Judges 21: In Writing

 You said! he screams, you said !

You always lie! 

Explain how the buses aren’t running.

Explain we won’t be able to get home.

He is a furious whirlwind, unappeasable. 

Every word a promise, and so

every word is a lie.

I hate you! he shrieks. I hate

you. You're the worst mother

in the world. You’re pee. You’re poo. 

You’re all the disgust

ing things in the world.”

Vomit and spitup and urine and shit. 

Is that not what mothering is?

I want to tell him how 

his beautiful face turns ugly

how I hate the snarl of his bared teeth,

how the shades of his eyes pull down

over his soul. But as his mother,

I say Well, I love you. Swallow

the bile. Try to see him  

beneath the animal-rictus. 

Is this not keeping a promise,

even if unspoken?

Judges: Chapter 21

Bound in widening spirals 

of language and blood--

close like a vise

then dissipate.

For full chapter, click here

Having won a decisive victory, the self-righteous bloodlust of battle withdraws. And now Israel is faced with what they have wrought: a tribe decimated, with only a handful of survivors left hiding in the desert. The escapees have been picked off along the way, all women and children slaughtered. 

The utter destruction triggers consternation, but not self-awareness. Israel weeps–and helplessly asks Oh God of Israel, why has this happened in Israel, that one tribe must now be lost from Israel? It is as though their own actions were a force beyond their control, something that "happened." There is no confession

Yet within this helpless cry is a new development. For the first time, the nation sees itself as an entity. They are “Isael” (repeated three times) rather than scattered tribes; they sense that the loss of a tribe–even an enemy tribe–will damage this entity of “Israel” irrevocably. 

But despite the emerging national awareness, helpless weeping has a troublesome history. The people wept in the desert all night after the Spies' report–and lost their tights to the land. At the opening of this book, the people weep at the angel’s rebuke, instigating an iterative cycle of breakdown and betrayal. National weeping indicates an abdication of responsibility,  self-indulgent self pity. Now they weep a "great weeping"–and seek a solution that does not reflect on their own culpability. 

On the contrary–they seek to solve the problem of Benjamin with the same authoritative murderousness with which they decimated Benjamin. Gabah was condemned, no questions asked. Then the tribe of Benjamin as a whole, men, women and children, wereslaughtered. Now, Yabesh Gilead is also to be put to the sword--except in this case, the virgins are preserved (the term hay in an eerie echo of Pharoh’s exemption of the females from his genocidal decree to kill the baby boys), to provide wives for the womanless sirvivirs of Benjamin. 

For the people, united in  their single voice, had all sworn to not “give their daughters to Benjamin”. Having killed all the Benjaminite women, they have condemned the tribe to oblivion. The intertextual links with the Jephthah saga are striking–and illuminating.

If the previous chapter was in dialogue with the primal battle of Ai, this chapter is in dialogue with a more recent saga: the story of Jephtha–intigator of civil wars,  . 

Jephtah of Gilead was the first to break the taboo on internecine warfare. Instead  of dissipating the tribal tensions that permeate the book, he slaughtered Ephraim.  It is this direct brush with civil warfare that makes the people of Jabesh Gilead wary abut joining the gathering against Benjamin. 

Jephtah is not only the instigator of civil wards, he is also aspeaker of dangerous vows. The parallels between Jephtha's and Israel's vows  are numerous. In both cases, the vow revolves around daughters, and their ability to marry. In both, the vows create bareness, cutting off the future. Jephtha condemns his  "only issue" cutting off his family line; here, the vow cuts off the tribe of Benjamin. Yet in both cases, the speakers refuse to take responsibility for their speech act, seeing themselves as victims of an external force. 

And in both, the aftereffects, particularly for women, are  tragic. Jephtha's treatment of his daughter initiates mass female mourning, as the women head out to the hills miyamim yemima to commemorate her loss. Here, Israel's solution to the vow ostracizing Benjamin is to provide captive brides. The nation lean on another  “great vow” to offset their first vow: in addition to cutting off Benjain, the people had also vowed to execute all those who did not join the national assembly. Thus, they annihilate the city of Jabesh Gilead, preserving the captive virgins as wives to the Benjemenite survivors.  When these are insufficient, the men of Benjamin are instructed to lay in wait (the word “ambush” Arev is particularly resonant, as it was an ambush that destroyed the tribe), and kidnap the girls who go out dancing in the vineyards, miyamim yemima. 

