by Harold Bloom
Exodus 19:20–25
There is a weird comedy when poor Moses has to remind Yahweh that the people cannot come up to Mount Sinai, because Yahweh seems to have forbidden it. But this is put aside in an incredible apex:
Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel:
And they saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness.
And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand: also they saw God, and did eat and drink.
Exodus 24:9–11
Even now I am overcome by the shock of this. Seventy-four holy men of Israel sit upon Sinai. They enjoy a picnic as guests of Yahweh. They stare at him while he stares back. For once only, in all of the Hebrew Bible, he is silent. Does he eat? They certainly do, but what is their food? The sublime subsides in mutual silence.
Judges 13–16: Samson
JOHN MILTON’S FINAL WORK was the astonishing transmutation of Biblical legend into the form of Greek tragedy. Samson Agonistes is a unique splendor, with little resemblance to Paradise Lost and even less to Paradise Regained. All critical attempts to interpret it as a Christian poem are exercises in a kind of pathos alien to Milton’s genius.
The story of Samson is told in Judges 13–16. Manoah has a barren wife, who is not named. Yahweh, evasively called an angel of the lord, manifests himself to her and prophesies that she will bear a son, consecrated to God from the beginning. This son of Manoah will be unshorn, dedicated to Yahweh from the womb onward.
Manoah requests the angel’s name, but is warned that it is secret. Offered roast kid, Yahweh feasts while Manoah and his wife look on. The flame of the altar or rock rises up toward heaven, and Yahweh ascends in the fire, while Manoah and his wife fall on their faces, since they realize that they have seen God.
Samson’s career begins with his choice of a Philistine wife, at a time when the Philistines govern Israel:
Then went Samson down, and his father and his mother, to Timnath, and came to the vineyards of Timnath: and, behold, a young lion roared against him.
And the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand: but he told not his father or his mother what he had done.
And he went down, and talked with the woman; and she pleased Samson well.
And after a time he returned to take her, and he turned aside to see the carcase of the lion: and, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion.
And he took thereof in his hands, and went on eating, and came to his father and mother, and he gave them, and they did eat: but he told not them that he had taken the honey out of the carcase of the lion.
So his father went down unto the woman: and Samson made there a feast; for so used the young men to do.
And it came to pass, when they saw him, that they brought thirty companions to be with him.
And Samson said unto them, I will now put forth a riddle unto you: if ye can certainly declare it me within the seven days of the feast, and find it out, then I will give you thirty sheets and thirty change of garments:
But if ye cannot declare it me, then shall ye give me thirty sheets and thirty change of garments. And they said unto him, Put forth thy riddle, that we may hear it.
And he said unto them, Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. And they could not in three days expound the riddle.
Judges 14:5–14
One could not say of Samson that “out of the strong came forth sweetness.” Except for his idolatry of his Philistine wife, there was no sweetness in him. She betrays the secret of his riddle to the Philistines, and he avenges himself by killing thirty of them, taking away their spoils. Denied his wife by her father, he resorts to mischief against her kinsmen:
And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.
And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.
Judges 15:4–5
Delivered to the Philistines by the frightened men of Judah, Samson breaks loose:
And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.
And Samson said, With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men.
Judges 15:15–16
After this outrageous exploit, Samson meets his fate by falling in love with the Philistine temptress, Delilah. She betrays him to the lords of the Philistines, after he tells her the secret that all his consecrated power is in his hair:
And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head; and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him.
And she said, The Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And he awoke out of his sleep, and said, I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself. And he wist not that the Lord was departed from him.
But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.
Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven.
Judges 16:19–22
The blinded Samson vindicates himself and his God by destroying himself and his enemies in a single act of furious violence:
And it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they said, Call for Samson, that he may make us sport. And they called for Samson out of the prison house; and he made them sport: and they set him between the pillars.
And Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them.
Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines were there; and there were upon the roof about three thousand men and women, that beheld while Samson made sport.
And Samson called unto the Lord, and said, O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.
And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left.
And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.
