No people in history were more in need of heroes than the Hebrews. Cast in their role, by events, as “strangers and sojourners,” they came originally in the time of Abraham, deep in the second millennium BC, from what is now southern Iraq, and entered recorded history between 1450 and 1250 BC. They were a slave people, without country and possessions, with little art or technology and no skill or record in warfare. They were subjects of the Egyptians, the greatest power of the Bronze Age, and woefully oppressed. They were not numerous either. It is one of the miracles of the human story that this tiny people, instead of disappearing into oblivion through the yawning cracks of history, as did thousands of other tribal groups—and even scores of famous nations—should still be in self-conscious existence today, an important piece on the great world chessboard, recognizably the same entity as nearly four thousand years ago.
Yet history has no miracles: only causes and consequences. And the reasons the Hebrews survived are that they had a god, a sole god, whom they worshipped with unique intensity and exclusiveness; and they had their own language, first oral then written, in which they recorded his favor and protection. They were weak in the physics of survival, strong in the metaphysics. They were first henotheists, with their sole god, Yahweh, as the divine ruler of their tribal confederation (what the Greeks called an amphictyony); then, during their Egyptian sojourn, they elevated their religious system into monotheism, Yahweh becoming sole god of the universe and all its peoples. This belief, which made them unique in antiquity, emerged under the first of their heroes, Moses, who took them out of Egyptian slavery and into independent nationhood. He gave them, in writing, their first code of divine laws, and led them, through forty years of tribulations and testing, to the edge of the land, “flowing with milk and honey,” which Yahweh had promised them. Moses made full use too of their second great gift, their language. Hebrew was not only sinewy, expressive and resourceful, but peculiarly adapted to the recording of history. It was Moses, according to rabbinical tradition, who set down the first five books of the Hebrew national epic, the Pentateuch, the opening section of what became known as the Bible, to Christians the Old Testament. On this foundation the Bible accumulated over the generations, as the canonical record of Hebrew history, in time, “the most famous book in the history of the world,” “the book,” as its name implies. Moses and his doings continued to dominate it. He is mentioned 767 times in the Old Testament and 79 times even in the New Testament, the Christian title deeds. No other hero of antiquity, at any other period or from any other region, has this degree of heroic celebrity.
Moses having created, as it were, the matrix of heroism, Hebrew records arranged the continuing story of the people and heroic figures. The Book of Joshua, conservatively dated from between 1375
BC and 1045 BC, tells how the Promised Land was conquered and settled. According to the Talmud, the Jewish record of oral teaching compiled from 400 BC to AD 500, Joshua, the Hebrew general, as well as being the hero of the book, was also its author, except for a coda recording his burial. The next biblical book, Judges, is the key work in Hebrew heroism, however. It was written late in the first millennium BC, after Joshua, and supposedly, according to the Talmud, by the Prophet Samuel. By rights it should be called the Book of Heroes, for most of its celebrities were not judges but fighters, who enabled the Hebrews, or Israelites as they began to be called, to survive as a recognizable, independent people during extremely difficult times.
The last centuries of the second millennium BC, the chronological junction between the Bronze Age and the new Iron Age, witnessed one of the greatest convulsions of antiquity, involving the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and its shores and much of western Asia—huge conquests and tribal movements, invasions and dispossessions, massacres and genocides and great minglings and fusions of peoples. The destruction of Mycenaean Greece and Crete, the events reflected in Homer’s later (eighth century BC) recounting of the Trojan War, the near-disintegration of the New Kingdom of Egypt and the movement of the Hebrews themselves into Palestine are all part of this reshuffling of the cards of history, the biggest upheaval until Alexander the Great broke up the Persian Empire and replaced it with the Hellenistic world.
The literary and archeological evidence of these massive but obscure events is fragmentary, and the picture historians have been able to build up is confused, and likely to remain so. No wonder, then, that the Book of Judges, recording part of the turmoil in a small area of the scene of convulsion, from a Hebrew viewpoint, is a confused and confusing document also. It claims to record the deeds of a dozen “judges,” or tribal heroes, called Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, Deborah (and her general Barak), Gideon, Tola, Jain, Jephthah, Ibzan, Elon, Abdon and Samson. But, though they are presented in chronological order, it may be that some were contemporaries. Their importance varied greatly. Several were obscure leaders of a single tribe. Others were national figures. The enemy too varied. At the beginning of the book, the enemy seems to be the original inhabitants of the Promised Land, the Canaanites. But no scholar has been able to settle the origins of this term, and it may be that it signified no more than the collective expression for a mass of small kingdoms and amphictyonies, living in Syria and Palestine: the Jebusites and Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, Arradites, Zemarites, Hamathites and others. The term may mean “lowly” or “low born,” and be abusive. One of the earliest references to Canaanites occurs in a clay tablet from the administrative records of the city of Mari (fifteenth century BC), which refers to “thieves and Canaanites.” The Hebrews regarded them with horror, for the Canaanite group of peoples had a superior artistic culture, and superficially attractive religious cults, and Hebrews were tempted to assimilate with them and intermarry. It was the Hebrew religious instinct to maintain a strict code of racial apartheid, which made dangerous contacts as difficult as possible. The best way to uphold this doctrine was to pursue continuous warfare, in pursuit of land, booty and slaves. The Judges personified this policy.
