Dark History of the Bible

by Michael Kerrigan

  Priestly Prohibitions

  These prohibitions were still more important for the priestly class, who were supposed to lead society by example. Some of the rules that bound them seem unfathomable now:

  They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard. (21, 5)

  Others, like the laws against men with physical imperfection approaching the altar – ‘a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose … that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye …’ (21, 18) – seem cruelly discriminatory to us now, even if they do still make a recognizable sort of symbolic sense. (Out of respect for God’s greatness, he should be ministered to only by the most flawless of his human creation.)

  ‘if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father.’

  LEVITICUS 21, 9

  ‘I am the Lord thy God, which hath brought thee out of the land of Egypt …’ God’s deliverance of the Jews from bondage was key to his authority and that of the law he laid down: here Moses leads his people through the wilderness.

  It goes without saying that priests were to make their marriages and conduct their sexual relations with the utmost care. Unsurprisingly, though, the bulk of the burden fell on girls and women (21, 9):

  And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.

  Laying Down the Law

  Forty years seems a very long time for an entire nation to wander in the wilderness – especially in so confined a corner of the Middle East. It’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that this section of the Bible is less about the literal itinerary of the Jews with Moses and more about their moral and spiritual reconstruction as a people; a preparation for their life in the ‘Promised Land’. This would explain the preoccupation of this part of the Bible – from Exodus, through Leviticus and on into the Book of Numbers – with the laying down of law and the establishment of custom.

  The concept of ‘cleanness’ was central to the Jewish way of thinking at this time. It could be both physical and spiritual, and could be compromised in all sorts of different ways. One of these was by rebellion, the refusal to accept the authority of the appointed leadership. Hence the blighting of Miriam – Moses’ own sister – when, in Numbers 12, 1, she and Aaron ‘spake against Moses’ asking ‘Hath the Lord indeed spoken only by Moses? hath he not spoken also by us?’ In punishment for this boldness of speech, we’re told, Miriam (although not, significantly, her male co-critic Aaron) ‘became leprous, white as snow’ (12, 10). She was then ‘shut out from the camp seven days’, a temporary outcast, the better to come to understand her place. Further punishments are meted out for protests against Moses’ leadership a little later (16, 31), when the ground opens up and swallows one unruly congregation: ‘They went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed over them,’ we are told. Shortly after, at 16, 49, illness is once again the scourge of God, and we find 14,700 wayward Jews being carried off by plague. And then again, when their unending wanderings in the wilderness was stirring up dissent (at 21, 6), ‘the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people’ – many, it is reported, died. Another 250 dissenters were swallowed up by the earth soon after (26, 13). God didn’t take disobediences lightly, it appears.

  The serpent-staff makes another appearance and works another miracle. This time (Numbers 21), appropriately enough, the brazen snake cures Israelites suffering from snakebites. Here we see them writhing in their pain.

  Moses scrambles to a mountain-top and – after 40 years’ wandering with his people in the desert – is granted his first sight of the Promised Land. Ironically, it is also to be his last. His work now done, he dies.

  MOSES AND THE MIDIANITES

  ‘THOU SHALT NOT kill,’ said the commandment – but, it seems, the Lord God himself was no fundamentalist. Murder in defence of his laws was not just accepted but acclaimed. Hence the praise for Phinehas, son of High Priest Eleazar. Hearing that a fellow Jew was consorting with a (pagan) Midianite woman, he ‘took a javelin in his hand’ (25, 7) and ‘went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through the belly.’ This worthy deed, we’re told (25, 8), didn’t just cut short an awful miscegenation but also protected the children of Israel from the ravages of a plague that had already taken 24,000 lives.

  The Midianites (the people to whom, we should not forget, Moses’ father-in-law Jethro belonged) were to prove an uncomfortable thorn in Israel’s side. When distrust finally flared up into open war, Moses was uncompromising in his language, urging his troops to ‘kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him’ (31, 17). The virgin girls, however, were to be spared, and brought back amid the plunder: 32,000 of these prisoners were brought home.

  The Conquest of Canaan

  After 40 years in the desert, Moses finally died within sight of the Promised Land – although (Deuteronomy 34, 7) ‘his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated’. The succession as chief of the Israelite tribes passed to ‘Joshua the son of Nun’ since he was ‘full of the spirit of wisdom’ (34, 9) and the late patriarch had ‘laid his hands upon him’. It was to Joshua that God now spoke (Joshua 1, 2), saying:

  Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel … From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.

  The land may have been promised to the Jews, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t have to exert themselves to get it. Most of it was already occupied by people who were not going to yield it meekly.

  Directly in their way stood the city of Jericho – which was important strategically and, for Joshua’s new leadership, symbolically. The story of the city’s siege and capture is celebrated: for six days Joshua marched his army round its walls, his priests blasting away on their sacred ramshorn trumpets all the while. For six days the city walls stood firm, the garrison untroubled – increasingly derisive, indeed – but on the seventh day, as the trumpets sounded, they collapsed. ‘Shout,’ cried Joshua to his troops, ‘for the Lord hath given you the city’ (6, 16):

  And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword. Jericho was now a Jewish city.

