Judges 18: In Writing

 Small Cruelties

After Danusha Laméris

I've been thinking about the way, when you walk

past a forgotten flower pot, it seems so easy

to snatch it. Or how overhanging oranges

tempt us, a leftover, perhaps, from Eden. How easily

“I want,” becomes “mine”.

And sometimes, when we hold

a marker, someone else will grab it.

Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. But

we want that extra big piece

of chocolate cake, with the perfect

swirl of cream. Want the purple marker,

and that specific “Gummy bear” song. 

We have so little control, always. So far

from the enclosed garden, with a heavy hanging

fig tree and a gate that can slam shut. Only

these two hands. Not so large. Not so powerful.

These hands, and the weapons we pick

up along the way. Sticks. Words.

What if these are our only nodes of exchange,

when we pass each other on our solitary prowls, 

erecting fleeting temples to our gnawing needs. Saying, “Mine”

“Give or I’ll take it.” Saying, “Let’s see you stop me. Please.”

Judges: Chapter 18

 

Scry,

but do not speak--

eyes wide shut

always seek advantage

on your path outward

For full chapter, click here

This chapter, like the last, is also set in an achronological "in those days". Yet if the previous chapter seems to have stepped out of history, this chapter is dense with intertextuality, reaching deep into the nation's past and future.

True, it continues the previous chapter, linked by the refrain "In those days there was no king in Israel," and by continued insistent allusions to the Samson saga. The Dannite warriors set out from "between Tzorah and Eshtaol," echoing the opening and closing of Samson's story "between Tzorah and Eshtaol". What is more, the repeated references to the "encampment of Dan" in the Samson story are now retroactively explained: the Danites live in an "encampment" because "no inheritance had fallen into their lot among the tribes of Israel," and so they remained unsettled, a kind of second Levi.

Yet this description is itself puzzling, for the Dannites were given an "inheritance among the tribes of Israel"--in the seventh lot, back when the tribes's territories were apportioned by Joshua--a territory bordered by "Tzorah and Eshtaol", which included the fateful Timnah, where Samson met his wife. Rather, as we were told way back at the opening of this book, the Dannites were blocked from this inheritance by the Amorites, who drove them to the hills--a dispossession that haunts this period as an implicit threat.

The Danites' solution here is to send out five warriors to "spy out (רגל) the land and investigate it" . The action is dense with meaning, awakening a plethora of echoes. The first reference to rigul / spies is the Joseph saga (which so dominates the initial apportionment of the tribes): "You are spies!" Joseph accused his brothers. "The nakedness of the land you have come to see."And indeed the Danites are searching for vulnerability. Reaching Laish, they see perfect prey: "a tranquil and unsuspecting people, with no one in the land to molest them." Similarly, after partaking of Micah's hospitality, they see opportunity: "Here the five men who had gone to spy (r'g'l) ... remarked to their clans, “Do you know, there is an ephod in these houses, and oracle idols, and a sculptured image and a molten image? Now you know what you have to do.”

Yet the Dannite quest is no less in dialogue with other incidents of spying--most centrally, the infamous mission to "scout out" the Land, which ended in a 40-year exile. Moses's mission statement was not to spy (r'g'l), but rather to explore (t'r לתור), with detailed questions, involving every aspect of the land: "see what kind of country it is." The relative vulnerability of the population is simply another detail: are the people weak or strong?  Ultimately, however, this exploration is destroyed by how it awakens the people's sense of their own vulnerability:  we were as insects in their eyes, and so we were in our own. Caleb and Joshua are the lone dissenting voices, insisting that vulnerability is in the eye of the beholder: Have no fear then of the people of the country, for they are our prey: their protection has departed from them, but God is with us. 

The Dannite spies attempt to channel Caleb and Joshua's energy, merging their various speeches as they exhort the Dannites to capture Laish: "God has delivered it into your hand. When you come, you will come to an unsuspecting people; and the land is spacious and nothing on earth is lacking there.” Yet there is a deep irony in this appropriation, for their message is fundamentally opposed to that of Caleb and Joshua. Caleb and Joshua insist that the dangers are illusory, and that the people should fight for their inheritance. The Dannite spies, by contrast, urge abandoning the Dannite lands to go attack an "unsuspecting people." What God has apportioned is meaningless: the central question is relative strength. The fearless Caleb defines and initiates the conquest of the Land; Joshua exhorts the people "How long will you be slack in going to possess the land that God, the Lord of your fathers, has given you?" The Dannites, by contrast, remain ever-slack: they turn away from the land God has given them,  acceding to their dispossession. Let us abandon our territory, is their implicit message, and look for someplace easy. In this, they truly are an encampment of nomads, connected to no specific nahala. Like the young Levite-priest, they go on a "path", looking for what they can find." This stands in contrast to the primal Danite warrior, Samson, who for all his erratic action and insistent loneliness, focused his efforts on the Dannite ancestral lands near Timnah.