However, the various Canaanite petty kingdoms, even including the more technically advanced ones which eventually coalesced into the people we know as the Phoenicians (producers of the alphabet we still use today), were not the only or even the principal enemy of the Hebrews. In the Old Testament, “enemies” are mentioned 919 times. Of these, 423 mentions, or 46 percent, refer to the Philistines. These formed one of the great, magisterial lost peoples of antiquity, whose name alone survives in the term Palestine, still used for the Promised Land of the Hebrews. This word was Egyptian, “Pelest,” or as the Egyptians put it, having no written vowels, “Plst.” The Egyptians knew them as the “Sea Peoples,” invaders who arrived from the north in ships. They came close to destroying the Pharaonic kingdom of Egypt and they evoked well-grounded terror wherever they penetrated. They were tremendous warriors by sea and land, rather like the Normans in the history of early medieval Europe. They overwhelmed the Hittites in Anatolia and destroyed the ancient and heavily fortified seaport of Ugarit in Syria.
They transformed Canaan into Palestine and took and fortified five big towns, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gaza, Gath and Ekron. They were, as we would say, Europeans rather than Asiatics or Africans. They came from Greece and Crete. With the collapse of Aegean civilization in the thirteenth century BC they had become pirates and mercenaries, but they brought with them their iron culture and Aegean-type pottery. We know what they looked like, for the Egyptian low-relief sculptors, with fear and trembling, carved their images on the temple walls of Medinet Habu. They were tall and slender—giants to most Asians—clean-shaven and eagle-eyed. They wore paneled kilts with tassels and their chests were protected by multilayered ribbed linen corselets. Their headgear, distinctive and frightening, were upright circles of reeds or leather straps or horsehair, mounted on a close-fitting cap. Each warrior carried a pair of spears or a long sword, or both. They had three-man iron chariots, each with a driver and two spearmen, and behind their armies, their families followed in oxcarts. Their mastery of hard-metal working made them more than a match for Bronze Age peoples in battle. And in the arts too, for their skills were considerable. The term “Philistine” as a hater of art is a misnomer: the Hebrews had nothing by comparison.
This formidable people moved into the coastal strip, slaughtering the Canaanites and pushing into the interior, confining the Hebrews to the mountains and their foothills. The Hebrews, then, faced a variety of enemies whom they needed to defeat simply to survive, let alone to occupy all the rich land Yahweh had promised them. Their resources, as noted, were metaphysical rather than primarily physical—they had tremendous religious morale springing from their monotheism and their clear code of ethics. But in one respect they tapped a physical resource which most ancient peoples denied themselves: they made full use of the brains and courage of their women. How it came about that so many great peoples, until quite recently, failed to draw upon half their human capital we shall never know. But the Hebrews did not fail—just as well, since they had so little else—and the Bible is the record of their common sense. It is a curious fact that the first written record of a joke—of laughter—occurs in the Book of Genesis, and shows Sarah, Abraham’s wife, in an antimasculine posture, laughing at the solemn all-male consultation between her husband, God and his angels about her approaching pregnancy. God rebukes her for laughing, but she has the last laugh, as well as the first.
This extraordinary episode, so typical of the way in which the Bible, unlike any comparable record of antiquity, continually places women in the forefront of events, sets the tone for the future. Hebrew, or Israelite, society was patriarchal, as indeed were all societies then (and indeed now), but not exclusively so. Women were prized too for their wisdom, tenderness, passion, and at times heroic ruthlessness. This is brought out with great force in the story of Deborah, which is told in Judges chapters 4 and 5. It is told twice over, first in prose, then in verse, and the Hebrew is superb. As with all the stories in Judges the scene is set by Israelite sinfulness—that is, their relaxing of racial apartheid and their mingling with the pagans, including observing their religious and cultural rites, what the Bible calls “doing what was wrong in the eyes of the Lord.”
When this happens Yahweh selects an instrument for the castigation of his people, in this case “Jabez the Canaanite king, who ruled in Hazor.” The account says that Jabez had a general, Sisera, “who lived in Harosheth-of-the-Gentiles,” and that he oppressed the Israelites “for twenty years” (i.e., a long time, though not a very long time, which would have been “forty years”). Sisera was a mercenary, and probably a Philistine or a commander of Philistine mercenaries, who we surmise set himself up as a king in his own right. Sisera, we are told, had “nine hundred chariots of iron” and the Israelites had no mobile armor at all. But they had Deborah, and her wisdom and power of command.
This enchanting woman provides one of the most satisfying biblical portraits. She was the wife of Lappidoth, but he was a nonentity and we hear no more about him. She had many gifts and roles. First she was a prophetess. She was by no means the only woman prophet. We hear also of Miriam (Exodus 15:20), Huldah (2 Kings 22:14) and in New Testament times Anna (Luke 2:36). But Deborah was also a judge, indeed the only one of the judges who is actually described as exercising judicial functions. “It was her custom,” we are told, “to sit beneath the Palm Tree of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephrahim, and the Israelites went up to her for justice.” This arcadian scene recalls Moses as judge, and evidently when this book of the Bible was edited, over two hundred years later, the tree was still in existence, and revered, and known by her name. Her evident repute and prestige as a judge reveals that she was learned, knowing all the regulations later described, not only in the Pentateuch but in Deuteronomy and Numbers, and much case law too. People came to her because her rulings were respected and took effect. When Sisera’s terrifying force of iron chariots threatened the settled land, “the Israelites cried out for help” but they turned to Deborah for advice and decisions. Her ruling was prompt. She could decide, from her wisdom, the nature of the campaign to be fought against Sisera, and the general strategy. But, being a woman (and probably an old one), it was unbecoming for her to direct detailed, tactical operations on the battlefield. For that a professional soldier was needed. “So she sent for Barak, son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali,” and issued to him God’s commands, she acting as prophetic spokeswoman for the Deity: “Go and recruit ten thousand men from Naphtali and Zebulun, and bring them with you to Mount Tabor. I will entice Sisera…to the torrent of Koshon with all his chariots and his horde, and there I will deliver them into your hands.”
