Judges and Chiefs
JUDGES 1–21 AND THE BOOK OF RUTH
Jael and Sisera by Artemisia Gentileschi.
CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP. GIDEON. THE SONG OF DEBORAH. WOMEN IN THE BIBLE. SAMSON’S STORY. THE SEA PEOPLES. MOUNTAIN DWELLERS AND THE ORIGINS OF MONOLATRY.
The book of Judges recounts the history of Israel’s tribes during the early years of their settlement in the land of Canaan. A series of outstanding, God-inspired leaders directed the people’s affairs in those days—Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, and others. These leaders are called shofetim in the Bible, usually translated as “judges.” This translation is actually somewhat misleading. True, in later times, the word shofet came to mean specifically a judge or magistrate, but at an earlier stage of Hebrew it designated any sort of rough-and-tumble leader or chief. (Of course, any leader might be called upon to mediate disputes and act as a judge, but this was a minor part of the shofet’s functions.) It would thus not be inappropriate to translate the term differently and think of the biblical book that comes after Joshua as the Book of Chiefs.
This book begins by describing the circumstances under which the Israelites’ various chiefs arose. In those early days, the Bible says:
The Israelites used to do what was evil in the sight of the LORD and worship the Baals. They would abandon the LORD, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt, and follow other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were all around them, bowing down to them . . . The LORD would grow angry with Israel, and He would give them over to plunderers who plundered them and sell them out to enemies all around . . .
Then the LORD would raise up chiefs to save them from those who had plundered them . . . Whenever the LORD would raise up a chief for them, the LORD would be with the chief, and He would save them from their enemies all the time that the chief was alive . . . But whenever the chief died, they would relapse and behave worse than their ancestors, following other gods, worshiping them and bowing down to them. They would not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways.
The book of Judges thus presents a series of intermittent leaders, each rising to prominence for a time to save Israel from its enemies and lead the people on the right path. No sooner would the leader die, however, than the people would revert to their sinful ways and sink back into the old cycle of apostasy and oppression.
Sociologists have studied the Bible from the standpoint of their own academic specialty, and one of the subjects on which they have focused is the various forms of leadership evidenced in the Bible. Leadership is an issue in all societies: who, if anyone, will have the authority to govern and make decisions affecting everyone? Different societies have answered this question in different ways. The world has thus known clan councils and tribal chiefs, emperors, dictators and oligarchs, kings and queens, constitutional monarchies, and parliamentary or presidential democracies.
Whatever the system of rule, one of the trickiest problems is that of succession. Especially when a single leader is empowered to make most of the decisions, his or her death can touch off a crisis. Who will be the next leader? Unless this question has a clear answer that has been accepted in advance by all members of the society, the old leader’s death can lead to a protracted power struggle, bringing with it the gravest consequences: civil war, economic collapse, or conquest by outsiders. That is why so many societies develop fixed, unalterable systems for the automatic replacement of the old leader. Perhaps the commonest of these in the past was kingship. The essence of kingship is that power passes automatically to the next heir to the throne. There is no test of fitness, nor any scrutiny of the heir by an outside body; as the old saying has it, “The king is dead; long live the king!” So dangerous is the chaos that might result from not having an established process of succession that, all over the world, people have been willing on principle to accept the king’s son or daughter as their new ruler even without proof that the new ruler will be any good at the job, indeed, without any guarantee that he or she will not be profligate or utterly decadent (often a hazard with kings and queens) or even a congenital idiot; almost anything is better than chaos.
Yet Israel in the book of Judges was a society without a king. The individual tribes had their own “elders,” but there was no satisfactory, ongoing coordination among tribes. Instead, they seem to have had a succession of temporary, ad hoc leaders, the “judges” or chiefs on which the book of Judges centers. These leaders all shared one striking trait: none of them had any prior claim to rule. They did not come from a dominant family or rise up through the ranks to take over. Instead, their rise to power was created by a crisis; something occurred that required someone to take over, and the person in question suddenly emerged. He or she was then put into power by general acclamation—“This is just the leader we need!” The sociologist Max Weber (who wrote extensively about the Bible) referred to this phenomenon as “charismatic leadership.”1
It is striking that the book of Judges seems to stress precisely this aspect of its various chiefs: they are anything but natural candidates for the job. Scholars point, for example, to the case of Gideon, whose rise to power is described in these terms:
Now the angel of the LORD came and sat beneath the oak-tree in Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, as his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press to keep it safe from the Midianites. The angel of the LORD appeared to him and said to him, “The LORD is with you, you mighty warrior.” Gideon said to him, “Excuse me, sir, but if the LORD is with us, why are we having all this trouble? Where are all the miracles that our ancestors recorded for us, saying, ‘Truly, the LORD took us up out of Egypt’? But now the LORD has abandoned us and left us in the power of the Midianites.” Then the LORD turned to him and said, “Go in this strength of yours and save Israel yourself from the Midianites; am I not the one who is sending you?” But he said, “Please, sir, how should I be the one to save Israel? My clan is the poorest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.”
Here once again is a human who encounters an angel and does not recognize him at first—but this belongs to an earlier discussion (above, chapter 7). What is relevant in the present context is the angel’s commissioning of Gideon to lead the people. One could hardly imagine a less qualified candidate. The scene opens with Gideon so intimidated by the raiding Midianites that he has to hide his spare grains of wheat inside a winepress. What a pathetic figure! The angel’s opening words to him—“The LORD is with you, you mighty warrior”—seem almost a joke in view of his timorousness. Nor is Gideon presented as a particularly pious individual. To the angel’s assertion that God is with him Gideon replies tartly: Oh yeah? If the LORD is with us, why are we having all this trouble? Most important, the passage spells out Gideon’s political unfitness to become a leader: he comes from a not particularly powerful tribe, Manasseh, in fact, from “the poorest clan” in that tribe, and he himself is “the least in my family.”
Yet it is precisely this unlikely candidate who ends up in charge, at least for a while, leading his troops to victory twice against Midian (Judges 7–8). Scholars also note that the biblical text was careful to specify, a few verses after the passage cited, that “the spirit of the LORD took possession of Gideon”; it is this that completes his transformation into a worthy chieftain (Judg. 6:34). But such a transformation occurs against the background of what sociologists see as a somewhat amorphous population, one in which an external crisis (Midianite depredations) can bring to the fore someone with no obvious claim to the top spot. So it is, in fact, with the other judges: these include the illegitimate son of a prostitute who supports himself as a highwayman (Jephthah, Judges 11–12); an impulsively violent man who marries a daughter of the enemy Philistines for a time, consorts with prostitutes, and ultimately surrenders to the sexual blackmail of Delilah (Samson, Judges 14–16); and a woman—not usually the stuff of leadership in ancient Israel, but in this case she actually goes on to lead a four-star general into battle (Deborah, Judges 4–5). Deborah seems already to have been a prophet (Judg. 4:4), but the others, just like Gideon, undergo a divine transformation: the “spirit of the LORD” comes over them and they are suddenly capable of great feats (Judg. 11:29; 14:6, 19; 15:14). They are the very model of charismatic leadership.
Since these leaders have no ongoing, statutory claim to power, they are unable to pass power on to their descendants—to become kings, in other words. In the biblical version of events, this circumstance is given a theological justification:
Then the Israelites said to Gideon, “Rule over us, you and your son and your grandson also; since you have saved us from the Midianites.” But Gideon said to them, “I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the LORD will rule over you.”
This, many scholars think, is putting the best face on what was actually a rather different reality. The political situation was such that neither Gideon nor any of the other judges was able to establish a royal dynasty or to unify the various tribes under one rule (if such a thought even occurred at the time).
A Woman Warrior
One of the most striking figures in the book of Judges is Deborah. The crisis that brings her to the fore is similar to that of Gideon’s time. In her case, “King Jabin of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor” (Judg. 4:2) was oppressing the Israelites, and they cried out to God for help.
