Judging Noa

by Strutin, Michel;

  The justice of inheritance seemed remote, but the daily plight of women found Noa close by. As she and Hur became learned in the law, the women of Manasseh discovered that Noa provided shrewd advice on problems a man might dismiss. One by one, they came, sitting with her as they spun wool, no more remarkable than any two women spinning wool and talking.

  “I am newly married,” said one young woman, “and my sister-in-law accuses me of stealing her bracelets and earrings.”

  “And you did not steal them?” asked Noa.

  “No. They were given by my husband as my bride price.”

  “So he stole them? Or, perhaps your sister-in-law is lying?”

  “I fear . . . yes. He did. Once I thought about it, I remember her wearing the earrings before I married.”

  “Then suggest to your husband there must be some mistake, but to preserve peace within the family it would be best to buy you new ones and give the others to his sister. In that order.”

  “What if he says ‘you are women and I can do what I want’?”

  “Tell him the law says ‘Do not put a stumbling block before the blind.’”

  “But I’m not blind.”

  “If he hid his acts from both of you, you were blind to his deceit. The law covers all sorts of blindness. And it is a law for all. If he refuses and you must approach a bet din, return to me, and I will help smooth the way.”

  “Thank you. You are as good an Advocate as they say. What can I do to repay you?”

  “Pursue justice. That is enough.”

  As she left, Noa hoped the young woman’s marriage, and her husband, would improve, but feared she would experience more of the same.

  Then she smiled. She had never heard anyone use such an honorific in addressing her. It felt good.

  “When the time is right, I will follow my own advice.”

  WHILE THE ISRAELITES wondered when they would leave for their promised land, the Midianites, who lived on lands to the east, came to resent them. Before the Israelites settled at Kadesh Barnea, the Midianites had often stopped there. They told their children about the cool nights they had spent under the palms they thought of as theirs.

  Their children said, “The date palms that were once ours now shelter strangers from Egypt who speak a strange tongue and worship a god no one can see but them.”

  Their loss filled them with hate.

  Now Haddad was a rising leader among the clans of the Midianites. He saw that the tribes from the land of the Great River were marked for favor and thought to wed his tribe to Hur’s. His daughter Keturah’s body had budded, filling him with dread that his honor would be soiled with lost virginity.

  “Our daughter Keturah is of an age to marry,” he said to his first wife. “She is of similar age to Hur’s oldest son, Gaddi. A match with Gaddi would be well made and wise.”

  “Why marry our daughter to a son of slaves? Those who steal our lands?” she argued.

  “We will strengthen ourselves by such a match.”

  “We will weaken ourselves with such a match.”

  “We weaken the other by embracing them, drawing them into us. And that is that,” Haddad finished.

  But Keturah’s mother had other plans. She did not want to marry her daughter to strangers who worshipped a strange god. She spoke in her daughter’s ear of Midian glories and losses, especially the theft of Kadesh Barnea.

  Malah, too, taught her daughter. Rimon heard of Beer Sheva, the well that Abraham had bought long ago. She heard of the cave and field he had purchased in the hill country, the honeyed land they had been promised, the house they would have.

  Seglit whispered a different story in Rimon’s ear. “Look at life as it is. Don’t be a fool full of dreams.”

  Rimon heard her mothers’ words, but her thoughts ran elsewhere. She nodded dutifully at their admonishments and nurtured her own visions. In the heat of the day, when most rested, she met with Tikvah, Hoglah’s oldest daughter, and a few others, celebrating their bloom just by being. They assessed the most handsome young men, imagined bride-price gifts they hoped to win, and assured themselves they would not be like their mothers.

  Over the years, theonce-spirited chatter of Malah’s group had devolved to discussions about nostrums and carping about husbands’ bad habits during the odd moments when they managed to meet.

  Malah remembered well the evening when Boaz, honing his knife on a sharpening stone, bent his head so that his hair, now more gray than black, parted to expose the back of his neck. Scored with lines like a dry, cracked riverbed, it was the neck of an old man.

