Good Book

by David Plotz

  We begin the chapter with the Israelites groaning as usual under the rule of enemy tyrants, in this case Jabin and his general Sisera, whose 900 iron chariots were the M1 Abrams tanks of their day. But they don’t scare the Israelite prophetess Deborah, who persuades Barak to raise a 10,000-man army to confront Sisera. (Deborah is a proto–Joan of Arc figure.) ’Fraidy-cat Barak won’t go to fight unless Deborah accompanies him. At Deborah’s urging, Barak begins the battle at just the right moment and routs Sisera’s force.

  General Sisera flees the battlefield, and arrives at the tent of Heber the Kenite. Heber’s wife Jael greets Sisera and offers him hospitality: “My lord, turn aside to me; have no fear.” (A nice thing about Judges 4 is that it has not one but two heroines: neither Deborah nor Jael is a prostitute, and both are awesome role models because of their courage and their skillful manipulation of weak men.) Sucker that he is, Sisera accepts Jael’s invitation and enters her tent. He asks her for a sip of water. She gives him a drink of milk instead. Jael covers the exhausted general with a blanket and he falls asleep. Then she picks up a tent peg, tiptoes over to him, and hammers it through his skull, “until it went down into the ground.” Barak stops by the tent in pursuit of Sisera, and Jael invites him in: “I will show you the man whom you are seeking.”

  The episode of Jael and Sisera is a perfect short story, as heart-stopping as anything Poe ever wrote. First, let’s admire how transgressive it is: Jael shreds the essential law of hospitality that defines tribal and Middle Eastern societies. She opens her home to Sisera, nourishes him, and puts him to sleep in her tent—all so she can assassinate him in the most brutal way possible. Its literary greatness comes from its slow buildup, the quiet accretion of details to heighten the tension. There’s Jael’s mysterious, beckoning invitation: “turn aside to me.” Is it sexual? There’s that moment of rest and safety when Sisera enters the tent, a sigh of relief that turns out to be a trap. Then there’s the turn of the story: He asks for water, and she serves milk. If this were a horror movie, the piano would now start plinking ominously in the high register. Why does she give him milk? Is she toying with him? We know it means she’s not exactly the subservient hostess she’s pretending to be; we know that something is awry, but we don’t know what it is. (It’s the first recorded case of lactose intolerance.) The unease subsides because she offers a motherly good night and gently covers him with a blanket. Then the assassination itself is utterly shocking: a quiet, domestic moment suddenly transformed into a Freddy Kreuger gore fest. Read the murderous sentence and revel in its bloody genius:

  But Jael wife of Heber took a tent peg, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple, until it went down into the ground—he was lying fast asleep from weariness—and he died.

  A hammer to the head—that’s exactly what this story is.

  CHAPTERS 6-8

  Bad times, so God calls a new judge. The Lord’s angel appears to a lowly farm boy, Gideon, and announces, “The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior.” Demonstrating refreshing skepticism (and clearheadedness), Gideon responds: “But sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds?” Good questions, young man. The angel doesn’t really answer but instead orders Gideon to deliver the Israelites from the Midianites. Again, the skeptic pipes up: “But sir, how can I deliver Israel? My clan is the weakest in Mannasseh, and I am the least in my family.” The angel, getting impatient, tells him he will succeed. But Gideon refuses to act unless God supplies more proof. The angel ignites Gideon’s offering of meat and cakes, and this fiery evidence finally persuades Gideon that he’s dealing with the divine.

  At last, a Bible hero I can groove with! The Bible has been knocking down its heroes one after another: Isaac, Jacob, Joshua, and others are not the paragons I remembered. But Gideon is another matter. He’s the Bible’s first empiricist, with a wry doubt that seems distinctly modern. Not since Moses has anyone dared to toy with God as Gideon does, and even Moses didn’t have the brazenness of Gideon. He’s the very model of the skeptic—dubious, but rational. He’s the kind of man I’d like to be.

  Gideon becomes a hellacious warrior for God. He tears down the altars to Baal. He sounds his trumpet, summoning allies to join him. (So that’s Gideon’s trumpet!) Before he leads the army into battle, he again tests God. (The test involves wool and morning dew and isn’t worth explaining.) God passes the exam, but our demanding judge still isn’t satisfied. He asks the Lord for yet more proof that He will aid Israel. Again, God performs a miracle.

