Aside from the random morality presented by an Old Testament God whose creed is BECAUSE I SAID SO, THAT’S WHY, which prepares us for childlike obedience to forces we can’t comprehend (i.e., totalitarian regimes, parents), I am hard pressed to see what anyone can learn from these paragons of life in the time of God. The brute cruelty of the Old Testament is the engine of its own overthrow: despite the 613 laws codified within its text, no actual system of crime and punishment prevails. And when we are done studying up on the fascist ways of the Lord, there are mainly just stories involving rape, incest, whoring, lust, coveting thy neighbor’s wife, deflowering one’s teenage daughter. Anyone who has taken the time to figure it out knows that the Bible is kind of like a dictionary in the hands of a ten-year-old who can while away the hours looking up “sex” and “prostitute” at an age when just the individual words have the power of vulgar electricity. Find Tamar and Judah, find David and Bathsheba, find Tamar and Amnon—and find the story of sexy stories, Samson and Delilah: stick with these and it is always an entertaining and sacred scandal sheet.
Now I know that this is obviously a massive generalization. Certainly there is moral guidance: the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy are tedious with tax codes and instruction on dealing with everything from mildew to infectious skin diseases—which is why no one ever reads them. And the Ten Commandments remain the code of civilized nations to this day. But, of course, even they did not come off without a bit of a mess: as Moses walked down the mountain, he saw the weary crowd with the golden calf and threw the two tablets down in frustration (probably not with quite the gusto of Charlton Heston, but still). The previous attempt at laying down the law, the Seven Rules of the Children of Noah—handed down at Mount Ararat after the deluge—actually includes a proscription against taking a bite out of a living being, which should give you an idea of how primitive things were—I mean, even Mike Tyson would have seemed ordinary back then.
Nonetheless, with enough shovels, and the right interpretive skills, one can dig some real lessons out of the many tales of the Torah—the spartan text lends itself to alternative readings, and it is in its terse and diverse chronicles of flawed, miserable humanity that this book continues to compel us over time. When Job pleads with God, the poignancy of his search for the Creator who could do this to him, his desire not to succumb to the belief that “it profits a man nothing when he tries to please God,” his wish to make order and sense of a world that has wrecked him recklessly, is poetry itself, philology more than theology. “Why do you hide Your face and consider me Your enemy?” Job asks of the sky above. “Will You torment a driven leaf?” The passages that comprise the book of Job show nothing of a just and good world or of a God worthy of worship by any but the most twisted monotheists, but the portrait of this omnipotent monster who seems like an arsonist who has fled the building he’s thrown kerosene and matches at, the picture of God in hiding while imposing all this grief on Job—turning from his responsibility, looking away from his own mess like an absentee father—provides pathos that is unsurpassed.
It was precisely this crazed desperation that seemed omnipresent in the Bible that occupied me through my twelve years of hard-core Orthodox Jewish education. The pursuit of God, of meaning, it was really about a lust for life in the face of the obvious poverty of the world’s paltry offerings. The lesson we were supposed to learn was that flawed behavior will take you down; the lesson I in fact learned is that any kind of behavior may take you down, and on balance, the good suffered more than the bad.
In a world that’s basically no-fair and in a time without pity, it was the image of David falling in love with Bathsheba as he gazed at her from the loneliness of his palace roof that felt to me like a picture of longing and need and desperation that would carry the story of this coupling through the ages. This common boy who would be king, this simple shepherd who was the son of a shepherd, the harpist and psalmist who really did not have the constitution of a ruler so much as that of a poet: this was a king who necessarily had to find the love of his life by gazing at her from a distance. He needed a woman from outside the royal court, far from the sycophants and the madding crowd. The insane twists and turns of their courtship: If he was so in love with her, how could he be so willing to give her back to her husband? And, for that matter, why are so many great biblical loves born of adultery and bad behavior that both sullies and intensifies the romance? And the price they paid for their sins—sins against people, not against God—make this love one of the most beautiful and intensely human of the Bible narratives.