Deborah was a prophet of sorts. “She used to sit,” the Bible says, “under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim” (Judg. 4:3). This, scholars say, is not merely a geographical note. The ability to encounter or converse with God was apparently sometimes associated specifically with certain trees or groves; thus, the angel seen earlier appeared to Gideon at the “oak tree in Ophrah,” and a group of angels is said to have appeared to Abraham at the “oak trees of Mamre” (Gen. 18:1). Other trees as well may be associated with prophecy.2 That Deborah used to station herself under a certain palm tree may thus indicate that she was in regular communication with the divine; in any case, when Israel’s situation worsened, she acted exactly in the role of a prophet, speaking on God’s behalf:
She sent a message to Barak son of Abinoam, [who was] from Kedesh in Naphtali, saying, “The LORD, the God of Israel, has issued you an order: ‘Go, take up your position at Mount Tabor, and take with you ten thousand troops from the tribe of Naphtali and the tribe of Zebulun. Then I [God] will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army, to meet you by Wadi Kishon with his chariots and his infantry; and I will hand him over to you [to defeat].’” Barak said to her, “If you go with me, I will go; but if not, I will not go.” And she said, “All right, I will go with you; but there will be no glory for you in the course that you are following, since now the LORD will be handing over Sisera to a woman.” Then Deborah got up and went with Barak to Kedesh.
The ancient Near Eastern equivalent of the modern tank was the war chariot. It could mow through an army of foot soldiers with ease, its whirring wheels and snorting horses sowing panic through the ranks. Sisera, the enemy general, had nine hundred such chariots, each made out of impenetrable iron (Judg. 4:3, 12). How could he lose? Still, Deborah was in communication with God. When she spoke with the Israelite general, Barak, she was quite unequivocal: God says that this is the moment to take the offensive. And so Barak did. Although hesitant at first (“If you go with me,” Barak tells Deborah, “I will go”), the Israelite general proceeded to Mount Tabor, accompanied by a massive force of ten thousand soldiers. When the enemy Canaanites suddenly saw this huge army sweeping down on them, they were the ones who panicked. Even their general, Sisera, abandoned his chariot and left the battlefield on foot (Judg. 4:16). The Israelites won a stunning victory.
Sisera’s own death was ignominious. Fleeing the scene, he frantically searched for someplace in which to hide; it was then that he encountered Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite.
Jael came out to meet Sisera, and said to him, “Turn aside, my lord, turn aside to me; have no fear.” So he turned aside to her into the tent, and she covered him with a coverlet. Then he said to her, “Please give me a little water to drink; for I am thirsty.” So she opened a skin of milk and gave him a drink and covered him. He said to her, “Stand at the entrance of the tent, and if anybody comes and asks you, ‘Is anyone here?’ say, ‘No.’” But Jael wife of Heber took a tent peg, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple, until it went down into the ground—he was lying fast asleep from weariness—and he died.
This was the end of the fearsome Sisera, outsmarted by one woman and then put to death by another.
After narrating these events in chapter 4 of Judges, the Bible presents in chapter 5 a stirring hymn of praise, known as the “Song of Deborah,” that basically recounts the same events in poetic style. This hymn, distinguished by its vivid language and thumping rhythm, has been of particular interest to modern scholars. The reason is that it seems to them to afford a rare glimpse of a biblical historian at work.
We saw above (chapter 13) that the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15 was, according to a hypothesis first put forward by Frank M. Cross and D. N. Freedman, the ultimate source of the narrative account of the splitting of the Red Sea that precedes it (Exodus 14). But according to Cross and Freedman, the author of the prose narrative did not understand fully the words of the ancient song; its mention of the waters standing up “in a heap” was taken to refer to the creation of a dry path in the midst of the sea, whereas all the Song of the Sea meant to say by this phrase was that the waves at sea were so high that they capsized the Egyptians’ boats and drowned them. Scholars see a similar error in the prose retelling of Sisera’s death (Judg. 4:17–21).3 According to the prose version, Jael gives Sisera some milk to drink and puts him to bed, then sneaks up on him while he is asleep and drives a tent spike into his head. On close examination, however, the Song of Deborah seems to be telling a slightly different story:
Most blessed of women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, of tent-dwelling women most blessed.
He asked for water and she gave him milk, she brought him curds in a lordly bowl.
She put her hand to the tent peg [and] her right hand to a workman’s mallet;
she struck Sisera a blow, she crushed his head, she shattered and pierced his temple.
He sank, he fell, he lay still at her feet;
at her feet he sank, he fell; where he sank, there he fell dead.
If one reads these words without preconception, they seem clearly to describe a different sort of death scene. There is nothing here about Jael covering Sisera with a coverlet and him then dozing off or even lying down. On the contrary, Sisera falls, and so he must have been standing when Jael delivered the fatal blow. In order to understand how someone knowing this song’s version could have produced the very different prose account, it is necessary to know something about the workings of biblical poetry.
Biblical poetry does not have rhyme or even a fixed meter. Its basic feature is a short, two- or three-part sentence. The parts, called clauses, are usually only three or four words apiece, and they are separated by a brief syntactic pause, of the sort usually represented in English by a comma. The poetic line is always end-stopped, that is, it always ends in a major pause (period or semicolon).
Writing poetry according to this formula is not very challenging (it is certainly easier than writing rhyming iambic pentameter, as classical English poets once did!). Still, ancient listeners or readers had to be informed in some way that clause B was the continuation of clause A and not some wholly new beginning—otherwise they might mistake B for the start of a whole new line. So it was that Hebrew poets developed various ways of signaling to people that B was A’s continuation. They could make B somehow dependent on A by omitting a verb or other essential word. Thus:
He subdues peoples beneath us, and nations beneath our feet.
The clause “and nations beneath our feet” cannot stand on its own; it needs to borrow a subject (“He”) and a verb (“subdues”) from the previous clause. Such omissions serve to bind B back to A and identify it as A’s continuation rather than a whole new start.
Another way of accomplishing the same thing is repetition: the same phrase that occurs in A occurs again in B, binding the two together. The Song of Deborah has many such repetitions; for example:
In the days of Shamgar son of Anath, in the days of Jael, caravans ceased . . .
Up, up, O Deborah! Up, up and sing it out!
The torrent Kishon swept them away, the onrushing torrent, the torrent Kishon.
A third alternative is taking commonly paired items and putting one of them in clause A and the other in clause B:
An ox knows its owner, and an ass its master’s trough.
By day the LORD sends forth His love, and at night His song is with me.
Finally, it is not uncommon for clause A to say one thing and clause B to say something similar:
Let me exalt You, O God my king, and let me bless Your name forever and ever.
Like repetition or commonly paired terms, such paralleling serves to cement the connection between A and B, identifying B as A’s continuation rather than a new beginning.
Just because they contain parallel actions or ideas, however, does not mean that A and B are saying the same thing. Usually B adds something quite new; sometimes, in fact, the whole point seems to be that clause B tops clause A and goes it one better. (In the last example, exalting God and blessing His name are fairly similar, but clause B has added something new, the element “forever and ever,” which extends and intensifies what was said in A.)
But having clause B go beyond A inevitably creates a potential ambiguity. What does the line as a whole now mean? Is B intended simply to supplement A (that is, “Let me exalt You, O God my king, and in addition to that, let me bless Your name forever and ever”)? Or are they to be mentally recombined into one assertion (that is, “Let me both exalt You and bless Your name forever and ever, O God my king”)? Or is the apparent distinction between A and B merely what English stylists used to call “elegant variation”—that is, it makes no real difference whether either or both are true (“Let me exalt You and/or bless Your name—it really doesn’t matter which”)? Or is B actually intended to correct or replace A (that is, “Let me exalt You, O God my king—no, that isn’t enough; instead, let me bless Your name forever and ever”)? This last possibility may seem a bit stretched for Ps. 145:1, but it actually occurs a great deal in biblical poetry. This is especially true when numbers are involved:
Three things are too wondrous for me, and four I do not know . . .
For three things the earth groans, and for four it cannot endure . . .
In both these cases, the “four” in B is actually intended to cancel out the “three” in A. (We know this because in each case the text goes on to list four things, not seven.) We might thus reword each as “three, nay four,” or “three, and as a matter of fact, four.”
