Judges: Chapter 6

 

To be clothed in God's spirit

or be its clothes

and feel rain fall, while the earth cracks sear

or see earth drink, as the cloth stayes dry

As if the rain did not fall on all, 

or every day

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Forty years of peace--the count of a generation, as transformative as the forty years wandering in the desert to birth a nation capable of independence. But the end of this forty-year cycle is breakdown, not rebirth, as "Israel does what is offensive to God", and are delivered to the Midianites for a symbolic 7 years--seven, the number that structures the covenant and its abnegation, creation and destruction.

And indeed, this enemy is destructive--the leitwort is ש'ח'ת, destroy, as the nomads come to pillage, not settle, and strip the land "like locust".

If the previous chapter returns to the Song of the Sea, in complement and echo, this chapter is in dark dialogue with the Exodus story, as the mighty hand that God once employed against Egypt crashes down on Israel. The "living" (מחיה) that Joseph provided for his brothers is here taken away (they left them no מחיה ), and if once Israel called (ve'yizak) and their voice rose to God, now the only thing that rises is the enemy, while Israel's cry dangels, unanswered. And indeed, when God does send a "man prophet" in place of the "woman prophetess" Deborah, his message is now an accusation of how they have failed the Exodus: "I rescued you from Egypt...yet you did not obey Me" (Judges 6:9-10).

The message ends abruptly and hopelessly, in a seeming rejection of Israel's pleas for help. "If God is with us, why has this befallen us? Where are all the wonderful deeds with which took us out of Egypt?" Gideon demands, giving voice to this hopelessness. Yet an angel is waiting under a tree to appoint a new redeemer. Gideon's initiation is replete with intertextual allusions to Moses and to his initiation: "Bi adoni", Gideon says, echoing Moses' double "please sir" as he tries to convince God to send someone else; I have sent you (שלחתחך), God says, echoing his appointment of Moses. Like Moses, Gideon is given multiple "signs" (ot). Like Moses, he asks "if I have found favor" (Exodus 33:13). If Moses was the only prophet to see God "face to face", Gideon declares "I have seen an angel face to face."

Yet this very parallel highlights the essential difference. Moses asks to find favor in order to reject God's plan of an angelic intermediary, saying "Unless Your face goes before us, do not lead us from here. For how else shall it be known that I and Your people have gained Your favor, unless You go with us, so that we may be distinguished, I and Your people, from every people on the face of the earth?” (Exodus 34: 14-15). But having failed the Exodus so deeply, the angelic intermediary is all that remains. Gideon is the Moses of this angelic redemption, a shadow who communicates with angels rather directly with God; a postlapsarian redeemer who "wears" (לבש( the spirit of God, rather than feeling it intrinsically within him. For God, as expressed by the prophet, is indeed angry, rejecting Israel's call; but on a lower level, an angel can respond. If Moses ' signs are primordial--water that turns to blood, an Edenic snake--Gideon's are homely: let the earth get wet while the wool stays dry; let the wool be soaked, while the earth stays sere. Yet look closely, and this is his own version of Moses' request to be "distinguished": let there be, even at this lower level, some element of care. Show us we can still be special.]

Even though he is driven by fear, Gideon ends up echoing the redemption of the Exodus "at night", as he finally fulfills the commandment of breaking the altars, and destroying the Ashera trees. It is not that appointed, awaited "night" when God acts with no intermediary as he did in Egypt. But it is something.]

Judges 5: In Writing

 I, to God, I will sing

Seek "I"

pasty-faced in the mirror

while hands drum the door

Imma, I need you, I really

need you. 

Nur, nur, the baby pinches my shin

demanding milk.

From the corner of my eye

the hawk-swoop of my son's hand

and my daughter is wailing.

Motherhood is resisting

the blandishment

of rest. Constant

vigilance.   

Pull your mouth into a smile

Focus. Split 

your ears three ways.

Why did you hit your sister?

my voice a harsh caw. 

The casual kicks

swats and biting. Stop

I say. I am counting

They are wildwaters

bursting all dams

I the melting mountain.

His legs kick 

like a donkey's, just missing

my stomach,  

 I wonder how i ever

contained him

within me. 

Peer through the window

as the last lights fades

enumerate and engrave the finds of the day:

a smile, a cloud, a bird, glints on water

try to awaken tomorrow

to eke out a voice

and tell it sing. 