In fact, David’s story offers rare verisimilitude, perhaps because his own poetry, prayer, philosophy and other writings—combined in the compendia of Psalms and Lamentations—give us insight into a struggling man. Sin and forgiveness and a measure of justice seem to punctuate this story.
If the story of David is sensible and symmetrical by biblical standards, if his character’s complexity is developed by a multitude of his own writings and others’ chronicles, the minimal approach to the doomed love dance of Samson and Delilah is quite the opposite. While this is one of the most famous of Old Testament pairings, a first-degree fatal attraction that is also the first of its kind, the first episode of a femme fatale—of a woman whose mere existence is a contagious, airborne virus for that certain susceptible sucker of a man—the entire section on Samson amounts to four short chapters in Judges, with Delilah only fitting into the final of those, and of its thirty-one verses, she appears in only sixteen. In her mysterious silence, Delilah becomes the Jackie Kennedy of Philistia—though Oliver Stone doesn’t even think that the First Lady was part of any conspiracy to assassinate her husband (though I do think it’s a clever new angle for someone to explore), while Delilah was absolutely in cahoots with Samson’s enemies. Despite the sorry end, in less than a score of sentences, the saga of Samson and Delilah provides us with enough material to provoke pictures of a great romance, it’s got enough to it—and suggests so much more—to make up the treatment for a Cecil B. DeMille epic in grand Hollywood style (starring Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr, neither of whom was iconic enough to carry it off). It is the archetypal story of cross-cultural love between members of warring nations: this is Romeo and Juliet, if the Capulets were Florence and the Montagues were Siena and the medieval castles of Tuscany were well-fortified fortresses for city-states battling for dominance. To put this in more precise terms: she was a Philistine and he was an Israelite, and in modern terms they would be a Palestinian and an Israeli; it’s not just that their respective peoples are natural enemies—it’s that, just like today, even back then they were engaged in interminable territorial disputes. This is not, say, the fairly usual act of a German and a Jew marrying in 1998; it is the German and Jew taking their nuptial vows in Nuremberg in 1939—and then refusing to leave the country as a matter of principle. Essentially, the story of Samson and Delilah is one of fatal love, where someone is bound to die, it is not a matter of if, only who and when—and in this case, it winds up being both of them.
From the time I first learned about Delilah when I was ten or eleven years old in elementary school, I wanted to know more. Now, when you’re as young as I was, you don’t particularly have a feminist consciousness, you don’t yet have a notion of what a woman’s rights and privileges in the world really are, and a sense of sexual power is only in its nascent phase; that preteen moment marks the age when men look and leer and then catch themselves doing it and feel ashamed at ogling this pretty baby. The power you have as a girl at eleven is to make men uncomfortable; it is not yet to make them feel good. So when I learned about Delilah, curiosity and imagination were all that I had at my disposal. And yet, it seemed to me, I felt in some visceral way that Delilah had the right idea. I also became similarly fascinated with Potiphar’s wife, Vashti, Bathsheba—all the girls of scandal provided by the Bible. I liked the women who behaved badly, and I liked the women who made men behave badly. I liked Jael, the warrior woman, who in the book of Judges
lured the enemy commander Sisera into her lair, fed him a soporific potion and then hammered a peg through his temple and left him for dead. Jael was a heroine, a seductress in the service of God, but that makes her a minority of one: all the other self-actuating, sexually compelling Bible women were presented as Satan’s spawn. The idea that a woman could be that dangerous just fascinated me. Who cared about Deborah, Sarah, Esther, all the good girls? It seemed far better to be bad.
And in recent years, I’ve found myself likewise obsessed with the criminal cases of Pam Smart and other women whose weapon of choice was the stranglehold of sex. Ms. Smart, you may recall, was the pretty, prim school-district employee in New Hampshire (she was often referred to, erroneously, as a teacher) who seduced a fifteen-year-old virgin boy—a seemingly sweet son of a single mother whose bleak trailer-park clam-digger existence was suddenly brightened by sex several times a day with this older woman who liked Motley Crüe and Van Halen as much as he did—and then told him that he couldn’t have his source of joy any longer if he didn’t kill her husband. Since little inheritance or insurance was involved in this transaction, for the life of me I could not comprehend why this woman did not just get a divorce, and sickening as the situation was, it just fascinated me that she had fucked this teenager into submission. She had literally bartered her body in exchange for her husband’s corpse for no clear reason—except perhaps the thrill of causing this much mess. This was so incomprehensible to me that I investigated excessively. And my interest in this subject, in how and why it happens, in the way all those clichés are played out—strong men become weak and oh how the powerful and mighty crumble—has never abated over all this time.