The “replacement” option may be clear in these cases involving numbers, but in other lines one cannot say for sure if the writer meant to assert that both A and B are separately true, or that A and B are to be mentally recombined into a single assertion, or that B is intended to replace A, or that the difference between them is insignificant. Thus, an ancient Canaanite poet once wrote:
My house I built of silver, my mansion of gold.
CTA 4 VI 36–38
Did he mean: “I built my house out of silver, and then I built a separate building (my mansion) out of gold”? Probably not; in this case, the separate-and-simultaneously-true option is unlikely. But any of the other three is indeed possible: “I built my house/mansion out of silver and gold” or “I built my house/mansion out of silver—as a matter of fact, not silver but gold” or “I built my house/mansion out of precious metal, silver or gold, it doesn’t matter.” Usually one can tell from the context, but often, as in this case, one cannot quite be sure.
So what did Jael do to Sisera? The song says:
She put her hand to the tent peg, [and] her right hand to a workman’s mallet.
But this line is actually much more ambiguous in Hebrew than it is in English. The word translated above (by the NRSV) as “tent peg” can certainly mean that, but it can also designate a digging tool (Deut. 23:13) and perhaps other things. “Stick” would probably be a better translation (because it is less specific). The phrase translated “workman’s mallet” is likewise overly specific in English. The “workman” part is pretty clear, but the word rendered as “mallet” probably only means something like “club” or “smasher.” In other words: “She put her hand to a stick, [and] her right hand to a workman’s club.” In such a version, it is altogether unclear whether this poetic line is describing two separate actions—first she took A, then she took B—or simply describing the same action via the “replacement” strategy: she grabbed an A; as a matter of fact, not an A but a B (or even, possibly, stick or club, it doesn’t really matter).
What follows, however, makes it pretty clear that Jael picked up only one implement.4 The reason is that, as we have seen, Sisera is standing when Jael strikes him—he had to be if he subsequently fell at her feet. It is very difficult to imagine her holding a tent peg in one hand and a mallet in the other, approaching the standing Sisera, and saying, “Hold still a minute while I line this up with your temple.” Much more imaginable is that Jael, having grabbed an appropriate implement—a stick, nay, a mighty club—then approached the drinking Sisera and, whirling around with all her might, smashed him with it on the side of his head. That, it seems likely, is what the song was trying to describe.
Years, perhaps centuries, later, songs that tell stories were no longer in fashion; their words now had to be “translated” into continuous, historical-sounding prose narratives. Whoever sought to render Sisera’s death in prose read the same crucial line differently. “She put her hand to a stick, [and] her right hand to a workman’s club” seemed to him to refer to two different implements, so that is how he reworded it in prose: “a tent-peg . . . and a hammer” (Judg. 4:21). Perhaps, indeed, he liked the overall picture of a more ladylike Jael, who maternally tucks Sisera into bed, gives him some warm milk, and waits for him to doze off—rather than confronting him head-to-head. So the prose writer created these other elements: there is no coverlet in the song, Sisera is standing, and so she of course does not drive a tent peg through his head and into the ground, as the prose narrative says.
If, for modern scholars, this process of rendering story poems into prose occurred in the case of the Song of Deborah and the Song of the Sea, then perhaps it happened as well for other prose narratives in the Bible, narratives whose original song versions have been lost. That, scholars say, would explain why the southern stories of the J source and the northern ones of E had so much material in common—they independently put into prose a collection of narrative traditions that had once been transmitted in hymns or story poems. If so, this might suggest that the raw material used by the J and E sources were considerably older than J and E themselves, perhaps going back to the time of King David or even earlier.
Samson
Perhaps the most unforgettable of all of the judges is Samson. His parents, as we have seen earlier (chapter 7), had long been childless—until the visit of a certain angel (Judges 13). The angel announced that they would at last have a child and instructed the future mother to abstain from wine and strong drink during her pregnancy and to follow other rules, since her son was destined to be “a nazirite to God from birth” (Judg. 13:5). (A nazirite was a kind of Israelite ascetic. Elsewhere, nazirites took their vow themselves, as adults; their self-affliction included not consuming wine or other grape products and not cutting their hair; see Num. 6:1–21.) After Samson was born, he—like any nazirite—was also forbidden to cut his hair, indeed, to allow any razor ever to come in contact with his head (Judg. 13:5).
Samson observed these requirements, and he grew into an extraordinary adult, a man of superhuman strength and courage. He also led an active social life. (The anti–Vietnam War slogan of the 1960s, “Make love, not war,” would have quite puzzled Samson, who seems to have gone at both activities with equal zeal.) Chapter 14 of Judges finds him smitten with a young woman from the enemy side, the Philistines. His parents naturally objected to the union, but Samson insisted: “Get her for me, because she pleases me” (Judg. 14:3). On their way down to Timna, where she lived, Samson and his parents suddenly encountered a roaring lion. The “spirit of the LORD” came mightily over Samson, and he tore the lion apart with his bare hands. Later, during the wedding feast, he killed thirty men from Ashkelon in order to use their clothing to pay off a bet. After that, he set fire to the Philistines’ fields in an act of revenge, and then killed a thousand more Philistines when they tried to capture him. One night, after consorting with a prostitute in Philistine Gaza, he pulled up the city gates with his bare hands and dragged them all the way to Hebron (forty miles, as the crow flies). Decidedly, here was a divine servant of a kind rarely seen.
“You Can Tell the Truth When You Hear It”
At this point in his life, however, Samson met his match: he fell in love with the ravishing Delilah. As soon as they learned of her involvement with Samson, the Philistines approached Delilah with an offer: if you can get Samson to reveal the source of his strength and how he can be overcome, we will give you eleven hundred pieces of silver. Delilah agreed.
So Delilah said to Samson, “Tell me, what makes you so strong? And what would you have to be tied up with so that someone could overcome you?” Samson said to her, “If they were to tie me with seven fresh tendons that had not been dried, then I would become as weak as an ordinary person.” So the Philistine chiefs brought her seven fresh tendons that had not been dried, and she tied him with them while an ambush was waiting in her room. Then she called out to him, “Samson, the Philistines are after you!” But he snapped the tendons as a strand of fiber snaps when it touches the fire. So the secret of his strength remained unknown.
Delilah did not give up. In fact, surprisingly, she acted as if she were the injured party: “You deceived me! You lied to me! Now come on—tell me what you have to be tied up with” (Judg. 16:10). Samson gave her another, somewhat similar answer (new ropes, never used) and the same thing happened: the Philistines entered and he snapped the ropes with ease. She tried a third time, and his answer this time was a little different: “If you weave the seven locks of my head with the web and make it tight with the pin, then I shall become as weak as an ordinary person.” So Delilah tried a third time, but once again Samson escaped harm.
Now Delilah was truly upset. “How can you say you love me,” she asked, “when you do not confide in me? That makes three times that you have deceived me and have not told me what makes you so strong.”
Finally, after she had nagged him day after day and pestered him, he was tired to death. So he confided the whole thing to her and said to her, “A razor has never come upon my head; for I have been a nazirite to God from my mother’s womb. If my head were ever shaved, then my strength would leave me; I would become as weak as an ordinary person.” When Delilah realized that he had confided everything to her, she sent a message to the Philistine chiefs, saying, “This time come up; he has confided everything to me.”
The end was inevitable. Once Samson’s hair was snipped, all his strength disappeared. The Philistines captured him with ease and, having gouged out his eyes for good measure, took him in chains back to Gaza, where he was put to work as a mill slave. But Samson’s hair began to grow back, and with it, apparently, some of his old strength. Brought to the temple of Dagon, Samson prayed to God for one last burst of power, and seizing the temple pillars in his arms, he pulled them down on himself and the assembled Philistines, killing more of the enemy in that one blind act than he had killed before in all the days of his strength. Thus ended the life of this toughest of judges.
About all this rabbinic interpreters had one main question. How did Delilah know, after Samson had given her three wrong answers, that he was finally telling the truth? The text is quite clear: “Delilah realized that he had confided everything to her,” it says, and she was so sure that this time she knew his secret that she at once sent a message to that effect to the Philistines. But how did she know for sure? The Talmud’s answer (b. Sota 9b) is a curt three words: nikkarin dibrei emet, or in a contemporary idiom: “You can tell the truth when you hear it.”
