Dark History of the Bible

by Michael Kerrigan

  Jotham cursed Abimelech and his house and his reign as Judge. He enlisted the help of a neighbouring ruler, Gaal, in a war with Abimelech’s Israel – without success, though, for Abimelech won the day.

  Abimelech seemed invincible in battle. Ironically, it was to take a woman to overthrow him as well. Laying siege to the city of Thabaz, he breached its defences and was attacking the central tower in which the garrison and their families had holed up when he was hit on the head by a ‘piece of millstone’, hurled from a high battlement by a woman trapped inside (9, 53). Seeing that he was being brought to his death by a female attacker, and unwilling to endure the ignominy, he called on his armour-bearer to ‘thrust him through’ (9, 54).

  Slain by a stone hurled from the battlements above by a woman of the city, Abimelech lies dead outside the walls of Thabaz. He had his swordbearer run him through to spare him the shame of being killed by a woman.

  Jepthah’s obedience unto death – and her valuing of her virginity above her life – made her a model for feminine propriety well into modern times. Painted around 1660, the maiden’s fate, though lamented, is never for a moment questioned.

  A HIGH PRICE

  GOD SHOWED HIS impatience with his people when – once again angered at Israel’s return to dabbling in pagan practices – he gave them over to the domination of the Ammonites. He was to prove exacting in the amends he demanded from the Jews. Anxious to secure his people’s freedom, Judge Jephthah ‘vowed a vow unto the Lord’ (11, 30), promising that, if he would assure Israel victory:

  Then it shall be that, whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.

  God gave him his victory but, returning home in triumph, Jephthah found his jubilation turning to despair when his beloved daughter came rushing out of the house to meet him.

  A model for Jewish girlhood, Jephthah’s (unnamed) daughter, accepted her grisly destiny without repining. She asked only for two months’ grace, ‘that I might go up and down upon the mountains, and bewail my virginity’ (11, 37).

  A Hairy Hero

  And so the cycle continued: in adversity, the Jews remembered their God; as soon as he restored prosperity, they invariably wavered in their faith. God, angered as he was by their apostasy, always came to his people’s rescue, providing some leader or hero who could help them.

  One of these was Samson. He was born to a man named Manoah and his wife, who were unable to have children: the angel who brought Manoah’s wife the good news warned her that God insisted, as a condition of allowing her to conceive, that no razor should ever touch the head of the son she bore (13, 5).

  Samson grew up a hero of a fairly straightforward sort – albeit wayward from the first in his romantic aspirations. Despite his parents’ disapproval, he set his sights on a beautiful young woman of the Philistine people – pagans and enemies of the Jews. On his way to see her one day, he was attacked by a lion but was able to pull it physically apart with the incredible strength of his hands.

  Sweetness, Strength and Savagery

  A standard superhero story, then. Later, though, the plot was to thicken. Passing by the same place, Samson saw that there was a nest of bees, full of honey, inside the lion’s carcass.

  Samson used this as the basis for a riddle to confound his fiancée’s family’s Philistine acquaintances. If they could solve it, he said, he would give them ‘thirty sheets and thirty changes of garments’ (14, 12). ‘Out of the eater came forth meat,’ went the riddle; ‘and out of the strong came forth sweetness’ (14, 14). The ‘meat’ here (in its old sense, of meaning simply ‘food’) was the honey, which had come out of the lion’s belly; the sweetness too was the honey from inside the ‘strong’, the lion.

  Driven almost demented by their inability to solve this riddle, the Philistines threatened to kill his bride if she didn’t reveal the answer: when she did, it was Samson who was mad with rage. Immediately embarking on his own one-man war with the Philistines, he killed 30 of their young men at random and took the clothes off their backs to settle up his wager (14, 19).

  Schooled in the classical learning of the Renaissance, artists found themselves irresistibly drawn to see Jewish Samson as a version of the Greek strongman Hercules. He too had wrestled with a lion, as the biblical hero does here.

  Not surprisingly, his father-in-law reconsidered and gave his wife to another in marriage. ‘I verily thought that thou hadst utterly hated her,’ he insisted (15, 2). (More remarkably, he said that Samson could still wed her younger sister.) Samson erupted into a fury all over again and, since the wheat harvest was fast approaching, he:

  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.

  In revenge for this, the Philistines burned both his sometime bride and her father to death. And in revenge for that, Samson ‘smote’ the Philistines ‘hip and thigh with a great slaughter’ (15, 8).

  When a Philistine army marched down to confront the Jews, demanding that Samson be given up to them, safely bound up in cords, Samson told his comrades that they should tie him and hand him over as required – he would happily comply. Once he was behind the Philistine lines, however (15, 14):

  the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands. And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.