And women who were forcibly adorned with the albatross of voodoo sexual powers preoccupied me even more. So Delilah was instantly heroic to me—perhaps this was misguided, perhaps this was just an attempt to find a God who looked like me—but the rabbis were all telling me that she was a witch, a bitch, a termagant, a whore. There were other problem women in the Bible, the main problem being that their sexual existence could not be denied, and while everything about a woman can be controlled and regulated—right down to whom she is or isn’t allowed to sleep with—her elusive, effulgent sexual anima, her ability to project lust and allure, cannot be contained by any set of rules. It just is. Sexual energy, like the warmth of sunshine or the green color of grass, is an indigenous characteristic with exogenous manifestations that can’t be stopped, can’t be helped, and should not be blamed—though all those things often are (for sunburn, for grass stains, for rape). Nothing the rabbis said had any real impact, but certainly I later noticed that even at this late date, women perceived to be sexual—never mind sexually powerful—are scary.
My fancy for biblical bad girls probably had something to do with a desire to discover or—failing that—invent an image for myself of a powerful sexy woman, the kind who got her way and got around. This was during the late seventies, a funny time to be a preteen girl, perhaps because it was such a strange time to be a woman. The women’s movement was still fresh enough that it had not yet come to the point where all the serious and determined types were going to Wall Street to make a fortune—there was still some desire to have female empowerment delivered on female terms, to “feminize” the value system so that traditionally male traits like ambition and money hunger and greed could be displaced by caring and sharing, by creativity and professional fulfillment; so while women, for the most part, had not yet assumed the slick sheen of power and moxie, they no longer had the conventional accouterments of femininity and wily sex appeal at their ready disposal either. That period of American womanhood was dowdy as can be—even with Raquel Welch out there campaigning for the ERA, the measure did not pass, at least in part, I would guess, because no one wanted to sanction that plain, bland model of femaleness it seemed likely to bring in its wake. Feminism simply had not done much in the way of window dressing—which is to say, Bella Abzug’s hats did not make equal work for equal pay look terribly grand or glamorous.
On the big screen, the locus of our collective fantasy life, we could have been given updates of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn, of brash, brassy career women with renegade style in shapely, fitted suits or sporty pants ensembles. We could have been granted the fleshed-out fashionable celluloid rendering of the modern, liberated lady—the hardworking hussy or the well-bred broad to be reckoned with. Instead we got realistic women, single mothers played by Marsha Mason and Meryl Streep. The wispy forbidding beauties of the early seventies and before, the Katharine Ross and Susan Anspach and Carrie Snodgress types—the college girls with hippie hair and elegant, educated diction and ballerina posture that seethed of Seven Sisters schooling and a certainty that they would easily be able to resist even Jack Nicholson’s charms—had retired, it seemed, to motherhood in Topanga Canyon or Sonoma Valley, to horse breeding and sheep farming but not to anything like acting. Everybody on the screen was warm and accessible or struggling and stressed out because that unrealistic bitch goddess was understood to be a dream of the prefeminist variety. Even Princess Leia had a foul mouth and earmuffs for hair.
So Delilah to me was a sign of life.
I lived in a world of exhausted, taxed single mothers at the mercy of men who overworked and underpaid them, men who forgot to send child-support checks, men who forgot they had children, men who forgot everything because they knew that women—at some point while crawling around the floors grabbing at what crumbs the world may have left over for them—would remember. I grew up in a world where only John Lennon, who had so completely prostrated himself before Yoko, would have dared to say that woman is the nigger of the world. It took a former Beatle to point out a plain truth. I had never in my life encountered a woman who’d brought a man down. Until Delilah.
