Preface to Intricacy, Design, and Cunning in the Book of Judges

We possess art lest we should perish from the truth.– Nietzsche

The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.– Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

Of all the books in the Hebrew Scriptures Judges, despite its apparent simplicity, is the most difficult to comprehend. Containing many curious anomalies, non sequiturs, and other ostensibly irrelevant details, it seems crude, chaotic, and close to being nihilistic. At first sight, it is an anthology of folktales about male and female heroes of Israel–probably composed by storytellers long before Israel became a nation. But what odd heroes these characters turn out to be–undisciplined and heartless caricatures, compared with noble Achilles and Patroclus–defying the reader’s expectations about sacred history and how heroes ought to behave. Readers have always found these stories difficult to understand and deeply disturbing.

The stories, however, were regarded as part of Israelite history. According to this history, the tribes escaped from oppression in Egypt, and after wandering forty years in the Sinai, entered Canaan under Joshua in about 1250 BCE, annihilated the towns and inhabitants of the land they believed Yhwh had given them, and settled down in the respective territories Joshua had allotted to them. Judges supposedly recounts actual events in the period 1250-1020 BCE, which took place right after the Conquest, before the Israelites finally persuaded Samuel to a­noint a king. The Jewish tradition emanating from Josephus was that the scriptures had been transmitted orally and accurately through the ages–not a jot nor a tittle of it altered. Despite the discrepancies between the Septuagint, the MT, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, this seemed in the main true. With the example of how the Homeric epics were passed along orally for hundreds of years before finally being written down, the accuracy of oral transmission of the Bible seemed possible, too, and this possibility lent authority to its witness as history.

Although Judges tells us many things we expect only from fiction and almost none of the things we expect from history, pressure from biblical scholarship has always kept even skeptical readers in a straightjacket, preventing them from seeing what was really going on in the stories.

This was because most of the biblical scholarship on Judges before 1980 was done by the believing community, and it concerned history, religion, and language, but next to nothing about the style and the literary quality of the book by literary critics. Interpreters either assumed it was written in much the same manner as the “historical” books of the Bible, or else ignored its style completely. Even when literary critics tackled the book beginning in the 1980s and continuing until now, none of them–to my knowledge–analyzed this author’s style. Believing that the author of Judges was mainly a chronicler blinds the reader to perceiving Judges as literature, and a very creative work of literature at that. This present study is an attempt to explore and demonstrate its greatness.

Chapter 1. Introduction

To the literary critic, everything about a text contributes to its meaning and value. Without an understanding of the author’s method, the structures he created, and the literary games that he played and without comprehending the book as a whole instead of merely piecemeal, we cannot completely decipher its meaning.

Although at first bewildering, the plots can be made out well by a careful reader either through using the numerous commentaries or through using the method of the “hermeneutical circle,” whereby one reads the book in the usual fashion–from top to bottom–numerous times, and then at subsequent readings applies what one has previously learned, gradually accumulating and using all possible information.

But there is another way of reading the book: one lays the stories down side by side, and reads across the stories, also numerous times, to find out how each word and/or idea is related to all other appearances of the word and/or idea. Instead of concentrating on a certain topic or a particular character or a particular custom or belief, we begin looking at the book in its entirety, at all the characters simultaneously, as it were, and switch back and forth between them at will. We are like viewers in an airship gazing down at the landscape of Israel below us and watching those figures as if they are all living and acting contemporaneously. What we see is a vast network of relationships like the neural network of the human brain, producing a multidimensional, multivalent text. With 10,000 words in this text, there are innumerable relationships to crunch, incalculable ideas to ponder, and countless conclusions to reach. Our enterprise is to comprehend all these relationships, no matter how arduous the enterprise, for understanding this complexity makes all the difference in how we interpret the stories and how we evaluate them as art.

The book was carefully designed to consist of a structure of many parallels of stories with comparable and contrasting situations and people, its parts almost perfectly symmetrical. The correspon­dences and contrasts besides being useful are also aesthetically pleasing, symmetry being a highly prized constituent of art, as it is indeed of life forms (the design of the snowflake or the chambered nautilus, for example). The design also demonstrates ­the ingenuity and skill of the writer.

