occurring before the advent of the first judge Othniel. Josephus does, by implication, offer an interpretation, however forced, of the book as a whole, but as I have indicated, attention is never drawn in the Antiquities to the separate books or to the breaks between them. The effect is to emphasize their continuity rather than their separateness, their meaningfulness as a corpus of sacred books (ἱεραὶ βίβλοι) rather than as distinct literary units. 3.02 That the stretch of material comprising