  Storms of Slaughter

  Ai, Gilgal, Gibeon, Makkedah, Libnah … the rest of the Book of Joshua goes by in a veritable catalogue of killing. During the capture of the city of Ai, 12,000 men and women were ‘utterly destroyed’ (8, 26) in a single day. The swords of Israel at Beth-horon were backed by ‘great stones from heaven’ (10, 11) – a destructive hailstorm sent by God himself to ensure that victory that day went to his Chosen People.

  Having taken Hazor (11, 11), ‘they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them: there was not any left to breathe: and he burnt Hazor with fire.’ This is the rhetoric of genocide, of a people clearing a land of its inhabitants to make space for themselves. If it weren’t also the rhetoric of epic exaggeration, it would be seriously damning.

  THE HOLY HARLOT

  AS HE WORKED on his plans to capture Jericho, Joshua sent two of his men as spies to the city. They found a secret lodging in the home of the harlot Rahab (2, 1). Not only did Rahab take them in, but she bravely covered for them when men came to hunt them out, hiding them on her roof concealed beneath ‘stalks of flax’ (2, 6).

  Rahab had, she said, heard the stories of the Jews, their deliverance from Egypt and the protection they’d received from the Lord their God. She helped them now in return for the protection of herself and her family. Then (2, 14):

  she let them down by a cord through the window: for her house w
as upon the town wall, and she dwelt upon the wall.

  So, with her help, the spies got clean away.

  Later, when the town was taken, Joshua remembered Rahab’s loyalty and courage. ‘Only Rahab the harlot shall live,’ he said (6, 17): ‘she and all that are with her in her house.’

  Rahab’s assistance to his spies was not to be forgotten by Joshua once he’d taken Jericho. She and her family were spared in the days that followed, when all the other people in the city were put to the sword.

  Joshua and his troops look on from a distance as the city of Ai goes up in flames. The Book of Jericho doesn’t flinch from describing the carnage of the Canaan campaign: the Promised Land was to be won by force of arms.

  A hero in harness: Samson, shorn of his strength-giving locks, is forced to drive a mill for the Philistines. Carl Bloch’s 1863 painting points up its subject’s beauty at the expense of showing that he has been blinded in both eyes.

  IV

  THE BIBLE

  ‘THOU SHALT SMITE THEM, AND UTTERLY DESTROY THEM’

  The Jewish people consolidated their hold on Canaan in a campaign of cruel slaughter until the entire country had been bloodily subdued.

  ——♦——

  ‘Ye have not obeyed my voice.’

  JUDGES 2, 11.

  The death of Joshua, at 110 years of age, left the Jewish nation leaderless – and, as believers, vulnerable to whatever more obviously enticing spirituality came their way. The period that followed saw frequent backsliding into paganism – often God or Yahweh was rejected in favour of other cults; sometimes that of the ancient Semitic deity known as Baal. ‘I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,’ Yahweh had reminded Moses as he gave him his Commandments (Exodus 20, 5): he certainly didn’t take kindly to the adoration of rivals now. ‘And the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel,’ we read, ‘and he delivered them into the hands of spoilers that spoiled them, and he sold them into the hands of their enemies round about.’

  ‘Evil in the Sight of the Lord’

  Despite this, we are told, ‘the Lord raised up judges, which delivered them out of the hand of those that spoiled them.’ This book of the Bible is actually known as the Book of Judges – the title does not seem to imply any sort of legal background: just tribal leadership, and the backing of the Lord. These men were ‘judges’ in that they imposed and administered the law on God’s behalf. Even so, they could not necessarily command the loyalty or obedience of their people. For, it is reported (Judges 2, 17), the Jews:

  would not hearken unto their judges, but they went a whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them: they turned quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in.

  Such has been the dominance of the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ that the practices of ancient paganism now seem impossibly remote – yet the Bible tells us of constant temptation from – and frequent backsliding into – the rites of Baal.

  This backsliding into paganism was to be a feature of the time. It is signalled by formulations like ‘And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord’ – at chapter 2, verse 11. Much the same report is made in close-to-identical words at 3, 12; 4, 1; and 6, 1, for example. Each time, fortunately for the Jews, a new Judge took charge and led his people back on to the monotheistic ‘way … their fathers walked in’.

  Typically, they imposed their authority, not by their learning, their eloquence or their stoic dignity but by their military prowess – like that of Shamgar, ‘which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox goad’ (3, 31).

  Moabite Massacre

  One longstanding conflict in Canaan was with the Moabites, a pagan people occupying the area to the east of the Dead Sea. The children of Israel once again doing ‘evil in the sight of the Lord’, God grew angry and ‘strengthened Eglon the king of Moab against Israel’ (3, 12). With his allies from the lands of Ammon and Amalek, he ‘smote’ Israel and took its children under domination.