The Bible reports that five cities in the region of Israel belonged to the Philistines: Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath. (The first three are ports on the Mediterranean coast, the other two slightly inland.) This coastal constellation made them a mighty power in biblical times. For a while, they managed to guard jealously the secret of forging and sharpening iron (1 Sam. 13:19–21), which gave them a profound strategic advantage;5 at times their power stretched far from the coast into the hill country of the Israelite tribes. But who exactly were the Philistines? Modern scholars know that they were not originally a Semitic people. They seem to have arrived in Canaan from somewhere in the Aegean region. Their ultimate origin may have been as far north as the southern Balkans, or else in the Greek islands, or nearby Crete or Cyprus. It is also possible that they came from Anatolia (what is today Turkey, north of Syria). Wherever they came from, however, to understand the Philistines it is necessary to speak of another group of whom they were apparently a part, the Sea Peoples.6
The term “Sea Peoples” refers to different seafaring nations who tried to attack the Egyptian coast during the reigns of Merenptah and his successor, Rameses III—that is, at the end of the thirteenth and start of the twelfth centuries BCE. The Egyptian texts name nine different peoples, one of whom, represented as P-r-š-t-w, seems to be the same name as “Philistine.” Hittite records, from the area of modern Turkey, as well as the El Amarna letters, also mention some of these peoples. The Egyptians succeeded in holding off the attack on their own shores, but they were less successful in defending the shoreline of the eastern Mediterranean. The Sea Peoples (or some subdivision thereof) may have worked their way overland down the coast of Canaan and/or arrived by sea; in addition to the Philistine cities mentioned, other Sea Peoples appear to have established settlements at Joppa (today’s Yafo), Dor, and other sites. One witness thereto is the temple excavated at Tel Qasile near Joppa, built in the style of a typical Mycenean temple, which is radically different from that of a Canaanite temple.7 Interestingly, Greek mythology tells that the heroic Perseus married Andromeda, daughter of the king of Joppa, after saving her from being eaten by a sea monster. The two stayed for a time in Joppa before moving on. The ancient geographer Strabo makes cautious mention of this myth in his brief survey of the area:
Then [comes] Joppa, where the coastline of Egypt—which at first stretches towards the east—makes a remarkable bend towards the north. In this place, according to some writers, Andromeda was exposed to the sea monster. It is sufficiently elevated, it is said, to command a view of Jerusalem, the capital of the Jews, who, when they descended to the sea, used this place as a naval arsenal.
Strabo, Geography 16:2.28
Perhaps, scholars say, this myth hides a faded historical memory of Aegean interlopers who came to settle at Joppa and mixed with the locals.
If no one is exactly sure of the Philistines’ ultimate origin or of the route that they followed to Canaan, one thing is clear: in terms of their material culture they were quite similar to the Greeks, at least for a while. Their monochrome pottery is like that of Greece and unlike Canaanite pottery. With time, they settled in and adopted many elements of Canaanite civilization, although, as we shall see, they were still perceived as foreigners in King David’s time—and his sworn enemy once his throne was established.
In the light of the Philistines’ apparent Aegean connection, the story of Samson takes on a somewhat different look for modern scholars. Examined in his broad perspective, Samson emerges as the only biblical hero who even remotely resembles the heroes of Greek myths. It is not only that he has the superhuman strength of the Greek Heracles (Hercules), and the impetuousness and fits of anger that go with it. In addition to this, scholars point out, he is truly the only biblical hero to suffer from “woman trouble.”8 Elsewhere in the Bible, what goes on between men and women is basically nobody’s business but theirs. There really are no biblical love stories. Rebekah, the Bible reports, replaced Isaac’s mother in his affections (Gen. 24:67)—not exactly the stuff of high romance. Jacob falls in love with the beautiful Rachel in a single verse (Gen. 29:20). The Hebrew Bible features no protracted courtships, no face that launched a thousand ships, no men whose love for fair maidens leads them to deeds of derring-do or dastardly disgrace9—except Samson. Samson gets entangled with—if the archaeologists are to be believed—Aegean women, not once, in fact, but three times (his Philistine wife from Timna, a prostitute from Philistine Gaza, and Delilah, ally of the Philistines and probably, though not explicitly, a Philistine herself).
And these women are all quite similar—so beautiful, so treacherous! Samson’s first wife coaxes and wheedles and weeps to get Samson to reveal the answer to a riddle—and then betrays the secret to her townsmen (Judg. 14:15–18). That’s exactly what Delilah does too—coaxes and wheedles him almost to death (Judg. 16:16), then turns the information over to the enemy. Such females are not found elsewhere in the Bible—and certainly not in the book of Judges. Scholars also point out that Samson himself does not really fit with the other leaders of the book of Judges. He does not lead anyone; no crisis brings him to prominence, and he does not save any tribe of Israel from its enemies.10 The part of his saga that does sound authentically Israelite—his mother’s infertility and the subsequent visit of an angel (Judges 13)—is completely separate from the story of Samson himself (Judges 14–16); the Deuteronomistic historian has apparently not even gone to the trouble of composing a transitional sentence to bridge the gap between these two. This editorial shrug may offer proof of the hero story’s distinct origins, scholars say. Even Samson’s name sounds fishy, as if it were derived from the word for “sun”—a deity worshiped by other peoples, but not, as far as the Deuteronomistic historian is concerned, Israel.11
Some scholars, therefore, see Samson’s saga as a typical “border story,” born on the Philistine side but then imported to the neighboring Israelite tribe of Dan (Samson’s tribe).12 Some of the details remained the same, scholars say, but the originally Aegean protagonist was now an Israelite superhero who, for some reason, has a fatal attraction to Philistine females. One might look back at the question that Samson’s parents asked when he first announced to them that he wanted to marry a Philistine woman: “Is there not a woman among your kin, or among all our people, that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?” (Judg. 14:3). The real answer, scholars suspect, is that Samson himself—culturally if not genetically—was born from the same stock.
The Book of Ruth
Apart from leaders like Deborah and Gideon and Samson, there is another important figure associated with the period of the book of Judges, Ruth. She is said to have lived “in the time when the chiefs/judges (shofetim) were ruling” (Ruth 1:1); for that reason, the book of Ruth is located in Christian Bibles just after the book of Judges. (In Jewish Bibles it is placed toward the end, after the Torah and the prophetic books.)
The book of Ruth is a pastoral story, set at the time of the spring grain harvest. Its heroes are two women, Naomi and her Moabite daughter-in-law, Ruth. Some years earlier, Naomi had left Bethlehem to settle in Moab with her two sons. Both then took Moabite brides. But when Naomi’s husband and the two sons suddenly die, she is left with no means of support and so resolves to return to Bethlehem. “Stay here with your parents,” she advises her widowed daughters-in-law—after all, what hope can Naomi offer of finding new husbands for these Moabite women in Bethlehem? But Ruth refuses to abandon her mother-in-law: “Wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you stay, I will stay: your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.” So Ruth and Naomi travel back from Moab to Bethlehem together.
When they arrive, Bethlehem is in the midst of the busy harvest—and this ultimately will cause Ruth to meet Boaz, a relative of Naomi’s and one of Bethlehem’s leading citizens. While Boaz is a wealthy householder, Ruth now finds herself at the other end of the social scale—she joins in with the gleaners, paupers who scurry around in back of the harvesters in the hope of picking up a stray stalk or two of grain. Boaz notices her and, having heard of her noble behavior with Naomi, makes sure she gets ample grain. One thing leads to another, and it is not long before she finds herself, at midnight, next to Boaz, who has fallen asleep on the threshing floor. The scene is handled with great delicacy—and indeed, with a touch of humor:
After Boaz had eaten and drunk and was in a merry mood, he went to lie down next to a pile of grain. Then she entered discreetly and, lifting the cover from his feet, lay down. In the middle of the night the man gave a start and jumped back—a woman was lying at his feet! “Who are you?” he said. She answered, “I am your handmaiden Ruth. Spread your cloak over your handmaiden, for you have the right to reclaim me.”55 He said, “May you be blessed by the LORD, my daughter; this latest instance of your loyalty is even better than the first; you have not gone after young men, whether poor or rich. And now, my daughter, do not be afraid, I will do for you all that you ask, for all the assembly of my people know that you are a worthy woman.”