  Gideon amasses a 32,000-man army, but the Lord says he doesn’t need that many soldiers to defeat the Midianites. So Gideon asks anyone who’s fearful to go home. That leaves him with 10,000 men. Sounding like Donald Rumsfeld before the invasion of Iraq, God tells Gideon he still has too many troops. The Lord has Gideon bring all the men to the river to drink. Gideon discharges every soldier who laps water with his head down, like a dog—such a man presumably wouldn’t be alert in battle. That leaves Gideon with just 300 fighters.

  But 300 was plenty for the Spartans at Thermopylae, and it’s surely enough for God’s Chosen against the Midianite horde. That night, Gideon sneaks his 300 into the Midianite camp, where they all blow trumpets and shout, “For the Lord and for Gideon.” Then, they turn the Midianites into hamburger.

  Let me rescind some of my enthusiasm for Gideon. He’s one angry man. A couple of Israelite villages refuse to provision Gideon’s army, because he hasn’t yet captured two Midianite kings. Gideon vows revenge. In due course he captures the enemy kings—Gideon always gets his men—then plans a sadistic reprisal against the defiant towns. He captures a young man from one of villages, and interrogates him till he gives up the names of seventy-seven village officials and elders. Gideon seizes the seventy-seven and has them trampled to death underneath thorns and briers. Good Lord! Doesn’t this sound like something that would have happened in rural Poland in 1943?

  The Israelites beg Gideon to be their king, but he refuses, saying the Lord will rule them. This rejection of the crown seems to be a terrible mistake. If there’s any lesson in Judges, it’s that people need to be ruled. Israel keeps reverting to idolatry because it lacks a powerful central authority. The occasional martial hero (Gideon, Ehud, Barak) can rout the enemy in the field, and create a brief respite between subjugations. But the good times don’t last, because there’s no central government to organize the army, secure borders, and enforce laws. Religions are always leery of government, fearing that secular rulers will claim powers that ought to belong to God. But Judges is brutal evidence that the absence of government is much worse than government. This book of the Bible is, in some sense, a vindication of Dick Cheney’s worldview. Activist “judges” are the problem. They’ve left the Promised Land a mess. What Israel needs is a strong executive.

  One happy coda to the Gideon story: As I was finishing Good Book, Hanna gave birth to our third child. We named him Gideon.

  CHAPTER 9

  Gideon sires seventy sons. After his death, one of them, Abimelech, decides he alone should rule. The original gangbanger, he hires a militia of riffraff—“worthless and reckless fellows”—and massacres all his brothers but one. The lone surviving brother, Jotham, warns the Israelites not to let the fratricidal Abimelech become their king. Jotham’s warning takes the form of a lovely fable about how the trees chose a monarch. As far as I can remember, Jotham’s tale is the first parable in the Bible. Until now, the Good Book has been pretty literal-minded: When someone acts wrongly, God calls out his misbehavior, then smites him. When God has a law, He issues it, and doesn’t wrap it in a metaphor. Jotham’s parable is a preview of what’s to come with the prophets and Jesus.

  But I guess the Israelites found parables as hard to understand as we do today, because they ignore Jotham’s caution and crown Abimelech king anyway. He is probably the worst monarch ever born. His capital, Shechem—the same star-crossed town wiped out i
n the story of Dinah—eventually turns against him. Abimelech slays the Shechem militiamen who rebel against him, incinerates 1,000 Shechemites taking refuge in the temple tower, razes the city, and sows the land with salt. But he gets his just deserts. As he besieges the next town, a woman drops a millstone on his head. Abimelech begs his servant to stab him to death: “Finish me off, that they may not say of me, ‘A woman killed him!’” But of course, that’s what we remember: that a woman killed him. There’s a great finishing touch to the Abimelech saga: “When the men of Israel saw that Abimelech was dead, everyone went home.” Everyone went home—what a sublime, casual farewell to a horrifying story.

  CHAPTER 10

  Two forgettable judges: Tola and Jair. Jair has thirty sons who rode on thirty “burros” and owned thirty “boroughs”—apparently a stilted English rendering of a Hebrew pun. For all its depravity, Judges is easily the funniest biblical book so far, full of potty humor and sharp wit.

