Page 7 - Pemahaman teks Hakim-hakim 6-8

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l and only 1 have led you up from Egypt and 1 brought you out of
the house of slavery; and I delivered you from the hand of the Egyp-
tians and from the hand of all who oppressed you and 1 drove them
out before you and 1 gave you their land; and 1 said to you, 'I am
YHWH your God (translation and emphasis mine).
The prophet describes the character of God in terms of the familiar
deliverance and settlement motifs. Notable is the use of the first person
verbs. 19 In Jg 6:8-9, five verbs are used in the first person, once with the
independent pronoun for added emphasis tf71K, fiinK,
This sequence of verbs concludes with the exclamation:
"I am YHWH your God." Clearly the focus of the prophet's message is '
on the identity of God. This statement is followed by God's command,
which echoes the first commandment: "You shall have no other gods
before me." Similar to the Decalogue, the command to serve YHWH is
connected closely to who God is. The point of the prophet's message is
to remind Israel once again who God is. 20 '
However, the prophet relays God's perception in 6:10: "Israel did not
listen to my voice." To counteract this perception, God commences a series
of actions that serve the function of revealing God's identity.21 The first of

19Cf. also God's self revelation in Exod 3:7-8, where God reveals Godself once more
through a series of first person verbs. It is said that God has seen Israel's misery, that God has
heard the people's cries and that God knows their suffering. Birch notes that this reveals
something of the character of God who responds to Israel's hurt (Bruce C. Birch, "Divine
Character and the Formation of Moral Community in the Book of Exodus," in The Bible in
Ethics: The Second Sheffield Colloquium [ed. John W. Rogerson, Margaret Davies and M.
Daniel Caroll; JSOTSup 207; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995], 136-163
[122,125]). Cf. also Fretheim, The Suffering of God, 128-129; Walter Brueggemann, "Bodied
Faith and the Body Politic," in Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme, and
Text (ed. Patrick D. Miller; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 67-94 (72-74).
2°Although the prophet does not explicitly uses the verb "to remember," I argue that the
motif of remembrance is implied in the recollection of what God had done in Egypt. The
theme of remembrance is strengthened by the occurrence of the verb in the final
assessment of the narrator in 8:34, i.e., that Israel does not remember God. Furthermore,
the call to remembrance is found throughout Old Testament passages, reminding Israel of
what God has done, especially in Egypt, and consequently calling Israel to loyalty (Deut
5:15; 7:18; 8:2; 8:18; 9:7; 15:15; 16:3; 16:12; 24:18).
2iMieke Bal, Narratology : Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1985), 32. Bal argues that it is through a series of repetitive actions that
we get to know a character.