The Book of Judges: Ecopsychological Readings

Directly addressing ecological crises and our planetary future, Deryn Guest’s ecopsychological readings present an urgent and profoundly innovative challenge to biblical scholars all over the world. For, when organic connection between humans and the natural world has been lost, indeed even the capacity for such connection profoundly damaged, the complicity of the Bible and its interpretation in this loss must be scrutinised. No longer is it possible to write biblical commentary without asking similar questions to those posed in this volume.
The new dialogue partners Guest brings into the field of biblical scholars are most welcome and most needed. Applying theories of ecopsychology and employing a three-dimensional sensory amplification of scenes from the Book of Judges, Guest brings what has often been relegated as ‘background’ or ‘setting’ imaginatively into the foreground. Readers will find themselves reconsidering mountain-daughter encounters, pondering how standing stones can offer a word from the Gods, how trees and flames participate in navigating human-divine relations and how horses, foxes and lions become collateral damage in those dealings.
A surprising discovery is that a single thread runs through many of these scenes. Guest names it the ‘Changing of the Gods’. It involves the denigration and censure of all things ‘Canaanite’. As the not-us, the not-Christian, not-Jewish, not-Yahwistic, the ‘Canaanite’ is revealed as a projection of our own anxieties and demons on to a convenient Other. The significant consequence of such scapegoating is that we are alienated from the life-giving, numinous encounters that could otherwise happen on every green hill and under every green tree.
A compelling interdisciplinary study, this book is vital reading for all involved in biblical interpretation. It promises not only transformation of the field, but of scholars themselves as they reflect on their own complicity in writing commentaries that alienate their readers from the whisper of stones and the messages of trees.