Having published a lengthy
study of named heroines in the modern Serbo-Croatian epic
tradition,¹ I have
been interested to consider what likenesses might obtain
between the South Slavic epic women who are so familiar
to me and the far more widely known stories of women
in the Old Testament.
A conspicuous distinction in the South
Slavic case is between women who marry by polite arrangement, and those
gotten contrastingly by bride-capture. The story of Tamar in Genesis 38
has caught my eye as an interesting example of the former kind - a
`negotiated' bride - and on the other hand her namesake, Absalom's
sister Tamar, an abortive bride-by-capture, in 2 Samuel 13-14. Both
these `marriages' are outstanding failures, and not only because both
`husbands' perish without issue. The Tamar in Genesis is precariously
positioned from the very beginning of her story.
Jacob's son Judah takes a Canaanite
woman named Shua to wife. She bears him three sons, the first of whom
is Er. When Er is of age, Judah finds a wife for him named Tamar. But
Er dies before his marriage with Tamar has issue. Judah imposes the
leviratic duty of `redeeming' Tamar on his second son, Onan, who
however temporizes until he too dies without issue by Tamar.
Recognizing the apparent threat to his own lineage posed by the
hapless Tamar, Judah declines to treat his third and last son in
the same fashion as he did Er and Onan, and sends Tamar home to her
paternal kin as an `unredeemed' widow.
Ignored now by Judah and his remaining
son, Tamar resorts to a trick. She dresses as a veiled whore, puts
herself in Judah's way, and gets a solicitation from him. Exploiting
his uncircumspect lust, she extracts from him both his direct
redemption of herself, which Judah was unwilling to provide her
through his youngest son - namely her pregnancy by Judah - and also
a set of material objects (Judah's identifying seal, cord, and stick),
which she uses subsequently to compel his admission of paternity.
Thereafter, one perfectly understands, her support and that of her
child will flow no longer from her father, but from her deceased
husband's father, Judah. Thus the woman Tamar secures by pretense
(posing as a prostitute) from a male who does not support her (Judah)
a provision for herself which she transfers to the estate of another
man whose ward she will henceforth be (namely the estate of her real
husband, Judah's first-born son Er).
Superficially, the case of Absalom's
sister Tamar is rather different; but typologically speaking, there
isn't really enough difference to matter. King David's first-born
son and favorite amongst his numerous progeny is a fellow named Amnon.
This Amnon is rather like Judah in his subjection to reckless lust.
He lures Absalom's virgin sister Tamar into his inner chamber alone
with him, and rapes her. Then, having done what he wanted to do, in
an equally impulsive fit of disgust, he turns her out. Thus disowned
as dishonorably as was Er's Tamar in Genesis 38, Absalom's Tamar too
resorts to a bit of play-acting. She adopts the attitude not of a
prostitute, but rather of a mourner as for one deceased, and thus
makes herself terribly troublesome to her brother. (If you don't
like my description of Tamar's mourning as a piece or `play-acting'
or ruse, just ask yourself what sort of funeral it is where the only
mourner is the corpse). Absalom begs her to stop, pointing out to her
what all of us understand about her position without having to be
told, namely that Amnon, after doing what he has done, really has
no choice at all but to marry Tamar now, and if Tamar will only
calm down and stop pretending someone has died, it can all be
worked out and Tamar settled honorably in Amnon's house.
But Tamar will have none of it,
clearly preferring to remain Absalom's ward rather than have to
depend on the capricious Amnon for her well-being in years to come.
So she persists in her pose as a woman scorned virtually to death
until she so exacerbates relations between Absalom and his brother
Amnon that the former assassinates the latter. As a consequence,
Absalom is in bad odour with his father King David for a couple
of years; but David being the man he was, Absalom - marvelous to
relate - not only is rehabilitated at court but becomes precisely
what Amnon was before Absalom killed him, namely King David's
fair-haired favorite amongst all his numerous sons. This preferred
status at court has effectively been transferred by Tamar from
Amnon, whose care for her Tamar could not dependably rely upon,
to Absalom, whose protection and devotedness to her are unshakable,
and this has been accomplished by means of Tamar's pose as the
wailing mourner. Only a fool would fail to realize that Absalom's
power to take good care of his poor ruined sister Tamar has been
wonderfully increased by Tamar's own actions in supplanting Amnon
with Absalom.
So the shared scheme of the two Tamar
stories runs like this: By an act of assumed identity or `play-acting'
on her part, a woman secures from one male a prize benefit for another
man, who will be responsible for her well-being thereafter. The process
of the transfer of prize from the one male to the other is very perilous
for one or both of the males concerned, who may forfeit life itself
during their manipulation by the woman, as Amnon did, and as did Judah
in the contingent loss of his second son Onan.
So, is the common type of
these two tales uniquely the property of women named Tamar
in the Old Testament? No, it seems that it is not.
Let's back up a story or two
in Genesis - by-passing the genealogical stuff and the king
lists - and notice next the story of Dinah. (The reference in
Genesis 35 to Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, names another woman,
of course, but there is no story about her, whereas there's
a ripping good yarn about Dinah.) Dinah's is another `marriage'
that didn't succeed.