Judges: Chapter 5

Awaken from the dephths

the mother seeking 

the ferocious core

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The chapter reiterates and crystallizes the themes raised in the previous chapter. Reiterated is the spatial dimension, the leitwords "falling" "to go" (l'kh). Intensified is the focus on gender, and on the role and leadership of women.

The intertext of Deborah's Song is Moses' Song of the Sea, continuing the Book of Judges dialogue with the Book of Exodus. Both are replete with water imagery and the downfall of horses and chariots (Then the horses’ hoofs pounded / As headlong galloped the steeds ) . 

Az yashir, "Then sang" open both these iconic songs. In Exodus, the singer is the male Moses, while Mirian "the prophetess" (Exodus 15:21) only takes up the chant at the end with the band of dancing women, declaring "Sing to God." Here, Deborah takes up Miriam's imperative form, but it is "the woman prophetess" who is the primary singer, with the male Barak as secondary. Deborah is the speaking heart, Barak her physical arms: "Awake, awake, O Deborah! Awake, awake, speak  song! / Arise, O Barak; Take your captives, O son of Abinoam!").

The  poem switches to first person, as the prophetess calls on herself to speak: "I (anochi), to God, I (anochi) will sing," The song is a claiming of women's speech: "Awake Deborah...speak (Dabri) song"  as Deborah puns on her name to claim the authoritative speech (dibur) that is usually the preview of men. And the song is indeed structured around  the power of femininity, subverting female archetypes. History itself is redefined in feminine terms (in the days of Yael). It opens with the rise of Deborah, "a mother in Israel" (5:7), and closes with Sisera's mother, sitting and awaiting the return of her son. Between the bookends of these maternal figures is "Most blessed of women Yael, wife of Heber the Kenite, most blessed of all women in tents" (5:24). These three women are the structuring principle of the song, reaviling the hidden female matrix of warfare. Each woman drives the war in her own way: Deborah by ordering Barak to battle; Yael by seducing Sisera to supposed safety in order to assassinate him; and Sisera's mother, who raised her son to revel in the sexualized violence of war, where he can claim "a womb or two for every manhead (5:30). The male "taking of captives" is the muscle power playing out these deep drives. 

 

Western society has traditionally divided women by different traits: nurturance vs. sexuality, the mother and the whore. In this song, these female paradigms are intermixed, so no woman is one or the other. Deborah the mother is Deborah the speaker, calling, judging, "exploring the heart."  Sisera's mother, sits inside sniveling and worried, but is revealed as ferocious and predatory, reveling in rape. Yael exits the traditional female space of the tent to beckon Sisera in, in language that is sexually suggestive: "Between her legs" Sisera rises, falls, and collapses, rises and falls and collapses again, to be utterly destroyed.  Yet the seductress is also maternal, offering nurturing  "milk" as she soothes him to sleep. Has the rapist between her legs been birthed or undone? 

The maternal emerges as a dangerous, ferocious, and celebrated  power.]

Judges 4: In Writing

 If you go with me, I will go

And if you will not go with me, I won't go

but stand in place

mule-faced, kicking the floor

I said, Get dressed!

You say: You're not helping me.

 

I say, We'll be late.

you hold out your arms, so you do it.

Legs outstretched like a mannequin

knees locked unyielding 

marionette with invisible strings

that twitch away from me. 

No glory in this path

mouth twisted to rictus

coaxing, cajoling, screaming--

nothing helps.

All you want is to fall

burrow deep into the floor

I want to go back into your belly, you say.

I want to be inside.

But if they kill you, you add

I'll die too. 

Judges: Chapter 4

What is up
will topple down
and what is out 
be gathered in.
Stand at the linen

[For full chapter, click here

A chapter that is both highly gendered and spatial. The leitworts are "arise" "go down" and "go".   Whereas time here is fuzzy and simultaneous (they did evil and Ehud died; she was judging Israel at that time) space is defined and prominent. Deborah, the "women prophetess" who is the "wife/woman of Lapidot"  (gender emphasized a three-rung gong) sits "beneath" the palm in the hills of Ephraim, where all of Israel "goes up" to her to be judged.   The upward motion is emphasized 4 times. The woman-prophetess calls upon Barak son of Avinoam to "go" (l''kh) and fight Sisera and the Canaanites. This vectored motion is repeated 7 times, as Barak insists that he will only "go" if Deborah "goes" with him; she assents, but warns him there will be no glory on the path on which he "goes". "Afes"--literally "zero": for if she accompanies him, salvation will be given to "the hands of a woman."

