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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  The fact that the woman is described as a concubine, by the way, is probably not intended by the biblical author to demean her. A concubine is technically defined as a “a legal wife of secondary rank,”14 a woman who “dedicate[s] herself to one particular man exclusively,” and who “could partake of many aspects of regular marriage.”15 A concubine was not equivalent to a mistress or a harlot, at least according to biblical tradition and rabbinical law; the Bible regards concubinage as an unremarkable and perfectly honorable position in a household, and four of the twelve tribes of Israel descend from the sons of Jacob’s concubines. But contemporary readers tend to feel otherwise, and at least one feminist Bible critic argues that the concubine ought to be regarded as a kind of sexual chattel: “Legally and socially, she is not the equivalent of a wife,” insists Phyllis Trible, “but is virtually a slave, secured by a man for his own purposes.”16

  Trible goes even further in Texts of Terror, her collection of revisionist readings of the Bible, and suggests that the Levite himself may well be the murderer of the concubine and not merely an unwitting accomplice to her murder. The Septuagint plainly states that the concubine is dead when the Levite finds her outside the door of the old man’s house in Gibeah. But the Masoretic Text is not so plainspoken: we are only told that the Levite calls to her, and she makes no answer. So Trible asks us to entertain the notion that the concubine was still alive on the morning after the gang rape, that she clung to life on the long journey back to the hill-country of Ephraim and died only when the Levite took out his butcher knife and went to work on her body.

  “Is the cowardly betrayer,” asks Trible, “also the murderer?”17

  Such crimes and misdemeanors on the part of the Levite, real or imagined, are ultimately less troubling than the blood-shaking acts of violence against women that are so graphically depicted throughout the Book of Judges. The Gibeah Outrage is the single most grotesque example of what feminist Bible critic Anne Michele Tapp characterizes as “gyno-sadistic biblical texts,”18 and the stories of Lot’s daughters and Jephthah’s daughter are only slightly less off-putting. “They are passive, resigned and helpless,” she writes of all of these nameless women and their stories of abuse. “They suggest that women lived only as objects to be bartered, abused and sacrificed by men.” What’s worse, Tapp insists, the moral example of these Bible stories was (and perhaps still is) not merely sexist but actually life-threatening. “The ideologies expressed through these [stories],” writes Tapp, “are both degrading and deadly for women.”19

  Yet, remarkably enough, another feminist Bible scholar proposes that the author of the Book of Judges is a woman. What’s more, she asks us to consider whether the physical violence and sexual abuse described in Judges is not so grotesque, so preposterous, that it amounts to an elaborate work of parody. Adrien Janis Bledstein wonders if whether the Book of Judges was composed by “a deeply religious woman who is satirizing men who play God,” a woman who is “[using] humor to deflate the arrogant.”20 And Bible scholar David Penchansky is willing to entertain the same intriguing notion: he detects “some radically feminist perspectives within the Hebrew Bible,” and he goes on to imagine that Judges is the work of “a woman secretly harboring sympathies for the goddess, perhaps Asherah.”21

  By tradition, authorship of Judges was ascribed to the prophet Samuel, but the conventional wisdom among scholars is that the book was probably compiled from various stories and poems of the ancient Israelites by the same person (or, perhaps, persons) who authored the Book of Deuteronomy, a source known as “D” or the Deuteronomist. In fact, the Deuteronomist (or a source called the “Deuteronomistic historian”) is thought to have authored—or assembled and edited—not only Deuteronomy itself but also the six books that follow in the Hebrew Bible, including Joshua, Judges, the First and Second Books of Samuel, and the First and Second Books of Kings.22

  The Deuteronomist may have been a priest who lived and worked in the court of King Josiah, a descendant of King David during whose reign the scroll containing the Book of Deuteronomy mysteriously showed up in the Temple at Jerusalem.23 Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman nominates the prophet Jeremiah as the man most likely to be the Deuteronomist. But Bledstein suggests that the Deuteronomist—and thus the author of Judges—may have been an otherwise obscure prophetess named Huldah who endorses the authenticity of “all the words of the book” that was found in the Temple (2 Kings 22:16).24

  Regardless of the gender of its author, however, the fact remains that the Book of Judges depicts women as both heroines and martyrs, victims and victors. Indeed, if the nameless concubine who is gang-raped to death is the single most victimized woman in the Bible, Judges also gives us a Bible-era guerrilla fighter who is arguably the single most valorous one. That woman is Jael, the only woman in the Hebrew Bible who slays an adversary with her own hands, and a woman whose story can be read as an ironic counterpoint to the Gibeah Outrage. Jael emerges from the woman’s tent and, quite literally, strikes a blow against the worst excesses of “gyno-Sadism.”

