Samuel: Chapter 9

 

Who do you find
As you rise, as you fall
looking for
this day, this hour, this now

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After the drama and heartbreak of the previous chapter's depiction of Samuel's old age, this chapter opens with a new beginning--and a new protagonist: "There was a man in Benjamin whose name was Kish son of Abiel...a Benjaminite, ..He had a son whose name was Saul". This sonorous introduction deliberately echoes the exact syntax of the opening verses of the book:  "There was a man from Ramathaim...whose name was Elkanah son of Jeroham son of Elihu ... an Ephraimite. And he had two wives..." , as does the focus on food and sacred eating. If until now, we have been reading the saga of Samuel, it now turns into the story of Saul.

The name itself emphasizes the linkages between the two protagonists: the name  Saul (Shaul ש'א'ל--lit. "asked for""lent") takes us back to Hannah's introduction of her own son: "This is the child I prayed for, and God has given me my request (sha'alti ש'א'ל) that I asked (sha'alti ש'א'ל) of him. I in tוrn lend him (hish'altihu ש'א'ל) to God...For as long as he lives, he is lent (shaul ש'א'ל) to God"--Saul retroactively taking the place of Samuel.

The change in protagonist comes with a shift in ambiance, as the narrative switches to a fable-like quest of threes, full of direct dialogue, and replete with allusions to earlier biblical narratives, from Abraham to Joseph to Moses to Gideon. In this version, Samuel is no longer the national leader, but a local "seer", come to play his part in a quest of "searching" and "finding" (מצאו)--two leitworts of the chapter.

The appointment of a king is also redefined: not as idolatrous betrayal, but as an act of mercy analogous to the Exodus itself: "He will deliver My people from the hands of the Philistines; for I have taken note of the plight of My people, and their outcry has come to Me”.  

Yet the chronotope of this fairytale-like story is complex. Space is defined by a continuous oscillation between rising and falling, echoing Hanna's song of flux; meetings happen at liminal spaces, heavy eith expectation. Time opens with a retrospective look at history ("Formerly in Israel...the prophet of today was formerly called a seer), then narrows down to focus on a specific day ("one day before" "on this day" "this time appointed" "just then"): far from being timless, this fable is almost breathlessly of a moment, easily missed and transient. 

Samuel: Chapter 5

 

Watch for the portal

Enflamed limen

between here and there

you and me

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As the Israelites scream in despair, the Philistines triumphantly carry off the Ark of Covenant--Israel's great hope--to the Temple of Dagon. We are returned to another nadir in Israel's history, when Samson, who had "begun to redeem Israel from the Philistines," was publicly debased in Dagon's temple. Yet the intertextual link contains a hint of hope: the very triumph of the Philistines may be their downfall, bringing their temple down upon them. 

If in the previous chapter, Israel was punished when they celebrated their prowess and control over the Ark, now the Philistines' turn has come.  As in the previous chapter, the emphasis is on the word "take" lakakh, highlighting the physical manipulation of what should be sacred, beyond human ken; the human propensity to grab. The Philistines "take" the Ark from Even HaEzer, they "take" it to the Temple of Dagon, and they "take" Dagon when he topples at the foot of the Ark. 

In response, God severs Dagon's "hands". There will be no handling. The public debasment of Dagon is followed by a private debasment of the Philistened. God's "hand" spreads throughout the Philistine city in a plague (echoing the Exodus,when the "hand of God"  kills the livestock ). The Israelites had hoped for a Lord of (military) Hosts Who fights in the open, "trumpeting" the arrival the Ark to their camp, as though it were a weapon.  When the Ark finally acts against the Philistenes, it is specifically through the hidden, the invisible. The Philistines are struck with hemeroids, their most private bodily functions made public in a general outcry (homeh) that echoes Israel's despairing cry in the previous chapter. The Ark is avenged through shame, the debasement of the Philistines both elided and inscribed in the text by the difference between the written and read form of the word for "hemeroid"--read as t'horim (hemeroid), written as afli (sahdowed, dark), as though the word is too shameful to be written, but highlighted by its very absence. The "dishonor" (I-kavod) experienced by Israel in the previous chapter is countered here by the " very heavy  (kaved) hand of God".   