What should have been a scene of great tenderness gets off to a bad start, with the old man suddenly jumping up in panic at finding a young woman in his bed. But Boaz recovers his composure and, in his own, highly elevated (if not pompous) idiom, agrees to take her on as his wife—indeed, he goes on to tell her to stay the rest of the night, which Ruth does (being careful to leave before daylight to avoid a scandal). Then, having taken care of the legal requirements (4:1–12), Boaz and Ruth are duly married. The story ends with a genealogy: Ruth and Boaz have a son, Obed, whose son Jesse is none other than the father of David, king of Israel.
The story of Ruth has been cherished by Christians and Jews alike. For the latter it has been important principally because Ruth is a model of the ideal convert. Her words to Naomi, “Your God will be my God,” were taken as the affirmation of one who has understood the truth of Israel’s faith and embraced it as her own. To this day, it is customary for women converts to Judaism to adopt “Ruth” as their new name.13 The story did pose one exegetical difficulty for ancient interpreters. A certain law in Deuteronomy had been quite specific: “No Ammonite or Moabite shall enter into the congregation of the LORD—not even in the tenth generation, they shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD” (Deut. 23:4). How then could the Moabite Ruth have been accepted as Boaz’s bride? The answer exegetes gave depended on a technicality: the word “Moabite” in this verse is in the masculine form, hence, “A Moabite [is forbidden], but not a Moabitess” (b. Yebamot 69a).
Modern scholarship has not always been kind to the book of Ruth. While the text claims to record events from the time “when the chiefs [or judges] were ruling,” many scholars believe the book was written long, long after the time of the book of Judges. Its unconscious use of Aramaisms and, on the other hand, its deliberate effort (not always successful) to have the characters speak in highly inflated, ancient-sounding language point to a late date, they say—probably to the period after the Babylonian exile. That would also explain why the redemption ceremony that precedes the marriage is described as “the custom in former times in Israel” (4:7)—such wording indicates the narrator’s own chronological remove from the time of the story.
The story itself has a fablelike quality. Naomi’s two sons, who die almost as soon as they are introduced, have emblematic names: Mahlon means something like “Sickling,” and Chilion “Bound-to-Go.” It seems doubtful that either was ever anyone’s real name. As for Ruth’s profession of faith, “Your God will be my God,” this seems to modern scholars less the words of a convert (actually, there is no evidence of the existence of such a concept in biblical times) than a simple statement of Ruth’s desire to return with Naomi to Judah and, in the process, to take on a fully Judahite identity.
Why was the story written? The key, scholars say, seems to be the genealogy at the end. As noted earlier, intermarriage was a very sensitive subject in the postexilic period: Ezra took a strong stand against it, ordering the men of Judah to divorce their non-Judahite wives. Now here comes a story in which an upstanding citizen, Boaz, not only marries a non-Judahite, but a Moabite—the sort of marriage partner explicitly forbidden by Deut. 23:4. Not only did such a marriage take place, the story affirms, but Ruth turns out to be none other than the great-grandmother of David, founder of the royal dynasty and, hence, possessor of the bluest blood of all of Israel’s bluebloods! To assert such a thing in postexilic Judah would have been as shocking as saying today that a member of Britain’s royal family actually has a goodly portion of Pakistani or Indian (or Jewish) blood in his or her veins. Seen in this light, the polemical purpose of the story would appear unmistakable: mixed marriages, it says, are perfectly acceptable. No wonder, scholars assert, that the author went to the trouble of trying to get his characters to speak in archaic-sounding Hebrew and having them greet each other with such pious exchanges as “The LORD be with you,” followed by “May the LORD bless you” (2:4). It was crucial to give readers the impression that all this took place long, long ago (thus “grandfathering” intermarriage to the time of David) and among people whose devotion to God was beyond question.
The biblical account of the period of the Judges contains some striking female figures, but considered together, they present a conflicting picture of women’s lives.14 On the one hand are the portraits of Deborah and Jael, which suggest that women may have played an active leadership role in ancient Israel—these two, in any case, are strong, take-charge heroes. Ruth and Naomi are closer to traditional women’s roles; indeed, the way in which they maneuver Boaz comes close to suggesting some of the usual clichés about female guile; but in the end we are made to feel that they are quite admirable people, and the attention lavished on their thoughts and feelings in the narrative bespeaks an evident sympathy and respect for them as women. On the other hand, there is Delilah, a temptress straight out of Hollywood B-movies, who nags and wheedles and lies unashamedly until she finally succeeds in betraying her man. Finally, there are female victims. The anonymous daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite ends up being sacrificed like a barnyard animal because of a rash vow that her father had made on the eve of an important battle (Judg. 11:29–40). At least Jephthah expresses some regret, tearing his clothes because “I cannot take back my vow” (11:35), but the text hardly censures him for having brought about his daughter’s demise. Wasn’t her death itself important? And as will be seen presently, the book of Judges concludes with the story of a brutal rape, in which the most horrifying element is that the narrative does not even afford the victim a voice: she says not one word. She seems to be more of a prop, or a casus belli, than a real person. So what were women in biblical times—powerful leaders; or men’s equal but quite opposite halves; or perfidious temptresses, morally and in all other ways men’s inferiors; or simply less important than men, often the victims, sometimes mourned, sometimes virtual nonentities?
These questions became particularly important with the rise of feminism in the latter part of the twentieth century.15 Biblical scholars began to reexamine some of the most basic issues connected with women, as well as the effect that Scripture may have played in determining women’s social roles in Western society. Many feminist scholars highlighted the inferior status of women in biblical laws: most obviously, women were given to men in marriage in exchange for a bride price; they did not normally inherit property or manage their own affairs (for the daughters of Zelophehad, see Num. 27:8–11; 36:1–11); their vows to God could be annulled by their husbands or fathers (Num. 30:1–15). Women could not serve as priests; only men were required to carry out the pilgrimages associated with the three festivals (Exod. 23:17; 34:23; Deut. 16:16). These and similar practices certainly bespeak a fundamental presumption of inequality, one that carried over into later times.16
Feminists also pointed to the extraordinary number of anonymous female figures as symptomatic. We know the names of Noah and Lot and Manoah, but not those of their wives (although the wives of the latter two certainly played important roles).17 The story of the rape of Dinah goes on in great detail about the revenge exacted by her brothers, but of Dinah’s fate we hear not a word. Such omissions have seemed to many scholars to betray an obvious undervaluing of women that is woven into the very fabric of biblical narrative. Indeed, that supernal moment of divine revelation at Mount Sinai is preceded by Moses’ blunt instructions: “And he [Moses] said to the people, ‘Prepare for the third day [when God will appear to you]: do not go near a woman’” (Exod. 19:15). Certainly, “Let men and women stay separated for three days” (apparently, for reasons of ritual purity) might have had a more even-handed sound, but “And he said to the people” grated as much on feminist ears: don’t you mean half the people?18 And what about poor Eve, to whom God says, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you”? Did not this officialize women’s inferiority sub specie aeternitatis, giving it nothing less than God’s own seal of approval?
