The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible

by Jonathan Kirsch

  At that moment in the history of Israel, according to the conventional wisdom of contemporary biblical scholarship, the priests and scribes who assembled and edited the Bible were in despair over the unhappy fate of the Israelites. The “united kingdom” of David and Solomon had fallen into ruin centuries earlier, and the exploits of these great and powerful kings were the stuff of legend. The northern kingdom, known as Israel, had been conquered by the Assyrian empire in 722 B.C.E., and the northern tribes—the famous “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel”—had been dispersed and largely destroyed. The southern kingdom, known as Judah, was conquered by the Babylonian empire in 587-586 B.C.E.; the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was razed, and the ruling class of the kingdom was deported to Babylon. A tiny remnant was allowed to return to Jerusalem sometime around 538 B.C.E., when the Babylonian empire was itself conquered by the armies of the Persian emperor. Only after the Babylonian Exile came to an end, and the Israelites straggled back to Canaan, were the holy writings and the traditional lore stitched together into the book that we now know as the Bible, at least according to the consensus of contemporary biblical scholarship.

  When the princes and priests of ancient Israel returned to Canaan, they found a land, a culture, and a community in deep crisis. Ritual sacrifices to Yahweh were no longer possible because the Temple had been destroyed, and the land of Canaan was filled with rival clans and tribes that worshipped a pantheon of strange gods and goddesses. Discouraged and disaffected by their long ordeal, the Israelites were tempted to consort with the strangers among them, to marry them and to worship their deities, sometimes by venerating forest groves and “high places,” stones and posts, graven images of gold and silver, and sometimes by availing themselves of the sexual services of temple prostitutes or participating in bacchanalian rituals or perhaps even offering human sacrifice. The priests and scribes who collected, compiled, edited, and rewrote the texts that make up much of the Bible were plainly obsessed by the powerful allure of strange gods and strange women, both of which they regarded as a threat to the very existence of the Israelites, and they used the holy texts as a rhetorical weapon to coax, cajole, threaten, extort, or simply scare the Chosen People into shunning their neighbors in Canaan and marrying only their fellow worshippers of Yahweh.

  Much rhetorical ammunition could be found in the writings of the prophets, ancient and contemporary, whose visions and oracles were added to the Five Books of Moses to create the heart of the Hebrew Bible as we know it. One can literally open the prophetic books at random and find some hot-eyed and heavy-breathing tract on the subject of pagan worship, or intermarriage, or both. Indeed, the sin of apostasy and the sin of sexual promiscuity are treated as interchangeable by many of the prophets, one serving as a metaphor for the other throughout the Bible. All of the woes of Israel—conquest, dispersion, despoliation, and destruction—are depicted in the prophetic books as just punishments inflicted by God on the Chosen People for their spiritual and carnal infidelities.

  “I have loved strangers,” boasts a wanton and impudent Israel to an angry and jealous God in the Book of Jeremiah, “and after them will I go” (Jer. 2:25).

  “Because of thy filthy lewdness,” God thunders back, “thou shalt not be purged from thy filthiness … till I have satisfied My fury upon thee” (Ezek. 24:13).

  The condemnation of marriage with non-Israelites in the Bible is not merely metaphorical. In one remarkable scene in the Book of Ezra, we see the priest called Ezra—“a ready scribe in the Law of Moses” (Ezra 7:6)—as he returns to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon and discovers, to his horror, that “the holy seed have mingled themselves with the peoples of the lands.” After sitting down in the dust, rending his garments and tearing his hair like a man in mourning, Ezra lifts himself up, dusts himself off, and resolves to do something about the “abomination” of intermarriage. So he conducts a public ceremony in which a multitude of Israelite men, abject and weeping, are divorced en masse from the non-Israelite women whom they have taken as wives. “[L]et us make a covenant with out God to put away our foreign wives, and such as are born of them,” exhorts the stern priest as he tears asunder an uncounted number of mixed marriages (Ezra 10:3). “Be of good courage, and do it!” (Ezra 10:3–4).

