

The mixture of legend and chronicle making up the Book of Judges describes a fragmented Israel trapped in a cycle of backsliding from God, enslavement by foreign powers, redemption, and reempowerment followed by renewed backsliding: a world in which each tribe follows its own interests and directs bellicose energy as readily against another tribe of Israel as against Israel’s traditional enemies. The phrase, repeated four times in the later chapters of Judges, “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes,” forms the closing sentence of the book, where it glosses the gruesome story of the Levite whose concubine is raped to death by members of the tribe of Benjamin, and who cuts her body (“together with her bones”) into twelve parts to form messages to the other tribes; those tribes then nearly annihilate Benjamin in the Battle of Gibeah, sparing only a few men so that the tribe will survive. (Since the Benjamite women have all been murdered, the remaining men are married off to women from a town, Jabesh-Gilead, that had refused to join in the war against the Benjamites, and that, both as punishment and as a way of generating a supply of wives, has had all its men slaughtered [Judges 19–21]).¹ Given that the tribes of Israel not only kill “twenty and five thousand” Benjamite warriors in battle, but then go on to massacre the entire Benjamite population (20:46–48), this all-but-genocidal episode holds up as the worst bellum internecinum in Judges. Running it a close second, however—and far outstripping it in adult male casualties, the casualties that the Bible counts—is the battle between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites earlier in Judges that culminates in the shibboleth test with its “forty and two thousand” Ephraimite victims.

The story of the shibboleth test forms the capstone to the story of Jephthah in Judges 11–12, which begins with a small-scale version of social fragmentation: “Now Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valor, and he was the son of an harlot: and Gilead begat Jephthah. And Gilead’s wife bare him sons; and his wife’s sons grew up, and they thrust out Jephthah, and said unto him, Thou shalt not inherit in our father’s house; for thou are the son of a strange woman” (11:1–2). (“Gilead,” very occasionally a proper name in the Bible, but commonly a toponym for an area of the Transjordan, is perhaps functioning here as a collective personification, with no specified genealogy leading to Jephthah.) When the Ammonites oppress Israel, however, the elders of Gilead seek him out and ask him to lead them in battle. The first sign that speech acts will play an important role in the narrative comes as Jephthah bargains for sovereignty: he will lead the Gileadites against the Ammonites if they in turn will not just reintegrate him, but make him their permanent leader (shofet or “judge”), which they swear to do: “The Lord be witness between us, if we do not do so according to thy words.” Jephthah in turn makes a vow: “And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, if thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering” (11:30–31). As mythic narrative demands, what comes forth out of the doors of his house, after the battle, is his own, and only, child. The child, a daughter who remains unnamed in the story—there is a sense in which she does not live long enough for a name—begs for two months to “bewail her virginity,” which are accorded her, after which the father “did with her according to his vow which he had vowed: and she knew no man” (11:38).²

In the wake of this blood sacrifice—the only narratively foregrounded case of consummated child sacrifice in the Bible³—the Ephraimites cross the Jordan and enter Gilead, angry that Jephthah has fought (and presumably despoiled) the Ammonites without them. There follows the famous story of the shibboleth test:

And the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together, and went northward, and said unto Jephthah, Wherefore passedst thou over to fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee? we will burn thine house upon thee with fire. And Jephthah said unto them, I and my people were at great strife with the children of Ammon; and when I called you, ye delivered me not out of their hands. And when I saw that ye delivered me not, I put my life in my hands, and passed over against the children of Ammon, and the LORD delivered them into my hand: wherefore then are ye come up unto me this day, to fight against me? Then Jephthah gathered together all the men of Gilead, and fought with Ephraim: and the men of Gilead smote Ephraim, because they said, Ye Gileadites are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites, and among the Manassites. And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth [שיבולת]: and he said Sibboleth [סיבולת]: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. (12:1–6)