Dinah "captivates" the Hivite
chap named Shechem, Hamor's son, and he takes her for his wife
by bride-capture, pure and simple. Never mind the anachronism:
observe simply that it's the Amnon-Tamar story all over again,
except that far from turning the woman out after having his
way with her, Shechem the Hivite is eager to do the honorable
thing and make Dinah his negotiated bride, not just his
captured bride. The only real impediment to his intention is that
he is Hivite, and that fault destroys both him and his whole town.
Just as Tamar's `trick' of mourning cascaded into the further trick
of Absalom's tricking Amnon to attend a feast putatively for
reconciliation, but really for the murder of Amnon, so Dinah's
`captivating' Shechem leads to her brothers' trick of pretending
reconciliation with Hamor and his people only in order to ambush,
destroy, and plunder them. Together, this pair of tricks - his and
hers - brings about the transfer of extensive material wealth from
the males of the Hivite country to Dinah's brothers, whose ward we
certainly understand the poor ruined Dinah will have to be thereafter.
But her dowry, as it were - namely the compensation wrested from
the uncircumcised Hivite males for the benefit of Dinah's brothers
while they serve in loco mariti - is no mean endowment:
(Genesis 34:28-29) "They took away their flocks, cattle, donkeys,
and whatever there was in the town and in the countryside. They
carried off all their riches, all their little children and their
wives, and looted everything to be found in their houses." Dinah
may be a ruined woman, but it was profitable to the men who will
keep her subsequentially. And, of course, there is danger both
for the Hivite males - who were simply annihilated - as also
for Dinah's own brothers (since military action always entails
mortal peril for even the canniest ambushers, for whom something
might quite disasterously go awry).
So, do such tales of
tricks-by-women, males-deprived, males-enriched, and
women's-subsequent-dependence-on-enriched-males regularly
attach only to thwarted matrimonies? Well, no; they don't
seem to be restricted in exactly that way either. Another
step backward in the Book of Genesis brings us to the next
- i.e., the previous - story about a named woman, who is
of course Jacob's Rachel - or should one say, Laban's Rachel.
There's no problem about her marriage, except perhaps
that it took inordinately long to accomplish, both as to the
wedding and as to the progeny gotten from it for Jacob's
lineage. But aside from those blemishes, it is a real marriage
with all the advantages that good Israelite endogamy and
careful prior negotiation can impart to it.
I won't abuse a reader's
indulgence by pointing out at too great length the feminine
trickery, transfer of property from male to male, and
subsequent feminine dependence on the winning side of the
transfer in Rachel's story. Rachel's future cannot lie
lifelong in Laban's wardship of her; her readiness to have
Jacob shows her sensible awareness of that. So she purloins
Laban's household idols as she departs his house with Jacob,
the man who will be her lifelong guardian thereafter. Her
famous trick is of course her concealment of Laban's
heathen gods amidst her menstrual rags, from which she
deceptively refuses to rise - not, so she pretends, because
she has anything of Laban's to hide, but only because, well,
because she is menstruating, and Laban therefore wouldn't
want to see what she's sitting on anyway. So it is that
Rachel too, like all the other Old Testament women we've
noticed, in foresightful anticipation of her future
dependency not on Laban but on Jacob, by a ruse transfers
everything of value that she possibly can from Laban to
Jacob. And what then for poor Laban? Whatever will he do
- how can he survive and prosper? - without his household
gods, who may not matter much in Canaan (though even there
they may have some residual efficacy) but who surely are
not negligible in Laban's Harran? Laban without them is
clearly endangered, and so he clearly needs the compact
he immediately makes with Jacob over the monumental cairn
at Galeed, since it is Jacob who now possesses whatever
advantages the godlets from Harran may be able to confer.
Nor does the male
endangerment end with the endangerment of Laban. From
his parting with Laban, Jacob proceeds straight to the
most perilous familial encounter he could possibly
experience on return to his native land, namely his
reunion with Esau, whom he has not seen since he conned
Isaac out of Esau's birthright, which was of course the
defining moment' requiring his exile to Laban's country
in the first place. If anyone of humankind might now
probably destroy him, it must be Esau. And as though
to make doubly sure that he does not escape the full
weight of peril associated with his complicity in
Rachel's typical woman's trick, sandwiched into the
danger of meeting Esau is the truly weird and frightful
encounter with the praeternatural person beside the ford
at Jabbok. One cannot suppose that any of this
juxtapositioning is merely coincidental, secondary, or
otherwise unrelated to the foregoing story of Jacob;
on the contrary, the standard narrative pattern involving
Rachel and her trick with Laban's fetishes inescapably
involves and requires the immediate sequel of mortal
danger for Jacob both with Esau and with the nameless
terror of his noctural wrestling-match. This was surely
from its origin one story, and no mere editorial
compilation in aftertime.
