Samuel: Chapter 2

 

You can be raised from the depths 

or plunged in free fall

in a world that perches on stilts

For full chapter, click here

Confession: I completed this drawing a lifetime ago--before the war with Iran started. I delayed photographing it because my grand plan of using both sides of the page hit a snag, as the notebook started to fall apart. I did not solve the notebook issue, but am now am trying to pick up the threads of my thought post-apocalypse, returning to the project. Again. 

Crisis. Restart. Crisis. Restart. This has become the pulse underlying Bibliodraw, and is perhaps appropriate for this chapter, which focuses on mutability--on a world in which all is conditional, and can be flipped in a moment. 

The chapter opens by returning to, and emphasizing, Chana's radical redefinition of prayer.  And Chana prayed , once again using the new reflexive term va-titpalal (ותתפלל). The chapter, through subtle wordplay, draws attention to this new word for prayer in 2:25: If someone sins against another person, God may intercede ((p'l'l פלל, lit. "arbitrate" "judge" ); but if someone offends against GOD, who can intercede (יתפלל) ?” Prayer is now intimate, interactive, reflexive, connecting heart and mouth,  inside to outside. "My heart exhalts...my mouth opens wide". Hanna, through prayer, links to the intimacy of the "God of knowings" (el deot), who knows multiple minds, but is also multitudinous. 

Indeed, this is the essence of her thanksigving prayer: God is the anchor around which  "all acts are measured", yet his multitudinous means that the world is inherently unsteady, in flux. Everything can transform into its opposite, God containing both sides of the binary: the satiated may become hungry, the barren full, life and death, the netherworld and exhaltation, poor and noble, the humiliated and the proud  all can morph into each other. 

The chapter then proceeds to demonstrate this thesis, as Eli is given a prophecy about the coming fall of his dynasty: "I had intended for you and your father’s house to remain in My service forever. But now—declares GOD—far be it from Me!" Even the priesthood that was granted to Aaron as a gift that could not be questioned is not immutable. The foundational structures of the nation depend on the relationship to God. The "enduring house" will be reserved for a new, "fatheful" priest.  

It is within this fraught context that the idea of kingship is introduced. In a final departure from Judge's,  era "when there was no king in Israel, each did what was right in his own eyes" Hanna concludes her exhaltant prayer with the call: "God will judge the ends of the earth— / Giving power to the king, / And triumph to the anointed one.".  This call forshadows a new political era. Yet it also intimates that the king will not be the stabilizing force foreseen by Moses.  Rather, he will be part of the world of flux and revsersals, where even the greatest of gifts can be taken away by a God that judges the very "ends of the earth" allowing them to transform --ourobourous like-- into each other. 

Samuel: Chapter 1

 

Watch for the lips--the edges

where the bitter inside

pours forth 

See me, and remember.

For full chapter, click here

"There was a man...from the hill country of Ephraim"--the opening of this book echoes the opening of the final section of Judges, a perfect replica if not for the additional detail of the hometown of Rammatayim. Indeed, the chapter is dense with intertextual links to the closing of Judges, the juxtaposition acting as an implicit commentary. 

As in the case of Michah, the story of the "man" very quickly becomes a story about his relationship to women--in Judges, Micah's mother; here, Elkana's two wives. We are given two levels of reality: the official story of the "man", and the teaming complex story of the family. The House of God in Shilo--which animates the backdrop of Judges as the option rejected by the Dannites, and as the home of the abducted dancing girls--here moves center stage. Now, for the first time, it plays the unifying role Moses envisioned, presented as a locus of pilgrimage miyamim yemima (another direct echo of the closing of Judges).  As in Judges, we have a story of barrenness, and the promise of a Nazarite from before conception, whose hair will never be touched by a razor.  As in the closing of Judges, this is a story that places vows at the center.

Yet these very similarities highlight the essential differences. 

If the closing of the Book of Judges utterly reduces women to their reproductive function, here, relationship is placed at the center: Penina has children, yet it is Hanna who is beloved, "though God had sealed her womb." "Am I not better to you than ten sons?" Elkana pleads. 

