Gift of the Grotesque: A Christological Companion to the Book of Judges

By Daniel J. D. Stulac

"No other book of the Bible is quite so R-rated. No other book is quite so ugly or grotesque. Judges offers its reader not a roster of angelic saints, but an astonishing tempest of brutality, feces, slaughter, assassinations, conspiracy, genocide, child sacrifice, rage, betrayal, mass graves, gang-rape, corpse mutilation, kidnapping, and civil war." Gift of the Grotesque offers readers a series of seven theological essays focused on one of the most confusing and challenging books in the biblical canon. Stulac's captivating style combines sensitive exegesis with broadly accessible meditations on culture, art, music, literature, memoir, theology, and spirituality. Better understood as a companion rather than a biblical commentary, this unusual resource will kickstart the theological imagination of anyone who struggles to understand how the book of Judges points forward to the life and work of Jesus Christ. Dare to follow an experienced biblical scholar into the heart of Israel's theological Dark Age, and you will encounter there the transformative Word of God in ways you do not expect. The prophetic book of Judges, writes Stulac, "wants to gut you like a fish, because on the far side of that unenviable prospect, it wants you alive like you've never lived before."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Feb 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666725520

Daniel J. D. Stulac

Daniel J. D. Stulac is assistant professor of the Old Testament at Briercrest College in Caronport, Saskatchewan. He is the author of History and Hope: The Agrarian Wisdom of Isaiah 28-35 (2018), Life, Land, and Elijah in the Book of Kings (2021), and Gift of the Grotesque: A Christological Companion to the Book of Judges (Cascade, 2022).

Book preview

Prelude

Land is dirty business. The act of living in place, of carving out an existence for oneself in a particular location and in a way that remains durable throughout successive generations, requires one to engage directly with other living beings such as plants, animals, fish, and birds, as well as non-living features of the habitats from which both humans and non-human organisms subsist, such as rock, sand, water, and mud. Physical contact with these material realities is unavoidable. One could say it is even mandatory. After all, to be human is to be a creature and not a god, born into this world on the same Day as the rats and tapeworms. The creaturely reality that governs us and limits us and that we cannot (and should not) hope to transcend is a reality dripping with blood, sweat, semen, saliva, and excrement. Life is sloppy. It is disheveled, untidy, and unkempt. Life is grotesque.

To be human is to be a creature and not a god, born into this world on the same Day as the rats and tapeworms.

For precisely this reason, farm life is never idyllic, even on those evenings when the sun sinks slowly over the distant hills and the clouds turn the color of raspberries and wine, and the hermit thrush plays its ethereal flute amongst the pine trees on the far side of the lane. True, these divine riches often accompany rural living, but they follow long hours of backbreaking labor if one actually intends to generate a livelihood from the cows and chickens and pigs whose wellbeing requires the space that in turn makes such beauty visible to the exhausted porch-sitter. Additional chores always remain, and the chances are good that whoever does them will be a smelly mess when they are finished. My first two weeks on a working farm had me forking away two vertical feet of matted urine and feces from an overused goat pen. It was not a pleasant experience, nor did I exude a pleasant aroma afterwards. Farms stink. Farmers stink, too.

Land inhabitation is difficult, demanding, and short. Disaster lurks in the cobwebbed corners of the house like a mosquito waiting to bite. It incubates amongst the rotting rafters of the barn; it eats away at the riverbank, little by little, like an unstoppable economic freefall cutting away at one’s life savings. And yet, somehow life-in-place also bubbles up with joy, beauty, love, and hope. The sun rises, spring returns, and babies are born—in slime and excrement, usually, but their irrepressible gasps for breath fill their parents’ imaginations with the outlandish notion that things really will get better rather than worse. Life is a tragedy; life is a comedy. Life . . . is a miracle.

The Bible begins with a pair of farmers living-in-place, a man and a woman tasked with the upkeep of a Garden. The job soon proves too much for them. Eating, as it turns out, is not only an agricultural but also a theological act. Acknowledging that the human creatures have become something different from what they were intended to be, God banishes them from their natural home, draped in the flesh of dead animals. Creation begins to bleed.

