In Front | Depictions of Judges Across Four Centuries

Here we see Samson tearing apart a lion with his bare hands, a popular theme for medieval Bible illustrators (Judg 14:5-6).
Courtesy Museum of the Bible Collection. All rights reserved. © Museum of the Bible, 2020. 

Gideon seeks a sign. A fleece is on the grass (Judg 6:6-40). Behind is the enemy camp, and Israelite soldiers drinking from the river. (Judg 7:4-7). 
Courtesy Museum of the Bible Collection. All rights reserved. © Museum of the Bible, 2020. 

Gideon’s fleece (L) alongside another Old Testament “test.” Rebecca brings water to Eliezer and his camels, and becomes Isaac’s wife (Gen 24).
Courtesy Museum of the Bible Collection. All rights reserved. © Museum of the Bible, 2020.

Gideon’s revenge on his enemies (L) and another scene of revenge on enemies of God’s people—the Egyptians who drowned in the Red Sea (Ex 14).
Courtesy Museum of the Bible Collection. All rights reserved. © Museum of the Bible, 2020.

Manoah’s Sacrifice (Samson’s parents)
Courtesy Museum of the Bible, Green Collection. All rights reserved. © Museum of the Bible, 2020.

The Sacrifice of Jephthah’s Daughter 
Courtesy Museum of the Bible, Green Collection. All rights reserved. © Museum of the Bible, 2020.

Jael Shewing [sic] the Body of Sisera
Courtesy Museum of the Bible, Green Collection. All rights reserved. © Museum of the Bible, 2020.

The pictures above will help you see how artists in several historical periods imagined and depicted the judges of the Bible. Some of the details employed by the artists include details consistent with their period in history. Remember that we too have cultural filters that shape our mental images of biblical figures.

The first two images (Gideon and Samson) come from a German language Bible printed in 1483 in Nuremberg. The illustrations were made using woodcuts (carvings in a block of wood that are then stamped on paper). These kinds of prints were an inspiration for many later illustrators like Albrecht Dürer.

The third and fourth images are from a 15^th century copy of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis or Mirror of Human Salvation, a bestselling, anonymous, illustrated work of popular theology in the late Middle Ages. It concentrated primarily on the ways in which the events in one part of the Bible paralleled events in another part—what we call “echoes” or “intertextuality.”

The final three images appear in the Macklin Bible, the largest English Bible ever mass-produced. It was released in 1800, in both color and black-and-white copies. The Macklin Bible was officially dedicated to King George III, and he personally ordered the Bible’s complete set of six volumes. The illustrations you see here are from a colored copy in the Museum of the Bible Green Collection.