This serves as a reminder that vows, from their very introduction, are  inexplicably related to issues of genderl: a man’s authority over women is expressed in his ability to undo her vows, to control her speech. As history unfolds, vows are used more directly and explicitly to control women’s physical being: blocking marriage, controling fertility, and here, triggering kidnapping and forced marriage.The very dance  (meholot) that during the Exodus expressed Miriam’sredemptive power, becomes subverted. Jephtha’s daughter is undone by her dance towards her father; the dancing here renders the women  vulnerable.   

It is telling that the battle that supposedly began over a brutal gang rape ends in sanctioned abduction and rape. The objectification of the concubine with her penetrable, dissectible body, here move to the national level, as women become faceless vessels of reproduction. The vows grant a vise-like control over words and narrative, preventing all questions and change. A key divergence from  the  Jephthah’s saga is  illuminating: Jephtha makes a neder–a vow that sanctifies something to God; his commitment to the “utterance of his mouth” is part of a lifelong quest to infuse human language with God-like accountability by bringing all questions to this ultimate Other.  The Israelites, by contrast, make a shevuah–a vow that focuses on the human relationship to objects. The consequence of breaking this vow are not God's wrath, but a human curse: “yet we cannot give them any of our daughters as wives,” since the Israelites had taken an oath: “Cursed be anyone who gives a wife to Benjamin!” (21: 18). The newly self-consiouce Israel  are caught in a language loop where their vows are reinforced by their own imprecations, each  amplifying the other.    

Something new is indeed born in this final section of the Book of Judges, bookended by its repeated refrain: In those days there was no king in Israel. A unified national identity is coming into fruition. Yet it is a monolith vision, that speaks as “one man” and squashes all dissent with death. Its assertion of authority is lumbering, dangerous, and blind, calling to mind's Yeat's haunting description of a time when "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Indeed, "what rough beast, its hour come round at last / slouches towards Bethelehim to be born?"

 

Judges 20: In Writing

Slogan Walk

  

All together. At once.

My baby’s teeth are rotting.

Only two, and they teeter

like fragile stalactites

devoured from the sides.

In their death they command us victory.

His wails weave

through the bannered street

Bring them home now!

We will win together

intertwine with the slogans

514 days. 

He is hungry, and tired

the nurse forbid 

even mother’s milk

Gonenim is strong together.

All morning, he scrounged desperately

and I grabbed

away each comfort.

We are bringing them home NOW.

 

a year in captivity

we pass the plastered bus stop 

with its signs

and remnants.

Eden won't return

Elad won't return

Elad won't return.

won't return. won’t return

Iconized faces, with their visceral demands

language of the body

urgent and voiceless.

 

Judges: Chapter 20

 United as one

against one--

answer now

no questions.

For full chapter, click here

If the opening of the Book of Judges detailed the movement from individual to tribe, its closing begins the movement from tribe to nation, as "all the Israelites... the community assembled as one" in Mitzpeh. The all-inclusive, national nature of the gathering is emphasized five times in two verses, and reinforced by the use of the rare verb k'h'l--from the same root of the hakhel, the ceremony in which the king reads to the full assembly of the people every seven years.

Yet this idealized version of an "assembly of God" unified as "one man" is undermined in the very next section, in which we are told that "Benjamin heard that the Israelites had assembled." It is not all the assembly, nor all the tribes: the sudden cohesion of the national group takes place around the creation of an outgroup: Benjamin. This retroactive exclusion casts an ironic light on the sonorous opening--and on the characterization of the gathering as the "assembly of God".