General Barak’s willingness to obey Deborah’s summons testifies to her authority, and he accepted her plan moreover. But the reply with which he qualified his submission is still more telling: “If you go with me [into battle], I will go. But if you will not go, neither will I.” That was blunt: her morale-boosting presence on the battlefield was essential to victory, in his view. And he, as battle commander, needed her physical reassurance, and advice on tactics too. So it had been with Moses. She assented with a grim feminist note: “Certainly I will go with you, but this action will bring you no glory, because the Lord will leave Sisera to fall into the hands of a woman.”
So Deborah went with Barak at the head of his ten thousand men. When Sisera heard of Barak’s movement, he took his entire force to the bottom of Mount Tabor. That was exactly what Deborah had hoped for. Torrential rains, pouring down the slopes, had turned the plain below Mount Tabor into a quagmire. She woke the sleeping Barak: “‘Up! This day the Lord gives Sisera into your hands! Already the Lord has gone out to battle before you.’ By this she meant the rain.” So Barak came charging down from Mount Tabor with ten thousand infantry at his back. Sisera’s huge force of chariots became useless in the rapidly forming marsh, sticking in the mud. Their spearmen had to dismount, and were picked off one by one. They tried to flee, but the Israelite foot soldiers pursued them, and killed all.
Sisera too abandoned his bogged-down chariot and “fled on foot.” It is always a poignant moment when the commander of a powerful and triumphant cavalry force miscalculates, sees his squadrons distintegrate and suddenly finds himself alone, without even a horse. Some hours elapsed, and many weary miles. The proud commander, now muddy, frightened and exhausted, came across a group of tents of a tribe he believed friendly to King Jabin. He approached a woman’s tent, for safety, and Jael came out to meet him and said: “Come in here, my lord, come in—do not be afraid.” He went in, and she covered him with a rug. It was, of course, against all etiquette for a man, especially a fugitive, to violate the sanctity of a woman’s tent. And Sisera, in his distress, went on to commit two further breaches of social laws. He asked for refreshment without waiting for an invitation. He said to Jael: “Give me some water to drink—I am thirsty.” So she opened a skin full of milk, gave him a drink, and covered him up again. Thus emboldened, he tried to take charge of the woman. He said to her: “Stand at the tent entrance, and if anybody comes and asks if someone is here, say No.” This was too much. Jael, whose husband was Heber the Kenite (another nonentity), affronted and angered, waited till Sisera was asleep, then “took a tent-peg, picked up a mallet, crept up to him and drove the peg into his skull as he slept. His brains oozed out into the ground, his limbs twitched, and he died.” In due course Barak arrived in pursuit, and Jael went out to him and said, “Come, I will show you the man you are looking for.” Barak went in, found the wretched corpse, and remembered Deborah’s prophecy.
This is a grim but fascinating and convincing story, and we are told it in the Bible not once but twice. Judges chapter 4 tells it in prose, as I have just summarized it. Chapter 5 tells it in verse, which Deborah composed and sang (with Barak providing a base or baritone descant). She thus emphasized a point which all sensible heroes or heroines learn: those who compose for posterity their own account of their deeds, and so get their version in first, are more likely to be remembered with all honor—a lesson made use of by many heroes, as we shall see, from Julius Caesar to Winston Churchill. Deborah sang the earliest version of her victory song on the evening after the battle. Just as she followed Moses’s example as a judge, so her song echoed the chant of exultation he composed after Pharaoh and his host were drowned in the Red Sea (Exodus, chapter 15). On this occasion we are told that Miriam, another prophetess, and Aaron’s sister, “took up her tambourine, and all the women followed her, dancing to the sound of tambourines,” and Miriam sang to them this chorus:
Sing to the Lord, he has risen in triumph,
The horse and the rider hurled in the sea.
But Deborah, after the battle of Mount Tabor, was more than a tambourine girl. She was a successful ruler in war. As she put it:
Deborah’s song is a more sophisticated piece of poetry than Moses’s victory hymn. Much had happened since the days of the exodus, and the Israelites had honed their poetic gifts perhaps by illicit contact with the Canaanites and other more advanced peoples. There is some splendid detail in Deborah’s song, and a pulsating rhythm in the battle scene, recalling the thunder of the chariots—and bitter taunts at the missing Israelite tribes who were not in the battle in their nation’s hour of need. There is also pathos. Deborah tells the tale of Jael and Sisera in more detail than in the prose version and the description of Sisera’s awe-inspiring death is dramatic, with the throb of sickening repetition. But Deborah adds a touching coda, describing the anxiety of Sisera’s mother, worried by his late return, “peering through the lattices,” watching the high road through the windows of his palace, and repeatedly asking her attendant princesses:
Why are his chariots so long in coming?
Why is the thunder of his wheels so delayed?
Deborah, an imaginative and clever woman, puts herself in the place of the tragic mother, and ends her victory paean on a humane note of sympathy for the stricken woman. The true hero always ends a battle by thinking of the slain, including the defeated enemy.
We have, then, this picture of Sisera’s mother straining her eyes through the lattice. That is so characteristic of the Bible, a great book of true history, written as vivid literature, full of character sketches of the mighty and the small, and warm touches of humanity. There is nothing quite like it in the other writings of antiquity, until we come to the Greek drama of the fifth century BC. Homer has not the same intimate power.