This symmetrical device is exemplified in the ­Deborah and Samson sto­ries, which are almost the same length and are intricately intertwined, causing us to compare, among other possibilities, Jael’s subduing of the enemy with Delilah’s, Sisera’s mother with Samson’s, and Barak’s method of warfare with Samson’s. Another example would be the many parallel stories about parents and children–five stor­ies about Fa­thers and Daughters (Achsah, Jephthah’s daughter, the Timnite, and the Concubine, as well as the fathers of the daughters of Shiloh); two stories about Mothers and Sons (Sisera and Micah); and one story with two incidents concerning Fathers and Sons (Joash/Gideon and Gideon/Jether) as well as a third relationship, Jerubbaal/Abimelech. In literature as in life, it is only through comparisons and contrasts that we can determine which actions or people or things are preferable, or even what anything means. We learn that something is good or bad only because it is either better or worse than something else. This is the basic reason, other than design, for the many parallels in this book.

In the best of the modern Twentieth Century li­terary-artistic fashion, the author never “tells” us anything, but “shows” all. Though this method is found in other narratives of the Bible, it is a defining characteristic of style here. The author himself does not interpret the comparisons for us but makes the readers analyze them and hypothesize about what the differences mean. And here is a major difficulty: to assimilate so many details and make choices about them is too laborious for the reader. But since the author has set up this problem for us to solve, not to do so is to miss completely what the book intends to teach.

These correspondences are a form of intertextuality. Intertextuality is one of the ways meaning is established in all language systems. Every text in a language is ultimately involved with all other texts–i.e., language is always referring to other words and texts; it is the contexts of all texts that define the meaning of any particular word. No text stands alone. Once writing systems are developed, intertextuali­ty happens naturally and pervasively. But it can also be a consciously-contrived artistic device, as in Eliot’s The Waste Land. Likewise, the intertextuality of Judges is deliberate and consists in both an inner intertextuality like the examples above, and an outer one, with parallels and references to many stories and passages from Genesis through 2 Kings. Intentional intertextuality is one of the secrets of how the author gains multiple meanings from his otherwise simple stories.

A multitude of keywords belonging to more than fifty different categories have been sprinkled throughout the text. Among other functions of these keywords is that they serve as signposts, pointing out where the comparisons are to be made.

Another part of the design is that the book is highly “iconic”–every story containing dramatic tableaux, in which the characters are as if frozen in memorable postures. It is a picture book, of sorts. Also tucked into the design here and there is a variety of curious little word patterns, each with its own special import.

Because of the perfection of the design, I assume a single authorship. ­­Or possibly, if the book was altered by a later redactor, the fact that the symmetry and proportions of the book were preserved means that the redactor under­stood the structure and followed the rules of the games that the author played. Though a bit of tweaking was done by later editors, probably the Deuteronomists, who inserted short warnings against behavior which might have brought about the fall of the reconstituted Israel in the Post-Exilic period, the fact that the designs are so precise means that not much tampering occurred.

To aid the reader in determining the extent of the author’s design, I have supplied a number of tables in this chapter–among them, 1) a comparison of the Deborah and Samson stories, 2) the father-daughter, mother-son, father-son stories, 3) the references and allusions to other stories in the Bible, and 4) the author’s ingenious chiastic structure, at least of the beginning of the book with its end.

Chapter 2. The Comedy of Horrors

One reason for the difficulty in understanding these stories may be that readers fail to recognize them as being simultaneously both hor­rific and comic. The horrific elements have the effect of nullifying the comic, and vice versa.

A census of the casualties and deaths reveals an astonishing amount of violence, usually ignored by commentators. There are 88 cases of vio­lence in which the victims (those with names) are killed. 267,860 nameless people are slaugh­tered in battle, as well as “great slaughter” (no count made) in a large number of other battles. At least 9 named ci­ties are destroyed as well as a large number of unnamed cities, including “all” the Benjaminite towns. In addi­tion, many kinds of fraud and vio­lence are committed, such as ­­Samson catching 300 foxes, lighting torches attached to their tails, and sending them into the fields of the Philistines to burn them up. Instances of terrorism like these mark the cunning of underdogs, the weakest triumphing over the strongest. The mood of the Israelites toward the Canaanites and Philistines throughout seems to be: “Exterminate all the brutes.” The land is a heart of darkness(1).