The irony gains force, as the Levite, now described as "the husband of the murdered woman" rather than the "master" of the abandoned concubine, gives his testimony. The story matches the Levite's new persona of grieving husband, and is a mix of subtle distortions and lies-by-omission. Like the Dannites, the Levite knows how to control the narrative: Now it is the entire city of Geva that attacked him, rather than the rabble; they saught murder, not rape; and they somehow captured his wife, with no mention of how he actively shoved her out the door to the surrounding mob. There are hints to his heartlessness, as he psychopathically describes how he  "took hold of my concubine and I cut her in pieces," yet no one questions him. He closes his testimony with a call for action, demanding "a plan here and now!"

The Israelites "answer as one," no questions asked. War on Geva is the plan. They gather against the city, 'as one man, friends,"--the irony now heavy and ugly. Benjamin is told to hand over the perpetrators for execution. Turned into an outgroup, its people sentenced sans trial, Benjamin hunkers down defensively and refuses.  As the tribe gathers for war, with its troop of elite left-handed warriors, we are returned to the opening of the book, with Ehud, the left-handed savior from Benjamin. All this power will now be turned against the nation, instead of acting to save it. 

The past continues to reverberate, as the people ask God "who shall advance for us first, to fight Benjamin?" echoing the question that opened this book, "who shall advance for us first, to fight the Canaanites?" The fight against an external enemy has turned inward. Now, as then, the answer is Judah--but with a crucial difference. If in the fight against the Canaanites, God promises victory, here He is notably silent as to the outcome. Israel, deaf to nuance, rush to action, no questions asked. Only after they are soundly beaten do they begin to think about whether they should have attacked "my brother Benjamin" in the first place.

The  Israelites win by setting a trap--a near-perfect replication of the battle of Ai.  As in Ai, the warriors are lured out of the city, leaving it vulnerable to an ambush party that sets it on fire.  As with Ai, the warriors only realize their mistake when they turn to see the column of smoke rising from the city behind them. The intertextual links are numerous: the "about thirsty" and "about thirty-six" slain; the use of the lottery; the escape toward the desert;  the repeated mentions of Bet El; the phrase "for an outrage (nevela) has been done in Israel."

The linkage to Ai is illuminating, both for its similarities and its differences. Ai, Israel's first defeat, came to teach a bitter lesson in the cost of ationhood and collective responsibility: all of Israel were held accountable for Achan's nevela, and the entire nation was defeated for his sin. No wonder then Israel's immediate and unified desire to "stamp out this evil" when a nevela is committed in Geva: all are responsible, all will be punished. 

Yet it is here that the two lotteries are revealing. In Ai, it is God who initiates the lottery to identify the guilty party, narrowing down from tribe, to clan, to person.   Even after Achan is selected, Joshua waits for a confession, and then seeks to back the confession with concrete proof. Only then does Joshua punish Achan. Here, the nation initiates the lottery to select warriors to destroy Geva. Collective guilt is assigned, with no confession, or attempt at proof.  And in meting out punishment, the nation is as ruthless to the entire tribe of Benjamon as they were to the guilty Achan. The destruction of the cities of Benjamin goes beyond the destruction meted out on Ai: even their animals and belongings are decimated. 

Indeed, if Geva recreated Sodom, here the Israelites recreate Sodom's destruction, leaving nothing but fire. 

Yet this stands in stark contrast to Abraham, who begs God to consider if there are any righteous in Sodom who might redeem it. Here, there is no search for redemption, only the unifying surge of indignation, which ironically leaves the most guilty party unpunished]

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.

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 18: In Writing

 Small Cruelties

After Danusha Laméris

I've been thinking about the way, when you walk

past a forgotten flower pot, it seems so easy

to snatch it. Or how overhanging oranges

tempt us, a leftover, perhaps, from Eden. How easily

“I want,” becomes “mine”.

And sometimes, when we hold

a marker, someone else will grab it.

Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. But

we want that extra big piece

of chocolate cake, with the perfect

swirl of cream. Want the purple marker,

and that specific “Gummy bear” song. 

We have so little control, always. So far

from the enclosed garden, with a heavy hanging

fig tree and a gate that can slam shut. Only

these two hands. Not so large. Not so powerful.

These hands, and the weapons we pick

up along the way. Sticks. Words.