  She looked at her own hands and saw knuckles bony and swollen with grinding grain and kneading dough day after day. Age and the sun were stealing her beauty and that of Seglit. Each looked at the other, smug in seeing a line etched deeper in the other’s face, a ropy blue vein stringing down a forearm.

  They turned the mirror on themselves only to apply more henna and kohl to cover graying hair and dulled eyes. When a smear of henna streaked the edge of Seglit’s temple, Malah smiled at her sweetly, delighted that Seglit’s vanity was on askew.

  Rimon was their shared, contested glory. Now of marriageable age, Rimon had hints of Malah about her, but the provenance of her tilted nose was unknown as was her hair, an explosion of coiled ringlets that framed her face like a dark, glowing corona. One evening, while trying to pull a comb through Rimon’s hair, Seglit ceased her effort to run a hand around the girl’s finely boned wrist.

  “These and your ankles are more mine than your mother’s. You are more like me in shape. After all, your mother’s frame is much more . . . sturdy.”

  Spontaneously, Seglit pulled off one of her daintiest bracelets and offered it to Rimon.

  “Here, my heart, this will show off your wrist—and will attract eyes.”

  She arched her eyebrows knowingly as she slipped the bracelet onto the girl’s wrist. Rimon smiled, tolerantly, and arched her eyebrows right back, wondering if she had time to run off and meetTikvah.

  Rimon’s other aim was to avoid her mothers’ dramas. Once, Noa stepped in unnoticed while Malah and Seglit slung insults, contesting each other’s mothering tactics. They were in the thick of it, hurling verbal volleys.

  “You wait for my daughter like a spider in a hole, ready to jump her with your skinny spider-hair arms,” Malah threw at Seglit.

  “You,” returned Seglit. “You infect her with the smell the dung beetle spews when it eats the shit of the scorpion.”

  Noa burst into laughter, breaking their viperous entanglement. The two women yanked themselves erect and glared at Noa.

  “You two. You should hear yourselves. Even Yoela, telling stories, could not have thought of such things. You should hold a contest. You are the experts. Who better?”

  And that was what they did.

  On Rosh Chodesh, the night the moon returned from darkness, they celebrated. Matching women’s cycles with the moon’s cycles, Rosh Chodesh was meant to be holy, but Malah’s and Seglit’s celebrations were hardly that. Women came to be entertained by word-sparring, storytelling, and song.

  At the entrance to the women’s side of the tent Malah had laid a pile of sweet, brown carob pods, curved like cupped hands and rattling with seeds. The women shook the pods while ululating their approval of the most outrageous verbal concoctions.

  Seglit’s women cheered her on while Malah’s group crowded in with “Let her speak.” Sometimes Malah and Seglit charged into such ridiculous territory they collapsed against each other in laughter. At this point in their lives laughter was a release at least as potent as sex or sarcasm.

  The women ate dates and cakes washed down with barley beer. Some beat tambourines. Others got up to tell their best tales: bawdy and beyond belief. No one was disappointed.

  Embarrassed by these entertainments, Rimon fled to her grandmother’s tent where she was sure to find Milcah. She was drawn to Milcah, the antidote for her mothers’ emotional extravagance, and imagined midwifery for he
rself.

  Like Rimon, Boaz left the tent on the evenings his wives put on their entertainments, saying to himself, “They are women. This is what they do.”

  Some among the priestly class heard of the raucous Rosh Chodesh parties and set out to end them. In the month of Sivan, as the women inside were clapping to the rhymed tale of Seglit’s cousin, men from the tribe of Levi broke into Boaz’s tent. They came with sticks and started beating the women and driving them into the night, roaring at them:

  “Sacrilege. How dare you desecrate a holy day?”

  “Whores! Go home to your husbands.”

  The women scattered into the dark like mice.

  The blunt end of a stick caught Malah’s cheek, and it swelled, red and purple.

  Boaz returned to find Malah and Seglit in a corner of the tent, Seglit pouring water into a bowl so that Malah could refresh the cloth compress she held to her cheek.

  “What happened here?”

  When they told him, his first response was, “Is Rimon safe? With Milcah?” Then, “It is my fault. I should have forbidden such foolishness.”

  “What are you saying,” demanded Seglit. “We were bothering no one. Does our faith forbid laughter?”

