Sunday
Among the Anglican communion’s Old Testament options this week are fascinating but disturbing episodes from Judges featuring women. I also share a tripartite poem by a woman rabbi, who is just as fascinated and disturbed by these figures as I am.
The stories of Deborah, Jael, and Yiftach’s (or Jephthah’s) daughter appear in the lectionary at a disturbing time, given the horrors we witnessed in Israel and the counter-horrors we are now seeing in Gaza. In the Judges stories, we see historical violence, which raises the question of bloodshed in a sacred text. Which in turn leads me to an interesting essay I just read on the Journey to Jesus website.
In it, the wonderfully sensitive Christian writer Dan Clendenin addresses the question by observing that, in this section of the Bible, “[s]laughtering your enemies and then celebrating it in poetry seems to have divine sanction.”
He points out that first Jael is celebrated for driving a tent peg through the skull of a rival general (!), and then the supposed healing prophetess Devorah does an in-your-face victory dance taunting the man’s grieving mother. First, here’s Jael, presenting herself as loving hostess:
Jael went out to meet Sisera and said to him, “Come, my lord, come right in. Don’t be afraid.” So he entered her tent, and she covered him with a blanket.
“I’m thirsty,” he said. “Please give me some water.” She opened a skin of milk, gave him a drink, and covered him up. “Stand in the doorway of the tent,” he told her. “If someone comes by and asks you, ‘Is anyone in there?’ say ‘No.’”
But Jael, Heber’s wife, picked up a tent peg and a hammer and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep, exhausted. She drove the peg through his temple into the ground, and he died.
Just then Barak came by in pursuit of Sisera, and Jael went out to meet him. “Come,” she said, “I will show you the man you’re looking for.” So he went in with her, and there lay Sisera with the tent peg through his temple—dead.
And now for Deborah and Barak’s victory song, which recounts Jael’s assassination before concluding with the following taunt. The rival general’s mother, they imagine, thinks her son is late because he’s dividing up Israeli plunder and Israeli women:
“Through the window peered Sisera’s mother;
behind the lattice she cried out,
‘Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why is the clatter of his chariots delayed?’
The wisest of her ladies answer her;
indeed, she keeps saying to herself,
‘Are they not finding and dividing the spoils:
a woman or two for each man,
colorful garments as plunder for Sisera,
colorful garments embroidered,
highly embroidered garments for my neck—
all this as plunder?’
“So may all your enemies perish, Lord!
But may all who love you be like the sun
when it rises in its strength.”
As in the current Middle East conflict, no one comes off looking good.
Addressing the appearance of such stories in the Scriptures, Clendenin mentions how some have argued that they’re merely descriptive (he puts “merely” in quotes) rather than prescriptive. The problem is that they were seen as prescriptive by the Crusaders and those who carried out genocide against Native Americans.
One strategy people have used to counter the violence is to privilege certain sections of the Bible over others—say, Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” over the stories in Judges. But of course, as Shakespeare reminds us in Merchant of Venice, “the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” Christian, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists—in fact, all kinds of faiths–have used sacred texts to justify atrocities.
Another strategy is to treat the Bible strictly as an historical text reflecting the ideology of the time. Clendenin points out that Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan reads 1-2 Kings as
self-serving imperial records that portray Israel’s kings as they saw themselves and wanted others to see them — God loves us and hates our enemies. He blesses us with their treasure. From that perspective, no war crime is too heinous as a means to these delusional ends…
As Berrigan sees it, these stories are entirely made up. After all, they were written about 500 years after the purported events, and there’s “little to no” archaeological support for them.
Another way that Biblical violence is glossed over is by reading it allegorically, not literally. The enemies are not without but within. Clendenin observes similar reasoning among those Muslims that “insist that the true jihad or holy war is waged in the inner soul rather than against external enemies.”
Quoting Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (1984), Eric Seibert’s The Violence of Scripture (2012) and Philip Jenkins Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (2012), Clendenin observes that this too is a dubious way out. After all, people read allegories differently.
To cite a recent instance, new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who has said that the “Bible comes first over the Constitution,” uses the text as a rationale to condemn LBGTQ+ folk, same sex marriage, abortion, divorce, separation of church and state, and certain forms of birth control. A few weeks ago, sounding like an Old Testament prophet, he called America “dark and depraved,” described the culture as “irredeemable,” and said that a “time of judgment” has arrived. My sense is that he elevates the Book of Judges over Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” and the command to love our neighbors.
My own take is that the Bible, along with all its editorial background (what has gone in, what is left out) is a rich but flawed document of humanity wrestling with the most profound questions. As also occurs in great literary works, there are parts of Bible that are at war with other parts. Nor should this surprise us. After all, however divinely inspired, it came to us through scores of authors and editors. We should also note that, when we critique religious violence, we often do so from a perspective that has been shaped by this very religion.
We should always keep in mind that, while parts of the Bible have inspired—and been used to justify—human horrors, others parts have led (I’m limiting myself to literature here) to Dante’s soaring vision of “the love that moves the sun and others stars,” to Milton’s version of the creation story, to Father Zosima’s account (in The Brother’s Karamazov) of God’s love as a force that embraces and animates all living things. Much of what is best about our culture and our civilization is grounded in Scripture.