There is another piece
of the present story-pattern or `type' which we would
also do well to notice now rather than later (since sooner
or later we're going to have to notice it and define its
place in the emerging pattern anyway). That is the element
of Rachel's trickery of the other woman - or the other
women - namely Leah, and the two slave girls Bilhah and
Zilpah, whom Rachel and Leah commit to concubinage with
Jacob. They and their teeming progeny are also immediate
parts of the tale about the stolen household gods, for it
is the exhausting, manifold quest through all their
pululating campsite that buffers Rachel until the time
of Laban's last, forlorn inquiry as to whether, all other
places having failed to disclose anything useful, his
treasures might possibly be underneath Rachel? No trace
of any of them having appeared elsewhere, it is not likely,
and so in the end Laban forsakes his quest at the very
threshold of discovery. Those three other, aboundingly
fertile women are thus, however unwittingly, Rachel's
instruments - or, in effect, her accomplices - in her
thievish ruse. So too was the Canaanite woman Shua a
necessary precondition for Tamar's deception of Judah
in Genesis 38, for without Shua's complicit fertility
in first bearing Judah's three sons Er, Onan, and Shelah,
Tamar could never have achieved in the first place the
standing in the scheme of Judah's lineage that gave
occasion and meaning to her subsequent deception of
Judah. If this seems a strange or contrived idea,
be patient; we'll see plenty more recurrence and
confirmation of it as a systematic piece of the story
pattern as we continue.
Marching on resolutely
backwards, we come next to the woman before Rachel,
who was of course Laban's other woman, not his
daughter Rachel (or Leah), but his sister Rebekah. Oh yes,
there is, to be sure, some mention also of the woman named
Keturah (Genesis 25); but there is no story about her,
and we can't describe the pattern of her story when we have
no story. This is another of those things that happen quite
frequently in Old Testament narrative; a woman is named, but
the narrator neglects to tell us what she did (or what
any other woman did in proximity to her. That such a woman
merely bore a child or children, as Keturah did, I take to be
truly no narrative at all about what she did, because
as anyone who has ever seen it happen must appreciate, to a
great degree bringing a child into the world isn't somehow
anything a woman so much does as it is something done
to her (the whole process being by nature profoundly
involuntary once it has begun), and a thing which, as the
English word aptly says, she either bears or not, as
the case may be.) So we skip Keturah and consider Rebekah
next.
There is no uncertainty
about the identity of Rebekah's ruse either, is there?
It was of course her thievish deception in the matter
of Esau's birthright. What a fine piece of flim-flam
on Rebekah's part to transfer that valuable asset
- Esau's birthright - from Esau to Jacob! And why did
she do it? Well, there were two reasons, neither of them
sufficient without the other. First, Esau had married
a pair of Hittite women, which upset both Isaac and
Rebekah no end. But that unpleasantness on Esau's part
must practically have mattered quite a lot more to
Rebekah than it did to Isaac, who grew so old and failed
in his faculties that he hardly understood anything that
was happening around him any more. In fact, he got to
the point where he wasn't long for this world; and when
he was gone, it wasn't going to matter any longer to
him whom his son Esau had married. That left
Rebekah, who was certainly still in full possession of
her faculties, with the nasty prospect of having
to live on for who knew how long after Isaac's time
in the keeping of her elder son Esau, and all the while
at the mercy of Esau's plural alien wives, since her
other son Jacob, who up to that time had certainly
shown himself to be decidedly too passive about making
a place for himself in the world, hadn't yet even married!
What was she to do?
What she had to do was
to play upon male passions, of course, just as the two
Tamars later did, and as Rachel did too in exploiting
Laban's squeamishness. Isaac had a weakness for hunter's
stew, and Rebekah faked it with lambs' meat. Then she hid
Jacob in the likeness of what he was not, coached Jacob
in as fine a piece of play-acting as ever was, and so
bamboozled both Isaac and Esau out of the
most valuable possession either of them could own. And
why did she do all this? Because plainly Rebekah meant
to make her home as a future widow not with Esau, but
with Jacob; and so it was to the man whom she anticipated
and desired to be her guardian in time to come that she
transferred Isaac's legacy by her ruse. The cost to Esau
was of course more than merely the birthright; by Rebekah's
swindle, he lost not only that, but his very place in the
Israelite line of agnation, and so he became in the sequel
an unrecoverable exile from his own people. And what a lot
of trouble it brought down on that callow homebody Jacob's
head, who was just incredibly lucky (and, so the redactor
would have us understand, divinely protected too from the
ghastly potential aftermath of Rebekah's deception. One
does not forget that this is the first two-brothers tale
following the story of Cain and Abel, and the likeness is
frightening.)
Did Rebekah's scheme succeed?