Deborah’s heroic epic is essentially about women—herself, Jael and Sisera’s mother—and it left a huge impression on Israelite womenfolk, many of whom could read the Scriptures, some even helping to write them (the Book of Ruth is certainly by a woman). Late in Israelite history, about 300 BC, there appeared a sparklingly written account of an event that had occurred a century before, about the decapitation of an enemy general, Holofernes, by a beautiful and clever Israelite heroine, Judith. Scholars often argue that the Book of Judith, which is in the Apocrypha rather than the canonical Old Testament, is a romantic novel rather than a historical account. There was indeed a general called Holofernes, in the time of Ataxerxes Ochus, who reigned from 359 to 338 BC. But the Book of Judith ascribed to him the wrong nationality, and there are other errors and inconsistencies. But it seems to me more likely that Judith was an actual person, whose deeds struck the Israelites forcibly, since they recalled Deborah and Jael. Judith conflates these two separate war heroines into a single magnificent human being, who is, in addition, rich, wise and ravishingly beautiful. There is exaggeration here, plainly. But perhaps not as much as desiccated biblical text scholars think. The history of the Jews is peopled with remarkable creatures, especially women.
As it stands, the Book of Judith is one of the most beautiful and satisfying of the Scriptures, written in superb Hebrew. It has a feeling almost of voluptuous luxury about it. The ancient Near East has moved on decisively since the time of the Book of Judges. Everything is on a much bigger scale. In place of Sisera’s nine hundred chariots of iron, the enemy king, Nebuchadnezzar, tells his general Holofernes, “take under your command professional trained troops of 120,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry and march out against all the people of the West who have dared to disobey my commands.” There is a tremendous amount of oriental boasting. The king says he will “vent my wrath.” The whole land “will be suffocated by my army.” The “dead will fill the valleys and every stream and river will be choked with corpses.” Holofernes too is a boaster. Having put down all the disobedient peoples except the Israelites, he is warned by Achior of the Ammonites that Israel is a dangerous opponent, protected by a powerful god, and to beware of attacking them. Holofernes laughs him to scorn: “Who are you, Achior—you and your Ammonite mercenaries—to play the prophet and tell us what to do and what not to do? Our King is himself a God who will exert his power and wipe the Israelites off the face of the earth.” He boasts: “Their mountains will be destroyed with blood and their plains filled with their dead.” He then marched his army to the Israelite fortress town of Bethunia, cut off its food and water and prepared to starve it out. “Throughout the town there was deep dejection,” the account continues, and Ozias the magistrate and other elders were denounced angrily by the people for not submitting to Holofernes. They agreed to surrender if God did not rescue them in five days.
At this point Judith sent her maid (evidently a formidable woman in her own right) to summon the elders to her to explain their cowardly conduct. They came. Why was she so powerful, like Deborah, and able to get the leading menfolk to obey her summons? She was rich. Her husband, Menasses, had died of sunstroke “while in the fields gathering the harvest of barley.” He left her all his property, “gold and silver, male and female slaves, livestock and land.” She was pious too. For three years she had lived as a widow, refusing all offers of remarriage, dressing herself in sackcloth, fasting every day except Sabbath eve, and living in a humble shelter erected on the roof of her palace. She was “both beautiful and attractive,” and she had a reputation not only for piety but for wisdom too.
She rebuked the elders for their lack of trust in God, and said she had a plan to deliver the town from Holofernes. But it was secret, and she would not tell them in advance. All they had to do was to open the gates for her and her maid, and let her go to the enemy camp. She then recited a tremendous prayer, imploring God, “the God of the humble, the help of the poor, the supporter of the weak, the protector of the desperate, the deliverer of the hopeless,” to give to her, “widow as I am, the strength to carry through my plan and shatter their guile with a woman’s hand.” She then removed her sackcloth and widow’s weeds, washed, anointed herself with costly scents, did her hair, put on a headband and dressed in her gayest clothes, put on sandals and anklets, bracelets, rings and earrings, “and all her ornaments,” and made herself “attractive enough to catch the eye of any man who might see her.” She told her maid to put up a skin of wine and a flask of oil, and a bag filled with roasted grain, cakes of dried figs and the finest bread.
Then the gates were opened for her, the elders amazed by her startling appearance, and lady and maid, with their goodies, passed out of sight. When she reached the enemy lines, she was promptly arrested and questioned. But she had prayed to God to give her a deceitful tongue (being accustomed, as wife and widow, never to lie), and she told them a persuasive tale, that she was running away from her own people and going to Holofernes with vital military information. They were amazed by her beauty and intrigued by her tale, and she was taken immediately to the general’s tent.
Holofernes was “resting on his bed under a mosquito-net of purple interwoven with gold, emeralds and precious stones.” He received her graciously, captivated by her appearance, and she told him a long, circumstantial tale about how she would lead him and his army to Jerusalem “and I will set up your throne in the heart of the City.” He was delighted: “In the whole wide world there is not a woman to compare with you for beauty of speech or shrewdness of speech.” He took her to his inner tent, “where his silver was laid out,” and ordered dinner. She remained in the camp three days, eating her own kosher food, and on the fourth day Holofernes, deciding the time had come to possess her, ordered a banquet for himself and her alone, without any of his officers and attended only by his personal servants. She, having put all the enemy’s suspicions at rest, and won permission to enter and leave the camp freely, put on her finery and came to the general’s tent. He was “beside himself with desire,” and “shook with passion.” She ate and drank with him, but from her own watered-down provisions. He drank a vast quantity of wine, “more indeed than he had ever drunk on any single day since he was born.” When it grew late, the servants discreetly withdrew, closing the tent from outside: “Judith was left alone in the tent, with Holofernes sprawled on his bed, dead drunk.” She prayed for strength, “went to the bed-rail beside Holofernes’ head, took down his sword and grasped his hair.” She “struck at his neck twice with all her might, and cut off his head.” She “rolled the body off the bed and took the mosquito-net from its posts.” Then she gave the head to her maid, who put it in the food bag. They were let out of the camp, as usual, and made their way back to Bethunia.
