Judges narrates the centuries between Joshua's death and the rise of the monarchy through a repeating cycle stated almost as a formula: Israel does evil, is delivered into an oppressor's hand, cries out to God, and is rescued by a judge, a charismatic military and sometimes legal deliverer rather than a monarch, before the cycle begins again with the next generation.
The judges themselves range from the celebrated, Deborah leading Israel to victory as both judge and prophet, Gideon testing God with a fleece before routing a much larger army with three hundred men, Samson's doomed strength and fatal attraction to Delilah, to the barely sketched, several judges receive only a verse or two. The book's closing chapters abandon the cycle structure entirely for a set of dark, unresolved episodes, a civil war that nearly annihilates the tribe of Benjamin, an idol set up in private worship, a Levite's concubine murdered and dismembered, framed by the refrain "in those days there was no king in Israel, everyone did what was right in their own eyes," a line that reads as both description and argument, building a case for the monarchy the following books will introduce. Modern readers have found the book's violence, and its treatment of women in particular, Jephthah's daughter sacrificed to fulfill a rash vow, the concubine's fate, among the New Testament and Hebrew Bible's most difficult material to sit with.