If vows, up to this point, have been the most potent expression of patriarchal control, with a father and husband given the right to undo a woman's vows, while men's vows act to suppress female freedom, here it is a woman who makes the vow--and her husband acquiesces. "Do what is good (tov) in your eyes," Elkana says--the very expression is a subtle variation of the closing refrain of Judges "each man did what was just (yashar) in his eyes." From a "man's" search for justice, we move to a woman's search for "good".

At the center of this chapter is an act of prayer--one utterly different than what we have seen before. In the Book of Judges, the nation screams and weeps to God, at times with implicit blame. Hanna, by contrast, engages in an intimate conversation. From the "bitterness of her soul", she is mitpalel--using the until-now relativly rare reflexive form that eventually became the standard Hebrew word for prayer: to intercede/ judge oneself. The reflexive act implies that this conversation acts not only on God, but on Hanna's deeper self. "Hanna was speaking to her heart", discovering her own interiority and "hard spirit." "Her lips moved, but her voice was not heard" outwardly--only within. See me, she pleads. "Remember me, do not forget." 

If in the story of the concubine, speaking to a girl's "heart" implies manipulation and coercion, here it becomes an act of intimacy and strength. If Jephtha is destructively committed to the "utterings of his mouth," here the vow remains outwardly unuttered, existing as an internal promise. 

This act of prayer is so radically new, Eli, the high priest, does not know what to make of it, mistaking it for intoxication. "No, my lord. A woman of hard spirit am I,"  Hanna responds with quiet strength. This prayer is not an act of imbibing, but rather of pouring forth. And Eli recognizes her authority, granting her request.  

If the closing of Judges depicts widening ripples of dissolution--from family, to tribe, to nation--this chapter presents an opposing movement: a growing interiority, reflected in a supportive relationship, which ripples outward to impact the House of God.

Judges: Chapter 19

 

Delay the departure, 

the return

there are shelters with no safety

fellowship that does not warm

paths that reach nowhere.

Cling to the threshold.

For full chapter, click here

This chapter shares a chronotope with the preceding chapter: it too takes place in the timless time of "in those days"; it too refers to the twin spaces of Beit Lehem of Judah and the Mountain of Ephraim. It is further linked by various intertextual elements: the centrality of the father, the unusual term for "be persuaded"--ויאל vayoel-- and repeated references to a youth naar and to a Levite.  

This final section of the Book of Judges,  set aside by the refrain "in those days there was no king in Israel", tells a story of ever-widening dissolution. It begins with the domestic, with Micah's betrayal of his mother; and extends to the tribal, with the Dannite abandonment of their territory and the House of God; and here it spreads to the national, as the Levite calls together the 12 tribes of Israel.  The widening canvas is accompanied by the stripping of individuality: in the story of Micah, the protagonist is named immediately; in the story of the Dannites, the Levite's name is revealed only at the very end; in this story we are left with nameless archetypes: a  Levite, a girl, her father, an old man.

Indeed, as the story opens with a nameless Levite from Mount Ephraim, for a moment he can be confused with the Levite priest of the Micah saga. Yet if Micah's Levite is identified as a youth (naar  נער), with a hint of innocence to offset his opportunism, the nameless "Levite" of this story is defined as a "man". The appelation naar is split off to other characters--to his servant (repeatedly called a naar), and his youthful concubine (referred to as naara). Innocence is transferred elsewhere, leaving only ruthless faithlessness.

 And if the story of the Danites gestures towards the future, to the "exile of the land", this story returns us to the nation's prehistory, to the story of the destruction of Sodom (Genesis 19). Abraham's future as a nation  is declared in the same scene as the judgement of Sodom--a primary bifurcation. Yet here Israel has created its own version of Sodom, in the city of Gevah.