  There was nothing terribly judicial about the ‘Judges’ of Old Testament times – except, ultimately, they did administer the law. The leadership they provided was essentially military, however: nowadays they may have been described as ‘warlords’.

  The Jews were crying out to the Lord in penitence, and he ‘raised them up a deliverer’ (3, 15) in the person of Ehud, son of Gera, ‘a man lefthanded’. He was sent as an emissary to take a gift to Eglon, King of Moab. But, the Book of Judges tells us:

  Ehud made him a dagger which had two edges … and he did gird it under his raiment upon his right thigh. And he brought the present unto Eglon king of Moab; and Eglon was a very fat man … And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat. And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly: And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out.

  Emboldened by his actions, his fellow Jews attacked the Moabites (3, 29):

  And they slew of Moab at that time about ten thousand men, all lusty, and all men of valour; and there escaped not a man.

  ‘And the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly’.

  JUDGES 3, 22

  A Woman’s Place

  Jewish society at this time was for the most part, quite literally, a ‘patriarchy’, but this didn’t necessarily mean that women didn’t play an important role. And not just as wives and mothers: Deborah, wife of Lapidoth, for instance, was revered as a ‘prophetess’ (4, 4). More than this, we’re told: ‘she judged Israel at that time’ – she was, in short, a leader of her nation.

  Eglon, King of the Moabites, falls dead, brought down by the dagger which Ehud has been carrying concealed on his thigh beneath his clothing. This, it seems, was the ‘message from God’ which the Jewish Judge had brought.

  This said, Deborah’s authority doesn’t seem to have been sufficient to dissuade the Jews from one of their periodic swings back into paganism. God, in his anger, had ‘sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, that reigned in Hazor’ (4, 3). Jabin was, by any ancient standards, an impressively powerful overlord: ‘for he had nine hundred chariots of iron; and twenty years he mightily oppressed the children of Israel’ (4, 3).

  Deborah was determined to save her people, though. Calling upon Barak, son of Abinoam, she ordered him to take an army 10,000 strong towards Mount Tabor, where he might attack King Jabin’s army under its feared commander, Sisera. An apprehensive Barak replied ‘If thou wilt go with me, then I will go; but if thou wilt not go with me, then I will not go.’ Deborah promised her support, while warning him that the glory of the campaign would not ultimately come to him, ‘for the Lord shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman’ (4, 9).

  This was a little unfair, perhaps, for Barak and his army did get their victory in the field of battle (4, 15):

  The Lord discomfited Sisera, and all his chariots, and all his host, with the edge of the sword before Barak.

  Sisera, in his panic, jumped down from his chariot ‘and fled away quickly on his feet’, with Barak and his host in hot pursuit. But they could not catch Jabin’s captain, who took refuge in the tent of his friend and also his ally Heber the Kenite.

  But Heber’s wife Jael was not quite so sympathetic. She felt for the Jews, who had so long suffered at Sisera and Jabin’s hands. Even so, she stepped forward to welcome the fugitive, the perfect hostess. Ushering him into her husband’s tent, she persuaded him to lie down and rest in his weariness. She even covered him with a mantle for his comfort:

  And he said unto her, Give me, I pray thee, a little water to drink; for I am thirsty. And she opened a bottle of milk, and gave him drink, and covered him. Again he said unto her, Stand in the door of the tent, and it shall be, when any man doth come and enquire of thee, and say, Is there any man here? that thou shalt say, No. (4, 19)

  So it was agreed, and so Sisera turned in to res
t, reassured of his safety.

  Then, however (4, 21):

  Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.

  Deborah, wife of Lapidoth, was held in reverence as a prophet. The first (and only) female Judge, she led the Jews in rebellion against Canaan’s oppressive King Jabin, gaining victory with the help of another woman, Jael.

  When Barak arrived in pursuit of Sisera, Jael welcomed him in his turn, saying ‘Come, and I will shew thee the man whom thou seekest’ (4, 22):

  And when he came into her tent, behold, Sisera lay dead, and the nail was in his temples.

  Jael displays her trophy to Barak, Deborah’s general. Having welcomed Sisera, made the enemy commander as comfortable as any conscientious hostess should, she had driven an iron spike through his head as he lay in slumber.

  Just as Deborah had prophesied, then, Jabin and Sisera had been defeated by the men of Israel, but the honour of the victory rested with a woman.

  The Bastard and his Brothers

  Barak succeeded Deborah as Judge, to be followed in his turn by Gideon – chiefly remarkable, perhaps, in having ‘threescore and ten’ – or seventy – sons. Threescore and eleven in actual fact, for he sired another boy with a concubine. Abimelech (the name means ‘my father, king’, so can be seen as a defiantly asserting a right to rule) grew up determined to secure the succession for himself. That he was 71st in line to the title of Judge does not seem to have deterred him. With the help of his mother’s family, he murdered them – bashing out the brains of 69 ‘upon one stone’ (9, 5). Only the youngest, Jotham, managed to slip away and hide.