Three stories from the book of Judges are the focus of this study: Ehud (Judges 3:12-30), Samson (Judges 13-16), and the Levite and his woman and the descent into civil war (Judges 19-21). Each story is presented as a vignette that portrays the community in a different relationship to the space it occupies, resulting in different leadership strategies, community organization, and relationships. Situated in a postexilic Persian era context, the multivalent spaces of Judges suggest that a plural Israelite community is justifiably anxious about becoming lost in a spatial void. This horrifying possibility drives the book of Judges, forcing its writers to carve out a space (any space - even a textual space) to understand the implications of their own existence.

Within the book of Judges, Israel's entry into foreign social space produces a community defined by both external and internal identity boundaries that create/reflect communal fragmentation, demand fluid spatial movements, and constitute changing definitions of foreignness. Using critical space theory, (particularly the works of Edward Casey, Tim Cresswell, and Sara Ahmed) this dissertation examines how the narrative of Judges is both produced by a community and produces a community as it engages in a narrative struggle to define Israelite identity.