YMMV / Book of Judges

• Best Known for the Fanservice: Probably the reason the story of Samson and Delilah, with its multiple episodes of sexual intrigue starring a muscleman and a Femme Fatale, is the most familiar part of the book.
• Complete Monster: King Abimelech, the archetypal Bastard Bastard in literature, rose to power following the death of his good-hearted father Judge Gideon by having 69 of his own brothers killed. As ruler, Abimelech organizes wars of conquest and enacts atrocities to keep the Israelites under his control, most notably having a thousand civilians burned alive to suppress an uprising in Shechem. When the people of Thebez revolt against his cruel rule, Abimelech attempts to raze their shelter to the ground. Vain and petty until the very end, Abimelech, upon being mortally wounded by one of the women he was trying to immolate, orders his aide to impale him with a sword in a futile effort to create the illusion that he died bravely in battle and not by the hands of a woman.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Gideon winning against a larger nation with a small army of 300, eh?
• Nightmare Fuel: What happens to the Levite's concubine in chapter 19. The Levite is entertaining a guest at his home when men of the city surround the house and demand that he hand the man over, "that we may know him carnally." The Levite gives them his concubine instead. They gang-rape her to death and leave her body on the threshold. Particular a case of Values Dissonance (either that or a case of an intentional Nominal Hero) as at first he offers them his daughter as well, although the only one he actually hands over is the concubine, making her one of the earliest and saddest examples in literature of a Disposable Sex Worker. Even worse, it's stated that she ran back to her father, who tried to stall her husband from leaving with her, hinting that she may have been trying to escape Domestic Abuse. Which may also mean that if she did prostitute herself before this event (and she may or may not have actually done so), she was likely doing it for survival reasons or trying to get money to travel back home. Or that she was simply angry at the Levite, since the Hebrew word used for prostitution, zanah, can also mean "to be angry".)
• One-Scene Wonder: Some accounts are extremely brief, with the shortest being Shamgar. He gets only one verse to his name, which adds that he killed 600 Philistines with an ox-goad (a stick used as a cattle prod).
• Signature Scene: If a work makes a Shout-Out to Samson and Delilah, it will either reference Samson killing 1,000 Philistines with a donkey's jawbone, or ripping apart the pillars he was bound to in the temple of Dagon, bringing down the building and everyone in it.
• Squick: King Eglon's death. So fat his body swallows up the entire sword he's stabbed with, and feces leak out through the wound.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Samson is presented as a flawed figure who abuses his powers, gets screwed over for it, and ends up dying because there's nowhere else to go. Yet after he is betrayed by a certain Femme Fatale named Delilah, he gets captured by the Philistines and subjected to a particularly horrific Fate Worse than Death. You can't really blame him for wanting to bring the house down.
• Values Resonance: The specific instructions by the angel to Samson's mother not to drink alcohol while she is pregnant with him raise the question of how long it took societies to realize that pregnant women drinking alcohol was a bad idea.

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