It had its intended effect on Jacob, of course; but did it
succeed in her own interest? We have no explicit
narrative regarding her fate after Jacob's flight to Harran;
but after his safe return to Canaan and his establishment
of himself at Bethel with all his multitudinous family (all
of whom were women of her brother Laban's ilk and their
children, as seen from Rebekah's female point of view),
we hear in Genesis 35 that Rebekah's nurse Deborah died
and was buried. So Rebekah's nurse at least didn't go
wandering off to Seir as a member of Esau's entourage
(Gen. 33). In amongst all the other give-and-take between
Jacob and Esau in that chapter about who is and who isn't
going where to live with whom, the narrator has neglected
to tell us some rather interesting details about persons
in Esau's company who evidently elected to join Jacob's band.
It's a pity we don't have that bit, because it probably
contained some additional entertaining example of feminine
dodginess. Nevertheless, I myself have never heard of a case
in which a woman's nurse was not elder to the woman whom in
the latter's infancy she had nursed; so it is surely a fair
surmise that Rebekah lived to enjoy personally the
anticipated result of her swindle many a day in the house
of the man whose ward she elected to be, namely her son
Jacob's house.
Finally, were there any
(unwitting) female accessories in Rebekah's beguilement?
They must surely be the other named women in her story,
the Hittites Judith and Basemath, whose estrangement of
Esau from Rebekah created the situation requiring Rebekah's
tricky action in the first place. The names of such
accomplices are quite regularly included in Old Testament
tales of this pattern, whether or not the accomplices
realize that is what they are.
Abram's Sarai is a manifold
trickster of no different kind, though sometimes with, and
sometimes without, named accomplices. Her lengthy story
- generally coextensive with that of her husband - contains
three fine instances of beguilement.
[1] The first of her ruses
is too obvious: it is the bamboozlement of Pharaoh in Egypt
(Genesis 12:11-20), who takes Sarai into his harem because
she makes him suppose she is unwed. Fooling him in this way,
Sarai accomplishes an extraction from his wealth and transfer
to Abram (as bride price) of copious "flocks, oxen, donkeys,
men and women slaves, she-donkeys and camels," so that when
Abram and Sarai return from Egypt to Canaan "Abram was a very
rich man, with livestock, silver, and gold" (Genesis 13:2).
This costs the losing man Pharaoh great forfeit however beyond
the mere transfer of wealth to Abram, including no doubt much
loss of life, since (Genesis 12:17) "Yahweh inflicted severe
plagues on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram's wife
Sarai." But Sarai's own future as Abram's sole wife (rather
than Pharaoh's one-amongst-many) is assured, and Abram's
ability to support her well is simultaneously assured by what
she has done to Pharaoh with Yahweh's complicity.
[2] Indeed the most striking
difference in Sarai/Sarah's tale as compared with others is
not any devagation from the general pattern I have been
tracing, but rather that Yahweh himself figures as an
active co-conspirator in all three of her beguilements.
The next in the series is of course the matter of Hagar and
Ishmael; and here again "the other woman" who is named in
the story is an unwitting accomplice or tool of the tricky
woman's scheming. Sarai's device in this instance is to get
her childless husband an heir (just as earlier she got her
destitute husband wealth by her ruse in Egypt). Yahweh
cooperates with Sarah indispensably by keeping Hagar in
Abram's household with Ishmael as Abraham's heir-apparent
until Sarah's own son Isaac is weaned (particularly in the
scene by the well at Lahai Roi, Genesis 16:7-16). Then Sarah
duplicitously turns against Ishmael, and uses Abraham to take
away Ishmael's expected legacy and convey it instead to Isaac
(acts ratified again by Yahweh at the site of another, less
conspicuous well in the wilderness of Beersheba, Genesis
21:15-21). There is horrendous peril in this change both for
Ishmael's and for Jacob's lines, which will ever after be in
contention with one another. The general rule in polygynous
cultures of the Middle East - as also widely in black Africa -
was that a mother's standing in the patriarchal order rose or
fell with her son's fortunes, and the culture of the ancient
Israelites as depicted in the Old Testament was no exception.
Thus, no matter what hazards lay in it for the males concerned,
for Sarah, her position as chief amongst the women of Abraham's
household was definitively assured by the expulsion of Sarah's
only conceivable rival during her lifetime, namely Ishmael's
mother Hagar with her male champion Ishmael.
[3] Finally, even in death
Sarah is fit for one last beguilement, which is plainly the
greatest of her three. When she died, Abraham purchased
ground for her sepulchre at Macpelah, the first and only
land he himself ever owned in Canaan (Genesis 23).
Yet more than merely the body of Sarah reposes in it, for
Sarah's presence in it concealed from the beginning also
a tacit claim to right of ownership not solely of the cave
at Macpelah, but of all Canaan besides, to which the
children of Abraham are expected to return (and where,
incidentally, they may be expected subsequently to tend
dead Sarah's gravesite as assiduously as Abraham cared for
the living Sarah whilst she lived). So she is put to rest
like secret seed for the return of Abraham's posterity to
that place. Their eventual return is not however a pretty
or an easy prospect, for the future change of dominion in
Canaan will not be by purchase; it will bring with it
instead the infinite pain and peril for males of attempted
yet never decisively finished armed conquest on the one
side; and of partially defeated, yet never decisively ended
armed resistance to conquest by the other side. More males
on both sides will die in consequence of this, Sarah's last
beguilement, than anyone can count.