  CHAPTER 11

  If you have children, you might want to skip this chapter. It’s a horror. Jephthah, the son of a yet another prostitute, flees from his brutal brothers and becomes a crime boss. He’s the first Jewish mobster, the original Bugsy Siegel. But when the Ammonites invade Israel, the elders beg Jephthah to organize the defense. Jephthah agrees. He soon finds himself debating the Ammonite king. The Ammonite demands the return of land conquered by the Israelites. Jephthah counters that the Israelites won the land fair and square in battle, have occupied it for 300 years, and have been ordered by the Lord Himself to keep it. Jephthah tells the king, “Do you not hold what Chemosh your God gives you to possess? So we will hold on to everything that the Lord our God has given us to possess.”

  And there, my friends, you have practically the entire history of Israel, of the Middle East, and of planet Earth, in two short sentences. Your God says it’s yours. Our God says it’s ours. Meet you at nine AM on the battlefield.

  At this point, the story turns black. Jephthah makes a vow to God—a foolish vow, a pointless vow, but a vow nonetheless—that if God helps him defeat the Ammonites, he will give as a burnt offering whatever awaits at his door when he returns home from battle. The Israelites rout the enemy (of course), Jephthah returns home, and—you know how this ends. In a moment so ghastly it must have been ripped off by the Greek tragedians (and Hollywood):

  When Jephthah arrived at his home in Mizpah, there was his daughter coming out to meet him, with timbrel and dance. She was an only child; he had no other son or daughter. On seeing her, he rent his clothes and said, “Alas daughter! You have brought me low; you have become my troubler! For I have uttered a vow to the Lord and I cannot retract.”

  It gets worse. The daughter agrees. With perfect filial piety and faith, she volunteers for the sacrifice. In the most excruciating passage, she asks only that she be allowed to go off with her friends to mourn her virginity. “She and her companions went and bewailed her maidenhood upon the hills. After two months’ time, she returned to her father, and he did to her as he had vowed. She had never known a man.”

  Argh. It’s clear that the author of Judges recognizes the horror of the story, because the final verse of the chapter notes that Israelite maidens spend four days every year “chanting dirges” for Jephthah’s daughter. But make no mistake: Jephthah is heroic for honoring his commitment to God. He’s almost the only man in Judges who does what he promises to do, who doesn’t complain or doubt. His holy rigidity is glorious.

  But this leaves us with a dreadful question: what kind of God is so inflexible that he demands child sacrifice rather than cancel a foolish oath? When Abraham brought Isaac to the mountain, God sent the ram and stopped the murder. This time, He sends no ram. He condemns the child to the pyre instead. God tested Abraham’s fidelity, and then spared the innocent boy. In Judges, God tests Jephthah’s fidelity, but lets the innocent girl die. Why? What’s changed, my Lord? Remember, in Deuteronomy and Numbers, the greatest crime of the Israelites’ enemies—and the key reason they must be driven from the Promised Land—is that they sacrifice their own children to their gods. Yet here God’s greatest warrior does the same, and the Lord seems unbothered. Perhaps the lesson of this horror is that in a disordered nation like Israel during the era of Judges, where people are only intermittently faithful, terrible things will keep happening.

  Whatever the reason, Judges has left me bewildered. It’s an awful book. I don’t mean that it’s boring: on the contrary, it’s a great read. But it’s morally repellent, perhaps even more disturbing than Joshua because it’s much more graphic. In fact, it is so troubling to read that you have to wonder what the point of it is. Why are we asked to churn through this carnival of gore, immorality, fratricide, infanticide, and regicide, especially since God’s redemptive love is mostly absent? And wouldn’t it be more persuasive if the worst things happened to faithless Israelites, rather than to innocents and true believers such as Jephthah’s daughter?

  Perhaps the main difficulty is what I would call the “cheerleading problem.” Who are we supposed to root for? Are we supposed to rejoice that the left-handed assassin Ehud has gutted fat King Eglon, or spare a moment to mourn the degrading circumstances of Eglon’s death? Or consider the triumphal Song of Deborah in Judges 5, which commemorates the slaying of Sisera. The song makes brutal fun of Sisera’s mother, who’s waiting for her son to return from war. Sure, Sisera’s mom may be the enemy, but it’s grotesque to mock her suffering. Only a sadist could enjoy the sanguinary glee of Judges. But the book is here for a reason, so what is it?

