Tracking the World of Judges: The Use of Contextual Resources in Narration and Conversation

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of what we know about the period of the Judges and how we know it, following recent work by Jens Bruun Kofoed on text and history. It discusses important archaeological and textual evidence from Early Iron Age excavations, the ‘Israel Stele’ and personal names in the Book of Judges as possible evidence supporting the historical world of the judges. Furthermore, even if we do not have direct solid evidence to support the historical character of persons or events recounted in the book, we can at least explore how contextual resources work in normal communication in text and language use and then try to combine various sorts of evidence in order to achieve a more enriched understanding of our knowledge. A model of contextual resources developed by the linguists Linell and Karolija and others can help us explore how context integrates prior discourse, situation, interactional skills, personal background, and routines, as well as more traditional understandings of context as encyclopaedic knowledge. An analysis of multi-party conversations like Judg 8:18-25 and 13:8-14 can show how we can do contextual analysis of stories within their world in the Hebrew Bible, and thus enable us better to understand and handle extra-linguistic contexts in narration and conversation.