From Sarai backward to
Adam's Hawwah I find no other named woman with a tale
attached to her. There is, to be sure, Lot's wife, who is
otherwise nameless; and elsewhere too there are other such
unnamed women as Manoah's wife who was Samson's mother; or
Potipher's wife (in the story of Joseph); or Pharaoh's
daughter (in the story of Moses); or the two prostitutes
in the Judgment of Solomon; or the Queen of Sheba; or
Solomon's uniformly anonymous seven hundred wives and
three hundred concubines; or the nameless woman whose
dead son Elijah resurrected (or again, that one's double,
the variant `woman of Shunem,' whose dead son Elisha
resurrected); and the like. The most interesting fact
common to all of them I find to be that their stories
systematically do not conform to the pattern which
I have been describing here. Nor do the named women of
Milcah's kind, for example, conform; and that is just
because they have no stories, and hence they cannot
conform to anything. Many women named in the Old Testament
fall into this category; in 2 Samuel 3:1, for example, the
several wives of David at Hebron: Ahinoam of Jezreel, and
Macaah of Geshun, Haggith, Abital, and Eglah; or, later,
Jeroboam's mother Zeruah, or Manasseh's mother Hephzibah;
and so forth. But if women happen to be 1) named, and
2) there is some story about their own deeds, then I find
no instance in which women in the Old Testament stories are
not either examples of the tricky woman herself, or else
that type's accessory in a beguilement.
So I think we've dealt now
with all the named women who have stories told about them
in Genesis - well, all but one. We'll return to her presently.
In Exodus, the story of
Moses' wife Zipporah is thoroughly botched, no matter
whether she was the Midianite Reuel's daughter (Ex. 2),
or Jethro's (Ex. 3:1, 4:18, 18:1 ff), or the Kenite
Hobab's (Judges 1:16, 4:11). The only intelligible fragment
of it has her, like Hawwah, cheating Yahweh with a ruse.
Yahweh has chosen Moses as a victim in Ex. 4:24; but
Zipporah circumcised her son with her own hand, using
a primitive scalpel, a piece of flint. As any obstetrician
or pediatrician knows, it is a poor tool for the purpose
because it will cause unnecessarily great hemorrhaging
(severance by constriction being the less bloody way).
But hemorrhage is the fountain of Zipporah's trickery;
she conveys her infant son's consequently very bloody
foreskin to Moses, whose genitals she smears with the
gore so as to make him too appear to be (though in reality
he is not) freshly circumcised. In this deceptive fashion
she takes Yahweh's intended victim away from Him, and
secures Moses' continued life for Moses instead, who will
be her protector and support in times to come (whereas
Yahweh, who was about to take away her husband and leave
Zipporah a widow with an orphaned son of tender age,
was certainly not a person upon whom she could sensibly
rely for her future welfare). The peril for Moses is
prodigious all the while; and Yahweh, had he destroyed
the man, might have lost the very person he had himself
just called and equipped for dealing with Pharaoh in the
matter of the Israelites' promised liberation. Until
the woman achieves her purpose, all the males in the
story with her are at risk.
The affairs of kings
and priests supply little or no occasion for stories
about named women in the Old Testament; but heroes'
affairs regularly do. The Sinai is accordingly not the
only big arid desert between Zipporah in Exodus and
Deborah in the Book of Judges. There is but a pair of
small oases, all too soon passed over, that I have been
able to find in that great unheroic wasteland. The
women named in the first of those two little incidents
don't actually do anything; they only make a
short speech in a court of common pleas, so it is
stretching the scant meat of the text about them to
treat their episode as a proper story at all.
Nonetheless, the incident coincides with the general
pattern we have been discovering.
In Numbers 27, the five
daughters of Zelophehad - Mahlah, Noah, Hoglath, Milcah,
and Tirzah - jointly obtain their father's legacy either
for their own use - or, perhaps more plausibly, for their
(eventual) husbands' benefit - at the expense of their
father's male kin. The perils of dispossession for the
male kinsmen who are affected by the five women's
successful joint plea to Moses is patent; and, to make
matters worse, those present unnamed persons' loss Yahweh
extends as valid judicial precedent to all future probate
cases of the same character. But if anyone thinks for a
moment that the conflict between women's male consanguines
and affines occasioned by this legal precedent will ever
cease, or be free of deadly consequences in future
generations, I fear he is quite mistaken.
Still, there is no
explicit woman's trickery in the little story of
Zelophehad's daughters, is there? Or is there? They are
at pains to argue to Moses (Num. 27:3-4): "Our father
died in the desert. He was not one of the company of
those who conspired against Yahweh, Korah's party; it
was for his own sin that he died without sons. Why must
our father's name be lost to his clan? Since he had no
son, give us some property among our father's kinsmen."