What if these are our only nodes of exchange,

when we pass each other on our solitary prowls, 

erecting fleeting temples to our gnawing needs. Saying, “Mine”

“Give or I’ll take it.” Saying, “Let’s see you stop me. Please.”

Judges: Chapter 18

 

Scry,

but do not speak--

eyes wide shut

always seek advantage

on your path outward

For full chapter, click here

This chapter, like the last, is also set in an achronological "in those days". Yet if the previous chapter seems to have stepped out of history, this chapter is dense with intertextuality, reaching deep into the nation's past and future.

True, it continues the previous chapter, linked by the refrain "In those days there was no king in Israel," and by continued insistent allusions to the Samson saga. The Dannite warriors set out from "between Tzorah and Eshtaol," echoing the opening and closing of Samson's story "between Tzorah and Eshtaol". What is more, the repeated references to the "encampment of Dan" in the Samson story are now retroactively explained: the Danites live in an "encampment" because "no inheritance had fallen into their lot among the tribes of Israel," and so they remained unsettled, a kind of second Levi.

Yet this description is itself puzzling, for the Dannites were given an "inheritance among the tribes of Israel"--in the seventh lot, back when the tribes's territories were apportioned by Joshua--a territory bordered by "Tzorah and Eshtaol", which included the fateful Timnah, where Samson met his wife. Rather, as we were told way back at the opening of this book, the Dannites were blocked from this inheritance by the Amorites, who drove them to the hills--a dispossession that haunts this period as an implicit threat.

The Danites' solution here is to send out five warriors to "spy out (רגל) the land and investigate it" . The action is dense with meaning, awakening a plethora of echoes. The first reference to rigul / spies is the Joseph saga (which so dominates the initial apportionment of the tribes): "You are spies!" Joseph accused his brothers. "The nakedness of the land you have come to see."And indeed the Danites are searching for vulnerability. Reaching Laish, they see perfect prey: "a tranquil and unsuspecting people, with no one in the land to molest them." Similarly, after partaking of Micah's hospitality, they see opportunity: "Here the five men who had gone to spy (r'g'l) ... remarked to their clans, “Do you know, there is an ephod in these houses, and oracle idols, and a sculptured image and a molten image? Now you know what you have to do.”

Yet the Dannite quest is no less in dialogue with other incidents of spying--most centrally, the infamous mission to "scout out" the Land, which ended in a 40-year exile. Moses's mission statement was not to spy (r'g'l), but rather to explore (t'r לתור), with detailed questions, involving every aspect of the land: "see what kind of country it is." The relative vulnerability of the population is simply another detail: are the people weak or strong?  Ultimately, however, this exploration is destroyed by how it awakens the people's sense of their own vulnerability:  we were as insects in their eyes, and so we were in our own. Caleb and Joshua are the lone dissenting voices, insisting that vulnerability is in the eye of the beholder: Have no fear then of the people of the country, for they are our prey: their protection has departed from them, but God is with us. 

The Dannite spies attempt to channel Caleb and Joshua's energy, merging their various speeches as they exhort the Dannites to capture Laish: "God has delivered it into your hand. When you come, you will come to an unsuspecting people; and the land is spacious and nothing on earth is lacking there.” Yet there is a deep irony in this appropriation, for their message is fundamentally opposed to that of Caleb and Joshua. Caleb and Joshua insist that the dangers are illusory, and that the people should fight for their inheritance. The Dannite spies, by contrast, urge abandoning the Dannite lands to go attack an "unsuspecting people." What God has apportioned is meaningless: the central question is relative strength. The fearless Caleb defines and initiates the conquest of the Land; Joshua exhorts the people "How long will you be slack in going to possess the land that God, the Lord of your fathers, has given you?" The Dannites, by contrast, remain ever-slack: they turn away from the land God has given them,  acceding to their dispossession. Let us abandon our territory, is their implicit message, and look for someplace easy. In this, they truly are an encampment of nomads, connected to no specific nahala. Like the young Levite-priest, they go on a "path", looking for what they can find." This stands in contrast to the primal Danite warrior, Samson, who for all his erratic action and insistent loneliness, focused his efforts on the Dannite ancestral lands near Timnah.