  Ezra’s words of encouragement—“Be of good courage”—consciously echo the words spoken to Joshua by Moses (Deut. 31:23) and by the Almighty himself (Josh. 1:6) on the very eve of the invasion of Canaan, when the Israelites cross the Jordan River and launch a war of conquest that is intended to rid the Promised Land of its native peoples. (See chapter seven.) According to the Bible, God himself endorses a scorched-earth campaign against the Canaanites that is only slightly less horrific in detail—and far greater in scale—than the fate of the innocent men, women, and children who are made to pay for Shechem’s crime, whatever it might have been.

  TWO BELLIES, ONE SPEAR

  The massacre of Shechem and his people as recounted in the Book of Genesis foreshadows the carnage that is found in subsequent books of the Bible, a kind of “ethnic cleansing” that is intended to purify the Promised Land by obliterating the idol-worshipping men and women whom the Israelites apparently find so beguiling. By the time we reach the heroic saga of the Exodus from Egypt—the stirring national myth of the Israelites and the centerpiece of the Bible itself—we find a biblical atrocity story that is the mirror image of the tale of Dinah and Shechem; it is a tale in which the victim of seduction is an Israelite prince from the tribe of Simeon and the seducer is a Midianite woman. The two stories differ in one basic and crucial way: The patriarch Jacob is distressed and remorseful over the revenge that his hotheaded sons have taken against the people of Shechem, but Moses and God himself specifically sanction the punishment inflicted on the Midianites.

  The tale of the Israelite prince and his Midianite lover is set in the wilderness during the wanderings of the Israelites after the Exodus from Egypt. Moses, who is forever caught between a cranky God and the whiny Israelites, confronts yet another incident of backsliding on the part of the Chosen People, who are now “commit[ing] harlotry with the daughters of Moab” and sacrificing at the shrines of their gods (Num. 25:1–9). At the urging of the Almighty, Moses pronounces a death sentence on the Israelites who have strayed into strange shrines or strange beds—some twenty-four thousand Israelites will perish from the plague that God sends down on his Chosen People (Num. 25:9)—and a punitive campaign against the foreigners who have lured them there.

  At precisely that moment, one impudent fellow wanders into the camp of the Israelites with his Midianite lady friend in tow. (We are told, by the way, that he is a prince of the tribe of Simeon and thus a direct descendant of Dinah’s brother and avenger.) While the rest of the Israelites watch in horror, the prince and the Midianite woman who “beguiled” him brazenly retire to the tent where Moses and the Almighty conduct their tête-à-têtes. A man named Phinehas emerges from the crowd and follows the amorous couple into the tent, where he manages to spear both of them with one thrust of his weapon (Num. 25:7–9, 14)- Exactly what the man and woman were doing when they were both impaled through the belly with a single spear is left to our imagination, but there is one form of physical encounter between man and woman that nicely explains it.*

  The murder of the prince and his lover is enough to halt the plague that is ravaging the camp of the Israelites as a divine punishment for their “harlotry,” but the carnage is not over yet. Not content with the extermination of a single temptress, and apparently overlooking the fact that his own wife and in-laws are Midianites, Moses sends Phinehas and his comrades-in-arms on a mission to kill as many of them as possible-All of the Midianite men are slain, and all of the women and children are taken captive—but the decision to spare the women and “their little ones” turns out to be an act of dubious mercy. Moses is surprised and annoyed at his captains for bringing back so many prisoners of war along with the customary plunder and booty, and he coldly utters a command that we are shocked to hear on
the lips of the man who brought down the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai.

  “Have ye saved all the women alive?” Moses complains, plainly irritated at the sight of so many potential seducers of Israelite men, so many Midianite mouths to feed. “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones,” he continues, “and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.” Only the virgin girls are allowed to survive, Moses decrees, and they are consigned to his men of war for their own pleasure (Num. 31:15–18).

