Samuel: Chapter 1

 

Watch for the lips--the edges

where the bitter inside

pours forth 

See me, and remember.

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"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 initiate conversation. From the "bitterness of her soul", she is mitpalel--the first use of the 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 fourth. 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 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: 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.]  

 

Deuteronomy: Chapter 25

Brothers

together

fall

enfold

fight

Who do you hold
Intertwined
What do you carry
And what cannot be grasped?

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If the previous chapter closed with a focus of forgetting, on learning to leave things behind, this chapter focuses on remembering. “Remember what did to you on the way, when you came forth from the Land of Egypt” (25:7).  It is not only the memory of the path of national history that must be preserved, but also the individual names of those die “that his name be not blotted out from Israel.”

The forgotten are given to the forgotten: the left produce of the previous chapter are  left for those on the margins, for “the window, the fatherless, the stranger.” Memory is connected to belonging, to brotherhood—the leitwort of this chapter. Again, and again, the chapter speaks of ahim (brothers)—brothers, even if one is “wicked” (25:3); brothers, even if they fight. Brotherhood creates a space of “togetherness” (yahdav, another key word of the chapter).

  

Until now, Deuteronomy has focused on the socially vulnerable, insisting that the weaker parts of society—the widow, orphan the stranger—must be protected.  The lesson of slavery is providing a safe space for the weak. Yet now the focus on togetherness and brotherhood create a sensitivity to another type of vulnerability: the vulnerability of those who are “together” and alike to you. One must recognize the vulnerability of the guilty man punished in court, “so that your brother will not destroyed before you”; Amalek is condemned for attacking “all those who faltered behind” when the nation was  “enfeebled and weary.” A woman who “reaches forth her hand” (that terrible key phrase of Genesis) to grab a man's "vulnerable parts  (mevushav)" is to be punished by the loss of her own hand.

Which leads us to the fact that the place of women in this "together" space is questionable. The wife of a man who dies without children remains within the family space “she shall not go outside,” unless her husband’s brother does not wish to perform a levirate marriage that will “preserve the name of his brother.” Here, the wife becomes the glue in the continued “togetherness” of the brothers. Yet in the case of the a fight (“if men strive together, a man against his brother”), the woman cannot get involved: if she jumps in to protect her husband, she is punished. She is not to put her hand in the intimate space of their grappling together. Her own vulnerability is not taken into account.]