Reading Questions for 2/16 - Joshua and Judges
Posted on January 17, 2006
Your reading for this week is from the books of Joshua and Judges (yes, we are skipping Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). Here are some questions that might help focus your reading for the class discussion:
What sorts of repetition do you notice in Joshua and Judges? Do you notice repeated themes or motifs from the readings we've done in Genesis and Exodus?
Both Joshua and Judges are excessively violent--what do we do with all the violence in these books?
Think of the women characters in Judges--both the named and the unnamed women. How do women function (narratively) in this book?
What happens at the end of Judges? Do the final stories have something to do with the reason these stories have been canonized in the Hebrew Bible? In other words, is there anything at all that explains what the redactors were thinking and why this book in particular is in the Bible at all? Does it have something to do with the process of nation-building that we're seeing?
Please remember that your reading for this week includes two excellent essays by Tikva Frymer-Kensky on the women in Judges--both essays should be up on e-reserve on Monday.
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