Of course, the problem with the Bible is that it suffers from Tom Cruise syndrome, which is to say that it leaves an impression that men are the stars of the story, when anyone reading it knows that the women are the interesting part. Without women entering for the occasional intrigue, it would all be men doing their manly things—men sojourning and men wandering and men battling. It would be the Iliad, or one of Hemingway’s less interesting novels that contends for all the world to hear that bullfighting or trout fishing is all anybody needs to get through life. Only the periodic presence of women rescues the Bible from battle fatigue and worse. Without them, the whole book would just be men fighting over land in the name of the Lord. Who would supply the glamour? The suspense? The mystery? Women are the whole reason that the book is the all-time best-seller. Actresses of an earlier era understood this. Could you imagine Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford or Rita Hayworth or Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe ceding her star billing to someone as insignificant as a man? Back in their day Tom Hanks or Arnold Schwarzenegger would never be thought of as able to “open” a movie because female movie stars knew how to be stars. They were second billing to none. Bible women were not granted stardom, but they pilfered it with impunity. They snuck in, serpentine, and stole the plot. They were charged sex objects. It would not surprise me at all to discover that Eve started the whole mess with the serpent and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and Original Sin just to get attention. And it worked. Though it is not Bette Davis who is referred to in the title All About Eve, if ever there was an actress who was meant to lead all of creation out of paradise, it is she.
Just as Delilah, to me, was clearly the star. She was sexy and wild and got her way, even if it did all come crashing down on her head in the end. Even if the desert love concluded with Samson pushing apart a pair of pillars that bolstered the temple of Dagon, pressing these columns as if forcing open a resistant pair of female thighs, with the resulting burst being the death of Samson and Delilah and thousands of present Philistines, even if it all came to naught, Delilah had her sixteen minutes. She was grand and untidy and disturbing and disorderly, and she denied her life the minor-character status it
was assigned to. And of course, Delilah’s centuries-old superstardom and sex-symbol status has been accorded only because she brought this strong man down. And the lesson I derived from this—and I don’t know what the rabbis wanted me to learn—was that whatever power a woman created herself was a direct derivative of her potency to destroy men. Long before film noir, the Bible practically mandated the femme fatale as a feminist model. I mean, if I ever commit some criminal act or some man I’m involved with is mysteriously murdered, I’d have Leslie Abramson represent me, and we’d have to subpoena all these bearded little rabbis to prove that I was the victim of excessive Torah study and a Yeshiva education.
Delilah also represented to me the notion of woman on a pedestal, that quality that is worshipped, that gaga quality. I know, of course, that the problem with that role is how easily you can be knocked off that pedestal, and also that so few of us would qualify, but sometimes I feel like feminism be damned. Wouldn’t it be nice if women in daily life were just a bit more mysterious and unattainable and alluring as they apparently once were? That’s why there are no glamorous movie stars: our entire culture has become dowdy. The episodic interest in recent years in haute couture, in red-hot lipstick and glimmery-glowing eyes, in stiletto heels and silky lingerie, seems an attempt to redress this loss of outward indications of style and sensuality. We, as a people, miss playing dress-up. I, personally, am simply tired of the whatever and who cares and never mind of every aspect of culture: though I loved the Seattle grunge stuff to begin with, a few years later I don’t think I can stand to listen to one more rock album that doesn’t contain a single love song, that is so indifferent to the world outside an angry, bitter adolescent head that even the boy-meets-girl business, the romance and the possibility that it poses for redemption, has no place. I want more love songs like “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” and “I’m a Believer,” more songs where the girl is a dream and the guy is in reverie and everything isn’t all so goddamned so what. In Delilah’s world, there seemed no possibility of Samson raging and raving and having terrorist tantrums in his antisocial, antistate stance, because love became more important to him. Her effect on him is as strong as his physical strength—she is a colorful creature of charisma and sex, and she is undeniable. She is the temptation and lust story of the Bible, the story of a guy who should have known better but became weak in her presence.
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