Considering such matters, many feminist critics have responded by denouncing what they see as the Bible’s dyed-in-the-wool sexism, unremitting from beginning to end.19 Indeed, some have gone so far as to suggest that biblical monotheism is itself a form of sexism on high, in that it essentially replaced the earlier constellation of gods and goddesses with a single, all-powerful, and unmistakably masculine deity—one who, whatever the extrabiblical evidence, is presented in the Bible as not even having a divine consort beside Him.20 The society out of which such a view of things could have emerged, such scholars say, must have been one that, by nature, relegated women to second-class status, a hypothesis only confirmed by biblical laws and biblical narrative. But they point out that things may not have always been thus. Going back as far as the Old Stone Age (30,000 BCE!), ample evidence has been found for the worship of a Great Mother goddess, whose naked, big-breasted, and broad-hipped representations have turned up at numerous sites in the ancient Near East. In Canaan in particular, archaeologists have found many statuettes from the Middle Bronze Age IIB (ca. 1800–1550 BCE) of a
Naked Goddess, represented as Mistress of the Plants . . . The goddess also appeared as Mistress of the Animals. Goddesses are especially dominant. Their physical gender characteristics are often given special emphasis.21
The prominence of such a deity in the religious sphere has suggested to some scholars a parallel female prominence in everyday life; women, they argue, must have once exercised a highly diverse and altogether “primary” role in the economic and physical survival of primitive, agricultural villages in ancient Palestine.22
Why did things ever change? Perhaps, it is argued, a combination of plagues, wars, and famines in the late Bronze Age caused women’s previously diverse social roles to become focused almost exclusively on childbearing and child rearing; rebuilding the population was a vital concern. Later, this societal focus became ingrained and institutionalized, even after it was no longer so vital.23 Alternatively, the organizational change from a decentralized village economy to a larger-scale national or regional economy “created hierarchical relationships and robbed females of their customary equality and interdependence with men.”24 However it came about, such scholars believe, women’s subordination persisted through the rest of the biblical period and has continued from then into modern times.
If so, then dynamic female leaders like Moses’ sister, Miriam, along with Deborah and Jael and the prophet Hulda, may represent the last gasp of an ancient gender equality, “dynamic remnants” of a time when women were an integral part of the power structure.25 Of course, female dynamism and gender equality would not have disappeared with a snap of the fingers; indeed, some New Testament scholars see the reflection of these trends carrying on into the period of Jesus and the early church, as evidenced in Jesus’ nonpatriarchal relations with Mary Magdalene and other female figures, as well as in ancient synagogue inscriptions and other material finds that attest to the early prominence of women in the religious establishment.26 Gnostic Christianity notably celebrated the female. But such instances of gender equality were later reversed by the benighted forces of patriarchy, which also sought to destroy any traces of it in the church’s canonical literature.
This is a multifaceted and convoluted topic, certainly not one that can be discussed meaningfully in a few paragraphs. It should be stated, however, that, precisely because of feminism’s centrality in the latter part of the twentieth century, biblical scholars have sometimes tended to the extremes of apologetics or denunciation. Often, neither seems appropriate. For example, there seems little likelihood that the biblical laws reflecting women’s socially inferior status were a relatively new, or even particularly Israelite, development: as we have seen, they are paralleled by Mesopotamian legal codes going back to the third millennium BCE. The social roles played by women in biblical times are altogether comparable to those found in many traditional societies all across the globe; to claim that they came about by some social cataclysm unique to biblical Israel is wishful thinking. Many societies have worshiped a Great Mother goddess; it seems risky to jump from this religious way of conceptualizing fertility to any conclusions about social organization or gender-determined roles. As for the God of Israel’s masculinity, a number of feminist scholars have pointed to biblical passages in which God is portrayed in decidedly feminine terms. One passage entertains the hypothesis that God might have “given birth” to Israel (Num. 11:12); others make Him metaphorically Israel’s mother:
Could a woman forget her own baby? Could she disown the child of her womb?
Even if she could, I will not forget you . . .
As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you;
you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.
God may often be presented in masculine terms, but passages such as these seem to imply that such an assignment of gender characteristics sometimes has a highly metaphorical quality, one that can, therefore, be contradicted by metaphors from the opposite gender.
It is true that Deborah displays uncommon courage in leading the forces of Barak against Sisera; she is a hero. Yet the same biblical text that presents her as such has her remark to Barak, “There will be no glory for you in the course that you are following, since now the LORD will be handing over Sisera to a woman” (Judg. 4:8). Apparently, everyone knew that being defeated or killed by a woman was an ignominious death.27 The terms in which Jael is praised, “most blessed of women in tents,”56 are revealing; in ordinary village life, women rarely strayed far from home unaccompanied. The proud boast of a certain Cilician king of the eighth century BCE was that “in my days, a woman might go alone [in ‘dangerous’ places] with her spindles, thanks to Baal and the gods,” that is, she could actually walk around anywhere in broad daylight unescorted without having to worry about being raped or kidnapped or killed.28 The perils facing a lone woman outside her village are attested not only in Cilicia but in biblical Israel. According to biblical law, if a woman claimed to have been raped within the confines of her town, both she and the rapist were to be killed, because if she had in fact “cried out” at any point, surely someone in that densely inhabited space would have heard her. But if, on the contrary, she claimed that the rape took place beyond the confines of the village, “in the field,” then the man alone was to be killed (Deut. 22:23–24). Quite simply, outside the village was a dangerous place for women.
A number of biblical narratives seem to highlight this vulnerability of women—“texts of terror” they are called by the pioneering feminist scholar Phyllis Trible. The biblical accounts of Abraham’s expulsion of Hagar, Amnon’s rape of Tamar, the gang rape at Gibeah, and Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter all turn on the relative helplessness of females in biblical society. What is one to learn from these sad episodes? Trible writes:
Misogyny belongs to every age, including our own. Violence and vengeance are not just characteristics of a distant, pre-Christian past; they infect the community of the elect to this day. Woman as object is still captured, betrayed, raped, tortured, murdered, dismembered, and scattered. To take to heart this ancient story, then, is to confess its present reality . . . Beyond confession, we must take counsel to say, “Never again.” Yet this counsel is itself ineffectual unless we direct our hearts to that most uncompromising of all biblical commands, speaking the words not to others but to ourselves: Repent. Repent.29
She is right, of course, and few readers familiar with the day-to-day reality of violence against women can remain unmoved by her words. Yet this passage, and indeed much of feminist scholarship of the Bible, seems to me noteworthy for an entirely unrelated reason. One can hear in it loud and clear the same assumptions first adopted by the Bible’s ancient interpreters. That is: the Bible is addressed to us today; it contains lessons for us to apply in our own lives (“Misogyny belongs to every age, including our own”). In regard to other parts of the Bible, modern scholars—and Trible is certainly that—are generally rather skeptical about such a stance (save perhaps within the creative context of a Sunday sermon). Truthfully, what “lessons” could the etiological tales of Cain and Abel or Jacob and Esau hold for such scholars? Indeed, what sense do these narratives make outside of their original historical context? Isn’t that why so much of modern scholarship is devoted to reconstructing the historical reality of biblical Israel, the better to understand the original meaning of this or that biblical law or narrative or prophetic speech—before people started reading them on the basis of the Four Assumptions? Yet this stance is not maintained with utter consistency: nowadays certain elements in the Bible—particularly things having to do with woman’s unequal legal or social status, or violence against women—cannot be distanced the way other things can, with a “That was then, this is now.” They must, in one way or another, be presented as containing a message (positive or negative) for us today, hence: “Repent. Repent.” (Surely no modern scholar would claim that such is the original meaning of these narratives!)
Seen in this light, a good bit of feminist biblical scholarship does not appear to be very different from the activity of the Bible’s ancient interpreters. In both cases, the aim is to get the biblical text to contain a lesson for us, and that lesson must fit with the interpreter’s own beliefs and practices. Often, the only way to accomplish this is by claiming that, although the text seems to be saying X (women were of unequal status, exploited and even abused; that’s just the way it was, no value judgment intended), what it really means is Y (Repent. Repent). Only in such a way can the bumps in Scripture be smoothed away, allowing it to continue to be, at least in some sense, a book with a message for today.
“In the Mountains, There You Feel Free”
The oft-repeated theme of the book of Judges is that “there was no king in Israel” (Judg. 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25). This was, from that book’s standpoint, unequivocally a bad thing: the absence of a king meant that there was no social order, and people could just go around doing whatever they saw fit. For modern scholars, this assertion betrays a certain viewpoint, that of the Deuteronomistic historian. There ought to have been a king in Israel, this author believed; after all, there was one at the time that he wrote, and he must have thought that kingship was the ideal form of governance, the form that God eventually designated for Israel for all times (2 Sam. 7:13). In fact, scholars believe that such thoughts are what led the Deuteronomistic historian to compile the stories of the various judges in this book and present them in sequence: they provided at least something close to kingship.30 So, scouring various oral traditions and, perhaps, some written records, this historian came up with a series of ad hoc leaders, a broken chain of inspired men and women who could at least be said to have provided some sort of divinely chosen leadership now and again. But even the picture of this broken chain, most scholars say, is a distortion. The reality is that there was no king in Israel because there was no Israel; in fact, at an early enough period, there was not even any recognition among the disparate tribes that they might someday come together to form a unified nation.