Judges 16:25–30
I recall, in the far-off days of my youth, attending a lecture upon Milton’s Samson Agonistes at Yale. It was given by the venerable Chauncey Brewster Tinker, a scholar noted for the appearance of stigmata upon him during Passion Week, a time when he was reputed to glare at all passing Jews. I walked out of the lecture soon after it began, because it devoted itself to the assertion that Milton’s poem in every way transcended the barbaric Hebrew text.
Daughter of a Voice:
The Song of Deborah
THE HEBREW bat kol means “daughter of a voice” and in tradition was interpreted as the voice of Yahweh himself. In the Sinai epiphany, the Jews heard a speaking voice but beheld no divine similitude.
Though Yahweh’s voice could be heard roaring from Mount Zion or thundering or breaking the waves, his most impressive manifestation came to Elijah as a still, small voice.
Jewish visual art tended to show the bat kol as the Hand of God. I stare across the table where I write and look at our menor
ah, a replica of a fourteenth-century Turkish emblem in the Smithsonian. Hart Crane’s “Hand of Fire” trope in The Bridge is a descendant.
The bat kol is heard not in the prophets but in the poets. The War Song of the prophetess Deborah in Judges 5:1–31 would appear to be the oldest poem in the Hebrew Bible. It is set in the Iron Age (1200–1100 B.C.E.) and dates back to at least 1200 B.C.E.
Deborah’s name means “utterance,” and though she calls herself “a mother in Israel,” that is a spiritual and not a literal assertion. In the King James Bible she is called “The wife of Lapidoth,” but that appears to mean “the woman of torches,” and she evidently has no husband. Her fierce general, Barak, whose name means “lightning,” will not lead his warriors of Zebulun and Naphtali, both of them tribes of the lower Galilee, unless Deborah is a presence at the battle.
In chapter 4 of Judges, we begin with the dire situation of the children of Israel. The Canaanites, whose captain was Sisera, possess nine hundred chariots of iron. For twenty years Sisera torments the children of Israel. Deborah is introduced as the prophetess who judges Israel, as she sits beneath her palm tree. She calls unto her Barak the son of Abinoam and says to him: Take with you ten thousand men of the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulon. She promises that, at the river Kishon, Sisera, with his chariots and his troops, will attack the Galilean warriors of Zebulun and Naphtali. With this fierce injunction, she will deliver Sisera into the hand of Barak.
Barak, for all his courage, replies that he will not go unless Deborah goes with him. Deborah rises and goes with Barak to Kedesh, where Barak calls up the men of Zebulun and Naphtali. Yahweh intervenes directly, and Sisera and his host are defeated, so badly that Sisera himself leaps from his chariot and runs away on his own feet as fast as he can. Barak pursues and destroys the entire host.
I always thrill to the King James Version of Deborah’s triumphant outcry in Judges 5:18—“Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field.” A closer translation of the Hebrew might be “Zebulun is a force that scorned death: Naphtali also on the heights of the field,” but the King James achieves a finer resonance:
And the princes of Issachar were with Deborah; even Issachar, and also Barak: he was sent on foot into the valley. For the divisions of Reuben there were great thoughts of heart.
Why abodest thou among the sheepfolds, to hear the bleating of the flocks? For the divisions of Reuben there were great searchings of heart.
Gilead abode beyond Jordan: and why did Dan remain in ships? Asher continued on the sea shore, and abode in his breaches.
Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field.
Judges 5:15–18
Deborah is fiercely sardonic in contrasting the tribes that did not respond to the challenge and the men of Zebulun and Naphtali who risked everything and fought heroically in the high places, a phrase at once descriptive and eulogistic. The Hebrew sublime is superbly exemplified by Deborah’s triumphant outcry:
They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.
The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon. O my soul, thou hast trodden down strength.
Judges 5:20–21
The Hebrew is closer to “O my soul, tread them down with strength,” but the King James Bible converts its misreading into a glory.
Stand back from the Song of Deborah and you see a bride of fire inspiring a lightning-like hero to victory in the name of Yahweh. The woman of torches is utterance itself, her name emanating from the Hebrew for “word”: a word at once an act and the truth. The high song celebrates more than the warlike men of lower Galilee. It is the song of Yahweh as a man of war triumphant in the avenging of Israel, when the people of Deborah and Barak willingly offered themselves.
