A hundred years after Idrimi, several men famously set themselves up as the rulers of ‘apiru kingdoms in the hills. A man named Aziru succeeded his father as the king of Amurru in the mountains of Syria; and a man named Labayu set himself up as monarch in the hill country of Shechem. They both lived in an era when Egypt had extended its power throughout Canaan and along the Syrian coast, while the Hittites were expanding their dominion in northern and central Syria. Being a canny pair, both Aziru and Labayu claimed to be loyal vassals of the Pharaoh, sending him all sorts of polite letters (preserved for us in Akhenaten’s archive at Amarna) while raiding their richer neighbors. Even though the others kings complained—they were vassals of Pharaoh too, after all—Egypt doesn’t seem to have been able to stop the hill-kings’ attacks.
So what are all these men doing in the hills? Why aren’t they growing crops or raising sheep?
The answer is complicated. Some of these men may be there because of weather changes which turned already marginal farmland into ground whose only possible crop was rocks. Without farms, these men had to find different ways to live. Some of these men may have belonged to ethnic groups that were displaced when local power changed hands. Still others ran away to escape debt slavery. In the ancient world the poor were expected to work for their debt-holders until their debts were paid; for various reasons, they often ran away to escape this. Yet other ‘apiru were fleeing the consequences of their crimes.
Townsfolk had an ambivalent relationship with these landless men. The ‘apiru could be helpful (especially if the Ammonites decided to invade), but there was always the possibility that these men would turn to robbery and murder.
Want to know more? To read more about Aziru and Labayu, look for a copy of William Moran’s The Amarna Letters. To find out more about Idrimi, check out the electronic edition of his (pseudo-) autobiography here on ORACC.
Where did Willow’s proverbs come from?
When I was brainstorming for the story that would become “Overpowered,” the very first character that fell into place was Willow—the middle-aged servant with a proverb for everything.
I’d been wanting to write this character since working through the Akkadian wisdom poem “Arad Mitanguranni (Servant, Always Obey Me!)” The poem is a dialogue between master and servant. In every stanza of the poem, the master first says that he does want to do something (go hunting, eat, drive his chariot, have a family, fall in love, sacrifice to his god). Then the slave agrees, quoting a proverb to support his master’s wish. But the master is not a very steady fellow. He always changes his mind and decides not to do whatever it is (go hunting, eat, etc.) after all. The slave then supports this opposing view with another proverb. Here’s a short selection of the poem.
Master: Servant, always obey me!
Servant: Thus, master, thus!
M: I will steal something.
S: So steal, master, steal. Unless you steal, where will your clothes come from? Who will help you fill your belly?
M: No, servant, I will not steal.
S: [Do not steal, master, do not steal.] The one who steals is either killed or flayed, or has his eyes put out, or is seized, or is put in the guardhouse.
Scholars have argued about this poem a lot. Is it a reflection on the futility of life? A satire? A comedy routine? Probably the real answer is more simple: it’s a school exercise for scribes in training. Part of their education was to learn proverbs. Those ancient schoolboys probably enjoyed the poem’s absurd and humorous flavor.
I’ve always thought that the servant in the poem would make a good story character. Thus we have Willow… though his master is very different from the master in the poem! I was able to fit a lot of cool proverbs into his dialogue.
Still, there were other proverbs that I wasn’t able to shoehorn in. Here are just a few fun ones:
“Go up to the ancient ruins and walk about; see the skulls of high and low. Who was the benefactor and who was the malefactor?”
“Will you let go of a bull’s horn to grasp a fox’s ear?”
“Woman is a sharp iron dagger that cuts a man’s throat.”
“You find something, but it gets destroyed. You lose something, but it lasts forever.”
“A man who sets up his own house breaks up his father’s home.”
“Even the ant, when it is struck, will fight back and bite the hand of the smiter.”
“A bitch in her haste gives birth to blind puppies.”
“Friendship lasts for a day, business connections last forever.”
“The pig has no sense … while he was at leisure he mocked his master; now his master left him, the butcher slaughtered him.”
“The fowler who had no fish, only birds, holding his bird net jumped into the city moat.”
“The spider spun a web for a fly. A lizard was caught on the web, to the spider’s disadvantage.”
“Seeing you have done evil to your friend, what will you do to your enemy?”
“A scorpion stung a man. What did it get?”
“Last year I ate garlic. This year my insides burn.”
“You went and plundered enemy land while the enemy came and plundered your land.”
If you’re interested in ancient proverbs, you can look up more in Lambert’s Babylonian Wisdom Literature or in Cohen’s Wisdom from the Late Bronze Age.
Why trees?
In Judges 9, Jotham son of Gideon tells a story that begins, “The trees went out to anoint a king over them.” In the story he describes how the trees approached different ones from their number, asking each one to become king. But the olive tree, the fig tree and the grape vine all refuse: they have important tasks to do already, and don’t have time for kingship. Finally the trees approach the thornbush, the lowest and most despised of them all, and ask him to be their king. He agrees—but he also warns them that he will destroy them (and himself too) if they betray him. Jotham goes on to interpret the story, connecting the thornbush with his murderous brother Abimelek.