The consequence of this daring assassination was a psychological victory. On Judith’s orders, the warriors of the town hung Holofernes’ head from the battlements, and prepared for battle. The captains of the enemy host went to their general’s tent to rouse him for battle, found him dead, his head gone, and the Israelite woman missing. A great shout of horror and dismay went up, panic spread through the camp, and the men began to desert in fear. Then the Israelites issued forth and began to attack, and the entire army was soon in terrified flight. “The looting of the camp went on for thirty days.” They gave Judith Holofernes’ tent, “with all his silver, couches, bowls and furniture,” and she loaded it up on her wagons drawn by mules. Then, having safely stowed the booty, she led a dance of triumph, singing a song which begins
Strike up a song to my God with tambourines,
Sing to the Lord with cymbals.
The poem, which she wrote, tells the tale with a flourish, emphasizing the role of women. She took all her spoils to Jerusalem, purchasing with it sacrifices at the temple, and presenting the net from Holofernes’ bed as a votive offering. Having purified herself, she “returned to Bethunia and lived on her estate.” She refused all her many suitors, gave her maid her liberty, lived to be 105, full of fame and honor, and was buried alongside her husband. The story ends: “No one dared to threaten the Israelites again in Judith’s lifetime, or for a long time after her death.”
The role that women play in the Book of Judges and indeed in Jewish Scriptures as a whole sometimes raises ethical problems in an acute form. Can Jael’s actions be seriously presented as heroic? Can even Judith’s? Jael’s brutal murder of an exhausted fugitive while he was asleep strikes us as odious. Expert biblical commentators mitigate it by explaining how seriously he had broken the hospitality rules, but might not they be nullified by Sisera’s desperate plight? He foolishly believed he was among friends, and she reinforced his self-deception by her guile. She was in no danger from this fugitive so could not plead fear in her defense. It is hard to see her as a heroine at all. Yet Deborah predicted she would have the honor of accomplishing Sisera’s end, and Jael is accorded heroic status in Deborah’s chant of victory. Deborah herself is rightly accorded heroic status, but her implicit approval of Jael’s horrifying act raises questions about her ethics. But then, the time is the second millennium BC, a Hobbesian world where sheer survival is the object of statesmanship, and to be exterminated, or to exterminate in turn, is the routine outcome of battle. Barak, presumably with Deborah’s approval, or perhaps on her express orders, wiped out Sisera’s soldiers: “the whole army was put to the sword and died; not one man was left alive.” Sisera, naturally, was to be killed too. But Jael saved Barak the trouble, and to her was the honor of completing the extermination, and the praise for doing so. As Deborah’s song says,
Blessed of all women be Jael,
Blessed of all women in the tents.
Jael was certainly a heroine to Israelites who read the Scriptures, and it is not to be wondered that the author of Judith made her a compound of Deborah’s authority and wisdom and Jael’s daring. Judith, however, was altogether a more admirable and heroic figure than Jael. True, she was deceitful like Jael, and had to tell a great deal of ingenious and cunning lies over four nerve-wracking days. God gave her the skill to spin her tales and the fortitude to play her part. She knew that one false step would mean a horrible death (after rape) and therefore courage was an essential part of her feat—courage of a high order too, multifaceted, for it had to include both the effrontery of playing the irresistible harlot (and a praying one too) and the decisive physical feat of decapitation. She did this in only two strokes too: this was the customary number for the professional executioner of the Tower of London in Tudor times, and they used an axe, an easier instrument for the purpose (only the specialist at Calais used, like Judith, a sword).
Judith’s exploit appealed powerfully to painters, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, looking for a dramatic incident with which to display their skill in the biblical-historical genre. She was beautiful too, and a virtuous woman of noble blood. So she developed a notable iconographic persona in Christian art. In 1598–1599, the great Caravaggio, whose talents were exactly suited to this theme, did a tremendous Judith Beheading Holofernes, now in the Palazzo Barberini, in Rome. His ultrarealism and theatrical chiaroscuro were deployed to depict the precise moment Judith severed the head from the body and the blood began to spout in jets all over the canvas scene. The Judith theme was taken up by his brilliant pupil, Orazio Gentileschi, and Orazio’s tempestuous daughter, Artemisia, the first woman painter of the age. In 1611 they jointly painted Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes. This is a less sensational effort, after the horrid deed is done, with the maid stuffing the severed head into her bag. Artemisia’s version, now in the Detroit Museum of Fine Art, is full of drama, however, stressing the danger and fear of Judith that they may be discovered—she listens anxiously for a sound of the camp stirring. But the blood is missing. However, in 1613 Artemisia was brutally raped by Agostino Tassi, the painter her father had entrusted to teach her. He was sentenced to eight months in prison, a punishment she felt was outrageously inadequate for his repellent betrayal of trust, and shortly afterward she returned to the subject of Judith. This time she painted the actual beheading. This overpowering work, now in the Uffizi, Florence (there is another version in the Capodimonte, Naples) is much closer to Caravaggio’s effort. But in truth, it is superior, both in the handling of the blood and in the position and musculature of Judith in her fatal stroke. She is sawing the head off, using all her strength, most convincingly. Where Caravaggio’s Judith is awkward, Artemisia’s carries complete conviction. She is confidently enjoying her work. It is as though Artemisia had rehearsed the act repeatedly and discovered exactly how it was done—and imagined she was herself decapitating mercilessly the rapist Tassi.