  “BETWEEN HER LEGS HE KNELT, HE FELL, HE LAY”

  The story of Jael is told twice in the Book of Judges, first in the biblical narrative and again in a lyrical interlude known as the Song of Deborah, a “priceless piece of archaic Hebrew poetry” that is thought to be among the oldest fragments in all of the Bible.25 Indeed, the Song of Deborah is probably the remnant of a rich oral tradition that existed among the Israelites long before anyone thought to assemble the book we call the Bible.

  Deborah is a prophetess who also serves as a judge of Israel, a position of authority and leadership in the days before a king reigned over Israel. Deborah calls oh a man named Barak to lead the Israelites into battle against a Canaanite army under the command of a fierce and fearsome general named Sisera. Barak is a reluctant soldier, and he refuses to fight unless Deborah goes along with him. So the prophetess Deborah—whose name means “bee” in Hebrew and who is described by an obscure Hebrew word that suggests she is “a woman of flames”26—takes command of the army of Israel on the field of battle.

  “I will surely go with thee, [but] the journey that thou takest shall not be for thy honour,” Deborah taunts Barak, “for the Lord will give Sisera over into the hand of a woman” (Judg. 4:9).

  That woman is Jael.

  Jael is married to a man who belongs to the Kenites, a tribe that is not at war with the Canaanites; one Bible scholar describes her as “a bedawin housewife.”27 She is standing outside her tent when a lone figure approaches on foot. It is Sisera, who has fled from the victorious Israelites, abandoning his mighty war chariot and the vast army under his command; and now the defeated general seeks refuge from an unremarkable woman he takes to be a member of a neutral tribe.

  “Turn in, my lord, turn in to me,” says Jael to Sisera, and then—as if he had something to fear from her—she reassures him: “Fear not.”

  Sisera accepts her offer of refuge, and she hides him under a rug inside her tent. Thirsty from battle and flight, he asks for water, but she gives him milk, perhaps to lull him to sleep. He cautions her to turn away anyone who comes looking for him—and then he falls asleep. He is no longer afraid of his pursuers, and apparently feels that he has nothing to fear from the woman who is sheltering him.

  Sisera is dead wrong. Jael picks up a hammer and a tent peg, slips silently into the tent, and drives the tent peg through the head of the sleeping general. When Barak shows up in pursuit of Sisera, Jael invites him into the tent and shows him the body of the warrior, now dead, his head pinned to the ground.*

  The Song of Deborah reprises the incident in poetry that must have thrilled its original audience—and still has the power to thrill us.

  Above women in the tent shall she be blessed.

  Water he asked, milk she gave him;

  In a lordly bowl she brought him curd.

  Her hand she put to the tent-pin,

  And her right hand to the workmen’s hammer;

&nb
sp; And with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote through his head,

  Yea, she pierced and struck through his temples,

  At her feet he sunk, he fell, he lay;

  At her feet he sunk, he fell;

  Where he sunk, there he fell down dead (Judg. 5:24–27).

  Jael defies our worst fears of what is likely to happen when a soldier encounters a woman alone, whether in ancient Israel or contemporary Bosnia: we expect that the woman is at risk of rape, but here it is the soldier who is in danger. “Reversed rape” is how Bible scholars Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn describe the assault, and they read the Hebrew text to suggest that Jael thrusts her weapon into one of Sisera’s bodily openings rather than his head. “Patriarchal expectation is turned upside down,” they write, “as the warriors mouth is penetrated by an unmistakably phallic tent peg.”28 The contrast between Jael and the Levite traveler’s concubine is heartrending but somehow also highly satisfying: the concubine is a nameless victim of violence against women, a victim of her own husband and the men to whom he abandoned her, but Jael is a courageous and resourceful warrior who singlehandedly prevails over a mighty warrior. Notably, Jael is not an Israelite, but she acts to vindicate the “standard of faith” of Israel when the menfolk, symbolized by the fearful Barak, are reluctant to carry the flag into battle.29