What is so strange is that this devastation, destruction, slaughter, and carnage have largely been ignored by interpreters. J. Cheryl Exum, a well-known critic who has written many excellent articles and books on Judges, admits that the gouging out of Samson’s eyes did not disturb her until very recently when she saw a painting by Lovis Corinth of the blinded Samson, which brought out its horror to her for the first time(2). Milton did not make that mistake. The author meant for the violence to be noticed, for it is strongly stressed and is a definite part of the design. My analysis of the words of violence may surprise the reader in that they are so many and yet so unremarked.

Why has this carnage been slighted by almost every modern critic? Possibly critics are so single-minded–so preoccupied with their own topics, whether characters, plot, or history–that they do not think about it, or else regard the violence and ferocity as mere “background.” Oddly enough, despite his almost excessive attention to the details of slaughter, the author himself does not mention pain or suffering or bloodshed. Mutilations abound, but there are no gory descriptions. This also keeps the reader in a state of denial and ignorance.

One reason for the denial of pain in literature and in life that Elaine Scarry suggests in The Body in Pain is its “inexpressibility.” Unless one is the sufferer, one cannot enter into the other person’s suffering: “Even with effort, one may remain in doubt about its existence, or may retain the astonishing freedom of denying its existence(3).” Of course, pain could be, and probably was, expressed by the storyteller to his live audience.

Thus the author has achieved a kind of “alienation effect,” for the book has hundreds of instances of various kinds of comedy which counteract its horrors. These include slap­stick, farce, irony, satire, parody, riddles, games and puzzles, out-of-the-ordinary heterogeneity, exaggeration, people (the “folk”) in all kinds of relationships, women as destructive of men, women as foils, disguises and masks, strange uses of bodily parts, degradations of all kinds, food, wine, and banquets, weddings, topsy-turvy world (e.g., woman on top, the wrong person as king), bizarre use of common objects such as the use of strange objects for weapons, etc., as well as numerous instances of humor for which no adequate classification can be found–funny situations which in a film would evoke laughter, but because they are in the Bible, produce bewilderment and only a guilty pleasure, if that. The characters engage in all kinds of “preposterous acts” (like Samson with his foxes), which cause us to stop in our tracks and try to figure out how–in reality–such crazy acts could have been perpetrated. The list of these is long and amusing, once the reader begins to view them in this way.

“The site of comedy is the body,” says Seth Lerer(4). Mikhail Bakhtin makes this clear in his classic study of grotesque humor in Rabelais(5). And the body–especially mutilations, dismemberments, and references to what Bakhtin calls the “material bodily lower stratum” (such as bowels and bowel movements)–is the site of much of the comedy in Judges. With the help of Bakhtin’s analysis of Rabelais, the comedy can be defined as “carnivalesque-grotesque”–or in modern terminology, “black comedy.” We also find ­abundant use of the Trickster, a well-known underdog figure. Samson is the Trickster par excel­lence.

The whole book is ironical, moreover, and at the end, the Israelites seem oblivious that they are now committing, and thus condoning, the very atrocity that they had originally condemned when they aided and abetted those very Ben­jaminites (whom they are punishing for the crime of rape) to abduct (and rape) the virgins of Jabesh-Gilead and Shiloh! (Is this comic, or is this horrifying?)

Tragedies end with violent premature death and wanton destruction, while comedies end with marriage, and Judges ends not merely with one or two or three or four marriages, as in Shakespeare, but with mass weddings: the 600 remnants of the Benjaminites have carried off 600 brides. From what we imagine to be the male point of view, then, Judges ends with a huge revel, which is the Greek word for comedy. If critics have failed to see this comedy, it is probably because it has been counter-weighted with horror. We do not see what we have not been taught to see. Art is something we have to learn to understand.

Chapter 3. Hidden Objects: Wrestling with Anomalies, Solving the Enigma­

Into this horror/comedy/folktale mix, the author has planted hundreds of “hidden objects,” in the form of keywords belonging to a large number of categories. Discovering them is like digging in an archaeological site. I have attempted to list most of the keywords, put them in their proper categories, and shown how plentifully, and perhaps playfully, they are distributed, and what each of the categories signifies; they include People and Kinship Relations; Animals and Agriculture; Buildings and Building Parts (including Doors, Entrances, Gates, and the words Open/Shut and Inside/Outside); and Bodies, Body Parts, and Dismemberments, with a special category for Hands; Fabrics; Food and Drink; Containers; Invitations and Hospitality; and Tools, Instruments, and Vehicles, to mention only a few. Unlike the use of keywords in the Ugaritic myths, Judges has many more categories, and each of the categories represents an important theme in the narrative.