  “They are like the mob that killed my father,” Malah spat, cupping her hand over her cheek to mute the pain. “I thought we were finished with those . . . those . . .” She could not find the words, and her jaw had begun throbbing.

  “I’m afraid we will never be done with them,” he said. “You cut back the branches, yet they rise from the roots.”

  “Well, then, we must cut the roots.”

  “But the roots are part of who we are as well.”

  AMONG THE MOIST rushes edging Egypt’s River dwells a great slayer. Over the years, the prick of the anopheles mosquito, seeking a blood meal, infected and killed more Israelites than all of Pharaoh’s slave masters. Some survived the blistering fevers and chills and struggled back to health, only to be struck by bouts throughout their lives. Tamar, the wife of Gaddi, he who died with Korach, suffered bouts of malaria, but suffered stoically.

  “The slave masters did not kill my husband and this will not kill me.”

  Although malaria and age weakened Tamar, a stroke that paralyzed her right side struck the critical blow. More so than the zealots’ attack, Tamar’s stroke brought the wild nights of Rosh Chodesh to an end. Seeing the matriarchy of Manasseh on the horizon, Malah decided to cloak herself with the stately bearing of a headwoman.

  As Tamar declined, Noa and her sisters-in-law tended to her needs until she melted into the arms of her ancestors. As Tamar had done for Gaddi, Hur mourned his mother’s death with calibrated emotion in public and true grief within his tent. Tamar’s passingalsocaused Hur to see the world anew. In his eyes, the older generation was no more.

  “I should take my rightful place as tribal head, rather than wait,” Hur said to Noa. “Boaz is old and fading. His is only the face of leadership. Everyone knows it is me who leads and judges.”

  “And how will you pry the title from him?”

  “The older generation are few, and soon we will set forth for our lands. We know we must fight for them. That’s how it will be. Boaz is too old for battle.”

  “As you see fit,” said Noa. But she worried that if Hur wrested tribal leadership from Boaz, he would expect her to take his mother’s place. Malah would fight her for a position she did not want.

  Malah, too, was shaken by Tamar’s death.

  “Boaz will be next. And what will happen to me and my daughter?”

  She feared she would lose claim to his land and the thick-walled, two-story home, plastered and painted, that should be hers.

  Malah sought out her sister and demanded, “Noa, why have you allowed this to linger?”

  “What has lingered?” Noa looked up from her loom.

  “The claim for our land. You won over the Judges of Tens and the Judges of Fifties. Why did you stop?”

  “Ben Nun refused to hear our plea.”

  “But he is dead. Many years.”

  With her shuttle in one hand, Noa flung out her other arm to encompass the loom, the tent, everything.

  “All of this, every day of work . . . and children. The days slip away. What did you think? That I have been dreaming away my days, fanned by servants, drinking cool, scented water?”

  Malah stiffened at Noa’s sharp reply. Bridling her tongue, she continued evenly, “Now that our children are nearly grown, we must pursue this again. How can I insure a good match for Rimon? If Boaz dies before we reach our lands, Rimon will have nothing.”

  “It seems we will all die here. And these lands will be a match for our dry bones.”

  Noa said nothing about the pain of accusation and rumors of witchery that plagued her the last time she stood before the Judges of Hundreds.

  “I thought I had a sister with a fierce heart. A heart bent toward justice. What I find is a sister with a heart like a soggy stew.”

  As Malah stamped off, Noa asked herself, “What happened to the fearless Noa? The Noa I once was?”

  Unexpectedly, Hur strode into the tent to rummage through a small basket of flints.

  “Hur, do you think that petition for my father’s land . . .”

  “Can it wait?” Hur scrabbled through his belongings until he found the chisel he sought. “Gaddi and I are striking flints and—can you believe it—he is showing me a better method.”

  Hur rushed from the tent, full of fatherly pride. Noa pushed Malah’s challenge under the detritus of daily life.

  HOGLAH DID NOT ask Asaf for much. The one thing she urged was that the family celebrate the fall harvest together, and Asaf had always honored Hoglah’s desire.