  That the biblical author chose to include both stories in the same book is itself a telling irony. The nameless concubine is the victim of a gang rape in which her own husband is an accomplice, but Jael is the heroine of a tale that can be understood as “a polemic against rape,” as contemporary Bible scholar Susan Niditch points out. The image of Sisera lying dead at her feet can be seen as “a hideous parody of soldierly assault on the women of a defeated foe”30 and “an ironic glance at the time-honored martial custom of rape.”31 In both the original Hebrew and Niditch’s lyrical English translation, the moment of Sisera’s death at the hands of Jael is suffused with an ominous sensuality:

  Between her legs he knelt, he fell, he lay

  Between her legs he knelt, he fell,

  Where he knelt, there he fell, despoiled (Judg. 5:27).32

  The ancient rabbis interpreted the verse to signify that Jael engaged in sexual intercourse with Sisera seven times before slaying him!33 Indeed, the very words used by the biblical author in describing the encounter between Jael and Sisera emphasize the interplay between eros and thanatos, sex and death. The Hebrew word for “legs” or “feet,” as we have seen, is a common biblical euphemism for sexual genitalia, whether male or female. “Between her legs” echoes the most bloodcurdling of the many curses that will befall Israel if the Lord is not strictly obeyed. “[H]er afterbirth that comes out from between her feet and her children whom she bears,” says Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy, “she will eat them secretly” (Deut. 29:57 NEB). “Kneeling” recalls the despairing words of Job, who imagines his wife serving other men in every sense. “May my wife grind for another,” says Job. “May others kneel over her!” (Job 31:10). The mighty Sisera ends up “despoiled” by a woman—a word that is used elsewhere in the Bible to describe the defeat of a hated enemy in battle (Jer. 47:4) and the harlotry of a faithless Israel: “And when thou art spoiled, what Wilt thou do?” rails the prophet Jeremiah. “Though thou clothest thyself with crimson,… thy lovers will despise thee, they will seek thy life” (Jer. 4:30 Scofield KJV).34

  As if to emphasize the startling reversal of traditional roles in the story of Jael—the fact that a woman is the victor and a man is the vanquished—the Song of Deborah ends with a poignant but sharply ironic scene in the house where Sisera’s mother waits in vain for her son to return from battle. “Why is his chariot so long in coming?” says his fretful mother. One of the princesses in attendance on the old woman seeks to reassure her by suggesting that Sisera has been victorious in battle and is even now dividing the spoils of war, including “[a] damsel, two damsels to every man” (Judg. 5:30). The Hebrew word variously translated as “damsel” (JPS) or “wench” (NEB) or “maiden” (RSV) or “girl” (NRSV) has been rendered even more forcefully by contemporary Bible scholars: “womb,” the literal meaning of the Hebrew word. But Adrien Janis Bledstein pointedly insists on giving a coarse and offensive but idiomatically correct translation—“cunt”—in order to confront us with the fact that Sisera, if victorious, would have regarded the women of Israel as nothing more than booty to be used and discarded in just the same way that the men of Gibeah abuse the concubine. The irony, of course, is that Sisera has fallen victim to Jael, and not the other way around. “Little do these arrogant women know,” writes Bledstein, “that one of the ‘cunts’ has gored the neck of their hero.”35

  Jael is unique among the women in the Bible in her use of a weapon to slay a male adversary with her own hands, but she is also a trickster in the tradition of Rebekah, Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth. According to the Bible, she offers food and shelter in order to lure Sisera into her tent. The ancient author known as Pseudo-Philo paints a more lurid scene in which she spikes his milk with wine and strews her bed with rose petals as a further enticement.36 The rabbis preserve a tradition that Jael gave him milk from her own breast and “surrendered herself to Sisera’s passion” as “the only sure means to get hold of him and kill him.”37 So Jael shows herself to be “a warrior and seducer, alluring and dangerous, nurturing and bloodthirsty.”38 When Sisera falls dead at Jael’s feet in the tent where he sought shelter, we are reminded of the wretched concubine as she falls, dead or dying, at the door of the house where she, too, sought shelter—and a certain rough justice is done.