To say it another way, the Bible has barely begun before its reader must consider the problem of land. In the blink of a literary eye, the prospect of its inhabitation transforms from gift into gargoyle, for the human drive to master one’s fate—to control, manipulate, and engineer ourselves into an existence free of the parameters by which all of God’s creatures are governed—twists both reproduction and work into hideous caricatures of their true selves. As a doula mentioned to me some time ago, wearing an expression of great puzzlement, "A client of mine once said, ‘It’s not supposed to hurt, is it?’ I wonder where she got that idea." Ironically, these caricatures constitute the core problems that the humanist gospel of self-determination purports to rectify through increasingly industrialized, technological solutions. But there is no such way back, at least not one that humans can contrive by means of the knowledge we gained through disobedience. An angel and a flaming sword seal off that road forever.

Without question, Scripture’s idea of land inhabitation oozes tragedy. But land inhabitation in the Bible is also a Promise, an archetypal miracle baby named Laughter. Before too long, the book of Genesis introduces another man and woman. Their child-to-be will eventually embody a comedy of errors befitting his role within the greater book. Before the boy called Jest can be born, however, the reader must wait—and for a long time indeed. As the scenes begin to roll by, they build into chapters that narrate decades. The couple was already old and only grows older. Still, no baby. In fact, it is through the biblical material that narrates the years prior to the Promised Child’s birth—the arduous prehistory of Isaac we may call it—that we can know him best in relation to the larger canon. For much of the time that Laughter exists within the Bible’s pages, he remains no more than a hope and a prayer, present mainly as the longing for progeny and for a durable place in which that progeny might live, combined with God’s assurance that these desires will someday be satisfied. All Abram and Sarai can do is wait for the Gift to appear. To modern minds committed to the notion of disembodied progress and humanity’s liberation from its earthly prison, the story’s greatest intellectual difficulty obtains in its assumption that corporeal tragedy constitutes the framework in which hope finally coheres. There is simply no other way forward—or back.

The story’s greatest intellectual difficulty obtains in its assumption that corporeal tragedy constitutes the framework in which hope finally coheres.

In the midst of a deep sleep—a tardemah in biblical Hebrew (the same deep sleep into which Adam fell and during which God dismembered him to create Eve)—Abram learns that his Promised Children will become slaves in a country outside his Promised Land. An abused people—exploited, tortured, and displaced—they are symbolized by an array of dead animals, whose carcasses lie strewn about the slick, matted grass, entrails spilling out and soaking down into soil. As vultures wheel down for the feast, the reader wonders: how does Laughter finally come about in a world governed by such brutality, such death? At just this axial moment, Abram’s God chooses to become intimately involved in the farmer’s bloody mess. More than that, the signature inscribed on God’s promissory note drips not with Abram’s blood, as one might expect, but with God’s own (Gen 15:17). God enters the tragedy, so that Abram’s story might become a comedy.

Land loss is unavoidable, the Bible wants to say—an inescapable feature of the Garden given and foregone. But land inhabitation is a personal promise, too. It is always nearby in the biblical imagination, always possible, always available to those who adopt a posture appropriate to Gift. Life is a miracle, baby. Just wait.

1

House of Horrors

(Judges 1–2)

How does idolatry maintain its appeal? Generation after biblical generation seems to be taken in by those ubiquitous blocks of gilded wood, by stone statutes and clay figurines, by images, amulets, and ephods. Why are the people of God so chronically beguiled by a transparent farce? Can’t they see that when a person cuts down a tree, making an idol from one half while using the other half for fuel, the whole proposal on which idolatry rests devolves into sheer nonsense (Isa 44:9–20)? From a perspective anchored in the assumptions and prejudices of the modern West, it is easy—too easy (and too convenient, I think)—to imagine that ancient Israel was, for this reason, a culture of superstitious ingénues, a population of primitives little more enlightened than the cavemen caricatured in a Gary Larson cartoon.

