Jael and Sisera, or something about the wisdom of letting women play with hammers and nails

Nov 172010
 

Like many Bible readers, I come at the text from a blind spot created by Sunday school teaching and pulpit homilies and pop cultural sermonizing. The more I read it, the more fascinating it becomes—partly because it is never what I expect and not at all what I was taught. Part of me (the 15-year-old part, that is, about 90% of me) is still at the stage of being surprised and delighted by the moral waywardness of the characters, the shocking violence, and the prevalence of prostitutes and concubines. My Sunday school teacher, for example, did not dwell on the wonderful details of Ehud’s assassination of the fat king Eglon of Moab in the Book of Judges when the fat closes around the dagger and the shit gushes out of the wound (Ehud is kind of an Israelite Jason Bourne—the passage reads like that). [I realize I have posted about this story before—what does this tell you about me?]

003:015 But when the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, the LORD
raised them up a deliverer, Ehud the son of Gera, a Benjamite,
a man lefthanded: and by him the children of Israel sent a
present unto Eglon the king of Moab.

003:016 But Ehud made him a dagger which had two edges, of a cubit
length; and he did gird it under his raiment upon his right
thigh.

003:017 And he brought the present unto Eglon king of Moab: and Eglon
was a very fat man.

003:018 And when he had made an end to offer the present, he sent away
the people that bare the present.

003:019 But he himself turned again from the quarries that were by
Gilgal, and said, I have a secret errand unto thee, O king:
who said, Keep silence. And all that stood by him went out
from him.

003:020 And Ehud came unto him; and he was sitting in a summer
parlour, which he had for himself alone. And Ehud said, I have
a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat.

003:021 And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his
right thigh, and thrust it into his belly:

003:022 And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed
upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of
his belly; and the dirt came out.

I turn from this to the equally shocking and delightful tale of Jael nailing Sisera’s head to the floor. Sisera is on the run after losing a battle to the Israelites. He asks Jael for a cup of water. She invites him into her tent and offers him a glass of milk instead. Exhausted, he falls asleep. Then she, um, drives a nail through his head. A kind of Home Depot-style biblical assassination. Here is the no-nonsense, stripped down account in Judges.

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A new look at Rahab the harlot & a confusion of Judges

May 032010
 

Eglon, king of the Moabites, from Figures de la Bible (1728) Illustrated by Gerard Hoet (1648-1733), and others.

Procrastination has reached biblical proportions this packet round–on the other hand, not all my students got their packets here on time, so I have an excuse.

Over the weekend, I got through Joshua and part-way into Judges before I broke down. Joshua divides (like Caesar’s Gaul) into three parts. The first 12 chapters contain the dramatic crossing of the Jordan and the battles for Jericho and Ai (and various other places), also the stories of Rahab, Achan and the trickery of the Gibeonites. The next section is mostly an administrative  interlude in which the various tribes are assigned their allotments in the conquered land. And in the last section, Joshua dies. The first few chapters of Judges recapitulates Joshua, sometimes repeating chunks of text and story pretty much verbatim. And then we begin a series of cycles of backsliding (whoring after strange gods) by the Israelites (who, really, never seem to learn), punishment by God, and then rescue by a local hero who, for some reason, is called a judge. Some of the judges get a good deal of face time, their stories told in graphic detail (the Jael and Sisera story mentioned in an earlier post is part of the story of a female judge named Deborah).

The first time I read through all this material I came away with the impression that it was a kind of veiled history of the Israelites establishing themselves as a monotheistic community amidst a land teeming with polytheists. From Leviticus on, the emphasis seemed to be on establishing and maintaining cultural purity against contamination from the other regional communities. This seemed like a reasonable anthropological synthesis of what I was reading. Now, however, with my trusty Literary Guide beside me, I see greater complexity (and confusion). God makes a covenant with the patriarchs in Genesis to make their people prosper and bring them to the Promised Land. But as we read through the later books of the Pentateuch, we see God gradually introducing an override condition. At first the Israelites are the Chosen People, but then, it seems, they will be the Chosen People as long as they obey him. If they keep acting up (whoring after strange gods), he promises to obliterate them (and there is prophetic material that predicts just this). One of the conditions for God’s beneficence is that the Israelites completely eliminate (early ethnic cleansing) all the strange peoples who already live across the Jordan. God says specifically that they should not make any treaties or deals. Then Joshua goes across the Jordan and the very first thing that happens is that his scouts make a deal with Rahab the harlot which allows her and her family to live with the Israelites for always, thus breaking the covenant. The story of the Gibeonites involves a similar deal with the pagan Canaanites who are allowed to live among the Israelites–and the list goes on. Rather than expunging the polytheists, as they were meant to do, the Israelites keep them around, using them as labour, and then begin to intermarry with them, and so on.
Read the rest!