When I was starting to write “Overpowered,” I had no intention of using Jotham or Abimelek as characters. But I’ve always been fascinated by that tree-tale Jotham tells, so I named my mercenaries after different plants and included Willow, who could bring in all sorts of wisdom sayings and tales. Eventually, I ended up putting Abimelek in as my background villain… which quickly led to Jotham’s introduction into the story.
What is it with the Israelites and tree-tales? A few hundred years later, Jehoash of Israel sends another cautionary tree-tale to Amaziah of Judah: “The thornbush that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon saying ‘Give your daughter to my son for a wife.’ But a wild creature of the field that was in Lebanon passed through and tramples the thornbush” (2 Kings 14:9 / 2 Chr 25:18). The moral of the story is ‘Don’t get above yourself, lest things end badly.’
If you pay attention to the wisdom tales, metaphors and images in the Old Testament you’ll notice that relatively few of them involve animals. Instead you get plants. Here are a few examples:
“Are not the gleanings of the grapes of Ephraim better than the entire harvest of Abiezer?” – Gideon, Judges 8:2.
“The righteous flourish like a palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.” – Psalm 92:12
“A great eagle … came to Lebanon and took the top of the cedar.” – Read the rest in Ezekiel 17.
“I looked, and there before me stood a tree in the middle of the land.” – Read the rest in Daniel 4.
Trees were also a big deal in wisdom literature outside of Israel. In Babylon there was a long tradition of tree dialogues—basically, arguments between two types of trees where each tree thinks it is superior to the other. Here are some excerpts from the wisdom poem “The Tamarisk and the Date Palm” (adapted from Cohen, Wisdom from the Late Bronze Age). The text was found at Emar in Syria and dates to the 1200’s BC (the same time as “Overpowered”).
In far-away days, in far-away nights, in distant years…
The trees were enemies—Tamarisk and Date-Palm were rivals
And began an argument. Tamarisk said
‘I am bigger than you! Date Palm said ‘I’m better than you!
You, Tamarisk, are useless. Why are your branches
Fruitless, O Tamarisk? My fruits are fit for the royal table!’
Tamarisk spoke, responded proudly:
‘I am thinking of the furniture of the palace. What is of me in the palace of the king? The king eats on a table of me
The queen drinks from a cup of me, the warriors eat with a spoon of me, the baker kneads the dough in a trough of me…
I am supreme! I proclaim that I have no rival!’
The Date Palm replied proudly, speaking out to its brother Tamarisk:
‘In the offering-place of Sin the divine prince, without my being present
The king cannot perform libations. My purification rites are performed to the four corners of the world;
My fronds are dropped to the ground and a festival is celebrated.
But Tamarisk is only suitable for the brewer to use;
The spent grain is piled up on it like siege mounds!’
And the dialogue goes on (and on).
Tree-tales stayed popular in the ancient Near East for a very long time. In the 19th column of the Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon (one of the Dead Sea Scrolls), Abraham requests that Sarah pretend to be his sister, as in Genesis 12. However, he justifies this request to her by saying that he had a prophetic dream. “I saw in my dream, and behold, one cedar and one date palm. As one they sprung from a single root. And sons of men came seeking to cut down and uproot the cedar, leaving the date palm by herself. But the date palm cried out, ‘Don’t cut the cedar, for we have sprung from one root!’ So the cedar was forgiven because of the protection of the date palm.” He thinks that the men of Egypt will want to kill him in order to marry Sarah—but she can protect him if she says that he’s her brother.
Why does Cedar put dust on his head?
In a lot of ways, “Overpowered” is a contrast to “Guardian of Our Beauty.” While I explored highly organized royal religion in “Guardian”—Palli’s absurdly elaborate christening is a good example—I wanted to explore individual religion in “Overpowered.” What kind of interactions did the people in the back of beyond (aka the Israelite hill country) have with the divine?
The answer is that they tried a LOT of different things. The ancient Israelites often worshipped gods other than the God of the Bible, or they worshipped the right god in the wrong way. (The biblical prophets point this out frequently.) During the time of the judges in particular, we know that “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” We see people setting up family shrines with the wrong people as priests, making sacrifices at numerous local shrines (sometimes legitimately and sometimes not), setting up sacred stones, and so on. These practices were common not only among the Israelites but among many of the peoples of Canaan and Syria.
The archaeological record gives us even more details. For example, hundreds if not thousands of amulets have been excavated in Israel which were imported all the way from Egypt. The god Bes was a particular favorite. He was a minor protective deity, which may have made him less intimidating than the “big” gods. But numerous gods are represented in amuletic images and texts. YHWH himself is mentioned in two amulets made of rolled silver foil that were found at Ketef Hinnom. One of the silver amulets quotes the priestly blessing from Numbers 6! Oyeb son of Sa’ak, with his collection of amulets, represents a large class of people who had access to wealth but lacked strong ties to a particular god. (Amulets are also portable, making them handy for a mercenary soldier. In a world where most gods were viewed as very local, portable religion was hard to come by.)