The attraction to idolatry is not an intellectual one. It never was, it never is. After all, if pressed to apologize, the idolator can always invoke dissociation, claiming that the idol functions more like a religious icon, inhabited in some sense or merely inspired by the deity who stands behind it. No, it was never an intellectual attraction, and indeed Isaiah’s rhetoric on the subject should not be confused with modern skepticism, for its lyric poetry has more to do with an aesthetic celebration of God’s re-creational power than with experimentation and proof. In all their multitudinous forms, idols’ enduring attraction was and remains visceral, not intellectual. Idols appeal to the gut, to the appetites, to the affections. They satisfy the human longing for control, for safety, and for predictability in a bleeding world. They promise to alleviate our natural anxieties by making us masters of our own creativity. They put divinity into a person’s physical hands, right there in his or her grasp, just as an Apple’s ergonomic shape and pleasant heft suit the curve of one’s fingers. An idol fits in your pocket; you can wrap it up for lunch. You can manage an idol, trade an idol, engineer an idol, fashion an idol into the likeness of the thing that excites or troubles you most—and so reduce your creatureliness to a commodity bought and sold. One nibble wouldn’t hurt, would it? For then you shall be like gods . . . .¹

In the Bible’s premodern imagination, Israel’s resurgent taste for idols does not amount to an isolated series of infractions against a list of arbitrary rules. Nor does idolatry constitute a matter of libertine defiance in response to God’s uptight and austere no. Rather, idolatry is always connected to the problem of place. It manifests Israel’s failure to receive and thus to inhabit the Land. Into the thick of this problem—the lived tension between dependence versus autonomy, receptivity versus selectivity, gift versus gargoyle—the reader of the book of Judges is thrown.

Idolatry is always connected to the problem of place. It manifests Israel’s failure to receive and thus to inhabit the Land.

That reader cannot be criticized too harshly if, upon concluding the book of Joshua, he or she assumes that the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan had been fit with a tidy bow, so that their possession of the Land was assured (Josh 11:23) if not quite an accomplished fact (Josh 13:1–6). True, indications to the contrary had popped up along the way—subtle, offhand comments suggesting that Israel always had and always would struggle in its divine commission: lo horishu they did not dispossess . . . (Josh 13:13); lo yakhelu lehorishu they were not able to dispossess . . . (Josh 17:12); mitrappim labo lareshet lax in coming to dispossess . . . (Josh 18:3). But such language always played second fiddle to the more robust theme of victory and that victory’s corresponding division of the spoils. The casual reader of Joshua may therefore imagine that, at book’s end, Israel has finally reached a position to actualize its destiny as Abram’s Promised Children in Abram’s Promised Land. The book of Judges, however, presents a less sanguine alternative. In three crucial ways, it picks up on the discordant note already present in Joshua—that lingering, background dissonance—and draws it forward onto center stage.

Judges’ first move disrupts the reader’s sense of time. As its point of orientation, the book asserts that Joshua son of Nun is already dead (And it was, after the death of Joshua . . .; Judg 1:1). It seems appropriate, therefore, that the biblical storyline should move on to catalogue the Israelites’ efforts to wrap up whatever loose ends their former leader may have left behind. But at the same moment that the text advances the biblical chronology, it also tosses its reader backwards into reruns. Just a few verses later, Joshua’s still-living partner in espionage, Caleb, offers his daughter Aksah to anyone who can capture the town of Kiriath Sepher, and so Caleb’s youngest brother, Othniel, takes up the challenge (Judg 1:12–13). Aksah then petitions her father for an additional water resource in the arid country that she and Othniel have apparently come to possess as a result of Othniel’s feat (Judg 1:14–15). Haven’t we seen this movie before? Indeed we have, in Josh 15:16–19, a text that matches Judg 1:12–15 almost to the letter. Why does the Bible retell such an odd vignette, and more to the point, why does the Bible suggest that the events it relates happened both before and after Joshua’s death? The modern mind, trained to submit itself to the strict authority of materialist cosmology, believes wholeheartedly in the inviolability of time’s arrow. What’s done is done. If Judges were a history/fiction of some kind, offering its reader a slice of the real past, then either it or the book of Joshua must contain an error on this point. The two books cannot both be true. But the premodern book of Judges is not a history/fiction; it is better conceptualized as liturgical scripture. Through free play with such literary impossibilities, it opens the reader’s imagination to paradox and to mystery, and in this case specifically, it makes a crucial, lateral move away from the book of Joshua even while proposing to follow Joshua in chronological sequence. In other words, Judges simultaneously embeds itself in the world of Joshua—the immanent and ongoing conquest of Canaan—and yet also begins