  BLACK PROPAGANDA

  The earliest narratives in the Bible, or so goes the consensus of modern biblical scholarship, were first collected and written down sometime after 1000 B.C.E., during or shortly after the reign of David as king of the united monarchy of Judah and Israel. Much of the Bible was edited and revised during the reigns of the monarchs who descended from the House of David and succeeded him to the throne. So it is no surprise that many of the biblical authors regard David as the most important figure in the Bible—and he even figures in the Gibeah Outrage, although only in a secret subtext that is hidden between the lines of Holy Writ.

  David is not actually named in the Book of Judges, which describes the troubled era when “there was no king in Israel.” Indeed, the author of Judges is trying to convince the Israelites that they should submit themselves to royal authority by showing in such stomach-turning detail what can happen when they are kingless. By the time we reach the last and worst abomination in Judges, a gang rape that leads to civil war and near-genocide, the moral is unmistakable. “[D]o with them what seemeth good unto you,” says the old man who offers the mob his own daughter and his guests concubine, thus echoing the thematic phrase that we find more than once in the Book of Judges: “[E]very man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 21:25).

  But there is another and even more subtle subtext to the Book of Judges and, specifically, the Gibeah Outrage—an attack on the man who will become the first king of Israel, the failed monarch who will be anointed and then abandoned by God, the man who will be replaced on the throne by the glorious David. That man, of course, is Saul, and so the tale of the Levite traveler and his concubine can be understood as “an anti-Saul polemic”39—an effort by the biblical author to predict the moral flaws and political failings of King Saul, to blacken his reputation and sully his name, and thus to prepare the reader for the anointing of his rival and successor, David, as the savior-king.

  The rise and fall of Saul—and the remarkable saga that is the life of David—are chronicled in the books that follow Judges in the Hebrew Bible: First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, First and Second Chronicles. But the biblical author uses the Book of Judges to prepare us for these momentous events in the history of Israel. Above all, the author feels obliged to explain why Saul is unworthy to sit on the throne of Israel and deserves to be replaced by David. To the readers of the Bibl
e in ancient Israel, the subtext of the Gibeah Outrage and its aftermath must have been plain and perhaps even faintly comical, even though neither David nor Saul is mentioned at all in the Book of Judges.

  The “sons of hell” who threaten to sodomize the Levite and who gang-rape his concubine are men of the tribe of Benjamin—and so is Saul.

  Gibeah, the place where the outrage against the Levite and his concubine takes place, is Saul’s hometown and the capital of his kingdom. To make sure that the reader does not overlook the scene of the crime, the author manages to mention the name of the town twenty-two times in three brief chapters.40

  The assembly of the tribes where the war of extermination against the Benjaminites is planned takes place at Mizpah, the same place where the prophet Samuel will later convene a gathering of the tribes and designate Saul as the first king of Israel. (Saul himself, by the way, turns up missing at the crucial moment, and the befuddled prophet is forced to inquire of God about Saul’s whereabouts. “Will the man be coming back?” Samuel asks the Almighty in a comic aside, and God points out that Saul has concealed himself without explaining exactly why. “There he is,” says God, “hiding among the baggage” [1 Sam. 10:22–23 NEB].)

  Jabesh-gilead is the town whose population is slaughtered and whose virgin daughters are kidnapped and given as brides to the survivors of the tribe of Benjamin—and an attack on Jabesh-gilead by the Ammonites is the first crisis of Saul’s reign as king of Israel. At the very end of his life, when Saul kills himself to avoid capture in battle, the townsfolk of Jabesh-gilead bring his body back from the battlefield and bury his remains under a tree (1 Sam. 31:12–13).

  To convince the tribes of Israel to make war on the Benjaminites, the Levite traveler dismembers his slain concubine and sends a piece of her body to each tribe as a grisly call to arms. So, too, does Saul cut up a couple of oxen and dispatch the pieces to the tribes in order to compel them to join him in fighting the Ammonites: “Whosoever cometh not forth after Saul and after Samuel, so shall it be done unto his oxen” (1 Sam. 11:7).