  In Before Abraham Was, professors Arthur Quinn and Isaac Kikawada of the University of California, Berkeley, write that Judges:

  can be seen as a moral test for its readers. Those who are like the sinning Israelites will simply enjoy the story of Deborah as a victory of “us” over “them”—and will be indifferent to the truth or to the sentiments of common humanity, as long as this indifference is to “our” advantage. Those, in contrast, who do see the ironies, see the parallel between the mother of Sisera and the daughter of Jephthah, the treachery of Jael and that of Delilah, will find Judges an excruciating experience, a wrenching call to humility and repentance.

  CHAPTERS 13-16

  Has there ever been a more depressing story about the relationship between men and women than the tale of Samson? Its two conclusions are:

  (1) Women are deceptive and heartless.

  (2) Men are too stupid and sex-crazed to realize this.

  An angel appears to a barren woman to tell her she will bear a son who will deliver Israel from the Philistines. The angel warns that she must never cut his hair, because he will be a “nazarite” dedicated to God. The woman passes this news on to her husband, Manoah—as usual, the husband gets a name; the wife doesn’t. His response is hilarious. He doesn’t believe her. Instead of taking her word, he prays that the Lord will send the angel again to tell them “what we are to do concerning the boy who will be born.” So even though the angel already told his wife what they are to do, Manoah insists on being told again. (I have a relative like this, who annoyingly insists that you repeat to him anything you already told his wife.) The angel does return, and reiterates to Manoah what he already told Manoah’s better half. In due course a son is born, and they name him Samson.

  Visiting a nearby town, young Samson sees a Philistine girl and falls in love with her. Manoah and his wife then become the first Jewish parents in history to complain, You couldn’t find a nice Jewish girl? Truly. They say, “Is there not a woman among your kin, or among all our people, that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?” But their son just has a thing for pagan chicks. Samson insists that dad arrange a marriage with the Philistine babe.

  The Samson I met in Sunday school was brave, innocent, and holy. The real Samson, I’m dismayed to learn, is anything but. Samson is the original meathead—born 3,400 years too early to be a hockey goon, or the fraternity rush chairman. On the way to his wedding, Samson tears
a young lion apart with his bare hands. Later he eats honey from the lion’s carcass. At the wedding banquet, Samson bets the Philistine guests they can’t solve his riddle, which is about the lion and the honey. The riddle stumps the Philistines for three days. Eventually they threaten Samson’s bride, saying they’ll kill her and her dad unless she coaxes the answer out of Samson. She nags and wheedles and cajoles her husband for four days. Samson, clearly not the sharpest sword in the scabbard, eventually tells her the answer. She immediately passes it on to the Philistines, who solve the riddle. This enrages Samson, who also seems to think the Philistines have slept with his wife. (He tells them: “[You] plowed with my heifer.”) So the furious judge murders thirty other, apparently innocent, Philistine men. According to Judges, Samson kills them while he is possessed by the “spirit of the Lord”—a kind of holy ’roid rage. It’s not at all clear why God would encourage such pointless murder.

  Now it gets really complicated. Following the slaughter, his father-in-law gives away Samson’s wife to Samson’s best man, and offers Samson his wife’s sister instead (echoes of Laban and Jacob). Samson, who must be off his meds, flips out at the wife swap. He catches 300 foxes, attaches torches to their tails, and releases them into the Philistines’ fields, where they burn the crops down. (Like so many mass murderers, Samson gets off on torturing small animals. No word, PETA friends, on the fate of the foxes.) One bad turn deserves another: the Philistines retaliate by incinerating Samson’s wife and father-in-law. Then Samson takes revenge by butchering a mess of Philistines. The Philistines give tit for tat by dispatching an army against Samson’s land, Judah. To stop the war, Samson agrees to let Judah hand him over to the enemy, but the minute he’s in Philistine custody, “the spirit of the Lord rush[es] on him,” he breaks his shackles, grabs a donkey’s jawbone, and massacres 1,000 Philistines with it. Is there a lesson in this escalating slaughter? I don’t see one, except perhaps: don’t tell riddles. That’s what started the war.