ZIPPORAH AND MOSES (Exod. 4:24–26) Moses, his wife, Zipporah, and their son Gershom are camped at an oasis while en route to Egypt In the middle of the night, God (Yahweh) appears and attacks Moses. Zipporah uses the blood ritual of circumcision to defend her husband and son.
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS
The original Hebrew text of Exodus 4:24–26 is especially difficult to decipher because only two of the players in the scene are identified by name. The Bible tells us that it is Zipporah and Yahweh who encounter each other by night at the lodging place, but Moses is not named at all. Nor are we allowed to see with clarity who is doing what to whom—or why. Who do you think God’s attack is aimed at?
Why would God seek to kill Moses so soon after befriending him, anointing him as a prophet, and sending him on the crucial mission to liberate the Israelites from Egyptian slavery?
The traditional explanation of this story—known as the “Bridegroom of Blood”—is that Yahweh seeks to kill Moses because he has violated the single most important clause of the covenant between God and Abraham by failing to circumcise his firstborn son, Gershom. Do you agree? What do you think of Kirsch’s suggestion that it might have been some priestly editor, rather than God, who cared so passionately about circumcision?
Some scholars believe that the night attack on Moses reveals the hidden traces of pagan gods and goddesses in the Hebrew Bible. Do you agree?
Throughout his life, Moses is forced to depend on women to preserve his life or rescue him from deadly peril—both human and divine. As an infant, he is spared from Pharaoh’s death sentence on the firstborn of the Israelites by two courageous midwives who refuse to carry out Pharaoh’s decree. Moses’s mother fashions an ark out of bulrushes and sets him adrift in the river, thus saving her son’s life while appearing to comply with Pharaoh’s order. His sister watches over the ark from afar to make sure that he is rescued, and it is Pharaoh’s daughter who draws him out of the river and raises him as her adopted son. In this story, it is his wife who saves him. How does this revise our perceptions of Moses as a powerful and potent figure, a prophet who is privileged to encounter God face-to-face because he is so nearly godlike himself?
Kirsch theorizes that Zipporah might be patterned after goddesses of the ancient and classical world, such as Isis or Athena, who traditionally intervened on behalf of imperiled heroes. He also sees a specific link to one pagan goddess-rescuer in particular, the deity of ancient Egypt known as Isis. Do you agree with Kirsch’s theories?
STORY FIVE
JEPHTHAH AND HIS DAUGHTER (Judg. 11) Jephthah, a mercenary, is asked to lead the armies of Israel against an invading force from a neighboring kingdom. He accepts the offer and impulsively promises God that, in exchange for victory, he will sacrifice whoever first comes out of his house to greet him on his return from battle. He emerges victorious from the conflict but, to his horror, has no choice other than to sacrifice his only daughter to fulfill his vow She goes willingly to the slaughter, but only after taking two months to go to the mountains with her friends and “bewail her virginity”
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS
What does the Bible tell us about the worship of pagan gods and goddesses in the ancient world? And why did the biblical prophets regard pagan worship and prostitution as one and the same thing?
Is there significance to the fact that the Bible—a book whose authors regard names and naming as something sacred—fails to mention the name of Jephthah’s daughter?
The Bible asks us to regard Jephthah’s daughter as an accidental but willing victim of human sacrifice. Is another interpretation possible? What do you think of Kirsch’s suggestion that Jephthah’s daughter and her friends might have done something so shocking that the biblical authors were forced to dress up her death in the trappings of sacrifice?
The Bible tells us plainly enough that the women of Israel traditionally celebrated victory on the battlefield “with timbrels and with dances.” As a combat veteran who lived alone with his beloved daughter, Jephthah might have expected and even hoped for such a greeting from her. Although he bemoans the fact that she will need to die if he is to fulfill his promise to God, did he know—when he made his promise—that his daughter would be the first one to greet him?
What does God really think about human sacrifice? The Bible is filled with countless pleas and demands from his people, stretching all the way back to when He first befriended Abraham. Only a few pages earlier in the Book of Judges, the Almighty answers a plea from Gideon by offering a sign that it is really God who has called Gideon to service. And yet when it comes to making and keeping Jephthah’s vow, God falls wholly and ominously silent—and thus condemns his daughter to death. Why was Isaac spared and Jephthah’s daughter allowed to die?
STORY SIX
THE TRAVELER AND HIS CONCUBINE (Judg. 19-21) A traveling Levite and his concubine are forced by a storm to seek shelter in the town of Gibeah. They are taken in by a countryman and his daughter. The men of Gibeah—members of the tribe of Benjamin—surround the house in the night and demand the Levite be sent outside so that they might sodomize him. Instead, the Levite and his host offer up the concubine and the host’s daughter to satisfy the mob. The concubine is gang-raped to death. The Levite brings her body home, dismembers it, and sends the pieces to the four corners of Israel in the hope of inciting a war of revenge against the tribe whose men killed hen
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS
Does the Bible celebrate or denigrate women? Why do even the earliest feminist Bible critics tend to regard the Holy Scripture as hopelessly tainted by the sexism of the stern patriarchy that created the Bible in the first place?