So the five women acknowledge their father's sin, while
effectively concealing its character. In such a case,
how can anyone know whether Zelophehad's sin merited
not only the punishment of terminating Zelophehad's
agnatic lineage, but also the eventual dispossession
of his daughters? To be sure, it could not have served
the five women's interest in their own futures to expose
the exact nature of their father's sin (presuming that
they even knew its exact nature); and of course, what
is not disclosed is not necessarily concealed, so long
as no one knows what it is. If the same Yahweh who
either was deceived or let himself seem to be so by
Zipporah's deception with Moses' genitals is the Yahweh
of ultimate juridical authority in the case of
Zelophehad's daughters, then surely the possibility
cannot be ruled out of successful feminine dissembling
once more in the matter of Zelophehad's mysterious
peccancy. It was not, moreover, the biblical redactors'
habit anywhere in their text to dwell overmuch on the
exact method or details of the feminine deceptions and
ricks which they report time and time again with stolid
dryness. If therefore you can't see that the five
Zelophehad girls were as deep as all the others we've
been noticing here, may the Lord's blessing be with you!
You'll probably soon need it.
Deborah in the Book of
Judges tricks no one; she is only (as usual) the
unintentional accessory of another tricky female, who
is also named in the same story with her. That other
woman in Deborah's case is Jael, wife of Heber the
Kenite. You remember how (in Judges 4:17 ff)she
deceived Barak's opponent Sisera into believing she was
his friend and protectress, only to drive a tent stake
into his skull whilst he slept under her concealment.
Then she triumphantly turned Sisera's lifeless corpse
over to Barak. Deborah, indicating to her man Barak at
exactly what propitious moment to attack Sisera and his
army, sets Jael up for the kill as a good accomplice
should (no matter how unwitting).
But exactly what was in
it for Jael? Well, think about her position, which is
amongst a third, minority people who were a force to be
eckoned with neither in Jabin the Canaanite's hegemony,
nor in the Israelite supplantation of the older Canaanite
population under Deborah's vatic and Barak's military
leadership. A woman caught in the grind, as Jael was,
between two greater contending powers in the land must
provide for her own future somehow, for (Judges 4:11)
"Heber the Kenite had cut himself off from the tribe of
Kain and the clan of the sons of Hobab, the father-in-law
of Moses; he had pitched his tent near the Oak of
Zaanannim, not far from Kadesh." Such mere detached
sojourners in any land need friends amongst whichever
party dominates the country. It is her husband Heber
from whom alone Jael can hope for protection and support
of herself in future time, and so it is from the hapless
refugee Sisera that Jael plucks Barak's goodwill towards
her husband Heber and his people (including especially
herself) by killing the hunted man Sisera, and then
displaying his lifeless remains as a trophy to Barak.
But the real trophy of the tale is of course Jael's and
her husband Heber's new position as willing allies of
the Israelites in their ascendancy. Meanwhile the peril
for males associated with the deceptive woman's trick
is, as usual, at least twofold: Sisera is slain outright
by the tricky woman Jael; and Heber with all his people
are in mortal peril of Barak's enmity so long as Sisera
is a live refugee in Jael's tent.
Superficially, Samson's
Delilah may not seem an instance of named femininity
very parallel to Jael, Zipporah, Laban's kinswomen, the
Tamars, or the others of their kind; but typologically
speaking, she certainly is. Her great swindle was to
counterfeit the sweet intimacy of personal secrets
shared between lovers not because she adored Samson as
she seemed to do, but rather because she saw in him
an opportunity once-in-a-lifetime of whoring to provide
for herself in a way that would make her ever again
taking another man into her lap unnecessary. (Go ahead;
ask any professional prostitute what she would like most
in all the world if she could have it, and see for
yourself whether it differs much from Delilah's
dream-come-true.) A flabbergasting sum of money was
to be hers - eleven hundred silver shekels from
each of her plural Philistine instigators, a
prodigious dowry for a whore's years of retirement - as
the wages of her success in deceiving Samson and teasing
the secret of his strength out of him, if she could do
it. Was there ever in the world's history so grand and
apt a challenge to a prostitute's skill in `faking it'
as this? And she was equal to it! Multiply
duplicitous, she successfully dissembled not merely
her own feelings: in her house were successfully
concealed also the Philistine constabulary (disguised,
one has to suppose, as other girls' clients), ready
to leap out when summoned, subdue, and arrest Samson
as soon as Delilah's trick would unman him. Dangerous
for Samson, her manifold guile ultimately cost him his
very life; but the other males in her story, the
Philistine constabulary and their chiefs, might also
have perished in a trice at Samson's hands, had he
been even for a moment sufficiently unbefuddled by
Delilah to have been aware of their presence. So
Delilah by her guile conveyed the power of Samson
into the power of the Philistines for her own
benefit.
I have deliberately
put off to this point mentioning that other whore,
Rahab of Jericho in the Book of Joshua, because she is
typologically such a neat middle term between Delilah
and Heber's wife Jael. Rahab's story (Joshua 3) is
another of those too well known to be dwelt upon for
long. She conceals Joshua's pair of spies under stalks
of flax on her rooftop, deceives the King of Jericho
concerning the concealed Israelite spies' whereabouts,
and makes a precise contract with the spies about her
own future and that of the other people close to her
(i.e., those upon whom she must depend in future time).