Caleb and Joshua they are not. But the Dannite warriors have learned one thing by attempting to recreate the story of the scouts: the power of language.  The battle between Caleb and the rest of the spies is one of words: they do not argue about facts, but about how to speak of them. The scouts sin is their speech :  דיבת הארץ--the speaking of the land. In presenting themselves as modern day Calebs ad=bd Joshuas, the Dannite spies are careful to allow no dissent: shut your mouth, they order. Be silent. No one is to undermine their narrative. 

Yet the Dannites do not wholly accept it. Instead, they split:  600 warriors take off for easier climes, the rest stay in the homelands of Tzorah and Eshtaol. On the way "out" (as the move to Laish is defined in Joshua 19), the Dannite contigent also carry off the Levite and Micah's gods. The opportunistic  Levite, who searched to "live wherever he could find", and was drawn in by Micah's concrete monetary offer,  is happy to set off to bigger and greater things. The hapless Micah is forced to turn around with nothing, the thief losing what he stole, along with the relationships he thought he had baught. Commodification and betrayal are triumphant. 

The stolen gods are set up in the stolen Laish "until the exile of the land"--a dark dart into the future. The dispossession of the Dannites indeed foretells the eventual dispossession of all the tribes. The schism in Dan is echoed in the schism between  Micah's house of God and the Tabernacle in Shilo. Relationships dissolve. communication is silenced.  

Judges 17: In Writing

Can I have a chocolate coin? he asks, But you took one without permission, I say. What if I'm good, he says, what if I'm good the whole day?

Do you love me Imma,  he asks, do you?

Of course I do, I say, tired,

Because some kids in my gan day their imma hates them, he says.

Do you love me Imma, do you? he asks

Of course I love you, I say

Because I like to hear you say it, he says. Can I have a chocolate coin?

Judges: Chapter 17

 

What is taken

what is offered

what fills the hand

in the stops along your way

For full chapter, click here

The next chapter begins abruptly, with no mention of the passage of time (the usual bridge between sagas), nor any reference to an external oppressor.  We have left the realm of history, to enter the timeless space of the domestic: a "man from the mountains of Ephraim" in the middle of an exchange with his mother about money.

Yet despite the change of ambiance and setting, there is a strange yet clear textual link to the Samson story: the very specific sum of 1100 silver coins--paid by the Philistines to Delilah for Samson's secret--repeated here, twice, as the sum stolen by Micah from his mother. More subtle: this timeless "in those days" is defined by "each man did what was right in his own eyes" (yashar b'enav), an echo of Samson's justification for his choice of Philistine wife: "for she is right in my eyes" (yeshara hi be'eynai).

The linkage between Micah's coins and Delilah's blood money associates places money at the center, associating it with betrayal, commodification and possession. And indeed, the relationship between Micah and his mother zings around these coins, which change hands repeatedly between them. Micah steals from his mother who curses him, then retracts the curse. He says he will return the money; she says the money is his; then retracts this offer as he gives her the money. Instead, she gives him a fraction  to pay for "an idol and an ephod"--returning us to the Gideon story, with its possibility of hereditary kingship, at a time "when there is no King in Israel.".

 The intense interaction of mother and son contrast with the Samson saga, where Manoach the father keeps asserting his centrality.  In the backdrop is the gaping absence of the father. And indeed in the next section, the father moves centre stage: Micah, now revealed to be a father himself, "fills the hands of his son" to make him the priest of this new house of God-idolatry. Yet when a young Levite passes by, Micah sees an opportunity. Even as the Levite emphasized his migratory status as one who is opportunistically looking to "sojourn where he finds," Micah eagerly grasps at him, begging him to "stay with me and be my father and my priest,"  the missing father found at last. 

To offset this desperation for relationship, Micah offers money: " I will pay you ten shekels of silver a year, an allowance of clothing, and your food." The Levite accepts the blandishments he "has found", and has "his hands filled"  in place of Micah's son. Though Micah searched for a father, "the youth became like one of his own sons" and Micah is convinced that some how in this, he has earned God's blessing.    

Chapter 16: In Writing

 Browned leaves litter the pavement

like clawed hands 

or scattered flames.

