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Home , Abdon (Judges), Barak, Bedan, Jephthah, Samson

SHORT NOTES

BEDAN, OR IN 1 XII 11?

In a recent note in this journal, Howard Jacobson' has raised again the problem of the occurrence of an otherwise unknown judge or deliverer named in the MT of 1 Sam. xii 11, where Samuel declares, "And the Lord sent Jerubbaal and Bedan, and , and Samuel, and delivered you out of the hand of your enemies on every side; and you dwelt in safety". Jacobson's solu- tion, taking up a suggestion earlier made by H. Ewald and others,' is that the reference is to the minor judge Abdon (Judg. xii 13-15), though unlike Ewald, who emended bedan to cabddn, Jacobson thinks it possible that Bedan is simply a variant of the name Abdon. The major objections to this that come to mind, of course, are that Abdon was such an insignificant judge in comparison with the others named in this verse (Jerubbaal [ = ], Jephthah, Samue13) and that the says not a word about his having delivered Israel from enemies, such as 1 Sam. xii 11 requires. Jacobson's attempts to deal with these problems are unsatisfactory. First of all, he declares that Samuel is likewise not spoken of as having delivered Israel in the Old Testament and that extra-biblical traditions of his having done so may have been taken up here. Jacobson thereby overlooks 1 Sam. vii 3-14, which describes the leadership which Samuel gave to Israel in the war against the and explicitly states that it was his prayer to Yahweh which gained the deliverance. Secondly, he appeals to Pseudo-Philo's Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum xli 1,4 where Abdon (Addo in the Latin) is said to have defeated the Moabites. It is sur- prising that appeal is made to this late, haggadic work, which hardly preserves ancient tradition at this point. It is to be noted, for example, that Pseudo-Philo has various inaccuracies in this very context, placing Abdon and in the wrong order and giving the latter twenty rather than ten years of rule (xli 2). The context in 1 Sam. xii 9-11 clearly requires a deliverer of Israel from the period of the major judges. The old rabbinic view (cf. Babylonian , Rosh ha-Shanah 25a; Kimchi) that Bedan means "son of " (ben ddn) and refers to the Danite judge Sam- 262 son (so Targum) is clearly fanciful, as is F. Boettcher's claim, on the basis of Arabic, that Bedan means corpulentus, which he likewise understands as a reference to .5 Such views no longer have any following. Sometimes it has been supposed that Bedan is the name of an otherwise completely unattested judge,6 but against this it may be argued that, since the books of Judges and Samuel belong to the same Deuteronomistic historical work, we should hardly expect Samuel to cite the example of a judge who was totally overlooked in Judges. Y. Zakovitch,7 on the other hand, equates Bedan with the Bedan of 1 Chron. vii 17, who was a Gileadite, and who, he supposes, was identical with the Gileadite judge Jephthah. Just as Gideon was also known as Jerubbaal (e.g. Judg. vii 1), so Zakovitch believes Jephthah was also called Bedan. He claims that in 1 Sam. xii 11 Jephthah was originally an explanatory gloss on the name Bedan that eventually got into the text. However, against this, Jacobson (p. 123) has rightly pointed out that Jephthah's s father was called (Judg. xi 1) but the father of Bedan in 1 Chron. vii 17 was named Ulam, thus suggesting that Jephthah and Bedan are different persons. Furthermore, I would observe that, whereas the name Jerubbaal occurs several times for Gideon in the book of Judges, the name Bedan is never used for Jephthah there. Therefore, since the Deuteronomists edited both Judges and Samuel, we should not expect them to employ a name for Jephthah in the latter book which was completely unknown in the former. The same objection also applies to the view, occasionally expressed,8 that Bedan was an otherwise unattested alternative name for Barak. Occasionally, it has been suggested that Bedan is a corruption of the name Gideon9 or ,l° but these are not particularly close graphically, and neither can claim support in the ancient versions. They are therefore to be rejected. Graphically closer is the name of Barak, and this has the further advantage that it is actually attested in 1 Sam. xii 11in two of the ancient versions, the LXX and the Peshitta. In support of under- standing Bedan as a scribal corruption of the name Barakll the following points may be noted. (i) Barak, unlike Abdon or Bedan, is attested as a deliverer' 2 of Israel in the book of Judges (Judg. iv- v), such as the context in 1 Sam. xii 11requires. Indeed, his opponents, the Canaanite and his army commander ,