The census of the People and Kinship Relations, for example, uncovers an amazing variety of kinship relations and occupations. The author wants us to keep the whole society and its communities and families in mind. The impression one gets is of a dense, active, thriving, bustling population, belying the population estimates given by archaeologists for any of the early periods in which the stories might have originated. Examination of the hospitality, food, and drink categories–to mention one example–takes us inside the private spheres of the characters, revealing certain manners and customs, and violations of them. Hospitality figures in each one of the narratives and helps to unify them.

Like Homer’s use of epic similes, the keywords afford us glimpses of society apart from the terrible deeds of war that are being recorded. From these words and objects we are enabled to reconstruct the society and the historical period into which this author placed his fictional characters. The tales depict life in an agricultural and pre-political, pre-technological society, an age of very small towns, isolated from each other, before the development of skilled crafts, commerce, government, and law, and before the rise of an aristocracy. Except for the Canaanite chariots drawn by horses and the Midianite camels mentioned in the Deborah and Gideon stories, the book contains no trace of Israel's later developments as a civilization.

Related to keywords are the “binary opposites,” which are integral both to the design and to meaning. To some extent, this chapter is a careful linguistic study on which Semitic scholars may correct, add, or build. No doubt many “objects” still remain to be dug up by other readers–for they are truly hidden. Although these objects and binaries are ornamental, they also comprise a system for increasing the density of information to the text.

One of the literary games played by critics of this book is searching out the hund­reds of iron­ies ­in it and classifying them(6). In a table at the end of this chapter, I have listed and explained the “rules of the game” that I was able to uncover.

What formerly seemed to be anomalies and irrelevant details are now revealed to be building blocks of an information system.

Chapter 4. Hidden Objects: Case Law

One of the most common approaches of both the biblical scholar and the literary critic is to examine the morals and ethics of the society and the behavior of the characters depicted. Although Judges is not usually considered “philosophical,” the incidents pose three serious philosophical questions that all societies grapple with: “What kind of knowledge do we have about our world? what is ‘right’ conduct? and how should we be governed?”(7) The stories provide clues to the answers. Through a careful analysis of the many ethical dilemmas faced by the characters, and with the help of information gleaned in earlier chapters, we can now speculate about how such stories may have functioned in the evolution of a legal system.

One of the most important keyword categories is Concealment and Hidden Things (deviousness, deception, treachery; hiders, spies, ambushes; traps; secrets and riddles). The characters (underdogs) exercise cunning in their strategies to defeat the enemy; likewise, the author uses cunning in his strategies to hide all kinds of information from plain view (one of the “games”). People are hiding–like Sisera in Jael’s tent and the Israelites in the caves and dens at the beginning of the Gideon story(to mention two examples), and there are many ambushes in the various battles.

Cryptic messages have to be decoded (Ehud’s message to Eglon and Samson’s riddle); and secrets have to be discovered (like the secret of Samson’s strength). The author, in fact, plants clues that the whole book has a hidden meaning when Ehud tells Eglon: “I have a secret message for you, O king” (3.19) and, when the Levite, at the end of the book, asks: “And now, you Israelites, give your decision and advice” (20.3), messages, in both cases, directed obliquely to the reader. And Gideon asks the angel-messenger: “If the LORD is with us, why has all this happened to us?” (6.13). The main secret to be ferreted out of Judges is the author’s answer to Gideon’s question.

Categories of good and evil that are fruitful to study include the many references to anger; vows, oaths, and promises; and finally punishment and reward, retribution, requital, and revenge, which are exemplified over and over again in all of the stories.

Judges does not refer even once to the laws of Moses. If the laws already existed at the time the stories reached its present form, the stories may be a matching test for students in a law class, in which they were to find which laws to apply to which story. Or if the laws did not exist, the listeners were to propose possibilities.

Most of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of the evils portrayed in the stories, followed by an adjudication of the worst cases–like Jephthah’s and Samson’s. I have considered all the ramifications of each case, extenuating nothing that might have a possible bearing on it, weighing other parallel instances to make sure that what is considered right or wrong, or just or unjust, in one case will get the same evaluation in another, and in this way building up our knowledge of right and wrong. For example, Jael and Delilah both eliminate an enemy, but with significant differences. Is Delilah’s act worse than Jael’s? If so, why?