From here, all motion moves downward, and the army "goes down" to attack Sistra's forces; Sisra "goes down" from his chariot. We are descending towards ground zero. With Barak hinging all his actions on Deborah's presence, we have entered fully the realm of the female. 

Yael, the wife of Hever the Kennite, is the embodiment of that realm, as she exits the feminine space of the tent to draw Sistra inwards. "Turn into me," she tells him. and he turns in (va'yisar) "in unto her, into the tent." Sisra gets sucked inwards, then covered (ve-techsehu) , in a double hiding--in and in again. "Go to the doorway," he commands, attempting to control the threshold, to straddle the line between out and in; between the masculine battlefield, and the dark, protected, milky tent (she opened a bottle of milk... and covered him). Instead, Yael takes the peg that roots the tent to the earth, and uses it to drive Sisera into the ground: he "collapses"; he "falls", utterly engulfed and destroyed by the female space.  

There are links here to the opening chapters: if the initial salvation in chapter 3 returns us to the transitional figure of Otniel ben Kenaz, salvation here comes through one of the Kenites, who join the tribe of Judah at the opening of the book. We are still in the transitional period from the Book of Joshua, though the linking sinews are becoming thinner.]  

 

Judges 3: In writing

Daily weigh-in
needle fluctuating round and round
the set point. No way
back to before
when your body was wholly
your own.

Look down 
at mountains and troughs--
fleshy landscape of broken promises
to yourself. Your goal is
Today you will

eat only when hungry.
cut out
cake. Sticky seduction 
of sugar. Long nights.  
The pull of sleep.

Lie on a bed of flesh
spreading like ripples.

All those months carrying

bear down on your bladder

the weakened sinews 

weaving torso together

leave a groove down the center

separating before and after

Life made flesh--

weight of time and inertia.

It is hard, hard to rise

hard to pull yourself up by your arms

only to swallow

dagger and hilt

and feel the fat close on top of it. 

Judges: Chapter 3

 

We are porous

sucking and seepingץ

Seize the passage and threshold

learn to lock the door

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As in the previous chapter,  the focus here is on "generations", on the changes that happen when a whole population changes and forgets what it "knows" (one of the leitwords of this chapter). A process of change that happens by a changeover of populations (much like Khun's idea of paradigm shift in  his Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

The chapter opens with an ominous list of all the "nations that God left to test Israel" (1:3) in a crucible of war. These nations press from within and without, the external enemies matched by the nations among whom Israel "dwell" and intermarry, in an echo of that original dangerous encounter with the land's inhabitans, back when Shechem stole Jacob's daughter, so many generations ago. If in the original encounter, Shechem's plan to "let us take their daughter's to wife and let us give them our daughters" (Genesi 34: 21) is undone by the brother's violent assertion  that Dina is not for the taking, here it indeed comes to pass, as Israel melds into the surrounding populations and "forgets" the lord.

The first to rescue them from the consequences of God's wrath is Otniel,  who has been waiting like Chekhiv's gun since he was introduced by name in the first chapter. His fairytale like marriage to  Ahsa stands in contrast to the melding into local populations via marriage. 

The story of the second judge, Ehud ben Gera, makes the dangers of ingestion grotesquely corporeal, as he faces off against the fattened-calf (egel) King Eglon. The fleshy Eglon seems to have swallowed Israel into his gargantuan body, and his body swallows  Ehud's two-sided dagger up to the hilt,  and "the fat closed around it." While Eglon ingests the dagger, so it cannot be extracted, the "filth" does seep out. Ehud wins by controlling the entrances (p't'kh is another leitword), shutting the porous door,  and in the end  capturing the passages over the Jordon. Only in asserting boundaries does Israel find itself again]. 

Judges 2: In Writing

Every day the sun rises

every day it sets

every day the waking, dressing

cook, feed

battle of the clothes: too short, too long,

I want sleeves

no sleeves

a jacket

a hat

3 changes, 4

dull pounding behind my eyes

the rhythm of the day,

Hold me, I want you to hold me.

I can't walk!

throwing youself on the sidewalk

legs drumming asphalt.

Sometimes I am patient.

Often I am not.

Breaking point, I grab you,

or walk away, say: I'm gone.

Sometimes I hold you. 

Sometimes croon

It's hard. Sometimes

I feel the pulse

panic at your neck.

Always, in the end

I walk out the door

to your wails.

Say: too much noise.

Say: talk to me! 

