8: And the Fat Closed In Over the Sword
The story of Ehud, the left handed assassin. The point of the book of Judges as a whole is the pointlessness of violence. Violence never solves anything. <You could certainly get that idea from reading Judges. Did the author intend that? Not sure about that.>
“There’s a point to the book of Judges that you can only get if you read it as a whole.
Yes, it’s about a left-handed liberator and a fat king, but it’s also about a tribe that has lost its way. It’s about the failure of violence to actually solve anything.
The last thing the writer is doing is approving of or encouraging the violence—the writer wants us to see how pointless it is.
So when you’re reading the Bible, you’re always asking questions. You’re asking questions about the details of a particular passage, and then you’re asking larger questions about that passage as it relates to everything around it. What comes before it? What comes after it? Is there any action or phrase or idea that I’ve seen before?
Sometimes the meaning is in the story itself,
other times the meaning is found in how the story sits among a number of other stories,
and sometimes it’s the larger pattern that is the point.”
Quote from: Rob Bell. “What Is the Bible?.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/what-is-the-bible/id1146440401?mt=11