In passing we may note that the Hebrew text displays peculiarities in the passage in which the Ephraimites undergo their linguistic test. The phonetic difference on which the story turns most likely had to be misrepresented in order to receive written representation. It is not clear how the historical Gileadites would have pronounced the word shibboleth, nor how the Ephraimites would have mispronounced it; the decisive sound may well have been an English-style th, a bit of Proto-Semitic retained in the Gileadic dialect to which no letter corresponded in ancient Hebraic script, leading to the word’s being written with an initial shin consonant in Judges. Ironically, the Ephraimitic pronunciation was possibly some kind of sh—though also possibly some kind of s, or t, or th.⁴ In all of these cases, since the letter shin was being used to represent the sound the Gileadites were requesting, and since in unpointed Hebrew script, shin and sin are indistinguishable, the text had to use a different s-letter, the samekh, to render the Ephraimitic articulation of the word. “To advance the point of the anecdote,” as Jack M. Sasson puts it, “a word was purposely (or not) misspelled by using the consonant samekh (ס), instead of the expected shin (ש). The scribe might have had another option, which was to use the sin (ש), but avoided it, at least because it was orthographically undistinguishable from shin and might have compromised the thrust of the story.”⁵ A misspelling, or better, a graphic trope, is required in order to produce a stable, writable, and readable difference that relays the all-important phonemic difference (whatever it was). The text itself, as a written performance, mimics the Ephraimite’s misspeaking through an act of miswriting and could thus be said—a little fancifully, but in the spirit of honoring the hyperbolic force of these microscopic differences—to violate or fail the shibboleth test even as it generates it. This contingency serves as our first index of a structural, noncontingent fallibility that forms the condition of possibility of shibboleth tests.

Before pursuing that large question, however, we may follow to its end the story of Jephthah—which will not take long, since it concludes with an abrupt final verse after the shibboleth story. “And Jephthah judged Israel six years. Then died Jephthah the Gileadite, and was buried in one of the cities of Gilead” (12:7). The words “one of” were added by the King James Version translators, and many editions italicize them so as to flag the insertion. Jephthah’s is the shortest reign of all the judges; he dies without progeny; and Sasson notes that “he is said to be buried not in Mizpah or even Tov, but ‘in the towns of Gilead,’ lacking the precise location normally attached to judges. Expanding on this odd phrasing, the rabbis had Jephthah die in battle, with portions of his body scattered all around—a small price to pay for his bad judgment.”⁶ (A marginal note to an Aramaic commentary adds extra graphic detail: “And his limbs fell from him and his limbs were buried in the cities of Gilead.”)⁷ By “bad judgment” Sasson has in mind not just Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter, but also his murderous response to the Ephraimites. Earlier in Judges the Ephraimites had been summoned by the Benjamite leader Ehud and had held the fords of the Jordan with him against Moab (3:27–29); summoned by the Manassite leader Gideon, they had held the fords alone against Midian (7:24–8:3). Although these various stories in Judges are not chronologically marked, by the time we get to Jephthah, narrative sequence has established the Ephraimites as reliable partners in a judge’s battles with Israel’s enemies (though in the Gideon story we also get some foreshadowing: the Ephraimites complain to Gideon about having been called late into battle; he soothes them with diplomatic words, and then, as we noted earlier, goes on to murder the male population of Succoth and Penuel, cities that had refused his call to arms [8:1–3]). Furthermore, the dominant narrative strands of the Pentateuch suggest that the Ephraimites are right to claim close kinship with the Gileadites.⁸ But kinship here works as a taunt: “and the men of Gilead smote Ephraim, because they said, Ye Gileadites are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites, and among the Manassites.” The story of Jephthah contributes substantially to the social fragmentation that looms large at this point in the Bible. Of questionable legitimacy, destructive of his own progeny, ferociously murderous toward a closely related tribe, a judge of short reign whose nonspecific place of burial hints at a scattered corpse, Jephthah seems to be acting out an autoimmune disorder within patriarchal culture. His disastrous vow, which links his sovereignty and his prowess in war to the extinction of his line, may have something to do with the blend of massive force and structural instability that characterizes the shibboleth test as a technology of border control.