Part of the reason for this has to do with the topography of the land of Israel. According to archaeologists, what was later to become the distinct “Israel group” in Canaan is first attested in little, undefended settlements on the mountaintops of the central highlands. There is a reason why they were undefended: conquerors are generally not interested in mountaintop settlements. In terms of real estate, mountaintops are not nearly as valuable as the fruited plain below. On the fruited plain, grain can be grown in broad, swaying fields; a little brook or mighty stream, fed with water that flows down from the mountains, provides sustenance for the crops as well as drinking water for animals and people. To capture that land, with its relatively dense population and its other riches, is to win a prize. By contrast, the sloping, rocky terrain of the mountains is not particularly easy to farm and is not thickly settled. Even when—as happened in this period in Canaan—the technology of terraced farming is invented, it is no economic match for the agricultural potential of the land below. The fruited plain thrives; the mountaintop survives.
If mountaintops are poorer, they are also more difficult to subdue. Any conqueror will have, quite literally, an uphill battle if he tries to take possession of a mountain; the mountain dwellers will have the advantage of shooting down on the attackers, whether with rifles or bow and arrow or spears or simply rocks. If the conqueror persists and does get to the top, slaughtering everyone he encounters, what will he have accomplished? He is now the proud owner of some very second-rate real estate. (The only thing a high perch can offer him—and this is true of only some mountaintops—is strategic domination of a highway or other sensitive point below.) So, as a rule, the conqueror leaves the mountain dwellers alone. This is especially true when a sizeable group of mountains is involved. If he and his troops could conquer the first and then somehow fly from that mountaintop to the next, then they might be able to subdue the whole range in one movement; but they cannot. All they can do is leave some men on the first conquered mountain to secure it, and then walk all the way down again and start up the next mountain. Even marching through a mountain range to the other side is a potentially dangerous maneuver, since the mountain dwellers may come swooping down at any time.
It is for all these reasons that conquerors notoriously leave mountain people alone. If you hold a relief map of the world in your hands, chances are that one or another of the little elevated bumps your fingers touch will be found to be the home of some doughty little mountain people utterly disconnected from the valley dwellers below—and often the place will prove to be one of the world’s “trouble spots.” In the Pyrenees (between Spain and France), for example, are the Basques, who speak a language totally unrelated to any other known language in the world. This fact alone should say something about the extent of their involvement with the people down below! Where they came from no one knows, but once settled in those mountains, they pursued a fiercely independent course: conquerors came and went (Visigoths, Romans, Moors, and Christians), the Basques remained unchanged. Even today, many of them refuse to accept Spanish rule—despite the enormous disparity in force between themselves and the Spanish militia. The result has often been violence on a major scale. The next big mountain range eastward, the Alps, is not a trouble spot, but rather one enormous modus vivendi: this cluster of mountains is home to the Swiss, one nation with four official languages and many different, rather doggedly self-governing cantons. The unity of Switzerland is, to put it kindly, more formal than actual. Equally important for our point, however, is Switzerland’s lack of integration with the valley nations around it. As of this writing, this mountain stronghold has not displayed the slightest interest in joining the European Union, to which belong all of its neighbors in any direction; while everywhere around it the euro is legal tender, the Swiss franc has so far turned up its nose to this convenient means of exchange and continued to go it alone. This is altogether mountain people behavior. (It may also be no accident that both of the mountain ranges mentioned, the Pyrenees and the Alps, are today home to two notorious tax havens, Andorra and Liechtenstein respectively.) Farther east are the Balkans, where different mountain peoples have been fighting one another since time immemorial; the people in the fruited plain have been by and large unsuccessful at imposing any long-term central government on them. In fact, there are so many different little groups up there that a witty French chef of the eighteenth century began calling his new salad, composed of lots of different types of chopped-up tidbits, a “Macedonia” of fruits or vegetables (macédoine de fruits/légumes). Of course, the violence that regularly flares up among those fiercely independent mountain people and their neighbors can be sickeningly brutal. Taking the long view, however, an unwillingness to compromise, or even sometimes to cooperate, seems simply to be part of the mountain heritage. Moving eastward, the mountain Christians in the otherwise Muslim Levant, the Kurds holed up in the peaks of Kurdistan, the bandit chieftains of highland Afghanistan, and so on and so forth all bear witness to a single mentality. The state motto of New Hampshire, “Live free or die,” would be more striking if it belonged to Texas or Nebraska; amid the snowy peaks of northern New England, it has a somewhat inevitable quality (“Sure—who cares?”).
The central highlands of the land of Israel are not as high as any of these other mountain ranges, but they are high enough, scholars theorize, to have led to a somewhat comparable state of fierce autonomy in the twelfth or eleventh century BCE. The people up in the mountains soon grew used to being left alone (that’s why they settled there, according to the various contemporary scenarios outlined earlier); scholars do not imagine that they were particularly enthusiastic about any grand reamalgamation of themselves with the valley dwellers, or even with other mountaintop tribes. True, they had some things in common with one or both groups (language, culture—and perhaps religion); still, was that any reason to make common cause with them and voluntarily submit to the rule of a single king? Kings only took away your wealth in taxes and your children in the military draft or in forced work brigades. Indeed, elsewhere in the ancient Near East, kings were often all-powerful despots. The Egyptian kings were sometimes proclaimed to be incarnations of this or that god; they could do with their subjects whatever they wished.31 Mesopotamian kings, while not called gods themselves, ruled by the gods’ decree; who dare oppose them? In such an atmosphere, kingship was viewed with deep suspicion. Jotham’s fable (Judg. 9:7–15)—which tells how the trees seek to name a king and end up with a thornbush as their monarch—captures the mountaintop spirit: only worthless, low, power-hungry scoundrels are interested in ruling.32
On the other hand, there were times when united action seemed warranted. Even if no conquistador sought to subdue the mountain people, plenty of others seemed bent on taking whatever they could steal; the lower elevations were particularly vulnerable. In His anger against the people during this period, God “gave them over to plunderers who plundered them” (Judg. 2:14). Gideon, it will be recalled, was from the tribe of Manasseh; he was hiding wheat in his winepress when the angel appeared to him. Midianites, Moabites, Ammonites, and Canaanites seem to have taken turns oppressing God’s people in the book of Judges (see especially Judg. 6:2–5). Although the battle fought by Barak against Sisera ended in victory, Deborah’s song berates those tribes that did not answer the call to arms:
Among the clans of Reuben, there were great searchings of heart.
Why did you tarry among the sheepfolds, to hear the piping for the flocks?
Among the clans of Reuben, there were great searchings of heart.
Gilead stayed beyond the Jordan; and Dan, why did he abide with the ships?
Asher sat still at the coast of the sea, settling down by his landings . . .
Curse Meroz, says the angel of the LORD, curse bitterly its inhabitants,
Because they did not come to the aid of the LORD, to the aid of the LORD against the mighty.
Just as striking as the disunity reflected in this passage is its failure even to mention the southern tribes of Simeon and Judah: apparently, they were not yet even potential allies of the northern tribes!
Nor was the problem limited to military disunity. Even in those fractious times, the absence of any central rule had an impact on everyday life. Henri Frankfort may have exaggerated somewhat in saying that “the ancient Near East considered kingship the very basis of civilization. Only savages could live without a king.”33 Still, even in the mountains, the absence of some commonly agreed, and enforced, code of laws meant that civil order ended at one’s own village gate. Beyond the domain of a person’s immediate kin lay a frightening no-man’s-land. Perhaps the most chilling story in the book of Judges is that of a certain Levite and his concubine. Traveling late in the afternoon, they enter the Benjaminite town of Gibeah in search of shelter for the night. After finding the townspeople remarkably inhospitable, the Levite and his concubine are at last taken in by an old man. But the townsmen, in an episode suspiciously reminiscent of Lot and the Sodomites (Genesis 19), surround the house and demand that the old man surrender his guest “so that we may have intercourse with him” (Judg. 19:22). The host tries to calm the crowd, but they do not listen until the Levite traveler himself offers them his own concubine:
They wantonly raped her and abused her all through the night until the morning. And as the dawn began to break, they let her go. As morning appeared, the woman came and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her master was, until it was light. In the morning her master got up, opened the doors of the house, and when he went out to go on his way, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold. “Get up,” he said to her, “we are going.” But there was no answer. Then he put her on the donkey; and the man set out for his home. When he had entered his house, he took a knife and, grasping his concubine, he cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel. Then he commanded the men whom he sent, saying, “Thus shall you say to all the Israelites, ‘Has such a thing ever happened since the day that the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt until this day? Consider it, take counsel, and speak out.’”