Thus from Joshua, who holds her kinsmen's lives in his
hand to give or take, Rahab secures them in her own
interest. Whore she may be, but protect and support
her in the future they must. For the rest of the male
citizenry of Jericho whose fellows Rahab's kinsmen are,
however, there is only death in store, as there is
potentially too not only for the pair of Israelite
spies, but also for the whole of Joshua's army,
which - like any army in time of war - may suffer
casualties numbering anywhere from one to all, even
if they are victorious. Like Delilah, Rahab takes
in alien manhood; but oppositely to Delilah, she
conserves it for her own benefit rather than trading
it to other, inimical males for their purposes. Like
Jael, on the other hand, she takes in alien refugees
and treats them in a manner best calculated to serve
her own future; but whereas Jael is an honest wife,
Rahab is a whore.
The woman of Thebez
who broke Abimelech's pate (Judges 9) doesn't qualify
for our study, because she has no name - and, as may
well be predicted from that fact alone, she has no
profitable ruse either. Nor are any of the dancing
girls of Shiloh named (Judges 21), nor the concubine
of the Levite of Ephraim (Judges 19-20). So we come
next to Ruth and Naomi - or, as typologically they
ought rather to be sequenced - Naomi and Ruth; for
Naomi is the tricky one in their tale, and Ruth is
her accessory, who as accomplice differs from the
other accomplices we have recognized only inasmuch
as she is rather more witting of her complicity
than they. Naomi doubly insinuates Ruth into Boaz's
sleeping place - puts the younger woman `under cover'
there, and does so under the additional cover of
darkness. It's a good thing Boaz was willing, for
his position on waking and discovering Naomi's
guileful placement of the young widow in his bed
would have been fraught with trouble for him if
he hadn't wanted her. This bit of concealment
leads straight on to dispossession of an unnamed
man who ranks before Boaz in right of leviratic
redemption, but who (foolishly) prefers his own
inheritance to that of Naomi's deceased husband
Elimelech. So, unforesightful as he is, that man
is done out of the place that Boaz subsequently
comes to hold in the agnatic chain of David's
ancestry.
Naomi's trick of
tucking Ruth into bed with Boaz while the man's head
is full of alcoholic spirits thus effectively
deprives another man of both Elimelech's field and
daughter-in-law, appropriating them instead to Boaz,
who will (as the narrator uses Ruth's own words to
assure us) provide for Naomi thereafter. But in
order for this to happen, other men have had to
perish: both Naomi's husband Elimelech and both her
sons, Mahlon and Chilion. What named woman's
success-story anywhere in the Old Testament
doesn't cost some man or other his life? - and
usually more than one! (I do not mean to imply by
this observation that Ruth or Naomi was somehow
responsible for the three male deaths; as always
in traditional narrative, it is not the reasons
for things that primarily determine a tale's content,
but rather the simple logic of habitual association
that induces juxtaposition of the same elements in
a traditional story-pattern, whether or not
a narrator can think of any reason for it.)
A little more remains
to be learned from Ruth and Naomi before we move on.
In addition to its conformity with the story pattern
that we are discovering here, the tale of Ruth and
Naomi is also one of two outstanding examples in the
Old Testament of what I have previously described
elsewhere as the pattern of the `cosmogonic
triad.'²
For Ruth is to 'ares¸ as Naomi is to
tehom as Boaz is to elohim
in Genesis One, the earlier triad being coefficients
in the origin of the world, while the later triad
originates the lineage of David. Replication of
narrative patterns in this manner is one of the more
interesting effects of what I like to call narrative
`modulation.'
Now we can move ahead
to Samuel, whose story at its beginning is the story
of his cunning mother, Elkanah's wife Hannah. She
goes to the temple at Shiloh, where she makes a
brazen spectacle of herself remonstrating with
Yahweh about her barrenness (2 Sam. 1). The
presiding priest, Eli, in turn remonstrates with her
about the unseemliness of her demeanor, which he
attributes to her drunkenness. Hannah soberly
explains to him however that she has a terrible
problem, and that her egregious behaviour in Yahweh's
presence is due to no other cause. But she completely
conceals from Eli both the specific nature of her
problem and the solution to it which she has proposed
to Yahweh. Perpending nothing of the woman's secret
plan, Eli nevertheless blesses Hannah, desiring aloud
to her (and to Yahweh) "...may the God of Israel grant
what you have asked of him." But what she has asked of
Him is in reality that she may place an interloper in
the temple - her yet-to-be-born child Samuel - who
will in due course displace not only Eli but also
Eli's whole unsatisfactory male posterity in the
priesthood! And who is to be the male beneficiary of
this ruinous manipulation of Eli's male fortunes by
the deceptive Hannah? It is Yahweh himself, of course,
who makes great use of Samuel for his own ends; but
who also soon recompenses Hannah with the reward of
five children to replace Samuel in hers and her
supporting husband's lives. It is as good a provision
for her own future as any woman could want, though it
costs Elkanah a son, and it costs the man Eli
everything.