As in the case Samson, who carries the gates of Gaza on his back, the interaction with the Philistines, Israel's closest neighbors, revolves around liminal spaces. Dagon's severed hands and face are found on the threshold of his temple; the priests of Ashdod avoid the temple doorway; similarly, in the previous chapter, Eli dies at the entrance to the Mishkan, his neck broken when he strikes the doorpost. God here attacks the Philistines through the most hidden limen of all, the portal through which the body excretes what does not belong, a passageway between self and not-self.   The battle between Israel and the Philitenes takes place in this charged space between self and other, feeling for boundaries.

Judges 19: In Writing

 For five days, the rain fell.

Inched across the ceiling,

bubbled the walls. 

Drops bloomed beneath the window ledge

trailed vines towards the floor.

When I laid my daughter down to sleep

the pillow was soaked

deep red, dyeing my hand.

A treacherous puddle glinted below.

I took them out of the room,

laid a mattress on the floor

"we're camping out," I said

Tap, tap tap went the rain on the door

cold fingers reached down the ceiling and walls. 

Nothing can be fixed 

till the rain stops. 

The way out

is blocked by a pool full

 of dirt,  debris, and torn bags.

I wipe the floors. 

Line the windows with towels.

Overhead. the plane shrieks 

like a phantom diving for the kill.

Listen to the thunder, my daughter says. 

When there is lightning, 

does God tear a line through the sky?

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.

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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 4

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

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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

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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]. 

Joshua: Chapter 20

Trace the line to the gateway, and back

into the city, into the door of your own home

give place to the exile

the man out of place

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The growing focus on cities climaxes here, with the command to re-appoint the Cities of Refuge dedicated by Moses, adding now three additional cities on the western side of the Jordan. If the inheritance of the Land is "given" by God, these cities of refuge are "given" (20: 2) by the people, who "give" a place to the refugee involuntary murderer. These are human places within the expansive space of the Land--and they are specifically "cities" (the leitword of this chapter, defined by human boundaries, with a "gate" manned by elders and overseen by a court.

If the previous accounts of the cities of refuge (Numbers 35, focused on the question of the man-slaughterers relative guilt, this account focuses on the passage into and out of the city--continuing the Book of Joshua's focus on transitional spaces of entrance. The manslaughterer must approach the liminal gate, until he is "gathered into the city" and "given a place to sit (y'sh'v). His return (sh'v) from exile is also defined through the city, the wordplay of sh'v / sh'v highlighting the parallel: he is to return to "his own city, the city he left."

 The setting aside of the cities is a watershed. Back in Deuteronomy, Moses defined taking responsibility for cities of refuge as the moment when the land truly becomes "yours." It is the sign of a completed conquest. In dedicating these cities, Joshua is indicating that "God has expanded the boundaries" of Israel's territory. 

Joshua: Chapter 4

Recreation. 

Take the inside out,

bring the ourside in

Stable in the swirl

foot sunk in sand--

then disconnect at let the water back in.

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This chapter followes seemlessly from the last: it is the actualization of the plans and commands.  If the previous chapter ends with the announcment that "all the nation passed through the Jordan," this chapter begins at the moment after "and it was, when all the nation passed through the Jordan." If in the previous chapter, God promised Joshua that "I will begin to magnify you in the eyes of this nation, and they will know that as I was with Moses I will be with you" (3: 7),  in this chapter it has become a fact: "on that day God magnified Joshua in the eyes of all of Israel, and they feared him as they had feared Moses, all the days of his life" (4:14).

Continued is the theme of transition, here embodied in the Jordan River, the literal passage between before and after, inside and outside, As in the case of Rahab and her window, there is something sacred about the liminal space, and about the right of passage. The men that Joashua "prepared" before the passage must go back and take stones from the bedrock of the river, by the very feet of the preists. These stones are to be set up in the first "resting place" that Israel finds within the Land (again, an allusion to Moses and his experience at the "resting place" [malon] on his way to Egypt], continuing the presence of the passage. These are to be "speaking stones", arousing testemony. And even as teh Jordan is moved into the Land, the outer edge is moved into the Jordan, as twelve stones are set up within the river, to permenantly link the before and after. Thus, the desert experience is linked into teh transitional space of the river, and the river is moved into the "resting place" at Gilgal.  

Holding the passage open are the feet of the preists, rooted within the watery mud, causing the river to pile up on one side, and dry up on the other. "As soon as the soles of the preists' feet were lifted to the dry land, the waters of the Jordan returned to their place, running between its banks as before" (4:18). The transition from Moses to Joshua, from desert to the Land, revolves around literal movement: around learning to walk in a new way.]