What the stories of Deborah, Jael and Judith convey, and the iconography confirms, is the element of physical ruthlessness involved in many acts of heroism, especially when they are carried out by women. For these acts of violence are not, and never can be, routine. Their courage has to be, as Lady Macbeth puts it, “screwed up to the sticking pitch,” and once thus heightened, explodes in action of reckless and heedless intensity. Heroism is usually loveless, and when performed by women its element of hate and inhumanity appears particularly savage. The hero, and still more the heroine, must be capable of atrocity.
The prominence of women in the Bible continues to surprise us. It is marked throughout the Book of Judges. Even when women are not performing heroically, they are often the mainsprings of the action. This is particularly true of Samson, the most famous of the Judges, whose story fills chapters 13 to 16 of the narrative. It is his mother, not his father, Manoah, who is determinant in the events surrounding his birth (rather like Mary in the case of Jesus Christ), who dedicates his life to the Nazirite sect and who names him Samson. Some historians have tried to place Samson as the equivalent of the Greek Herakles (the Roman Hercules), a wonder-performing strongman, and entirely mythical. But Samson is in every respect a Jewish hero and wholly rooted in history. Unlike any of the Greek myth figures, he is a real man, who is comic as well as tragic. This Janus-faced dualism of laughter and tears is characteristically Jewish, appearing very early in the scriptural record. Samson is its epitome.
As a Nazirite, Samson must never cut his hair. His life is to be devoted to serving the Lord, and has many other duties and inhibitions. But Samson is a flawed hero. He keeps his vow not to cut his hair, knowing this is the secret of his strength, which he values and exploits ruthlessly. But he disobeys all other laws and customs, and even his service to the Lord is whimsical, spasmodic and often absurd. He has an unbridled lust for women, and women of an exotic kind, temptresses and wayward. He laughs, scorning the Israelite doctrine of apartheid that forbids its men to fancy shiksas, or pagan girls. The first we hear of him as an adult is his abrupt order to his parents to get him a Philistine woman from Timnath as his wife. When they remonstrate he tells his father, “Get her for me, for she pleases me.”
This sets the form of Samson’s entire career: the urgent surrender, the strong passions. In search of the Timnath girl he fancies his way is barred by a lion which he tears to pieces with his bare hands. He later finds a swarm of bees making honey in the lion’s body, and this gives him an idea for a riddle that he puts to the Timnite youths who attend his wedding feast, the prize to be outfits of clothing. His betrothed, under threats that she will be burned alive in her parents’ house, coaxes the solution to the riddle out of him, tells it to her kinsfolk, and so he loses his bet. Furious, he slays thirty men in Ashkelon, and takes their clothes to pay the forfeit. Already with a reputation as a troublesome fellow, with a taste for tricks and black humor, Samson is denied his wife, who is given to another. He is offered her sister instead (“better than she”) but rejects such solace: instead he declares a personal war on the entire Philistine people. He captures wild animals, ties torches to their tails and sets them loose in the standing corn, destroying the Philistine vineyards and olive groves too. In retaliation they burn alive his wife and her family. So he “smote them hip and thigh with great slaughter,” and then went down to live in a cave in the Rock of Etam.
At this point, Samson’s personal saga of lust and revenge gets swept up into the general Israelite resistance to their Philistine masters. Fearful of punishment, the Israelites hand him over to the Philistines, but he breaks the ropes that bind him and, using the jawbone of an ass, slaughters a thousand Philistine men. At this point he, like Moses and Deborah before him, breaks into song and sings the “Jawbone Victory Hymn.” He is then thirsty, and tells the Lord in his characteristic intemperate manner to give him water: “Must I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” So the Lord splits open a rock and creates for him the Spring of Lehi.
Samson is now a hero, or judge, lasting for twenty years in the anti-Philistine struggle. But there is nothing systematic or dependable about his leadership. He is eccentric in his behavior, idiosyncratic in his worship of Yahweh, fond of dangerous jokes and, above all, a womanizer. He seems to learn nothing from his experiences and falls repeatedly into traps set by sirens. He goes to Gaza, pounces on a whore, sleeps with her, arouses the anger of the locals, who surround the woman’s house, but then gets up at midnight, seizes the doors of the city entrance, lifts them off their hinges, and carries them on his back “to the top of the hill east of Hebron.” He then falls in love with the Philistine temptress Delilah, who is encouraged by their elders to lie with him and coax from him the secret of his incredible strength. She makes several attempts but is baffled by his weird sense of humor. Finally, he admits to her that it is his hair which empowers him. She then “lulled him to sleep on her knees,” calls to a barber who “shaved off the seven locks of his hair,” and then wakes him with her triumphant shout: “The Philistines are upon you, Samson!” And they are indeed: “They seized him, gouged out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza. There they bound him with bronze fetters and set him to grinding corn in the prison.”
