Abstract
Kamrada’s hero[in]es are Jephthah and his daughter (Judg. 11), Samson (Judg. 13–16), and Saul and Jonathan (1 Sam. 1; 9–11; 13–14; 28; 31). In each case, with the help of comparative material from the Bible, from the Ancient Near East, and from Greek and Roman Classics, she disentangles older heroic tales from the given biblical record. She argues powerfully that the deaths of Jephthah’s daughter and of Samson represent the zenith of the heroic tradition that underlies the book of Judges. The author of that book had doubtless disapproved of human sacrifice; but Jephthah’s daughter was different from Isaac, a child who required to be bound. And in any case the heroine’s consenting embrace of her death could not be written out of the inherited story: her tale was annually memorialised – she had become an institution (11:39-40). And ‘Samson’s … self-dedication to the deity completely fulfils his heroic life.’ (p. 104) Kamrada finds that Jonathan plays the traditional role of the young, brave, but disobedient hero: despite his military success, his disobedience and rivalry with his father ‘begins to disturb the communication with the deity’ (p. 139). And Saul, in many respects, continues the heroic tradition; however, after losing contact with the deity, he does not offer the deity his death like Jephthah’s daughter and Samson. While I find many individual aspects of her treatment of Saul and Jonathan suggestive, it fails to convince as a whole. She reconstructs a Saul story to which a post-heroic David was secondarily added, and presents it under the title ‘Urim and Thummim’ which she reckons were the normal early means of ‘asking the deity’. But she admits that David was surrounded by large numbers of heroes; and ‘asking the deity’ (and always making successful contact) appears to me more integrally related to the David-story—the contrasting theme of Saul’s failed consultations had stemmed from the author of Samuel rather than an older heroic tale.