Canter Bridge

Biblical narrative assumes a readerly discernment that works itself out along a wide horizon.

Biblical scholars consider that the book of Judges takes ancient narrative material and then weaves it into a more-or-less coherent whole that is itself part of Israel’s first epic history. By some lights this epic moves from primeval times through to the advent of Israel’s monarch or, in literary terms, from Genesis through Judges. Since such a horizon embraces six books, the term ‘hexateuch’ becomes common in describing the whole.

The result is something decidedly more engrossing than a string of stories haphazardly recalled. Though individual portions often rise to the level of gripping tales in themselves, the wise reader performs his task with wide eyes. This is all the more necessary given the Hebrew Bible’s developed reluctance to engage in mere morality tales. More often than not, the reader is expected to come to his own conclusions about an individual episode and its principals, an estimation that necessarily derives its moral balance from the wider story and the assumptions that undergird it.

Enter Gideon, a character who prima facie possesses many of the ideal leader’s most desirable qualities. He rescues, he plunders, he achieves poetic justice over the stingy inhospitality of some whom would in due time fall under his rule. He utters pious words of self-denial.

And there’s the rub.

The innocent reader might exalt Gideon and his erstwhile son Abimelech, whose name—with profound suggestiveness—means ‘my father is the king’, an ascension his father has resolutely refused with eloquent words.

The problem, which the wise reader might be expected to recognize in a book that is so perturbed by the possibilities and promise of Israel getting itself a proper king, is that Gideon acts like one and names his son as kings do.

He accepts gold, he multiplies wives, he gets himself up in purple. He hints, clumsily, at the ultimate perquisite of kings: dynasty.

Gideon, it turns out, is no hero, though generations have considered him so. The wide-eyed reader knows better. Gideon accumulated the credits of crisis leadership and then cashed them in.

He took.

A long time later, a woman fairly accosted Jesus as he undertook an urgent embassy to the home of a respected man whose child was dying too young, too quickly, and—as only death can threaten—too finally.

Jesus felt healing power flow from him and stopped all movement but his own, which he turned to the unnamed women who had both bled and been bled for far too long. In her first moments of knowing that healing had come without having had time to sort out the details, she trembled, no doubt expected that what had finally happened would now be undone with the shame of public repudiation added to her quiet uncleanness.

‘Daughter’, Jesus says to her while the impatients around him roll their eyes at his lack of focus, ‘your faith has made you well. Go in peace.’

He gave.