Rabbi Leon A. Morris: Hi. I am sitting here with Dr. Diane Sharon who is one of our faculty members at the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning. Diane also teaches at the Academy for Jewish Religion and a number of other places. And I have an opportunity to speak with you about the Book Judges and the category of people we call judges. So what is the Book of Judges, and who are these people that we call the shoftim, the judges?

Dr. Diane Sharon: Wonderful question. There are some people who think the Book of Judges is a book of history. I am not one of those people. The Book of Judges is a book of theology expressed literarily. What do I mean by that?

Well, in the Book of Joshua, everything goes well for the Israelites. Only 36 people die in the entire conquest of all of Israel, and everything goes exactly according to God's plan. Joshua is a wonderful leader, who is chosen personally by God and Moses and charged by both God and Moses on different occasions to lead the people well. And he does.

The Children of Israel, as a result, behave themselves after he dies for an entire generation of elders. If what I am saying sounds like a fairy tale, that is really because we have no experience like that in real life.

The Book of Judges, on the other hand, if the Book of Joshua is the best case, the Book of Judges seems to be the worst case. Everything bad that can happen happens in the Book of Judges, ending with a woman being cut up into 12 pieces. A lot of people do not know that. They have not read the book. That is not one of the haftarot [prophetic Sabbath readings] coming from the Book of Judges.

The Book of Judges is the worst case scenario. It begins with the death of Joshua and then asks the question who shall begin to fight the Canaanites. I am going to read the Hebrew and then read the English because it is a very troubling passage. And the Rabbis try to make sense out of it, and in contemporary literary scholarship we try to make sense out of it.

"It came to pass after the death of Joshua, the children of Israel inquired of God saying, ‘Who will go up for us against the Canaanites?' in the beginning of fighting with them."

The JPS translation fudges that by saying, "who shall go up first?" That is the rabbinic understanding, that they are asking which of the tribes shall lead the children of Israel. In fact bat'chilah everywhere else that it occurs in this form in the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible] means "at the start of," or "in the beginning of."

And if that is the case, you have a verse here at the very beginning of the book that has an internal contradiction. On the one hand, "after the death of Joshua," where it seems the land was conquered, and now you have "...at the beginning of fighting" with the Canaanites, which it seems would be a contradiction.

When I see something like that, I think of it as a speed bump that slows me down and asks me to ask more closely what is going on here. Let us say that the people who are writing and preserving this text were as smart as we are and understood things as well as we do.

If they wanted to express a best case/worst case scenario, but they did not have CD-ROMs and decision trees and other random access memory and they only had a device that would store information in a linear way, like parchment that you write on sequentially, how could they express simultaneity? How would they express that this is the best case at the same time that something else would be the worst case? How would they express that simultaneity and how would they communicate that to us?

To me the answer is when you have the Book of Joshua only 36 people dying in the entire conquest, which took years and years and years, and in the Book of Judges you have the opening sentence that asks us to make sense out of something that really is an internal contradiction, they are asking to read these as parallels. What is the best case if you do everything that is correct in the eyes of God? And the Book of Judges repeats several times, "they did what was right in their own eyes. There was no king in those days."

So the worst case is if we follow our own inclination without a view to what God wants from us, and the best case is if we do our best at every point to ask what God wants from us.

As for the nature of the leaders in the Book of Judges, we have a ragtag and bobtail group. We have a left-handed leader, who uses that left-handedness to fool the enemy into letting him, in a very scattalogical way, murder the oppressor of Israel.

We have a woman, two women, one of whom rides alongside a general who does not want to go to battle without this woman at his side, Deborah. And we have Yael, who strikes a blow against the enemy of Israel.

We have a coward. Gideon is threshing wheat in a cave because he is afraid of the Midianites coming and taking it away from him. It is very hard to thresh in a cave. You need a wind to blow the chaff away. He is a coward, and he tests God several times.

And Samson, who has more brawn than brains. These are not exactly ideal role models for ourselves and our children. What are they doing in the Book of Judges? The answer is two-fold. Number one, that God can work with imperfect vessels. God does not need a perfect vessel to work God's will. And the second is whenever you have a human leader, that human leader is going to be flawed.

LM: What an important message for us at this particular time as we approach an election, as we think about national leadership.