Is it possible, as one feminist Bible critic suggests, that the Book of Judges was written by a woman? And is the physical violence and sexual abuse described in Judges so grotesque and so preposterous that it amounts to an elaborate work of parody?
Jael is the unsung heroine of the Bible, a woman who is unique among all the compelling women in the Bible because she strikes down an enemy with her own hands. What does her story tell us about the role of women in war and peace in the ancient world? How many strong female characters from the Bible can you name?
Do you agree with Kirsch’s hypothesis—that there is a hidden political agenda in the story of the “Gibeah Outrage.” If there is such an agenda, what do you think it is? Kirsch sees the Book of Judges as a propaganda-like argument in favor of monarchy among a people who have been governed so far only by patriarchs, prophets, and judges. Do you agree?
STORY SEVEN
TAMAR AND AMNON (2 Sam. 13) After a sordid affair with Bathsheba, King David arranges for the death of her husband so that he might marry her Shortly thereafter Amnon, David’s oldest son and heir apparent to the throne of Israel, falls desperately in love with his half sister, Tamar. Amnon feigns illness and asks the king to send Tamar to nurse him back to health. When she arrives, he rapes her and throws her out in the street. King David hears about this outrage but does nothing.
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS
Some Bible scholars have tried to cleanse Amnon’s ugly crime by suggesting it is not a case of incest. Do you think their arguments have any merit?
Other scholars regard King David as a collaborator in Amnon’s rape of his half sister, Tamar. Do you see King David as an unwitting or an intentional accomplice? Does David’s guilt over his own sexual misadventures keep him from chastising his son for doing much the same thing? When Amnon asks David to order Tamar to nurse him back to health, does David know what Amnon really wants from her?
Kirsch sees the story of Tamar’s ordeal as an early augury of the decline and fall of David, the greatest king who ever sat on the throne of ancient Israel. Do you agree with his assessment?
WHO REALLY WROTE THE BIBLE?
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS
Is the Hebrew Bible the revealed word of God—or the work of man
y hands over many centuries?
Did a woman write the Bible—or at least the best parts of it?
Discuss the different biblical authors and the various versions of the Bible that have survived over the centuries and remain in common use around the world What do they tell us about the different peoples and cultures who preserved them and passed them along from generation to generation?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan L. Kirsch is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times and has been reading and studying the Bible for more than twenty years. He writes and lectures extensively on literary and biblical topics. His book reviews appear in the Life & Style section of the Los Angeles Times on alternate Wednesdays and in the Sunday Book Review. Kirsch, an attorney in private practice with the law firm of Kirsch & Mitchell, also contributes publishing-law columns to the newsletters of the Publishers Marketing Association, the Western Publications Association, and the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
Before embarking on the practice of law, Kirsch was senior editor of California Magazine (formerly New West Magazine), where he specialized in coverage of law, government, and politics. Previously, he worked as West Coast correspondent for Newsweek, as editor for West and Home magazines at the Los Angeles Times, and as a reporter for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. As a freelance writer, Kirsch has also contributed to California Lawyer, Los Angeles Lawyer, New West, Los Angeles Magazine, New Republic, Publishers Weekly, Performing Arts, Human Behavior, L.A. Architect, and other publications.
Kirsch is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN Center USA West, the Author’s Guild, the Western Publication Association, California Lawyers for the Arts, the Los Angeles Copyright Society, and the Intellectual Property sections of the California State Bar and the Los Angeles County Bar Associations. A member of the Board of Trustees of the Los Angeles Copyright Society, Kirsch also serves as legal counsel to the Publishers Marketing Association, the Western Publications Association, and the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. He is the recipient of the Publishers Marketing Association 1994 Benjamin Franklin Award for Special Achievement in Publishing.
Kirsch, 47, was born in Los Angeles, attended high school in Culver City, and completed a bachelor of arts degree with honors in Russian and Jewish history and Adlai E. Stevenson College honors at the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California. A member of the California State Bar since 1976, he earned a juris doctor degree cum laude at Loyola University School of Law. Kirsch is married to Ann Benjamin Kirsch, Psy.D., a psychotherapist in private practice in Beverly Hills. They live with their two children in Los Angeles.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1997 by Jonathan Kirsch
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Esquire magazine and the Hearst Corporation: Excerpt from “If You Could Ask One Question about Life, What would the answer be?” by Isaac Bashevis Singer, first published in Esquire magazine, December 1974. Reprinted courtesy of Esquire magazine and the Hearst Corporation.
Cambridge University Press: Excerpts from THE NEW ENGLISH BIBLE WITH APOCRYPHA. Copyright © Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press 1961, 1970. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-97070
eISBN: 978-0-307-56763-5
First Hardcover Edition: May 1997
First Trade Paperback Edition: March 1998
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