  Deadly Delilah

  The story of Samson and Delilah is the archetypal tale of the strong, straightforward man brought to his destruction by the wiles of womanhood. Delilah was approached by the Philistines as soon as Samson’s interest in her became known: ‘Entice him, and see wherein his great strength lieth,’ they urged her (16, 5).

  Delilah duly asked him and – apparently amused – he told her that his strength would ebb away if he were bound with bowstrings. The Philistines tried that while he slept – but when he woke, he broke them. Urged again, he said that his strength might be thwarted if he were tied up with fresh-made ropes: these were tried, and these too proved unavailing.

  Delilah pressed and, finally, he confided that the loss of his hair would drain him of all his strength: he described the prohibition the angel had issued before his birth. And so (16, 19):

  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.

  Towering above the mass of enemy troops, brandishing an ass’s jawbone about his head, Samson sets about the smiting of the Philistines. This dramatic engraving was created by Gustave Doré in the nineteenth century.

  As if this symbolic castration weren’t enough, the Philistines promptly performed a second one, putting out his eyes – just as Sophocles’ King Oedipus did, tormented by the guilt of his incestuous relations with his mother.

  ‘... she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head; and she began to afflict him...’

  JUDGES 16, 19

  Brought down by his beloved’s treachery, Samson was at his lowest, utterly abased: planning to parade him at one of their feasts, the Philistines pulled him from his prison. ‘Now the house was full of men and women,’ we’re told (16, 27):

  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.

  But Samson called on God for help (16, 28):

  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 righ
t 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.

  Beating the Benjamites

  The smiting continued, now with civil war between the Tribe of Benjamin (descendants of Joseph’s younger brother) and the rest of Israel. The Benjamites refused to respect the ‘voice of their brethren’ (20, 13) in the other tribes. Hostilities opened with an attack by the children of Benjamin that, according to Judges (20, 21), ‘destroyed down to the ground of the Israelites … twenty and two thousand men’. A few days later, ‘Benjamin went forth’ a second time ‘and destroyed down to the ground of the children of Israel again eighteen thousand men’ (20, 25). Although far superior in numbers, the other tribes were at first caught unprepared: the Benjamites seemed to be able to bully them at will. Soon, though, the tables were turned, and at a major engagement outside the city of Gibeah (20, 36):

  the Lord smote Benjamin before Israel; and the children of Israel destroyed of the Benjamites that day twenty and five thousand and an hundred men.

  Their city in flames, they fled for the wilderness, but ‘the battle overtook them’ (20, 42) and a further ‘eighteen thousand’ Benjamite lives were claimed.

  Jan Lievens’ 1635 Delilah is not the delicate and subtle seductress the nineteenth-century decadents loved to fantasize about but an aggressive thug-in-female-form. It is clear from the painting that this woman inspires fear even in the Philistines.

  HOSTLY DUTY

  AN EPISODE IN Chapter 19 of the Book of Judges brings us biblical morality at its most perplexing. In some ways reminiscent of the story of Sodom, it shows the masculine code of hospitality trumping just about everything else. Even, it seems, the need to protect women from gang rape.

  The story relates how an old man in the town of Gibeah took a weary wayfarer, travelling with his ‘handmaiden’ or ‘concubine’ into his home. ‘So he brought him into his house … and they washed their feet and did eat and drink’ (19, 21).

  As the evening wore on, however, and the old man’s company ‘were making their hearts merry’ (19, 22):

  the men of the city … beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him.

  The householder emerged and tried to reason with this rapacious mob: ‘I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into mine house, do not this folly.’ Seeing them still implacable, he offered them a compromise (19, 24):

  Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you; but unto this man do not so vile a thing.

  But the men were not to be dissuaded and carried on clamouring for the male guest to be given up to their lust. At this point, in desperation, the traveller brought his concubine out and handed her over to the baying crowd. ‘And they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning; and when the day began to spring, they let her go.’ Then, the account continues (19, 26):

  came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her lord was, till it was light.

  There her master found her when he awoke – she, alas, was not to be awoken. Carrying her body into the house, he cut her up (‘together with her bones’ – 19, 29), and sent the pieces ‘into all the coasts of Israel’. So outraged were the Jews at the men of Gibeah’s outrageous breach of hospitality (20, 11) that ‘all the men of Israel were gathered against the city, knit together as one man’.

  ‘The Levite Findeth his Dead Wife’. Horrified and fascinated by the connection they sensed between eroticism and violence, nineteenth-century artists were repeatedly drawn to the strange sexual politics of the Old Testament.

