Who Is To Blame For Judges 19

The horrific text of Judges 19 is puzzling, especially to Chinese Christians who read the Chinese Union Version. This dominant translation of the Bible seems to place the blame for the tragedy on the concubine, which in turns legitimizes violence against women. Using tools of narrative, intertextual, and ideological criticism, Tsoi reveals an anti-Levite rhetoric in the text that has been neglected by translators. An examination of the translation context suggests that an anti-concubinage agenda in the social context of Republican China might have contributed to the bias in the translation, resulting in more than a century of misinterpretation among Chinese Christians.

Every sixty-eight seconds an American is sexually assaulted. Lisa Smith writes in light of this startling statistic and against the backdrop of the blaming and shaming of countless victims to ask one important question: why does America’s rape culture continue to exist? The Blaming and Shaming of Defenseless Victims in America's Rape Culture explores the ways collective memory, religion, and sexist beliefs are used to silence survivors and protect the powerful. The author delves into how justice is denied in sexual assault cases—rape kits untested by law enforcement agencies, information suppression through non-disclosure agreements, and denial and inaction by organizations, universities, corporations, and people all contribute to undetected rapists in our society. Despite these discouraging happenings, the #MeToo movement proved that legions of survivors of sexual violence can use their voice to fight back. Oral and historical narratives are included to encourage others to share their stories and promote social accountability. Through insightful research and analysis, the author offers a much-needed viewpoint on a vital and timely issue—why and how American society is perpetuating and protecting a dangerous culture of sexual violence, and even more importantly, how to fight back.

The book of Judges describes a time in the life of the nation of Israel between the prophetic leadership of Moses and Joshua and the establishment of the monarchy. During that time, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6). The most shocking feature in the book of Judges, however, is not the horror of Israel’s sin, but the glory of salvation from that sin. The darkness of Israel’s sin is overcome only by the wonder of God’s salvation worked through a series of memorable judges, who ultimately point us to Jesus Christ. Part of the Knowing the Bible series.

A 10-session Bible study that examines Genesis 12-50 to discover how God orchestrates everything for His glory and the good of His people.

This book argues that African women's lived experiences are often spoken about authoritatively by people who are not included within this demographic, relegating these women to the role of spectators in their own stories. The dominant narratives of African womanhood, legitimized by intellectual discourse, are neither written by African women nor Africans in general. This book seeks to place feminism in Africa into its historical context by revisiting the experiences, practices, vision, and theories of feminism and gender in Africa. It is intended to serve as a comprehensive introduction to the field and provide a starting point for further and more advanced study of the nexus of feminism, gender, and development in Africa. Women Empowerment and the Feminist Agenda in Africa is designed to initiate post-graduate research and studies in the social sciences for directed and critical inquiry into the nature of feminist and gender politics and power relations in Africa. It is written for researchers, academics, and advanced tertiary studies, although professional gender and feminist organizations, especially those in Africa or focusing on Africa, will also find a wealth of information. The book is recommended for university libraries, post-graduate students and staff, the non-governmental community in Africa, women movement organizations in Africa, independent researchers and academics, and the African community at large.

"It is widely recognized that the Hebrew Bible is filled with rape and sexual violence. However, feminist approaches to the topic remain dominated by Phyllis Trible's 1984 Texts of Terror, which describes feminist criticism as a practice of "telling sad stories." Pushing beyond Trible, Texts after Terror offers a new framework for reading biblical sexual violence, one that draws on recent work in feminist, queer, and affect theory and activism against sexual violence and rape culture. In the Hebrew Bible as in the contemporary world, sexual violence is frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky. Fuzzy names the ambiguity and confusion that often surround experiences of sexual violence. Messy identifies the consequences of rape, while also describing messy sex and bodies. Icky points out the ways that sexual violence fails to fit into neat patterns of evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Building on these concepts, Texts after Terror offers a number of new feminist strategies and approaches to sexual violence: critiquing the framework of consent, offering new models of sexual harm, emphasizing the importance of relationships between women (even in the context of stories of heterosexual rape), reading biblical rape texts with and through contemporary texts written by survivors, advocating for "unhappy reading" that makes unhappiness and open-endedness into key feminist sites of possibility. Texts after Terror also discusses a wide range of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen. 43), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Lot's daughters (Gen. 19), Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), Hagar (Gen. 16 and 21), Daughter Zion (Lam. 1 and 2), and the Levite's concubine (Judg. 19)"--

This book takes a fresh look at the brutal story of the war between the sons of Israel and the sons of Benjamin in Judges 19-21. Relying on archaeological and survey data largely overlooked by biblical scholars, Krisel engages critically with the predominant scholarly view that Judges 19-21 uses “irony” to cast the explicit heroes in the narrative, the sons of Israel, as the implicit villains.

This book uses three examples of violent biblical stories about women, explored through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory in relation to culinary language used within these texts, to examine wider issues of gender and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. Utilising the tools of conceptual metaphor theory, feminist criticism, and classic textual analysis, Brownsmith interrogates some of the most troubling biblical passages for women—neither by redeeming them nor by condemning them, but by showing how they are intrinsically shaped by the enduring metaphor of woman as food in the Hebrew Bible, ancient Near East, and beyond. The volume explores three main case studies: the Levite’s “concubine” (Judges 19); Tamar and Amnon (2 Sam 13); and the life and death of Jezebel (primarily 1 Kings 21 and 2 Kings 9). All depict violence toward a woman as perpetrated by a man, interwoven with culinary language that cues their metaphorical implications. In these sensitive but critical readings of violent tales, Brownsmith also draws on a broad range of interdisciplinary connections from Ricoeur to ancient Ugaritic epics to modern comic books. Through this approach, readers gain new insights into how the Bible shapes its narratives through conceptual metaphors, and specifically how it makes meaning out of women’s brutalized bodies. Gendered Violence in Biblical Narrative: The Devouring Metaphor is suitable for students and scholars working on gender and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East more broadly, as well as those working on conceptual metaphor theory and feminist criticism.

This volume describes how the rhetorical devices used in Judges inspire its readers to support a divinely appointed Judahite king who endorses the deuteronomic agenda to rid the land of foreigners, to maintain inter-tribal loyalty to YHWH's cult, and to uphold social justice. Matters of rhetorical concern interpreted here include the superimposed cycle-motif and tribal-political schemata, concerns reflected in the plot-layers of each hero story, the force of narrative analogy for characterization, the strategy of entrapment which foreshadows portrayals of Saul and David in 1 Samuel, and the relation between Judges' implied situation of composition and its compiler's intention. In addition to offering new insights into the rhetorical strategy of the Judges compiler, this book illustrates a new method for understanding how plot-layered stories work.