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.