When the stories are viewed as law cases, then the readers become the judges of them. By thinking of themselves as judges, they are gradually shown (if they have eyes to see) what role their own personal schemas and belief systems have played, how they have been tricked into rationalizing about, and approving of, behavior that they would condemn in one case but not in another, and how readers may phase out or twist information that does not conform to what they expect, or want to see, or been told that the case (or book) is about.

Thus they gradually learn how every single detail in each of the cases impacts on their verdict, how one’s perspective matters, and how a system of law is built up by memory of its cases. Another thing they learn is how difficult it is to make legal decisions.

Finally, as Aeschylus shows in the Oresteia, we must conclude that in order for the Israelites to escape the chaos of an endless cycle of revenges, they need a body of laws and a strong ruling authority so that they do not have to continue inventing laws for every occasion as it arises–a Hobbesian conclusion.

Judges is the author's oblique explanation of how the country came to be divided, why the kingdoms of Yhwh’s chosen people were annihilated, how ­­Yhwh had tried to save them, but how the people, in the author’s eyes, persisted in going their own ruthless and selfish ways. Judges implies what reforms were needed (or what the priestly redactors thought were needed) so that the reconstituted Yehud (Judah) could survive after the return from the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century BCE.

Chapter 5. Submerged Ugaritic Myths

One common approach of the literary critic is to investigate the possible sources of a text not only to determine how authors use their sources but also to gain insight about the authors’ creative methods.

 As this chapter shows, the folktales of Judges are probably of Ugaritic or Canaanite origin, and date from a time when the inhabitants of the land had a common religion of El and his pantheon (including Athirat, Baal, Anat, Yam, and Mot), and before the Israelites branched off to develop their own version of this religion and transform the polytheistic religion into a monotheistic one. The characters of the Israelite stories may be the gods of a polytheistic pantheon, who have been brought down to earth and are now viewed as human beings.

The only extant examples of “Canaanite” literature are the Ugaritic myths. Because traces of the Ugaritic myths are found in a numerous places in the Bible, it seems reasonable to suppose that traces might also be found in Judges. I have discovered many.

In order to help the reader understand the comparisons, I have identified all the characters of the myths and briefly summarized the plots, reviewed the evidence of the myths in other parts of the Bible, and summarized some of the more recent theories about Israelite history and the development of its religion. The rest of the chapter discusses how the myths–especially those about Baal–were demythologized and adapted to Israelite scenes and circumstances in the story of Deborah, Barak, and Jael, and to a lesser degree in some of the other stories. At the end of this chapter I supply a table of how the myths and the folktales are different from, and similar to, each other. It is another kind of “intertextuality.”

Chapter 6. Conclusion

In this chapter, I list the many characteristics of style and performance that together are evidence that this book, though small in compass, is a great literary work. I also develop both an information theory and a ­narrative theory and hypothesize about how the author contrived such an intricate literary system in a preliterate age.

The proliferation of binary opposites forces the reader to shift continually back and forth between possibilities, like good or evil, strong or weak, male or female, father or mother, Yhwh or other gods, etc. This off/on (1/0) system is like the binary computer language in use today.

Once we perceive the system as dialectical, we find ourselves swimming in a sea of indetermination. But as human beings longing for closure, we instinctively try to take sides and reach definitive conclusions. Since the details can be added up in many different ways, the reader ends up with multiplicities of meanings. The text is not, however, an­archi­cal; for in setting up paral­lels be­tween epi­sodes within Judges and between episodes in Judges and ­the historical books of the Bible, the author is pro­viding his readers with a gloss. An example of this gloss is a comparison of the attempted threatened rape of the angels in Genesis 19 with the actual ­­rape of the Levite's Con­cubine in Judges 19 and the daughters of Shiloh in Ch. 21. What we have to figure out is how the latter cases differ from the former. In the end we will not arrive at a definitive interpretation, but at a choice among interpretations.

In dissecting the whole book and trying to perceive the rela­tionship of each tiny part to every other tiny part and from thence to the whole book, we have engaged throughout this study in what is called the process of “deconstruction,” the postmodern theory of literature that was first proposed by Jacques Derrida, and we have discovered numerous examples of this theory–for example, that meaning is obtained through ”différance,” including a system of binary opposites; that reading involves the free play of signification; that intertextuality produces meaning, while aporias (impasses and gaps) blur meaning; that there is a surplus of meaning and a deferral of meaning; and that these all result in a certain amount of indeterminacy and undecidability.