At this point, Samson is transformed from a seriocomic figure into a wholly tragic one, and becomes a true hero. His hair grows again, unnoticed by his enemies, his strength returns—and his worship of God—and when the Philistines take him to their great feast in the Temple of Dagon to taunt him, he gets a little boy to guide him to the central pillars. Calling on God to give him the power, he pushes aside the pillars from their bases and brings the entire temple down, killing “the lords and all the people who were in it.” The dead include, presumably, Delilah, and of course the little boy, as well as Samson himself. This ruthlessness in heroism makes Samson the first suicide-martyr-mass killer, adumbrating the suicide bombers of today’s Middle East. It makes even more explicit and horrifying the links between heroism and a brutal unconcern for human life, whether guilty or innocent. Samson kills all the Philistines, including the innocent child who had befriended him, and many of those in the crowd who had nothing to do with his blinding.
Nonetheless, Samson was honored then—his brothers carried his body to his father’s grave and buried him there—and thereafter by the Israelites, being a hero in the teeming biblical pantheon. One reason is that the episode, though clearly circulated originally in an oral version—it shows all the signs of such delivery—was later written down in tremendously powerful Hebrew prose (and poetry), so that the key phrases resonate and the characters, Delilah particularly, emerge with stunning impact. The fact that Delilah’s ruthlessness matches his own, giving Samson a dramatically worthy adversary, enhances his tragedy. As described, Samson too is a human figure, not a mythical one, a real person with a character compounded of strength and tantalizing weakness, a mixture of cunning and folly, a loner despite his lust, a riddle teller and prankster, not really serious until he becomes wholly tragic.
The Jews loved Samson, and still do. They discounted his failings, which anyway could be used as virtuous warnings against temptation. Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews, gives a glowing portrait, showing him a man of exceptional goodness, except in his relations with women. He adds: “That he let himself be ensnared by a woman is the fault of his human nature which is liable to sin thus—but credit is due to him for his surpassing excellence in all the rest of his life.” Josephus especially stresses his courage, the true mark of a hero-saint. This theme is taken up by the early Christian writers. Athanasius put him on a moral level with Samuel and David. St. Augustus likened him to Moses and Daniel. Some early writers compared him to Christ, in sacrificing his life for the cause and the truth. Clement used him as a powerful argument for chastity. All ranked him as a saint.
His literary and artistic appeal was even stronger, and more durable, than his religious message. Peter Abelard was the first to write a poem about him as a figure of tragedy. He wins the praise of Chaucer’s monk, and of Boccaccio, who simply blames Delilah for his weakness. The sheer potency of her beauty and wickedness and her devilish tongue, wrapping itself around the hero’s psychological muscles and rendering him powerless, appealed strongly, to artists especially. The iconography of Samson is enormous, at all periods of Christian art. I will note only three images. The first is by Rubens, showing Samson asleep over Delilah’s knees, a painting (now in the National Gallery, London) only recently authenticated. This has a blond Delilah presented not so much as a temptress as a Philistine heroine, doing her duty to her people: the darker figure of the sleeping Samson is the intruder—a hint of anti-Semitism, perhaps? Rembrandt, by contrast, was devoted to the Samson image, doing him time and again in different postures. Two pictures, one with Delilah and the other threatening his father-in-law, both in the National Gallery of Berlin, are notable. But the most extraordinary canvas, in the Frankfurt Gallery, shows the actual instant of the blinding and Samson’s almost superhuman effort to break free from his captors before the last of his strength ebbs away. This is the masterpiece of Rembrandt’s dramatic style, or period, and throbs with violence. In my view, however, the most memorable pictorial commentary on the betrayal is the huge canvas painted by the Jewish master Solomon Salomon (1860–1927) in 1886, which hangs in the upper entrance hall of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and dominates it. Here Samson is captive but not yet blinded, and the eye-line he flings at the exultant face of Delilah, feasting her eyes on his humiliation, is electric, a touch of genius.
Samson, however, reaches his apotheosis in the work of John Milton. Samson Agonistes is his finest poem, more troubling and painful even than the opening books of Paradise Lost, for Milton was himself blind when he wrote it, and his sense of the hero’s deprivation of sight is complete and gives an overwhelming horror to the scene he paints in burning words. He introduces a new character, Harapha, the Philistine giant who visits the imprisoned Samson to taunt, but flees in fear. He also presents his hero as a Job figure, struggling with himself and his weakness, and with God. It is the finest thing Milton ever did, combining effects from Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus, and throwing a bridge which the readers can step over, between Hebrew, Greek, Christian, and English cultures. Milton’s Samson has been described as presenting, from first line to last, a completely new and moving interpretation of the story. But of course by the time Milton introduces his hero, he is in his last phase, his repentance is complete, he has outgrown all his childish comedy and playfulness and he has become a martyr and a saint as well as a worthy hero.
The Bible will continue to inspire visual artists, musicians, and poets until the end of time, albeit—alas!—each succeeding generation now is less familiar with its contents, and its ringing cadences. And the Book of Judges will remain one of the most fruitful sources of the inspirational characters and incidents. For it manifestly comes from the heroic age. It deals with events which took place at the time of the Iliad. Troy was as real then as Gaza. Samson might have challenged Achilles to combat. And Deborah could have exchanged views with her fellow prophetess Cassandra.
Yet if the Book of Judges represents the classic time of heroes in Hebrew history, we must not forget the greatest hero of all, King David. Although Moses is, in one sense, the dominating biblical figure, the supreme lawgiver and recorder without whom the Old Testament would not have come into existence, David is the culminating hero of the narrative. All biblical events lead up to him, the creator of Hebrew Jerusalem and the founder of the United Kingdom of all twelve tribes. And after him, all is diminuendo and decline, to weakness and defeat, exile and troubled return, finally to martyrdom and diaspora. David is the culminating keystone of the entire biblical arch.