  The Israelites could be their own worst enemies – quite literally, when it came to the war between the Benjamites and the other tribes, a civil conflict which put most of the Jews’ external wars in the shade.

  Allowable Abduction

  By now the Tribe of Benjamin had been all but extinguished, but the enmity still continued – so much so that the other tribes agreed not to give the Benjamites their daughters in marriage. At the same time, it did not sit comfortably with them that a tribe of Israel should simply die out (21, 15): ‘And the people repented them for Benjamin, because that the Lord had made a breach in the tribes of Israel.’ Then, we’re told, the elders asked:

  How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin? … Howbeit we may not give them wives of our daughters; for the children of Israel have sworn, saying, Cursed be he that giveth a wife to Benjamin.’

  The answer was to sanction large-scale rape: the elders urged the Benjamites to lie in wait by the vineyards of Shiloh, north of Bethel, and abduct the daughters of the city as they danced at their annual festivities.

  An Intimate Revenge

  It was Israel’s turn to suffer massacre when hostilities with the Philistines were renewed, as depicted in the First Book of Samuel. In scenes of ‘very great slaughter’, 30,000 Israelites were slain (4, 10), and the sacred Ark of the Covenant was seized and taken to the city of Ashdod.

  The sons of Benjamin carry off the daughters of Shiloh – compelled to do so, they claimed, by the refusal of the other tribes to grant them wives. The story echoes the Roman myth of the Rape of the Sabine Women.

  God exacted vengeance on his people’s behalf soon after, though: he took the capture of the Ark as an unpardonable affront. The Philistines bore their trophy back in triumph to the temple of their idol, Dagon. Next morning, they found that the figure of their deity had toppled over in the night and was lying flat on its face on the temple floor (5, 3).

  And this was just the start. ‘The hand of the Lord was against the city with a very great destruction’, we’re told (5, 9):

  and he smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods in their secret parts.

  A talisman taken. The Israelites carry their Ark of Covenant into battle, believing it will bring them guaranteed glory. Instead, it is captured by the Philistines, who inflict ignominious defeat – and ‘very great slaughter’ on the Jews.

  In fear, the Philistines moved the Ark – first to the city of Gath, and then after that to Ekron – but in those places too people were subjected to the painful and undignified affliction of emerods (haemorrhoids).

  Buckled over in their pain – and their indignity – the men of Ashdod have cause to rue their recent triumph. The ‘emerods in their secret parts’ have been sent by God in punishment for their capture of the Ark of Covenant.

  In despair, the Philistines turned to their ‘priests and diviners’ for advice. They told them that they would have to return the Ark of the Covenant to the Jews. In addition, they said, the Philistines would have to make a ‘trespass offering’ (6, 9) to atone for their crime: five golden ‘emerods’, and five golden mice – one for each of the five chiefs of the Philistines.

  And so the Ark of the Covenant, carried in state on a specially constructed cart drawn by a pair of ‘milch cows’, set out on its journey back to Israelite territory. But the smiting on its account was not yet done. On its final stop, at the city of Beth-shemesh, local men opened the lid of the Ark and peered in. God was enraged at this act of sacrilege (6, 19):

  and he smote the men of the Beth-shemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men.

  The Coming of the Kings

  It was at about this time that Samuel came to the fore: the last of Israel’s Judges, he was at the same time the first of those divinely-inspired seers and preachers known as prophets. Their lives and teachings were to be the focus of the Bible in its next few books. Samuel was significant too, however, in ushering in the age of kings – those royal rulers who wo
uld bring what had been a loose tribal federation together into a single Jewish state.

  ‘... ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you’.

  SAMUEL 8, 18

  Samuel had built a personal reputation for himself by leading his people in successful expeditions against the Philistines, the Ammonites and the Amalekites. As he approached his death (8, 5), the people asked him to appoint a king. Although this request ‘displeased’ him, he prayed to God for guidance: the Lord instructed him to tell the Jews that they could have a king, but that he would tax and tyrannize them beyond all endurance. And (8, 18):

  ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

  Even so, the people insisted, so Samuel anointed Saul first King of Israel: he led the Jews to victory over the Moabites, the Ammonites and Edomites, as well as other foes. But his sons – and likely successors – were dishonest, and Saul himself avaricious. Things came to a head when he defeated the Amalekites (15, 7): the Lord had commanded him to destroy the whole people and all they had. When the moment came, however, Saul took it upon himself to spare their king, Agag, and the best of their livestock. God would never forgive this disobedience.