DS: The problem is that God does not always show up to fight our battles for us at the moment that we would like God to fight the battles. And by the end of the Book of Judges it becomes clear that flawed human leadership is such a problem when there is no orderly means of succession when one leader dies and another leader can succeed that person. There is no bulwark against corrupt leadership, and the book ends with the expression, "there was no king in Israel in those days. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

And the following chapter in the canon of the Jewish Bible is the opening of the Book of I Samuel, where Samuel, who is the only person in the entire Bible who anoints two kings, Samuel, anointer of kings, is born and comes on the stage. And he is in fact the first to argue with Israel about anointing a king, and ultimately, he anoints both Saul and later David.

LM: It is kind of an unsatisfactory progression, though, because the notion that everyone did what was right in his eyes because there was no king would lead one to think that once there is a king, then we will act correctly. Then we will act in accordance with God's command. And in fact that next chapter in our history does not turn out to work out so well either.

DS: That is absolutely right. The Book of Joshua and Judges, the Books of Samuel and Kings occur in a collection that we call the Deuteronomic History, a collection of books from the Book of Deuteronomy to the end of Kings that tells the story of Israel in the land.

And the Deuteronomist -- we in scholarly circles call him the Deuteronomist -- we do not know who it is necessarily, but we use that as a kind of shorthand. The Deuteronomist is asking the question in each of these books who shall lead the children of Israel and who shall succeed that person?

And they are trying out in the Deuteronomic History a variety of different models: the model of the idea leader, who is chosen personally by his predecessor, as in Joshua; the leader who is the son-in-law of Caleb ben Jephunneh, who is the one of the two spies who saw good in the land of Israel along with Joshua; the left-handed judge; the women judges; trying what we call charismatic leadership, leadership by God choosing you, by ruach Elohim, or Yad Adonai, or the hand of God or the spirit of God coming down upon you, which does not always work.

Samson operates alone. The spirit of God comes upon him, and he makes it tough for the rest of the Israelites with the Philistines some of the times.

Then we try kingship, and in the South we try dynastic kingship, and in the North we try a kind of succession of kings, one coup d'etat after another. We try a whole variety of different leaders on a human level when the ultimate king should be someone who feels that God is the real king and that He is only a placeholder or He is someone who puts the word of God into action.

How does he know the word of God? In the Hebrew Bible, the hierarchy is God is on top. The next in line is the prophet and then the king and then the priests. And what king wants to be told what to do by a scruffy prophet in a loincloth like Jeremiah, who lives on the streets? In terms of real politics it is a problem.

LM: So is the Bible working out what that hierarchy is between prophets and kings and judges?

DS: I think the Bible has its hierarchy set out.

LM: Yes.

DS: It is just showing us how it plays out if we behave ourselves, and if we do not. There is no question that the Bible feels that prophets are closer to God than kings are and, therefore, more authoritative. So that could be dangerous in the American political system. Do we really want a President who feels that he is speaking on behalf of God?

LM: And by the time that we get to the Rabbis, who declare that prophecy is over, and we know the kingship is over, so what are we left with? Is there to be found among the judges some kind of model for us for contemporary life?

DS: That is a wonderful question, and I would like to expand that question and say not just among the judges but among the leaders of Israel, among the kings as well as among the Judges.

And I think that the most important model is for the leader to feel humble before God, to feel that he or she is a vessel, a vehicle, to do good, to do what is right in the eyes of God. Goodness knows we have plenty of texts to tell us what is right in the eyes of God without necessarily having to have revelation, personal revelation.

But if a leader feels that he himself is a vessel, we have a statement like the one Joseph makes to his brothers in Parashat Vayigash [Genesis 45:4]where he is revealing himself to his brothers, who are terrified at facing the vizier of Egypt, who has the power of life and death over them, and he says, "I am Joseph, your brother. You sent me here for evil, but God turned it into good so I could save lives." And he understood that he was a vessel that God was using, a vehicle for God's will.

And later on when his father dies and his brothers are terrified that he will take revenge on them, he repeats that again. And in the Bible, anything that is repeated twice, there is the sense that that is confirmed. It is confirmation.

And I think that that is the message, to understand the same way Abraham is chosen by God for all the nations to be blessed through him, that our leaders are vehicles through which blessing is to come on all the people, and they are not, in fact, powerful in their own right.

LM: Dr. Diane Sharon, thank you very much.

DS: My pleasure.