He was also an extraordinary amalgam of diverse gifts and qualities, a man of profound faith, with an intense personal relationship with God, but also weak and sinful, though always repentant in the end. His character is so complex that, although he is brilliantly described in great detail in three of the best-written books of the Old Testament (1 and 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles), his personality eludes us. He is many things, and nothing; impossible to encapsulate. I live with David. In my London home the conservatory is dominated by a bronze replica of Verocchio’s statue of David with his foot on the severed head of Goliath. And outside, in the garden, there is an early nineteenth-century replica, made in marble dust by a Florentine sculptor, of Donatello’s famous bronze (now in the Bargello), perhaps the most remarkable statue ever carved and cast. But both show David in his most celebrated role as the teenage warrior killing the Philistine giant with his slingshot. And there are many other Davids. First the shepherd boy, summoned from his flocks to be chosen from his many brothers by Samuel, and anointed as a future king and leader of Israel. Then the young killer capable of slaughtering a lion and a bear as well as a Philistine giant. Then the young celebrity, welcomed at court and becoming the intimate of King Saul’s handsome son Jonathan, but arousing the jealousy and eventually the bitter hatred of the paranoid king. Then the hunted fugitive, taking refuge in his Cave of Adullam, and attracting to him similar outlaws and detribalized fighters. Then the guerrilla leader and resistance captain, shadowing Saul’s army as well as the Philistine host. Then the ruler of Hebron and parts of Judah, a king-in-waiting who eventually succeeds to the throne of Israel after Saul’s defeat and suicide, and the reign of his undistinguished successor, Ish-bosheth.
King David brings together, in a powerful kingdom, all twelve of the tribes of Israel. He secures his own personal city, Jerusalem, and makes it the capital. He builds his palace there, and stockpiles material for a great temple, engaging Phoenician masters to design it, though he does not live to see its birth. What he does do is create a resilient state and administration, with a professional civil service keeping accurate official records, as in other advanced kingdoms. He associates Israel with the modern trading economy of the Phoenician coast, raises living standards, increasing exports of food and wool, leather and other raw materials, and imports of luxuries. He takes his people into the Iron Age, with mines and forges and modern weapons. He improves the roads and the safety of travelers and merchants. But his reign is troubled by horrifying disputes within his own sprawling family, partly the result of his own weakness and sin, his many wives and adulteries, his favoritism and irresponsibility toward his growing (and grown) children, partly the inevitable problem of a spirited ruler driven by pride, ambition and lust spiced by incest. David’s reign is the epitome of personal monarchy with all its glories and miseries.
But on top of all this teeming saga of striking events, successes and failures in ruling, there is the emotional David and the artistic David. He loves God boldly, sometimes blindly and overwhelmingly, but he also loves women—and even men—with comparable abandon, sometimes in the face of God’s wrath. He is abandoned, sensual almost to madness, obsessive and reckless. Also noble, tender, sensitive, hypertensive and melancholy. These characteristics are linked to his love of beauty and his creativity. He is a harp player of extraordinary skill, a musician who can mesmerize his audience. He is a poet, a master of that superb form of Hebrew verse we know as the Psalms. He compiled the first section of the Book of Psalms (1–41) and the fourth (90–106) and most of these he wrote himself. The 73 psalms ascribed to him personally are outpourings of his thoughts and passions, longings, guilt feelings, repentances, prayers and religious philosophy, directly springing from his relations with God and with other people. Thirteen of these poems, drawn directly from his personal experiences, which can be linked to specific passages in the first and second books of Samuel, are masterpieces of the genre, emotion recalled in tranquil or anguished reflection, here given not in order of composition but in the chronology of inspiration by event: 59, 56, 34, 142, 52, 54, 57, 7, 18, 32, 51, 3, 63. There is nothing like this from the ancient world, certainly not from the pen of a busy, often distracted king. And David sang his psalms, and conducted choirs and orchestras. He danced them too, when appropriate. He did not leave victory and joyous celebrations to maidens with their tambourines, but leaped and pranced himself at the head of the processions of celebrants, to the amazement and delight of his subjects. Was there ever such a man? Such a liberator and kingdom founder, such a mover and transformer and builder, who explored and exhausted every aspect of the human condition, both earthly and spiritual? No wonder, even after the great dispersal, all Jews who had the semblance of a claim were proud to point to David as their ancestor. Even Christ, the son of God, had his Davidic lineage proclaimed, at least by his followers and biographers.
No wonder too that David eludes portrayal in words. The authors of the books in which he appears never quite put all the disparate parts of his personality and record together. The David of the Old Testament lacks integrity; the bits and pieces are all described but the whole man is not there. He eludes us. Artists have been similarly baffled. They can show the boy-killer of Goliath (Caravaggio, in a moment of self-laceration, puts his own tortured image in the severed head David is bearing off in triumph), and the ruthless seducer of Bathsheba, sending off her husband to death in battle so his wife can be enjoyed in safety. But the man as a whole they do not even attempt. Artistic re-creation has its limits. Writers without end have sought to give us the life of David, and continue to do so. Perhaps the astonishing skills of a Shakespeare or a Goethe or a Tolstoy might have been equal to it; but these men of genius were too wise to try. So David remains the superhero of the ancient world, but also the unknown one.