 

I love you, my toddler tells me,

digging into my cheeks.

Do you love me?

 

I bury

my nose in his wispy hair.

He grabs my wrist,

 

moves it up and down

his cheek. When I draw away

he pinches me.

 

How do we love each other,

let us count the ways

and how much,

 

and how little

and who more.

How long will you lie to me?

 

A reddened vine encircles

the lemon tree, a leaf cluster

rising to ring the finger

 

when I have you

heart sliced open

prostate on my knees

 

what do we do

with the openings,

what lies in wait inside?

 

Judges: Chapter 16

Rise and fall

on waves of passion

enwrap both sides

and bring it all down around you

 For full chapter, click here

The initial hint of redemptive promise embedded in Samson's marriage in Timnah has come to naught. Now there is no pretense of  relationship, as Samson baldly "meets a prostitute and sleeps with her." Yet even at this nadir, a new hint of redemption awakens: Samson sleeps only till "midnight", returning us to Gideon and his "midnight" battle. And when Samson carries the door with its two "sideposts" (mezuzot), we are carried back to an earlier midnight-- that fateful midnight of the Exodus, when the Israelites demarcated their boundaries by painting their sideposts with blood, so that God "passed over them."

And indeed in the next section, Samson "loves" for the first time--a change from the commodified, brutely sexual language used in his earlier encounter with women. Yet now, instead of buying women and their favors, it is Samson who is bought. Initially, Delilah sells him for silver, which the Philistine chieftains are careful to bring with them to the ambush. Yet as Delilah realizes that the wiley Samson has tricked her, the betrayal also becomes personal, a battle for power over this all-powerful man. "How can you be made helpless?" she asks him, again and again.

The answer is that fatal "love", along with Samson's permeable boundaries, the doorposts he never learned to demarcate. The physically strong Samson is internally weak, lacking staying power.  Just as when his wife coaxed out the answer to his riddle, he cannot withstand Delilah's questioning. Accusations, nagging, and his very "soul wishes to die." On some level, he wishes to be as helpless as he feels inside. Short bursts of intense power he can manage, yet cannot withstand sustained pressure--much as he was ready to die if God did not quench his thirst. 

And die he will. For this time it is not a riddle he reveals, but the source of his strength. In a scene of strange and terrifying tenderness, Delilah realizes that he has revealed "his whole heart", making himself utterly vulnerable. In a dark echo of Jael, she takes on a quasi-maternal role,  lulling him to sleep on her lap. When he is somnolent and infantilized, she calls in the Philistines to strip him of his strength. 

The degradation of Samson alludes to several episodes in his life, a kind of back window view of his downfall. Where once he chose a woman "who was right in his eyes" he is now reduced to an eyeless spectacle to be watched. After sauntering into Azza to sleep with a whore, he is now returned to Azza "to play" for his enemies.  Samson's final moments highlight the leitmotif of duality that has defined him from the moment his birth was announced, his death set into place before his conception. Strength and weakness; rough and sweet. He is the lion, riven in two; the twinned foxes running terrified of the fire burning between them. Where once he carried the gate and its two sideposts, balancing both sides, now he prays to be avenged of only "one of my two eyes." Symbolically, he wraps himself around both supporting beams, crushing them together, his duality forced to singularity, bringing the temple down.

Let my soul die with the Philistines, he prays. The saga ends chiastically, as Samson is collected by his brethren, and carried back to the Dannite lands between Tzorah and Eshtaol where his story began. And yet despite this return, Samson remains entwined and defined by the Philistines--the nation to whom he related, married, hated, loved, and died. Yes, he is buried with his father Manoach, but does he truly return?

Chapter 15: In Writing

Wails. She is curled on the floor.
She pushed me first! he says,
upright in his righteousness.

and now the baby is crying
Hurt me! Hurt me! 
pointing forlornly. 

He’s half your size! I say. 

Look at him!
But he stole my truck, he retorts. 

 
Gangly, he towers above the kindergarten, 
Look how strong I am, 

he boasts, 

Yes, I say, yes you are, 

don't say, 

and even when you were two

they called you a bully
as youngest–but largest–
you shoved for your turn.
 
By now she has picked herself up,

picks up the small metal dump truck
and hurls it at him

it smacks his face, 

scratching the corner of his eye.