  The slaughter of the Midianites comes as an appalling surprise to most casual Bible readers precisely because the clergy of both Judaism and Christianity have preferred to focus on the kinder and gentler passages of the Holy Scriptures. But the plain fact is that the Bible accommodates both love and hate, mercy and vengeance, life and death, and often in the very same passages. For example, the Book of Leviticus is where we find many of the stern and narrow commandments that are often cited nowadays by fundamentalists of various faiths, including, for example, the biblical decrees against gay sexuality (Lev. 18:22), tattooing (Lev. 19:28), and sorcery (Lev. 19:31, 20:6, 27). The priestly author of Leviticus broadly condemns all of the rites and rituals regarded as sacred by the native dwellers of Canaan: “And ye shall not walk in the customs of the nation which I am casting out before you” (Lev. 20:23). Yet it is also in Leviticus that we find the humane and compassionate credo that has been embraced as the essential moral instruction of the Bible-based faiths:

  And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God (Lev, 19:34).

  We have been taught—and we ought to hope and pray—that the ideals of justice, mercy, and loving-kindness are the ones that should be embraced by the faithful of the Bible-based religions. “What is hateful to you, do not unto your neighbor” is how Hillel, a revered Jewish teacher of the first century C.E., summarized the wisdom of the Torah, and Jesus of Nazareth goes even further: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you” (Matt. 5:44 KJV). Even if history shows that it is more often talked about than practiced, the so-called Golden Rule remains the keystone of the Judeo-Christian tradition: “We have built every idea of moral civilization on it,” writes Cynthia Ozick.25

  Yet we cannot penetrate the inner meanings in the story of Dinah and Shechem unless we discern the fear and loathing of the stranger that burned in the heart of at least some of the pious ghostwriters who fashioned the myth and legend of the Israelites into the book we know as the Bible. The rape of Dinah in the Book of Genesis and the seduction of the Israelite prince in the Book of Numbers are offered as morality tales, not atrocity stories, and they are meant to caution the readers of the Bible against the temptation of strange gods and goddesses and, above all, the men and women who worship them. For the redactors who slipped these two tales into the Bible and put their own spin on them, the real atrocity in each story is not the mass murder of men, women, and children, but the single act of seduction by a stranger that precedes it.

  THE BIBLICAL COURT OF CONSCIENCE

  The Bible can be read as, among many other things, a manual of survival for a nation of outsiders. The patriarch Jacob, like his own father and grandfather and countless generations of their descendants, is “a stranger in a strange land,” as Moses puts it, and he embraces a strategy that will turn out to be mostly (if not always) effective for preserving life and limb, identity and destiny, against conquerors, inquisitors, and pogromists. When he rebukes his bloodthirsty sons—“You have made my name stink among the people of the country” (Gen. 34:30 NEB)—Jacob is articulating his preference for diplomacy over war, accommodation over confrontation, going along and getting along rather than fighting back against the powers that be.

  “My numbers are few,” complains Jacob, a master in the art of realpolitik, and he makes it clear that his concerns about the Canaanites are pragmatic rather than principled: “[I]f they muster against me and attack me, I shall be destroyed, I and my household with me” (Gen. 34:30–31 NEB).

  Simeon and Levi, by contrast, are warriors who are driven by a fierce sense of honor rather than a cool assessment of relative military strength. But they also seem to believe that their embattled clan must answer violence with even greater violence if they are to survive as outsiders in the land of Canaan. Their act of revenge anticipates the strategies for survival that have been observed among the Bedouin tribes of the contemporary Near East. If a single Bedouin, man or woman, is set upon by members of a rival tribe, the victim’s relations feel obliged to inflict a mighty and memorable punishment on the whole tribe in order to deter future attacks; otherwise, it is believed, the clan (or “blood revenge group,” as the Arab word for “clan” can be rendered more literally) will be seen as weak and irresolute, and all members of the clan will be vulnerable to yet more insults and assaults.26 Like the Bedouins, the sons of Jacob seem to believe that both honor and deterrence make it essential to take revenge against Shechem in a way that will literally terrorize the rest of the Canaanites.

