Judges: Chapter 11

 

Who listens?

Who speaks?

And can you return?

The blurt of your mouth

the trace that is gone

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"Let whoever is first to fight the Amorites be chieftain," the elders of Gilead promise, scrambling for leadership. The cliffhanger ending of the previous chapter, where God's response is left uncertain, is resolved here, as we discover the existence of Jephtha, a  "great warrior" who is a son of Gilead. Salvation is at hand. 

Yet the chapter is dense with intertextual allusions, setting up a complex movement between hope and dread. Gilead searches for a leader, any leader, but it is unclear what kind of leader they have found. Jephtha's introduction is replete with parallels to the story of Abimelekh. Like Abimelkh, Gideon is a disenfranchised bastard. Like Abimelekh, his position is defined by his mother: the opening verses are full of references to women "a prostitute woman" "the wife of Gilead" "you are the son of an alien woman". Like Abimelekh, Jepthah leaves his father's home, and his brothers. Is Jephtha to be another faithless, murderous tyrant?

Yet in contrast to Abimelekh's active rejection of his father in favor of his mother's kin, Jephthat's break with his fatheris not a matter of choice. He is forced "to flee," and camps in the outer periphery until the elders of Gilead come to fetch him, like a discarded shoe. "For you have hated me, and banished me from my father's house, why do you come to me now when you are troubled (tz'a'r צר)?" he erupts, defining himself as a rejected exile who still sees himself as linked to his lost family home. 

This loaded accusation parallels two other pain-filled verses, which set into place the thematic matrix of this dense chapter. First, it is a direct syntactic echo of God's own accusation to Israel in the previous chapter: "For you have left me... let the gods you have chosen save you in your time of trouble (tz'a'r צר)." "That is why we have come to return you" the elders of Gilead respond, using the loaded term that also denotes "repentance." This parallel highlights that Israel are mercenary in their appeals to both God and Jephtha; they are using God and man for their own safety, oblivious to the hurt and wrong they have done. Jephtha seems aware that he is aligned with God's role: "God will listen between us" he says, demanding a deeper loyalty. He then takes on God's role in recounting the history of the covenant. In highlighting the role of the divine in salvation, Jephtha links himself to the Father--to Gideon rather than Abimelekh. Like Gideon, he insists that salvation is found not in might, but in divine intervention.  

Jephtha's pain-filled cry also directly echoes Isaac's cry to a different Abimelekh, back in the nation's prehistory, in Genesis 26: 27: "Why have you come to me, and you hated me, and sent me away?" This cry introduces the first human covenant in history, as Isaac and Abimelekh king of Grar "swear" to do no harm to each other, a covenant tied into place by "the blessing of God." 

And indeed, Jephtha is obsessed with the question of vows and human faithfulness. How can language be made binding? The leitwords of this chapter are d'v'r דבר, speech, sh'v, return, repentance, sh'm'a, to listen. Jephath "speaks" (דבר) his "speech" (d'v'r) "before God," trying to give it reality. His first act of war is to send the "speech (d'v;r) of Jephtha" to the King of Amon, fighting with words before he fights with weapons. If Israel, in the previous chapter. had lost their connection Moses and to Joshua, Jephtha here attempts to recreate it by focusing specifically on the power of Moses' words, on the messages that he sent. Yet these efforts are alas, in vain. Just as the kings did not listen to Moses, the king of Amon does not "listen" to Jephtha's words.  In the end, it is physical battle rather than words that matter.

Or is it?

There is a dark side to the attempt to make human language binding. "The first thing that comes out to greet me when I return (sh'v) in peace  I will dedicate to God," Jephtha swears. It is his daughter who comes to greet him, "with timbrel and dance", echoing Miriam's primordial timbrel and circle dance in the aftermath of the splitting of the sea. "You have destroyed me," Jephtha accuses his daughter. "I opened my mouth to God and cannot return" (sh'u'v).

Perhaps rather than seeking to reify language and make it binding, Jephtha would have been better  served by turning to women's speech, and connecting to his rejected mother. "This is the word (d'v'r) that God has commanded: if a man makes a vow... he must carry out all that crossed his lip.. if a woman makes a vow... and her father restrains her... none of her vows shall stand, and God will forgive her." The laws of vows are introduced by making women's vows dependent on relationships--be they with father's or husbands. Here, Jephtha's commitment to the blurting of his mouth overpowers the relationship to his daughter, and undoes the promise of redemptive return that lurks beneath the surface of this chapter.

The redemptive dance and song that could have connected to Deborah's own recreation of the Song of the Sea,  turn instead to a dirge, as the "maidens of Israel go every year, for four days a year, to chant dirges for the daughter of Jephtha". ]

Numbers: Chapter 30

What are the ties that bind?