This version of Sodom is both more local and crude than the original. If in the original story we have a mythic morality tale of "the entire city" rushing to attack the righteous Lot and his angelic guests, here a local "group of louts" surruond the house of the old Ephramite, and his all-too-mortal guests. The attackers are fewer, and not as violent--only "pounding on the door" rather than seeking to "break" it; yet those being attached are far quicker to surrender the weakest amongst them. Lot offered his "two virgin daughters" to the maurauding mob "to do with them as was good in their eyes." Here, the old man offers his daughter and the Levite's young concubine to explicitly "rape", only then returning to the euphemism of "what is good in your eyes."  And if in the original story, the horrific offer never comes to fruition, as the angels guard the limen with blinding light,  here the Levite brutally and heartlessly shoves his young concubine outside, himself breaching the guarded threshold. 

The association of a "girl" (naara) and "outside" is dire. When the girl Dinah "goes out", she is raped by Shechem,  And indeed, the dark future of the concubine is foreshadowed right at the opening of the story, when the Levite goes to "speak to [her] heart," echoing Shechem's attempt to appease Dina after raping her by "speaking to the heart of the girl (naara)." The Levite "master" is presented as aligned with the violent rapist mob. 

The threshold between inside and out, the space of feminine power in the Deborah saga, here becomes the site of female vulnerability. The concubine, excluded from the syntactic fellowship of plural verbs (they ate and drank ) which include only the men (the two of them), is now shoved out of the literal shared space, the door slammed behind her. After surviving a night-long gang rape, she collapses with hand outstretched on the limen, futilely begging protection. 

The gesture remains unanswered. When her indifferent  "master"  find her in the morning, he finishes the work of dissolution, carving her violated body into literal piaeces. Denied outer shelter, the interiority of the girl's body was repeatedly breched, and now he violently breaches her outer form, destroying her completely.]        

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: 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.    

Judges: Chapter 12

 

Capture the crossing

make breath into death

the sibilant tongue, a knife's edge

[For full chapter, click here

The figure of Jephtha is introduced with ominous parallels to Abimelekh, raising the essential question: will he be loyal to the Father or to the Son, a recreation of the heroic Gideon, or of his faithless bastard? 

Initially, Jephtha aligns himself with the Father, tying every action to the Lord who will "listen", fashioning himself as a recreation of Moses. 

Yet in this chapter, the question moves center stage, as Jephtha finds himself in a replay of Gideon's situation. Like Gideon, who fought along the liminal, definitive banks of the Jordan, Jephtha is at the fords of the river, with a leitword of a'v;r, passage, crossing. As in the case of Gideon, the men of Ephraim "call" (va'yatzek ויצעק, a direct echo of 8: 25)  an urgent gathering, and attack him for not calling them to join the fight. This time, they are more violent in their denunciation, threatening to burn the house down upon Jephtha (something that ironically Jephtha has already done to himself, in promising to sacrifice his one and only daughter as a "burnt offering"). 

  

Yet here the parallel between Jephtha and Gideon breaks down. Even as Jephtha tries to fashion himself as a new version of Gideon who "put my soul (נפש, nefesh)  in my hand, and crossed to fight the sons of Amon", in an echo if Gideon who "send his soul (נפש, nefesh) forth to save you", his reaction to Ephraim's accusations is diametrically opposed to Gideon's. Gideon does not punish an excess of involvement. Instead, he soothes Ephraim by lauding their achievements. Jephtha, by contrast, hurls back accusations. 

"I summoned you, but you did not save me" he counters--a childish non-sequitur that once again reveals his almost naked vulnerability, his damaged psyche as a rejected child. Ephraim, after all, did not ask to lead the war and "save" Gilead--they asked why they were not summoned to join the battle once it was happening.   In contrast to Gilead who uses his "word" (d'v'r) to "defuse their spirit when he spoke this speech" (בדברו הדבר הזה), Jephtha rallies Gilead to "slaughter" over 40000 members of Ephraim in a murderous spree that puts Abimelekh to shame.  

