Judges שופטים

Shoftim covers the years between Yehoshua's death and Shaul's coronation—some three and a half centuries, arranged in a repeating pattern: the people fall away, come under a neighbour's rule, cry out, a deliverer arises, and there is quiet for forty or eighty years, until it begins again.

The judges are strikingly varied: Otniel; left-handed Ehud; the prophetess Devorah with Barak, who defeat Sisera; Gideon, choosing three hundred men by how they drink; Yiftach, bound by his own hasty vow; Shimshon, a nazirite of enormous strength and weak will. None rules the whole country and few are uncomplicated.

The closing chapters are the darkest—the idol of Micha, the outrage at Giva, the near-destruction of Binyamin—punctuated by the verdict "in those days there was no king in Israel".