The emergence of the voice of Deborah is at once a gesture of freedom and a tribute to Yahweh. Is it not also a cry of survival prolonged into pragmatic immortality? That oxymoron informs the Song of Deborah’s desire to memorialize the victors of the battle against Sisera. The pre-eminent victor is Jael, who pungently destroys the fleeing Sisera:
Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent.
He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.
She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.
The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry the wheels of his chariots?
Her wise ladies answered her, yea, she returned answer to herself,
Have they not sped? have they not divided the prey; to every man a damsel or two; to Sisera a prey of divers colours, a prey of divers colours of needlework, of divers colours of needlework on both sides, meet for the necks of them that take the spoil?
So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord: but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might. And the land had rest forty years.
Geneva Bible, Judges 5:24–31
Fierce and exultant strains are heard against a satiric foregrounding of delusional expectations by the mother of Yahweh’s enemy. Utterance has freed herself to affirm the Covenant. Stalwart and persuasive as a prophet must be, Deborah has found poetic immortality. We do not know who composed her battle ode, yet I see no reason why we should not suppose that it was a woman of the southern Galilee.
From my childhood on, I have thrilled to the sound of her song, whether chanted in Hebrew or in translation. Sir Philip Sidney remarked that when he heard the old ballad “Chevy Chase” a trumpet sounded in his heart. The Song of Deborah has that effect upon me. And the magnificent “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” composed by the Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe and sung by Lincoln’s forces in the Civil War, always recalls for me Deborah’s War Song:
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat:
Oh! be swift my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
David:
“Thou Art the Man”
KING DAVID is the central hero of the Hebrew tradition. His story is something we feel intimately because so very large a part of European literary tradition emanates from him. Of all the Bible’s personalities, David is the most novelistic. David’s story is told from 1 and 2 Samuel through 1 Kings and then is retold in 1 Chronicles. We do not know who composed the book of Samuel. By tradition we call him the Court Historian, and I like to think of him as being a contemporary of the J writer.
Of all the figures throughout the Hebrew Bible, David seems to me the most Shakespearean. He is marked by inwardness and by an antithetical self. I do not find that I can think through to the end of David, any more than I can with Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra. There is always more to engage the spirit. Samuel, by contrast, is ill-tempered, and his prophecy is scarcely unmarked by dangerous selfishness and dubious pomposity.
King Saul is perhaps the darkest soul in all of the Hebrew Bible. David is his bad luck. That is to say, Yahweh’s fickleness destroys Saul by degrees. To be the first king of the Hebrews is a fearful fate. The narrator gives poor Saul no way out. His furies cannot prevail against the charismatic duplicity of David. After all, David charms Saul, beguiles Yahweh, and seduces Saul’s children Jonathan and Michal.
David is a new kind of man. Though he is the beloved of Yahweh, and dances in naked joy before the Ark, he is a secular
hero and in no way theological. Does anyone in ancient Greek literature resemble him in any vital way? James Joyce thought that Odysseus was the complete man, and there is much to be said for that observation. Yet Odysseus, compared with David, seems a less vital vision of human possibility. It is true that Odysseus has to be single-minded. His opponent is the ocean itself, which wishes to estrange him from home in Ithaca and his true wife in Penelope. David’s quest is more comprehensive. He carries the Blessing, and so he does not need to seek or to find. He need come home only to himself.
David is an astonishing improviser, which is the basis of his rise to the kingship. It would not be unfair to call him an opportunist, a contrast to his friend Jonathan. Jonathan, caught between his love for his father and for his friend David, is a far nobler personality. He and Saul die in battle against the Philistines, provoking David’s beautiful lament for them both:
And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and over Jonathan his son:
(Also he bade them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow: behold, it is written in the book of Jasher.)
The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!
Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.
Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though he had not been anointed with oil.
From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turned not back, and the sword of Saul returned not empty.
Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.