There is a  price to Jephtha's fanatical commitment to the reality of language. Gideon can use language diplomatically, to sooth and loosten. Jephtha, by contrast, destroys.  In the previous chapter, his commitment to the "blurting" of his mouth cost him his daughter. Here, he makes pronunciation itself a matter of life and death: Ephraim are judged on the literal placement of the tongue, as saying an "s" instead of "sh" condemns them to slaughter.

It is ironic and telling that this first civil war takes place between the "sons of Joseph", the twin tribes  who throughout the Book of Joshua hover between two and one, so close they are almost a single entity, as alike as the almost interchangable "s" and "sh".  "You are fugitives of Ephraim," the Ephraimites taunt, "Gilean is within Ephraim and within Menasseh." 

To Jephtha, a fugitive betrayed by his own brothers, this taunt is unbearable. Unable to appease his brother-tribe, he seeks instead to assert a demarcation as clear as the definitive river, as life and death. In doing so, he moves the Book of Judges to its darkest point yet.]

Judges: Chapter 11

 

Who listens?

Who speaks?

And can you return?

The blurt of your mouth

the trace that is gone

[For full chapter, click here

"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". ]

Judges: Chapter 10

 Who do you choose

and for how long?

Abandonment

[For full chapter, click here

After their disastrous flirtation with monarchy, the Israelites retreat from centralized authority. Leadership is provided by two minor judges, summed up in less than two lines each, each ruling for an uneven, non-symbolic number of years (23, 22), contrasting to Gideon and Deborah's sonorous 40 years of peace. The nation is reduced to begging someone--anyone--to lead: “Let whoever is the first to fight the Ammonites be chieftain.”

 The lack of leadership is spirtual as well military, as the nation descends to "serving the Baalim and the Ashtaroth, and the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites, and the gods of the Philistines." Only one god is left out from this comprehensive list: the verse ends with the drumroll chiastic closing: "and God they did not serve." In losing leadership, the nation also loses the link to Moses, to Joshua his successor, and to God. 

The chapter is indeed structured as the dark mirror of the final chapter of the Book of Joshua, with its closing covenant binding God, Israel, and the two sides of the Jordan. Like that covenant, the chapter opens with the root y's'f,--to gather, to add. If Joshua is "ye'asef" (gathers) the nation, here the nation yosifu (continues) "to do what is evil in God's eyes" and God promises not to "continue (osif) to save you." The two sections are tied together with shared keywords: "Choose" (b'h'r); "worship, serve" (a'v'd), and "abandon, forsake" (a'z'v), as well as with a shared focus on the "alien gods" that are "in your mists." Both emphasize clear-cut boundaries, as embodied by the river: "On the other side of the river lived your forefathers," Joshua opens his address. Here, the chapter focuses on attacks on the far side of the river, which gradually move from the periphery inwards.  

"If it is bad in your eyes to worship God,choose this day which gods you are going to serve..." Joshua demands, in his final address to the people. After an overview of God's shared history with Israel, he demands a choice as clear-cut as the two banks of a river: either God or the alien gods must be abandoned.   “Far be it from us to forsake (la'azov) the Lord and serve other gods!" the people respond.

Yet here, in an exact inversion of their earlier promise, Israel "forsakes (va'yaazvu) God, and did not serve Him." If before,  Israel reviewed their shared history with God, here it is God that must remind them of all the prior salvations. "You have forsaken Me," He concludes, once again highlighting the inversion of the promise, "and served other gods." A different choice has been made.

Back at that definitive covenant, Joshua warned, “If you forsake God and serve alien gods, He will turn and deal harshly with you and make an end of you, after having been gracious to you.” And indeed, the end seems nigh. After a tepid repentance, with a partial confession ("We have served the Be'alim", Israel admits, with no mention of the plethora of other gods), God seems ready to "make an end": "No, I will not rescue you again," says God. Referring back to that primal choice demanded by Joshua, he tells the people "Go call to the gods you have chosen." 

The sacred stone of covenant inscribed by Joshua has been overturned, the oak uprooted. What will bind the people to the land now? 