  The clash between Jacob and his sons—a clash between generations, values, philosophies, and strategies—is expressed in the bitter words that Simeon and Levi speak to Jacob after he rebukes them for the massacre of Shechem. To the patriarch Jacob, the betrothal of Dinah to the man who “defiled” her is an honorable compromise that will bring the blessings of peace and prosperity. To his sons, it is a peace without honor, a disgraceful sellout, and they utter an accusation that seems to apply even more to Jacob himself than to Shechem or Hamor: “Is our sister to be treated as a whore?”

  The “Bible’s court of conscience,” as one scholar puts it,27 has weighed the deeds of Simeon and Levi and found them wanting. Jacob himself delivers the verdict on his deathbed, withholding his blessing from Simeon and Levi, declaring them to be unworthy sons and successors precisely because they acted so rashly and so excessively, and denying them any portion of the Promised Land.

  Simeon and Levi are brethren,

  their spades became weapons of violence.

  My soul shall not enter their council,

  my heart shall not join their company,

  for in their anger they killed men,

  wantonly hamstrung oxen.

  A curse be on their anger because it was fierce;

  a curse on their wrath because it was ruthless!

  I will scatter them in Jacob,

  I will disperse them in Israel (Gen. 49:5–7 NEB).

  Tradition has approved and embraced Jacob’s example. His is the “[s]easoned voice of maturity,” and he sagely puts statesmanship above all: “[H]e rebukes such a childish religion which will endanger its own life rather than face realities.”28 Indeed, Jacob’s way has characterized a couple of thousand years of Jewish history, and we see his moral and practical example in a long line of revered figures that stretches from Maimonides, a renowned Jewish philosopher who served as the court physician to the vizier of Egypt and, it is said, the crusading Richard the Lion-Hearted, down to Chaim Weizmann, the “George Washington of Zionism,” who fought his war for a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the corridors of Whitehall and secured the first modern-day foothold on the soil of the Holy Land in the form of the Balfour Declaration with a pen rather than a sword.

  Then, within a single decade of the mid-twentieth century, history appeared to reverse the judgment of the court of conscience. Jacob’s way failed the Jewish community in Germany and the rest of Europe during the Holocaust, when the strategies of survival that had worked for a couple of millennia proved worthless against industrialized mass murder. Some were alert enough—and fortunate enough—to escape from Europe in time to avoid the worst excesses of the Holocaust. A heroic few armed themselves and fought back in the ghettos and forests and even in the death camps. But the greater number of European Jews perished, at least in part because they assumed t
hat the Germans were too civilized to murder six million men, women, and children in cold blood—and, later, they assumed that the Western democracies were too civilized to permit it.

  The scene that emblemizes the failure of Jacob’s way is one that was described to me by a Holocaust survivor who saw it with his own eyes: The venerable rabbi of a shtetl in Poland marched down the street with a Torah in his arms to welcome the storm troopers of the Third Reich because the old man recalled his own experiences during World War I, when the German occupiers turned out to be far more gentle and generous than the Polish peasantry or the Russian overlords who ruled them. The rabbi’s assumptions proved to be tragically wrong, and, like millions of his brethren, he paid for his mistake with his life.*

  As if prompted by the agonies of the Holocaust, the biblical court of conscience has begun to reconsider the antagonism between Jacob and his sons. A pronounced revisionist strain in postwar biblical scholarship suggests that Simeon and Levi, rather than Jacob, are the “real heroes” of Genesis 34 precisely because they picked up their swords and made war on Shechem to vindicate their sister’s defilement. For example, one contemporary biblical critic was moved to point out that two “extra-canonical” books—that is, Bible-era religious writings that were excluded from the Hebrew Bible itself—offer a countertradition that undercuts the “official” version of the massacre of Shechem as reported in the Book of Genesis. The Testament of Levi shows us an angel descending from heaven to hand Levi a sword and shield: “Take revenge on Shechem because of Dinah, and I will be with you, for the Lord has sent me.” And the Book of Judith, as we have seen, suggests that God himself armed Simeon with divine weaponry.29 God was on the side of the warriors, the countertradition holds, rather than the peacemaker.