Sacred stones must have had a lot of local importance—they were everywhere. Some of them were connected with larger sanctuaries (like the standing stones at Dan or Hazor) while others were hanging out alone or in groups on hilltops and in desert areas. We don’t always know what the ancient people thought about these stones. Did the stones represent gods or groups of gods? Did they mark places where God did something that the people wanted to remember?
But back to Cedar. Cedar always wears sackcloth and puts dust on his head, like a man in permanent mourning. Why does he do this? Unlike Oyeb, who responded to constant travel by trying to buy protection from the god of every place he passed through, Cedar reacted to his homelessness by swearing off gods altogether. In his mind, the only god with a reason to look after him was the god of the place where he was born; now that he’s lost his original home, he has no god at all. This leaves him with no protection against minor supernatural powers such as ghosts. In the ancient Near East many people believed that if the dead were forgotten—if their graves were no longer supplied with bread and beer—they would get hungry down in the underworld and come back to the land of the living in order to cause trouble for those who had forgotten them. However, if you were in mourning for them—if you wore sackcloth and ashes, played sad songs, avoided fine clothes and feasting—they wouldn’t attack you. Cedar, being a smart man, not only dresses in perpetual mourning but pours out beer for every grave he finds. If the dead aren’t thirsty, they won’t come up to torment you; and if you look sad, they will attack someone else.
Cut Scenes
Even though I added 13,000 words to “Overpowered” during revisions, there were still some scenes that I couldn’t fit into the story.
Scene 1: Taliyah’s Crime
This was the first new opening I tried for the story when I began expanding the word-count. Ultimately, I decided that including this scene made it too difficult for me to hide the fact that the Avenger was Taliyah’s cousin. Also… mild trigger warning.
A week’s travel south of the Dawn Refuge, outside a tiny stone house along the Wadi Sorek, Taliyah bat Shammai was grinding barley into flour. Slowly, steadily she walked around the millstone, passing in and out of the shade of the juniper tree, forcing the upper stone to turn with its wooden handle. She sang to herself as she worked, but clearly her mind was neither on her grinding nor her song.
Ah, Father. May the Overpowerer keep you, though you have gone down into darkness.
Shammai was dead and buried in the rock, and his house was left to his wife: the woman who had been his brother’s widow and was now his widow. Every pot, every goat, every pigeon belonged to the widow and nothing at all belonged to Taliyah, though all matters of the house had been in her hands since her mother died so long ago.
The long-eared goat sidled up to the millstone, nosing hungrily for dropped grain. “Ayeh. Go down from here.” Taliyah shooed him away with a sandaled foot, then scattered a few heads of grain behind her. “Will you never say enough, greedy one?” she murmured, as it came back again to lip at the hem of her skirt. The girl reached down to scratch between its horns.
A rock sailed through the air and thumped lazily against the goat’s brown rump. With an indignant huff, the goat leaped away from her and wriggled into a nearby thicket.
“Who did that?” Taliyah demanded, spinning around. Her dark hair threatened to come loose from the cloth in which she had bound it; she tightened it with one hand as she advanced toward the bank of the wadi. “I’ve told you boys—”
But the person climbing up the side of the wadi was not a boy but a man, a man who was the son of more years than Taliyah’s own seventeen. He leaned on a corded staff and his tunic was of linen—not embroidered, but as fine as a village man could hope to have. His face was forgettable, his frame neither slender nor impressive; the lack of lines on his skin made him appear young, but he moved with the confidence of an older man.
Taliyah’s lips tightened at the sight of him. “Peace to you, son of my uncle,” she greeted him.
“Is it peace? You were not so peaceable a moment ago. Fetch me a drink; it is a dusty road.”
Taliyah went to dip water from the water jar; when he followed her, she shooed him away as sh
e had shooed the goat. “I’ll bring it to you inside.”
“I am not going inside.”
“Won’t you go in to your mother?” The girl frowned at him. “Why did you come here, if not to see her?”
“What’s that to me and to you? Where is the drink you were fetching me?”
Sometimes Taliyah wondered why his parents had taught him no manners. He came here time after time, and each day he was more lacking in courtesy. But why should I wonder, when I know his mother? She hid a sigh. The enemy has no answer for kindness, she reminded herself, and tried to smile as she held up the dipper. “Here it is. Take it.”
“Hold it for me,” he ordered, and started to bend over; but she knew better than to allow that.
“Take it,” she repeated, holding it well away from herself and too low to drink from unless he went on his knees in the dust. The second his fingers touched the dipper she released it and backed smoothly away. She did not care to let him touch her.
He drank quickly, then dropped the dipper back into the dirt. Taliyah suppressed a wince.
“I hunger,” he said. “Bring me bread and meat.”
Taliyah wished he would eat at his own home. As her uncle’s heir, he had many fields and a fine house of stone. Still, this was where his mother lived; she would certainly not begrudge him a meal. The young man was the light of her eyes, though they could never speak to one another without quarreling. “I have bread, but there’s no meat.”
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