Judges: Chapter 10

 Who do you choose

and for how long?

Abandonment

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After their disastrous flirtation with monarchy, the Israelites retreat from centralized authority. Leadership is provided by two minor judges, summed up in less than two lines each, each ruling for an uneven, non-symbolic number of years (23, 22), contrasting to Gideon and Deborah's sonorous 40 years of peace. The nation is reduced to begging someone--anyone--to lead: “Let whoever is the first to fight the Ammonites be chieftain.”

 The lack of leadership is spirtual as well military, as the nation descends to "serving the Baalim and the Ashtaroth, and the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites, and the gods of the Philistines." Only one god is left out from this comprehensive list: the verse ends with the drumroll chiastic closing: "and God they did not serve." In losing leadership, the nation also loses the link to Moses, to Joshua his successor, and to God. 

The chapter is indeed structured as the dark mirror of the final chapter of the Book of Joshua, with its closing covenant binding God, Israel, and the two sides of the Jordan. Like that covenant, the chapter opens with the root y's'f,--to gather, to add. If Joshua is "ye'asef" (gathers) the nation, here the nation yosifu (continues) "to do what is evil in God's eyes" and God promises not to "continue (osif) to save you." The two sections are tied together with shared keywords: "Choose" (b'h'r); "worship, serve" (a'v'd), and "abandon, forsake" (a'z'v), as well as with a shared focus on the "alien gods" that are "in your mists." Both emphasize clear-cut boundaries, as embodied by the river: "On the other side of the river lived your forefathers," Joshua opens his address. Here, the chapter focuses on attacks on the far side of the river, which gradually move from the periphery inwards.  

"If it is bad in your eyes to worship God,choose this day which gods you are going to serve..." Joshua demands, in his final address to the people. After an overview of God's shared history with Israel, he demands a choice as clear-cut as the two banks of a river: either God or the alien gods must be abandoned.   “Far be it from us to forsake (la'azov) the Lord and serve other gods!" the people respond.

Yet here, in an exact inversion of their earlier promise, Israel "forsakes (va'yaazvu) God, and did not serve Him." If before,  Israel reviewed their shared history with God, here it is God that must remind them of all the prior salvations. "You have forsaken Me," He concludes, once again highlighting the inversion of the promise, "and served other gods." A different choice has been made.

Back at that definitive covenant, Joshua warned, “If you forsake God and serve alien gods, He will turn and deal harshly with you and make an end of you, after having been gracious to you.” And indeed, the end seems nigh. After a tepid repentance, with a partial confession ("We have served the Be'alim", Israel admits, with no mention of the plethora of other gods), God seems ready to "make an end": "No, I will not rescue you again," says God. Referring back to that primal choice demanded by Joshua, he tells the people "Go call to the gods you have chosen." 

The sacred stone of covenant inscribed by Joshua has been overturned, the oak uprooted. What will bind the people to the land now? 

Yet at the very moment that all seems lost, there comes a wildcard, overturning Joshua's vision of a jealous, relentless God. In a stunnigly anthropomorphic verse, God's nefesh (soul, breath, lifeblood) "cannot stand Israel's miseries." Almost despite Himself, God relents. Yes, there is the covenant, and its promises and curses. And then there are the deeper currents, the lifeblood stirring, the breath connecting God and humanity, beyond any local circumstance. Like a parent faced with a child's pain, God is carried away by overwhelming empathy. 

Though the chapter ends on a cliffhanger, with Isreal scrounging for leadership, this moving, strange and haunting verse gives the closing a hopeful cast. There are currents to the relationship between God and Israel that even Joshua cannot understand, a shared breath that reaches beyond the official bonds of covenant.]   

  

Judges: Chapter 8

Who stands back

and who joins?

Who leads. who follows?

Who birthed you 

and what do you birth?

We come to the closing of the Gideon cycle, as the young man who stepped into Debora's place achieves victory, providing, like her, for  a transformative "forty years of quiet."

As he chases the Midianites to achieve this decisive victory,  Gideon traverses the bank of the river, revisiting the stops made by his ancestor Jacob on his primordial journey back to Canaan: Penuel, Succot, and finally Shechem.

 Yet Gideon's trajectory here is the opposite of Jacob's.

If Jacob sends his children and wives ahead remaining "alone" to be rebirthed as Israel through a struggle with a mysterious assailant, Gideon's symbolic rebirth as Yerubaal took place before he approached Penuel. If Jacob's tumultuous life narrowed to the strains of Jabbok,Gideon's canvas widens. If before, we met Gideon alone, at night, in private dialogue with God and angels, here we see Gideon within the national context, as he interacts with the other tribes, and speaks to the Midianite kings.

 If Gideon's earlier struggles were with his own fears and doubts, here he struggles to placate those who wish for greater involvement (Ephraim), and to punish those who hold back (Succoth and Penuel). No longer does he carefully assuage fears. Instead, he ruthlessly and violently asserts national authority. Not for nothing does Israel offer him kingship. 

In place of the lone young initiate, we now see Gideon embedded within a family: suddenly he has "brothers, the sons of my mother," and a young son he is trying to train. Gideon's history begins to extend forward and back in time. As he retraces his forefather  Jacob's journey, and worries for his brothers, he is offered hereditary kingship, extending forward in time. "I will not reign over you, nor will my son reign over you. God will  reign over you," Gideon ceremoniously declaims, his every choice now reverberating through time.

 Yet this sudden tension between Gideon's rule and God's is dangerous, as the man who once was "clothed" in God's spirit now lays down a "dress" to gather gold (in a scene reminiscent of the creation of the Golden Calf). The money gathered serves to create an article of clothing (an "ephod") that becomes a gateway to idolatry, indeed competing with God.

Despite the achievement of the forty years of peace, the Gideon-cycle ends on a dark note. From one son we end with 70, and "many women" (precisely what Moses warned the king to avoid). The Israelites, we are  told, do not "deal kindly" with Yerubaal or his family. The hero who comes to deal with a post-Golden-Calf Israel gets trapped in their cycle of idolatry and sin).

Deuteronomy: Chapter 13

Seductions

Without and within 

the intimate, the exotic 

the known and unknown 

a fire between

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Having established that relationship is based on specificity and loyalty, this chapter turns to the possible threats to loyalty: the possible seductions away from God. The Chosen Land is a land on edge, and the relationship to God also remains on edge, full of tensions, tests, and uncertainty. 
The chapter is built of three parallels sections,each presenting a different possible seduction away from God, moving from the most intimate outward. The first danger is a false prophet or visionary who "dreams a dream"; the second is the seductions of close family "your brother, your son, your daughter, the wife of your bosom";  the final is peer pressure, as a whole city is "drawn away... to serve other gods." The sections are united by refrains, one highlighting closeness, the other distance: "go after other gods, which you have not known" vs. "burn out the evil from your midst (k'r'v, the root for closeness)."
The temptation away from God comes from within, from your brother, from your family, from your mind. Yet the desire is for distance, for what is far, exotic, a dream.
God is the God of the familiar, the "God of your fathers," who has proved Himself in "rescuing you from Egypt and redeeming you from the house of slavery." What He demands is the deepest intimacy, a ruthless loyalty that trumps all other connections: 
"After God your Lord you shall walk,  and Him shall ye fear, and His commandments shall you keep, and unto His voice shall you hearken, and Him shall you serve, and unto Him shall you cleave [d'v'k--the verb that usually refers to marriage "udavak be-ishto"--and he shall cleave to his wife".