Don't hollow what flees

the hollows of your mouth

Build your bindings
unless bound elsewhere







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"These you shall offer unto God in your appointed Meetings, beside your vows, and your freewill-offerings," closes the last chapter. After detailing all the time-bound, obligatory offerings, we now move to "vows": the voluntary obligations we impose on ourselves. 
In this, we return back to the theme of speech which has dominated this book since the moment Miriam was punished for "speaking" of Moses, which reached its apex in Balaam's curses-turned-blessing. "God is not a man, that He should lie; neither the son of man, that He should repent: when He has said, will He not do it? When He has spoken, will He not make it stand?"
Here, in imitato dei, Israel is to act as God acts, making their words "stand": "When a man vows a vow to God, or...binds his soul with a bond, he shall not hollow his word; he shall do according to all that proceeds from his mouth." 

Yet even as words are given weight, a woman's words are literally undone, creating a strange bookend of women-and-speech: we open with Miriam being punished for speaking, and end with a father or husband being given a right to "unravel" a woman's speech, literally undoing her own relationship to "her soul": she cannot "bind" without her husband/father allowing her word to stand.  This limitation on a woman's autonomy is seen as definitive of the relationship between man and woman (and the use of ish isha lends this passage primordial Edenic undertones): 'These are the statutes, which God commanded Moses, between a man and his wife, between a father and his daughter..."

Yet even as a husband can limit a woman's binding on herself, it does not undo her relationship to God. The vow still exists--it is simply "forgiven." And if giving words definitive weight creates "bonds" , so that your mouth defines your reality, the possibility of "undoing" and making a bond "void" also introduces an element of freedom. A man may make himself like God by making his word immutable; a woman's word is made untrustworthy, but  paradoxically more free.] 

Numbers: Chapter 20

Speak to stone

And beg for water

Call out

"I mean no harm"

Wait for answer

Can you force it

from the rock?

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A time of closings. In the aftermath of the spies, the entire generation was condemned to die in the desert in the course of 40 years. Now, at this first month of an unspecified year,  the full implications become clear. Miriam and Aaron die, and Moses' death is announced. He too shall die in the desert. Indeed only Joshua and Caleb will enter the Land from the previous generation. 

Again, we seem caught in a re-run of Exodus, but with more deadly implications. As happened before, there is no water; as before, God commands Moses to "take his staff" and bring water from the stone. This time, the command is to "Speak  to the stone." Moses instead "smites" it twice, in language that hearkens back to his role as redeemer in Egypt, when he "smote" the Nile to bring the plagues.

But the use of the staff is a fatal mistake. "Because you didn't believe in Me, to sanctify Me before the eyes of Israel, you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I am giving them" God declares. The water was to have come through asking, not through force. The role of the staff has changed--a indicated by the sudden flowering of Aaron's staff after the battle with Korach. Moses' return to his old role indicates that he can no longer lead the nation.

The limitation on force is highlighted in the next section, where Moses send to the King of Edom to ask for permission to pass through his lands of Edom. There are two attempts at persuasion, reiterating the narratives of Genesis ("Your brother") and Exodus. Yet  speech does not work here, Edom threatens violence, and the Israelites must "turn". What does it mean to ask for something from implacable stone?

We seem to have come to the non-negotiable. Solid stone, death and endings.]

Numbers 12: In Writing

Daub the sides

to shut out brine

and place you inside

caul-curled and perfect

to ride 

the weeping waves.

Do they whisper

as they waver

to your cries ?

I afar

Between the reeds

Beneath the sun

Beyond the walls 

of home

Outside

bob to your hunger

as the waters spit their anger

at my feet

You see a face

lean in

I see your mouth

suckling 

arms flail, frail.

She takes you from

your dark womb

your tomb

Encased in shadows

I wait for the river

to gather you

to her broad breast.

Numbers: Chapter 12

Eaten away

the stillborn tumble

of death 

into life 

Orphaned outside

Spit 

Defiled

before you can be 

gathered in

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This chapter continues directly from the previous. It shares all its key words: "to gather" asaf, "flesh" basar, "eat" achal "and "prophecy" "n'v'i) and is defined by the same "flaming anger" (hori af)  of God--an anger that was previously held at bay by Moses' prayers. 

The sudden spread of prophecy in the previous chapter removes the crushing burden of leadership from Moses. But it also undermines him. "And they [Miriam and Aaron] said: 'Has God only spoken to Moses? Has He not also spoken to us?'" God descends once more to the Tent of Meeting to protect Moses' uniqueness: Moses is "faithful" (ne'eman, from same root as omen, nursing, nursemaid). . 

For once, all three siblings are called together, only to be separated from three, to two, to one. Aaron and Miriam are called forth; and then Miriam is punished alone, and barred from the camp for 7 days.

The parental imagery of birth and motherhood that so dominated the previous chapter return, but with a distinctly darker hue. In place of a bratty, overwhelming child, we have a stillborn:  "Let her not be as the dead, who comes out of her mother's womb with half her flesh consumed!". God's position as angry father also becomes more explicit and more personally devastating: "and if her father had spit in her face, would she not be shamed for seven days?"

It is Miriam, who acted as mother to Moses, "watching from afar" as he was carried down the Nile, who took care to see that he was nursed, who is punished in the wake of Moses' despairing refusal to act as mother, "bearing the nursling against his chest."]