This is a book about tragedy as we confront it in texts rather than as we abstract it in theory. It considers selected narratives from the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, arguing that in them we encounter a vision of reality that can properly be called tragic. In appropriating notions of the tragic for the study of biblical texts, my aim is not to force the biblical material into Aristotelian categories, which are hardly applicable. Rather I am interested in exploring a particular dimension of biblical narrative, a dimension that reveals the dark side of existence, that knows anguish and despair, and that acknowledges the precarious lot of humanity in a world now and then bewildering and unaccommodating. Job experiences this dimension as the arrows of the Almighty, whose fierceness points beyond his physical suffering to the sudden, violent, and unprecipitated eruption of disaster into his life.

One encounters what I would define as the tragic vision in various biblical guises; for example, in the “jealousy of God” in the Primeval History of Genesis 2–11, or in the sufferings of the prophet Jeremiah, or in the book of Job – unless one choose to side with Job's three friends in maintaining that the suffering, the misery, the evil, and the inexplicable in the world are part of an inscrutable, larger plan for the good.