Yet at the very moment that all seems lost, there comes a wildcard, overturning Joshua's vision of a jealous, relentless God. In a stunnigly anthropomorphic verse, God's nefesh (soul, breath, lifeblood) "cannot stand Israel's miseries." Almost despite Himself, God relents. Yes, there is the covenant, and its promises and curses. And then there are the deeper currents, the lifeblood stirring, the breath connecting God and humanity, beyond any local circumstance. Like a parent faced with a child's pain, God is carried away by overwhelming empathy. 

Though the chapter ends on a cliffhanger, with Isreal scrounging for leadership, this moving, strange and haunting verse gives the closing a hopeful cast. There are currents to the relationship between God and Israel that even Joshua cannot understand, a shared breath that reaches beyond the official bonds of covenant.]   

  

Judges: Chapter 9

 

We sprout

from the earth's navel

dragging along the hills, trees and thorns

in the ever-battle 

of fathers and sons

[For full chapter, click here

If the previous chapter set Gideon within a wider family context, this family now takes center stage, as the Gideon saga continues to resonate forward and backwards in time. Certain key elements of his story are retroactively highlighted when seen in this broader context.
Abimelech, the son of Gideon’s concubine, introduced at the closing of the previous chapter, moves to the center, as he acts decisively  to take the kingship his father had rejected.  In an Oedipal drama, Abimelech moves to his “mothers family’s”, claiming their kinship and brotherhood, while murderously turning on his brother’s-through-his father.

This Oedipal killing of the father highlights that Gideon’s journey simlarily began by killing his father’s sacred bull. The initial, sublimated, struggle ended up bringing father and son together: Yoash defended his son, and brought to his symbolic rebirth as Jerubal.

Abimelekh, by contrast, turns on Jerubal, killing his 70 sons on “one stone.” Yet throughout, he expresses and works through elements of his father’s own personality, revisiting key moments and struggles. Like Gideon, Abimelekh has a special focus on “the sons of my mother.” Both father and son are related to the symbolic number of 70, with Gideon’s 70 sons countered by Abimelekh’s 70 pieces of silver. Abimelekh seems to be the only of Gideon’s sons to have inherited his father’s military might and strategy—like his father, he “divides the camp.” Like his father, he leads by example, telling his men to “watch and do as I do.”Gideon retraced Jacob’s journey to Cannan via Penuel and Succoth; Abimelekh takes the next step to Shechem. Gideon externalizes Jacob’s interior and lonely battle in Penuel, turning Jacob’s mysterious  struggle where  he “sees God face to face” into a ruthless battle over his authority with the people of Penuel. Abimlekeh revisits and heightens the treachery and violence that Jacob found in Shechem (indeed, the chapter highlights the intertextual connection by openly alluding to “Shechem the son of Hamor”).

Abimelekh—“My father is king”—his very name refers to the troubled relationship with his father, and specifically around the issue of authority and power. Indeed, it is Gideon himself who “puts” (veyasem, rather than the usual “ve yikra”) this name on him, pointing to unresolved tensions in the issue of kingship. Gideon is first offered the kingship after he uses the very elements of the earth—brambles and thorns—to punish the people of Succoth who mock his authority. Abimelekh, described by Yotam as a  “thornbush,” fights Gaal from the “navel of the earth” (Tabur haAretz), and his army appears like the shadows of the hills. He later cuts down trees and walks with them (in a Macbeth-like scene) to attack the rebels in the tower. Whereas Gideon razes the tower of Penuel, Abimelekh is killed by a grindstone flung by a woman in the tower.   

“I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. God will rule over you,” Gideon declared. Yet once the idea of earthly authority was raised, it seems impossible to contain. You will be ruled, Abimelkh tells the people of Shechem. So better by me your kinsmen, than by Gideon’s 70 other sons. The people of Shechem accept this argument, and crown Abimelekh, who “acts with authority (veyesar) over them.” When they tire of Abimelkh’s rule, they turn to Gaal the son of Eved (lit. servant, slave), who explicitly centers the argument around the issue of avdut-slevery/ service. Why should we serve Abimeklkh, he asks, we might as well serve Hamor. The issue is only power and who wields it.