And on that note, I’ll turn to Rabbi Rachel Barenblat of the Velveteen Rabbi website, who does what the best religious leaders do, which is to engage with holy texts in a soulful way. What she sees here is (1) prophetess Devorah who, while focused on justice, also appears to sanction Jael’s tent peg murder of Sisera; (2) Jael, who finds her story appropriated by church patriarchs for their own purposes and who acknowledges—as they do not—the pain of Sisera’s mother; and (3) Yiftach (a.k.a. Jephthah) who follows through on a horrific pledge made to God, one that involves sacrificing his own daughter.
Note that Barenblat searches for God in each of the stories, sometimes without success. In Devorah’s case, words may fall from her mouth like honey but the honey bee still carries a sting. And while, in her victory song, she reports being awakened by the people to come out and celebrate Israel’s victory, we are told that she has been dreaming of the murder, with the tent peg echoing the bee sting.
The Kennites were neutral in the wars, which makes Jael’s action particularly startling. And while the patriarchal rabbis claim her as a “righteous convert,” she knows that—like Sisera’s mother—she will “never be the same.” The rabbis’ simplistic explanation doesn’t do justice to what she did and why she did it.
And with regard to Yiftach’s Daughter, whose story appears later in Judges, Barenblat points out the horrific price that is paid for victory. We are never told whether God, who appears to have granted Yiftach his victory, approves of the sacrifice. The story ends with weeping women.
Where is God in Israel and Gaza at the moment? While some, quoting passages like the ones from Judges, think they know, poets like Barenblat are questioning.
JUDGES TRYPTICH
1. Devorah
Beneath her palm tree, Devorah
(the honey bee, her sting intact)
judged the acts of the Israelites
the people came with gifts
of oil and flour and yearling lambs
and she answered them with justice
she sent for Barak in his leathers
words fell from her mouth like honey
and he yearned to taste her sweetness
come with me, he pleaded
I will relinquish my own glory
if I can have you by my side
nine hundred iron chariots thundered
the Infinite cast panic like a spell
and all Sisera’s army was slain
and Devorah slept, and dreamed
Sisera stumbles into a woman’s tent
Jael’s doors open wide to let him in
he drinks milk fermented in goatskin
he slides into sleep: her tent pin rests
at his sweaty temple: she drives it home
2. Jael
My husband is a Kenite
Kenites don’t take sides
so when God told me what to do
I kept it to myself
someday the sages
will credit me with pluck
and righteousness, even if
my methods were obscure
but Sisera’s mother
wrapped in happy fantasies
of her precious son’s return
will never be the same
the rabbis say
Sisera demanded my body
the rabbis say
we slept together seven times
but you don’t get to know
you can claim me
as a righteous convert
but my story is my own
3. Yiftach’s Daughter
Israel whored with foreign gods
until Yiftach, prostitute’s son, rose up
wearing holy spirit like a cloak, saying
deliver the Ammonites into my hands
and whatever exits my house to meet me
will be sacrificed to You in holy fire
and out came his only daughter
bare feet flying to greet him, Daddy!
with her tambourine beneath her arm
he rent his garments in grief
she bent her head in submission
to her father and his God’s demands
two months with her friends in the hills
(curve of soft hips beneath her hands,
stretch of skin salted with hot tears)
and she returned home, pale
but resolute, and bared her neck
her father steeled himself to raise his knife
the sun went down early, turning away
from the war hero with bloodied hands
the mothers wept like the opened skies
when he burned her bones
no prophet spoke God’s anger
and the maidens mourned alone
Bonus poem
I came across this Nancy Hightower poem about Jael that strikes me as very Margaret Atwoodian. By this I mean that it pushes against sentimental vision of women as caring madonnas or angels in the home. Atwood, as we see in Cat’s Eye (Cordelia) and Alias Grace (Grace Marks), often shows them to have a dark side. Men may think they are dealing with a dove, only to encounter “an eagle, feathers spread,/talons reaching.” They think they see familiar household chores, followed by “quilted comfort,” before experiencing the kiss of a tent pin to the skull. Barenblat too hints at this dichotomy with Devorah, she of honeyed sweetness with “sting intact.”
I’m sharing the poem not so much for this insight but for the unexpected tenderness of the ending. Like Barenblat’s Jael, this one thinks of Sisera’s mother. Like many in Israel and Gaza at the moment, she looks out for her son returning, only to see “nothing/ but red leaves falling/ in the morning wind.
Jael
By Nancy Hightower
Then Jael, Heber’s wife, took a nail of the tent, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it to the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.
—Judges 4:21
such a muted sound at first
as spike hits skin, then,
the skull’s soft crunch.
one would think murder made more noise—
like a battering ram against the temple,
but no, just a simple tent nail
and a cup of milk;
we women have our ways.
had i more time, i would have cooked,
made the bed, washed the dishes—
scheduled in the killing.
but he had come quickly, galloped
himself into my sanctuary,
heaving breath in muffled gasps
and war-weary, as men often are.
i became an eagle, feathers spread,
talons reaching as i flew out to meet him,
and he, thinking i was his dove, his mother hen,
came under my wings, shadow-filled.
i wrapped their warmth around him with
my voice spinning lies, quilted comfort,
my hands tucking in the folds of the blanket
as he slipped into that dream-quenching slumber.
i almost kissed his brow
to drive the pin through.
his mother, far away,
felt the breeze of my hand as it came down,
gentle, a loving breath upon her cheek,
thought her son had come back early in victory,
and opened her arms wide in ready embrace.
when she turned,
her eyes beheld nothing
but red leaves falling
in the morning wind.