One of the vexing problems to be dealt with in a literary study of the Bible is how to deal with God–1) as the Yhwh of Judges; 2) as the God of the universe; 3) as but another character in the stories; or 4) as not there at all. I have tried to keep focused on the author’s Yhwh and not allow any other interpretations of God, including my own, to creep into my study. Although the accumulated biblical scholarship up to this time has been most useful and necessary, I have tried to elicit all my information from the text of Judges itself. Relevant information from other scholars and differences of opinions are usually relegated to the endnotes.

Through oral transmission of the well-known stories over and over again, one of the storytellers would have made modifications in each telling over possibly many years, incorporating all the intricacies into the text one by one, trying them out, and either deleting them or retaining them subsequently in his own personal text. The text was fluid until someone set down his final version and fixed the text.

The scant plots in Judges were merely scenarios, which we can imagine that the ancient storyteller, like storytellers of all time, may have  embellished and acted out as his spirit impelled. Storytelling could have been a dynamic performance art, perhaps involving costumes, acting, music, and sound effects, beloved by the audience, who would hoot and roar with laughter and cry and thump and become silent in turns as they responded to each dramatic event. At the end they might have their say in determining the verdicts: thumbs up, thumbs down. We can imagine whose side they were on.

The surface meaning of the book extols great heroes of the tribal wars after the alleged Con­quest, while the sub-surface (or subversive) mean­ing questions each one of them. Judges seems to have one meaning for the masses: that it is about the heroes--but another for the inner circle, those who have been initiated into its deeper meaning (its dark matter)–that it is a savage black comedy that attacks pride, cowardice, megalo­mania, tyranny, brutality, and lust and in the process makes serious philosophical and political comments about Israel. Most important, it is a story about the downfall of the tribes.

The author of Judges was a mini­aturist, with a small canvas on which to paint. Whereas most writers can say very lit­tle in only thirty pages of space in an English text, this author was able to portray a vast net­work of mean­ing, perhaps indeed an “infinity” of meaning in that small compass.

A Note about My Text Why should other (nonscholarly) readers who have no investment in the Bible or in religion or in Judges want to read my book? Because Judges is an important foundational book of western culture, helping us to understand in part how we came to be as we are today, and because, as I try to show throughout, it is a singular masterpiece of literature.

The greatest problem for me as a writer was to try to make its overarching complexity accessible to readers who are not closely familiar with Judges and who might not have the endurance for the depth analyses and close logical reasoning that are essential in order to enter into the artist’s imagination and elicit the many insights which await discovery there. These insights could have been summarized and generalized, but in my opinion, the author’s achievement could not be fully appreciated without the accumulated mass of evidence. I have tried to make that appreciation possible for everyone.

Because of the different methodologies used in different chapters, I had to discuss most of the stories several different times, but each time, it was with a different perspective and different conclusions. A certain amount of repetition was inevitable. I tried to limit that as much as possible.

The many charts, tables, and appendices given throughout help prove the extent to which the author went in order to fashion his intricate design. I also hope they will be of use to anyone entangled in the web of Judges as I have been, who wants to pursue this project further. Much more still remains to be learned.

Having spent many years of my wonderful life on this book, I can corroborate Camus’ insight, that Sisyphus was happy.

Endnotes

 (1)The quotation is from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, spoken by Mr. Kurtz, who was also trying to conquer a promised land.

(2) “Lovis Corinth’s Blinded Samson,” Biblical Interpretation, 6 (1998): 410-423.

(3) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.

(4) Seth Lerer, “Lecture One,” Comedy Through the Ages (audio tapes; [Chantilly, Va.]: The Teaching Company, 2000).

(5) Rabelais and His World (trans. Helene Iswolsky; Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965, 1968), passim.

(6) Lillian Klein catches many of these ironies in The Triumph of Irony in the Book of Judges (Sheffield: The Almond Press, 1988), but more remain to be discovered, even more than I have added to her list.

(7) Daniel N. Robinson, “Lecture One,” The Quest for Meaning: Value, Ethics, and the Modern Experience (audio tapes; Chantilly, Va.: The Teaching Company, 1999).