The callousness of the narrative is clearly intentional, the better to underscore its message. These are the kind of things that happen when there is no agreed minimum of civility; this is what happens when there is no king.
“The Lord Is King”
Some scholars suggest that such domestic disorder, along with military disunity, created the real-life situation that led to the fiercely independent tribes’ adoption of the God YHWH as their “king.”34 He would call them to battle when needed, and He would promulgate a minimal set of laws that would essentially extend kinship obligations to a much broader group; that would keep people in line.
In the biblical account of what happened at Mount Sinai (Exodus 20), God approaches Israel as a great suzerain or emperor, proposing to take Israel on as His “special people” if they keep the conditions of His covenant. The first of those conditions is that they have “no other god before [or beside] Me.”35 From a theological standpoint, such exclusive devotion to one deity while recognizing the efficacy of other gods—monolatry, as this is called—is rather odd. If other gods exist and really do make things happen—the rain, the harvest, reproductive fertility, and so forth—why should Israel be told to (as it were) put all their eggs in one divine basket?36 Why, for that matter, even conceive of God as some ancient Near Eastern potentate, presenting His covenant stipulations in a form altogether reminiscent of treaties between human suzerains and the vassal states?
The answer may be: this was the only kind of king that the disparate tribes of Israel could put up with at this point. As Gideon is represented as saying: “I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the LORD will rule over you” (Judg. 8:23). Any ordinary king might actually interfere in the internal affairs of the tribes, supplanting such system of rules and decision making as they had, taxing their material wealth and their manpower; soon, there would be no stopping him. A divine king, one who came to them like a victorious suzerain, was a different matter. Even in those ancient days, proclaiming Him as king might best be understood as establishing a loosely federalist, almost libertarian form of government: “True, we are now all united under one divine ruler, and this binds us together and obligates us, but only in certain minimal ways.” Under such a king, tribal rule could remain very much as before. It may therefore be significant that, in keeping with this theory, a certain verse toward the end of the Pentateuch (regarded by scholars as quite ancient) implies that God became Israel’s king at Sinai as a result of a collective decision of the existing tribal leadership: “There [thus] came to be a [divine] king in Jeshurun [Israel], when the heads of people gathered together, all the chiefs37 of Israel” (Deut. 33:5).
If, in practical terms, a divine king’s powers were somewhat limited, what could He do? Scholars have long noted that, in what they believe to be the most ancient stratum of biblical texts, God is consistently presented as a divine warrior:
The LORD is a warrior, the LORD is His name!
He has thrown Pharaoh’s chariots and army into the deep; the best of his troops drowned in the Red Sea . . .
Your right hand, O LORD, so glorious in power, Your right hand, O LORD, shatters the enemy.
There is none like the God of Jeshurun, riding the heavens to save you, and who triumphs on high.
LORD, when You went out from Seir, when You marched from the fields of Edom,
The earth trembled, and even the heavens poured forth, yes, the clouds poured out water . . .
The stars fought from heaven, from their courses they fought against Sisera . . .
Curse Meroz, says the angel of the LORD, curse bitterly its inhabitants,
Because they did not come to the aid of the LORD, to the aid of the LORD against the mighty.
When You drive Your horses, Your chariots to victory,
You wield Your naked bow . . .
Sun and moon stand still on high as Your arrows fly by in a flash, in the brightness of Your lightning spears.
You march across earth in anger, in fury You crush the nations;
You have gone out to save Your people, to save Your anointed one.
O God, when You went at the head of Your army,38 when You marched through the desert,
the earth trembled, the heavens dripped rain,
for fear of39 the One from Sinai, by God, the God of Israel.
It may be no accident, scholars say, that God is depicted as a warrior in these ancient texts.40 This was His nature as a deity, and it was thus primarily in military matters that His kingship, such as it was, expressed itself. In the book of Judges, as we have seen, the function of divinely chosen leaders is to lead in battle (Judg. 3:28–30; 4:10; 5:15; 7:19–23); they constitute the first step down in the chain of command from the divine warrior-king Himself. For the same reason, more than once we glimpse these leaders announcing, prophetlike, that God has determined that this is the moment to attack (Judg. 3:28; 4:14; 5:12;41 7:15; 11:33; 20:28): the General has passed the order down to His subordinates. As God’s spokesman, the prophetess Deborah also excoriates those who failed to join the ranks—that is, to answer the divine call to arms. All this has suggested to scholars that, at this early stage, God’s principal function was to fight for Israel on high while summoning His subjects to fight on earth below. Those who did not join in were deemed to have rebelled against the divine king’s orders. (It is also worth recalling that the Pentateuch itself cites an ancient source called the “Book of the Wars of the LORD” [Num. 21:14]. The title itself may say much about this God’s early function.)
The divine suzerain of Exodus 19–20 is, scholars say, quite consciously modeled on a human suzerain: a conqueror and holder of territories. As such He will have the duty, and the authority, to muster troops to protect His vassal—that is what suzerains do, after all. But human suzerains also have other covenant stipulations, and what is interesting in the case of the Sinai covenant is precisely that the rest of its stipulations are so different from those of ordinary suzerains. Which human suzerain ever cared if his far-off vassals committed adultery or stole or swore false oaths? This divine suzerain, however, promulgated just such a set of covenant stipulations: His demands turn out to be a supremely simple set of ten laws that all His subjects must agree to obey so that, even in the wilds of the Canaanite highlands, a certain minimum of human decency could be enforced. In other words, some scholars believe, the proclamation of this God as king, and the laws that went with His kingship, were precisely what living conditions in premonarchic Canaan called for. The scene may be set at Mount Sinai, some scholars say, but the real acceptance of God’s kingship took place in the Canaanite highlands.
If this (admittedly somewhat speculative) reconstruction is correct, then what can be said about the true chronology of the hero stories in the book of Judges? Some scholars still speak of the “period of the judges” as if it were a definable band of time, sandwiched in between the time of the exodus on the one hand and the emergence of the Israelite nation on the other. But to others—especially those who see the emergence of Israel as a principally inter-Canaanite phenomenon—no such specific period ever really existed. Instead, they say, what underlies the stories in the book of Judges is a fluid and fractious political situation involving many different groups, mountain dwellers and valley dwellers, Egyptian overlords who sometimes cared and sometimes did not, Canaanite city-states plus marauding Midianites, Moabites, Hivites, Benjaminites,42 and other discrete groups, all moving in and out of ever-shifting coalitions and political alignments. This situation may have gone on for centuries; no one involved even thought of independent nationhood as a possibility. Then, at first slowly but soon with increasing strength, the idea of some sort of loose federation or common bond began to emerge. It is precisely in such a context that Deborah’s words of expostulation to the nonparticipating tribes could make sense. Some vague feeling of obligation existed: they really ought to have done their share, but they did not. At the same time, no mechanism seems to have been in place to force these tribes’ cooperation or to punish their indifference; no group, except the somewhat murky “Meroz,” is actually cursed for nonparticipation.43 Indeed, the roster of tribes does not even correspond to the later, fairly standardized list of Israel’s twelve.
Perhaps, some scholars say, sometime not much before the composition of this song—under circumstances to be explored next—a new God appeared in Canaan, a deity previously unknown, whose principal association was with warfare. At first some, and then more and more, of the various groups in that land adopted Him as their warrior-king, the sovereign under whose rule they were prepared to come together and whose simple rules of conduct all were prepared to accept.