An alternative to this power-based vision of the inevitable domination of the strong is offered by Yotam, Gideon’s youngest and only surviving son. Yotam (lit “the orphaned one”) presents an opposing vision—both of kingship, and of Gideon. If Abimelkh expresses Gideon’s ruthless assertion of authority, Yotam highlights his vulnerability, his deep fear and bravery—how he “sent forth his soul to save you.” In a similar fashion, Yotam’s famous parable of the trees presents kingship as an insufficiency of self, rather than the right of might: the olive, the fig, the vine, are all too full of their own blessings to seek to lord over others. It is only the barren thornbush that is willing to rule, as it has nothing intrinsic to lose. What is more, kingship, Yotam argues, is a mutual system: if Abimelekh was raised justly, “rejoice in him and let him rejoice in you.” But if the rise of Abimelekh was unjust, “let a fire shoot forth from Abimelkh and destroy Shechem and a fire set forth from Shechem and destroy Ebimelkh.” The ruler and the ruled each define the other, building or destroying each other simultaneously. Rather than a hierarchal relationship in which one dominates the other, it is a circular relation of mutual definition.
Yotam delivers his parable from atop Har Grizim, location of the primal covenant with God, in order to “Make the people of Shechem heard to God.” This also introduced a fundamental difference between Gideon and Abimelekh’s Odeipal struggles: Gideon acts on God’s command, and fights on God behest. Though he asserts authority, he seeks to make “God rule over you.” Yotam and Abimelekh struggle over their father’s legacy, and Yotam calls God in on his side. The story ends with the victory of Yotam’s narrative: the fire indeed sets forth and destroys both Shechem and Abimelkh. “God repaid Abimelech for the evil he had done to his father by slaying his seventy brothers; and God likewise repaid the people of Shechem… so the curse of Jotham son of Jerubbaal was fulfilled…”.]

Judges: Chapter 7

 

Rise, to go down

Hold dread in check--

a dammed river

and know it can all

flip in a moment

[for full chapter, click here

This chapter continues smoothly from the previous (indeed, with no break in the Masoretic text). It shares the keywords of yad -arm, and the focus on the spatial tensions between downward and upward motion. Like the previous chapter, it is in dialogue with the exodus, with the locus-like enemy camp and a "night" of redemption; as in the previous chapter, Israel's primordial blessings (I will make you like the sand of the sea that cannot be counted) has been appropriated by their enemies. Gideon's fear is still an underlying force: the people camp in Ein Harod, עין חרוד, a verbal play on the later reference to "all that fear" (כל החרד), so that it can be read as camping on the "spring of anxiety." Yet Gideon keeps his promise and does not question God\, keeping his anxiety in check--even as God slaughs away his men.

In reward, God of His own volition offers a new sign to assuage Gideon's fear--and opens a new intertext. Gideon, we are reminded, is not just a lesser iteration of Moses for a fallen age. As a Mannasite, he is also a descendant of Joseph, the master of dreams. Like Joseph, he is offered someone else's dream, in virtually the same language: "Behold, I have dreamed a dream." As in the case of Joseph, who interprets a dream of bread loaves, Gideon hears of a loaf of bread, swirling like a dervish. This flipping source of nourishment opens the possibility of sudden reversal, where Israel's fallen, starved state can suddenly flip, just like Joseph's in the pit. 

Inspired and renewed. Gideon prepares for battle, while returning to the opening, miraculous battle that started the conquest of the land: like the settled Jericho, the nomad Midianites will be brought low by the sound of surrounding shofars, and God's will rather than by brute physical force.]

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

[For full chapter, click here

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: 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: Chapter 3

 

We are porous

sucking and seepingץ

Seize the passage and threshold

learn to lock the door

[For full chapter, click here

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].