While you scream

Listen to me!

I want you to listen!

Mouth a gaping O

of despair.

Judges: Chapter 2

 

Cry for the forgotten

Those who forget history

Are destined to repeat

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We move back, both in time and in space: once again,we are back in the encampment of Gilgal. the touchstone of the period of Joshua; once again, Joshua is alive, "sending the people away" (2:6). In an echo of Joshua's two closing farewell speeches (Joshua 23 and 24), the Book of Judges presents us with two transitons from the Joshua era to the epoch of the judges. As in the case of Joshua's farewell speeches, the first is more personal, while the second takes a broad historical perspective.

The story of the Exodus reverberates in the background.As in Egypt, where the passing of a generation leads to a loss of history as Joseph is forgotten, here a generation passes, and another rises that does not "remember God" and His faithfulness.

With the loss of Joshua's God of history, Israel enters a cycle of infinite return. We are no longer on a vector from "the other side of the river" towards the promised land, but rather in a repetitive futile cycle: repentance is fleeting; redemption temporary; and every boundary made to be broken. The language becomes habitual, yet laden with allusions, whether to the plagues in Egypt [the hand of God was heavy against them], or the Golden Calf [they have strayed quickly] .

The weeping that opens the chapter becomes a weeping for generations, a reverberation of the initial weeping in the aftermath of the spies' report in the days of Moses, which resulted in the loss of the Land.

A leitwort is "oath" (shvua) and "covenant". Israel has replaced the exclusive covenant with God with oaths and covenants with the local peoples. As intimated in the previous chapter, the cost will be steep.

Judges 1: In Writing

Dive

towards dry dust

demand

its blessing

well

from below and above

leap

and leave the tired animal

behind

 

Judges: Chapter 1

 

Start the after

we go up, we go down

jostled together.

Give me your blessing!

All we don't have

pressing against us 

unwanted intimacy

lodged in our throat

as we spin, again and again.

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The chapter begins "after the death of Joshua."It is both a continuation and a reprise, revisiting events that took place in the era of Joshua to create a bridge into this new reality. It is indeed a new reality of leadership, and the transformation is made apparent almost immediately. "Who shall go up for us initially, to fight the Cannanites?" (Judges 1: 1) the nation asks, searching for a new leader. ""Judah shall go up" (1:2) God answers, shifting the focus from individual to tribe. Relationships have now become fraternal rather than hierarchal ("Judah said to his brother"), as leadership disseminates within the tribal structure. Key events of the story of Joshua are retold within this new framework: the story of the conquest of Hebron the story of the conquest of Hebron is retold, yet this time with the focus on Judah, rather than the heroic Caleb. Here, it is the tribe that grants Caleb his inheritance, rather than the man who leads the tribe. as the leader is subsumed within his tribe. Only one individual still is given a central place: Otniel ben Knaz, conquerer of Debir, who fairytale-like, is granted Ahsa as his wife, in a passage is lifted almost verbatim from the account in Joshua. As in Joshua, Ahsa demands a "blessing" of her father, in the only piece of individual dialogue, and is granted the "upper and lower waters". 
The reprise of the list of conquered and unconquered areas builds a precarious bridge to a new, dangerous era. The list of conquests is matched by a negative list of "not conquest", as the Canaanites "are resolved to dwell in that land" (1: 27). Even when the sons of Joseph manage to conquer Luz, they are haunted by a negative shadow of Luz, created by the Cannanites that left: "and the man named the city Luz, which is its name to this very day" (1:26).  Rather than a triumphant settlement of the "land resting from war" that is the refrain of Joshua, we are presented with a tension-filled subjugation and uneasy coexistence.  At the closing of the chapter, the negative refrain of "did not inherit" (lo horish) turns into active dispossession, as the tribe of Dan is driven off its land and into the mountains. Is this what will happen to all?

Hello to Judges

 Me, years later, far less sure of myself, and the continuation of this project. But here is to trying a new book. 

For Judges, I chose to use a limited palette of acrylic markers (reds, blues, white). Using markers continues the visual language of Joshua, just as the opening of Judges overlaps and continues the Book of Joshua. 

The introduction of more colors indicates the more variegated leadership and social structure, as the strong central leadership of Moses and Joshua break down to the local tribal leadership of the judges.

The brown paper of the notebook echoes the paper I used for the book of Exodus, which is appropriate for this book of nation formation, which represents a kind of closure to the process begun in Egypt.

Here's to new beginnings!