Caleb and Joshua they are not. But the Dannite warriors have learned one thing by attempting to recreate the story of the scouts: the power of language.  The battle between Caleb and the rest of the spies is one of words: they do not argue about facts, but about how to speak of them. The scouts sin is their speech :  דיבת הארץ--the speaking of the land. In presenting themselves as modern day Calebs ad=bd Joshuas, the Dannite spies are careful to allow no dissent: shut your mouth, they order. Be silent. No one is to undermine their narrative. 

Yet the Dannites do not wholly accept it. Instead, they split:  600 warriors take off for easier climes, the rest stay in the homelands of Tzorah and Eshtaol. On the way "out" (as the move to Laish is defined in Joshua 19), the Dannite contigent also carry off the Levite and Micah's gods. The opportunistic  Levite, who searched to "live wherever he could find", and was drawn in by Micah's concrete monetary offer,  is happy to set off to bigger and greater things. The hapless Micah is forced to turn around with nothing, the thief losing what he stole, along with the relationships he thought he had baught. Commodification and betrayal are triumphant. 

The stolen gods are set up in the stolen Laish "until the exile of the land"--a dark dart into the future. The dispossession of the Dannites indeed foretells the eventual dispossession of all the tribes. The schism in Dan is echoed in the schism between  Micah's house of God and the Tabernacle in Shilo. Relationships dissolve. communication is silenced.  

Judges 17: In Writing

Can I have a chocolate coin? he asks, But you took one without permission, I say. What if I'm good, he says, what if I'm good the whole day?

Do you love me Imma,  he asks, do you?

Of course I do, I say, tired,

Because some kids in my gan day their imma hates them, he says.

Do you love me Imma, do you? he asks

Of course I love you, I say

Because I like to hear you say it, he says. Can I have a chocolate coin?

Judges: Chapter 17

 

What is taken

what is offered

what fills the hand

in the stops along your way

For full chapter, click here

The next chapter begins abruptly, with no mention of the passage of time (the usual bridge between sagas), nor any reference to an external oppressor.  We have left the realm of history, to enter the timeless space of the domestic: a "man from the mountains of Ephraim" in the middle of an exchange with his mother about money.

Yet despite the change of ambiance and setting, there is a strange yet clear textual link to the Samson story: the very specific sum of 1100 silver coins--paid by the Philistines to Delilah for Samson's secret--repeated here, twice, as the sum stolen by Micah from his mother. More subtle: this timeless "in those days" is defined by "each man did what was right in his own eyes" (yashar b'enav), an echo of Samson's justification for his choice of Philistine wife: "for she is right in my eyes" (yeshara hi be'eynai).

The linkage between Micah's coins and Delilah's blood money associates places money at the center, associating it with betrayal, commodification and possession. And indeed, the relationship between Micah and his mother zings around these coins, which change hands repeatedly between them. Micah steals from his mother who curses him, then retracts the curse. He says he will return the money; she says the money is his; then retracts this offer as he gives her the money. Instead, she gives him a fraction  to pay for "an idol and an ephod"--returning us to the Gideon story, with its possibility of hereditary kingship, at a time "when there is no King in Israel.".

 The intense interaction of mother and son contrast with the Samson saga, where Manoach the father keeps asserting his centrality.  In the backdrop is the gaping absence of the father. And indeed in the next section, the father moves centre stage: Micah, now revealed to be a father himself, "fills the hands of his son" to make him the priest of this new house of God-idolatry. Yet when a young Levite passes by, Micah sees an opportunity. Even as the Levite emphasized his migratory status as one who is opportunistically looking to "sojourn where he finds," Micah eagerly grasps at him, begging him to "stay with me and be my father and my priest,"  the missing father found at last. 

To offset this desperation for relationship, Micah offers money: " I will pay you ten shekels of silver a year, an allowance of clothing, and your food." The Levite accepts the blandishments he "has found", and has "his hands filled"  in place of Micah's son. Though Micah searched for a father, "the youth became like one of his own sons" and Micah is convinced that some how in this, he has earned God's blessing.