When he screams,

she rushes at him, kicking. 
A millee,  all wailing together
as my hands close over my ears  

Judges: Chapter 15

 

Strong as a lion
wily as a fox
the multitudes within
flaring out 
to burn the spaces between

[for full chapter, click here

Samson continues on his trajectory, a figure of ever-growing extremes. In this chapter, he acts completely alone, freed even from the human framework of his parents. Now he is a rogue, closest to his animal familiars. If in the previous chapter, his doppelganger was the lion he tore apart, here he expresses himself through the medium of the 300 foxes he uses as weapons. The lion embodies his inhuman strength; the foxes his strange, playful intelligence. Yet in both cases,  the animals also embody the contradictory tensions that defined him even before birth: the powerful lion is filled with sweet honey; the wiley foxes burn with uncontainable fire.

Just as the lion is torn into two, the foxes also are riven in two directions. Samson connects them in pairs, and the fire flares out  between the tails, destruction coming from two forces pulling in opposite directions. 

Like Whitman, Samson is "vast" and "contains multatutes." The story is dense with intertextuality. If Samson's annunciation echoes the story of Sarah and Isaac, and his descent to Timnah alludes to Judah's journey, here his story recalls Jacob's, as he is offered one sister in place of another. Yet unlike Jacob, who must accept the logic of replacement after stepping into his own brother's shoes, Samson insists on the specific choice of "what is right in his own eyes." In some ways, he is closer to Jacob's twin, Esau, utterly overwhelmed by his own appetites. Esau exchanges his birthright for a bowl of soup; while Samson is willing to exchange his life for water. Like the twinned foxes. Samson holds both primordial twins within him. 

The fire that has haunted this text since Ephraim threatened to burn down Jephthah's house around him here burns fully, destroying everything around it. Samson's twinned foxes destroy the fields and vineyards and olive groves. The Philistines respond by avenging themselves on Samson's faithless wife, "burning the house down" on her and her father. For nothing did she betray Samson to avoid the companions' threat to "burn down the house around her," The fire, like Checkov's gun, was burning already, and only waiting to be unleashed. 

Samson sought marriage to the woman in Timnah as a pretext to battle the Philistines. Now the political reality of ruler and ruled becomes instead tit-for-tat, with each side promising to do to the other as was done to them.

Yet despite this intensely personal and unstable relationship, we are told that Samson "judged" Israel. Even though Judah gives him over to the Philistenes as a lone-wolf vigilante, somewhere, somehow, Samson achieves a level of leadership. ] 

Judges 14: In Writing

Too cold, she says

snatching back her hands

I add hot. No

More. Too hot, she says.

Pours the cup out.

The tights are too tight

and the wrong pink

and have lines.

She puts on the blue

pale bulb of her right toe

exposed.

They're torn, I say, 

and don't match.

It's what I like, she retorts.

Back up dress in her bag--

just in case. Water

bottle exactly full 

Hold me, she says

I need you to hold me. 

On the couch. Exactly 

in the regular spot,

her slight body

burrowing into mine.

So hard, to face the world

As flayed as Marsiyas

insides exposed

to the wind's every tremor.

Judges: Chapter 14

 

Between up and down,

predator and prey

rough and sweet

strong and weak--

how not to be torn in two

[For full chapter, click here
And Samson went down to Timnah. The prophesized Samson has grown into maturity--and domination. No longer is the story about Manoach and his wife, or about the woman and her man: the former protagonists are now simply "his father and mother", Manoach as nameless as his wife.

With Samson's growth into manhood, the ambiguity introduced before his conception comes into full expression. The chapter is taught with the tensions between contradictions: Samson rises and goes down; he is physically strong and psychologically weak; he riddles about sweetness and terror. The striking image of the lion carcass dripping honey embodies these contradictory forces. The fact that the carcass is riven in two adds a dark undertone of doom. Samson skirts the edge of possibilities, walking through vineyards he is forbidden to drink from; marrying a woman he cannot really have. His inability to withstand his wife's nagging hints that these tensions cannot always be contained.

The opening movement toward Timnah returns us to Judah's journey toward Timnah in Genesis 28, where he too discovers duality. The two scenes are in dialogue: Judah's journey begins when he "goes down" from his brothers; he too discovers a woman, in language that is crude and sexual; both scenes contain a kid goat. The allusions to Judah's encounter with Tamar introduce the possibility that Samson's descent to the Philistines will also be redemptive: Judah's apparently illicit encounter with Tamar led to life after repeated death (and to the birth of Peretz, eventual forefather of the Davidic dynasty). Here too we are informed that Samson's "request was from God." Yet in contrast to Judah, who "goes up" to Timnah, Samson repeatedly "goes down," implying that the movement is more than spatial--and that perhaps these journies have different metaphoric trajectories. ]