  This year Asaf did not return for the festival, and she received no word of him. Although her sisters had included Hoglah and herfivechildren in all the festive meals, Hoglah cried herself to sleep each night. She confessed to Noa that she feared something terrible had happened to Asaf. Noa feared something terrible had happened to Hoglah.

  Noa’s fears were confirmed when a trader from the tribe of Reuben told Boaz that Asaf had married a Moabite woman. Boaz was circumspect and kept the information to himself until he learned more.

  The Reubenite trader felt no such obligation and word got back to Hoglah, who threw herself on her bed. Her weeping brought a sharp response from Bar-On, who had also heard the report.

  “You daughters of Zelophechad, you think you are high born. You are nothing but the spawn of a man stoned for stealing wood on the Sabbath. And your husband Asaf’s long lineage as a son of Manasseh—a story backed by silver. A talking ass would be closer in blood. There, now you know the truth. And you will pay as he did if you want to remain in this shelter.”

  “But I have nothing to pay with,” Hoglah wailed.

  She fled with her children to her mother’s tent. The hung wall shifted yet again, expanding Ada’s space to allow Hoglah and her children to crowd in, and contracting Milcah’s and Dor’s share of the tent. Milcah persuaded her husband that it was a temporary shift, but the noise of five children and Hoglah’s weeping took a toll on everyone’s temper.

  When Hoglah asked Boaz what she should do, he said, “Wait. This will resolve itself. It is likely just an evil-tongued rumor.”

  Yet, to ensure that Hoglah did not lose all of her possessions as well as a husband, Boaz sent one of his men to Bar-On’s tent to retrieve Hoglah’s belongings, especially the hand mill.

  Fall cycled into winter with no word of Asaf. As winter ebbed, another trader returned telling Boaz a tale of Asaf’s marriage to a rich Midianite widow “as old as your sister-in-law.” Boaz could not ignore the fact that two separate witnesses had told him the same story.

  He called Hoglah to his tent and said, “I’m afraid the rumors are true. Your husband has left you, still married. If Asaf does not return, your portion and that of your children will fall to Bar-On.”

  “Bar-On said Asaf paid him for h
is name. He is no relation to Bar-On at all.”

  Assessing the dire implications for Hoglah and her children, Boaz said to Hur, “Bar-On could fight for rights of inheritance, saying Asaf sold him what was his. And he could do with Hoglah, her children, and her belongings what he will. Even if Bar-On does not succeed in his claim, Hoglah will remain ‘chained’ to the marriage, and Asaf may return to claim these lands.”

  When Hur told Noa, she exploded.

  “This is not an empty debate. Either way Hoglah will be plundered.”

  Anger coursed through her, down to hands that felt Asaf’s neck between her fingers, his easygoing eyes staring back, for once not so full of lucky-me. She was frustrated with Hoglah, a bewildered accomplice to her own predation, at the mercy of whatever would come next. Knowing they were all willingly taken in by Asaf, Noa was determined to protect this most vulnerable of her sisters.

  “If Bar-On presses to inherit and wins, he will get the lands that should go to Hoglah,” she said to Hur. “Worse, he could sell her and her children into bondage. Hur . . .”

  “Yes?” he said, knowing what would come next.

  “Secure a place for me before the Judges of Hundreds.”

  “I HAVE A taste for game,” Adam announced.

  “So, feed your desire,” Tirzah answered.

  Hunting pleased Adam both in the act and in the eating. And it gave him time with his sons, Gibor and Yared. In the hazy light of dusk, the three of them crouched behind a low screen of bean-caper bushes. Ignoring flies and cramped muscles, they awaited the arrival of gazelles at acacia trees that stood an arrow’s shot away.

  Though Gibor and Yared had emerged from their mother one after another, they were unlikely twins, especially after their surge into puberty. Yared, who had descended second, was first in height, strength, and daring. Like his mother, honey-colored hair framed his head in soft waves. Though he had the slim build of an adolescent, his sure stance and swelling muscles attracted glances and flirtatious giggles of girls who had begun eyeing their prospects. Yared emanated energy as though the very air was charged by his presence. Yared also had Tirzah’s temper.