Did Hannah thus
deliberately ensnare Eli in a misunderstanding of her,
and hence in a religiously powerful but unwitting
complicity in his own ruinous dispossession and his
sons' disinheritance? Or was it all just Yahweh's
mighty providence, incomprehensible to everyone
concerned until after it was accomplished? Who can
say? Who cares? The pattern of the narrative is not
altered a jot by either supposition, for regardless
of whether one wishes to think of it as Hannah's
conscious guile, or as Yahweh's hidden will expressed
through her actions, its locus was unmistakably in
the woman either way, exactly where our emerging
story pattern predicts that it would be.
Saul's Michal
We have no stories
about any named wife or other kinswoman of Samuel or
of Saul except Saul's daughter - and David's wife -
Michal. If the manifold narrative about Saul's
rivalry with David were plain folktale, the centrality
of Michal to their quarrel would be greater than in
the biblically redacted telling. Fathers-in-law and
sons-in-law joined in deadly games of hide-and-seek
with one another are mainstream figures in oral
tradition, and in such tales the son-in-law's fitness
to be husband is the main issue. Accordingly, to tell
how David supplanted Saul as monarch without the
former's marriage to the latter's daughter would be
unthinkable, as would the eventual success of the
bridegroom without the bride's conspiratorial
assistance against the father-in-law. This is the
basic mold in which Saul's daughter and David's wife
Michal is cast. But here again - as in the case of
Ruth - stock narrative patterns intersect, and Michal
is also a guileful woman who extracts her own
future well-being from male peril.
Michal varies Rachel's
trick with household gods (2 Sam. 19:11-17), and
instead of concealing her teraphim so that it can
never be found, she only disguises it as though it
were David on his sickbed long enough for the the
real David, who is perfectly well, to reach a safe
distance from Saul's enmity. By this ruse she deprives
Saul of his intended victim (as Zipporah deprived
Yahweh of his intended victim Moses); while David,
whom she thus enables to survive, is also thereby
enabled to remain in contention with Saul until he
gains the latter's throne. Such women are not
forgotten by their beneficiaries; Michal thereafter
comes into David's keeping at Hebron (2 Sam. 3:12-16),
which is certainly an improvement for her over the
necessarily more paltry provision she can have as a
wife of Palti(el), son of Laish (2 Sam. 25:43-44).
David's subsequent support of her is, moreover,
lifelong: she is still maintained in his household
after the relocation of his capital to Jerusalem
(2 Sam. 2:20-23), despite the fact that she is as
barren of posterity as Abraham's Sarai was (and
that she remains without any such singular relief
from that condition as Sarah ultimately obtained).
All David's significant
wives were someone else's wives before they came
permanently to be his, and all coincidentally conform
to the pattern at hand. There are in sum six episodes
of the present sort attached to three of his wives.
Nabal's Abigail
Completely concealing
her actions (and also her blatant violation of his
policy) from her foolish Calebite husband Nabal, the
woman Abigail in 1 Sam. 25 transfers a prodigious
quantity of prepared foodstuffs from Nabal to David:
two hundred loaves, two skins of wine, five dressed
sheep, five measures of roasted grain, a hundred
bunches of raisins, and two hundred cakes of figs.
As for male peril: Nabal is dead within a fortnight,
and David gives thanks for his narrow escape from a
crime of bloodshed of the same sort he and his family
were later punished for severely in connection with
Bathsheba. Abigail comes soon thereafter into David's
keeping, where she remains throughout his transition
from mere captain of irregulars in the wilderness to
king at Hebron (2 Sam. 3:3). As second step in the
progression of David's significant wives from barren
to mother of his heir to the throne at Jerusalem,
Abigail is named as mother of a single son by David,
who is not however ever a contender in competition
for the crown.
Eliam's Bathsheba
(and Uriah)
[1] Eliam's daughter
Bathsheba is magnificiently cunning in 2 Sam. 11, as
befits the mother-to-be of Solomon. I'm sorry, but
I cannot be persuaded that the woman did not know
any more than Susanna did who might see her at her
bath, or what the probable result would be. Even
young women of quite ordinary intelligence and no
particular beauty have a keen awareness of what
privacy they may or may not enjoy at such moments;
and if - as sometimes surely happens - they forego it,
the act can never rightly be understood as other than
deliberate, no matter how artful the innocence with
which it is done. Indeed, a sweetly feigned innocence
is nothing short of essential if the lure is to
succeed well. And Bathsheba was neither stupid nor
ugly. She certainly comprehended who would observe
her, and from what vantage, and so she set her cap
to catch a king, skillfully contriving to surprise
and fix David's gaze on herself just at eventide,
that most sentimental and sociable phase in
everyman's circadian cycle.
Nor must one shed
too many tears for her man Uriah, who had in fact
behaved more foolishly than even Abigail's Nabal.
For if Nabal did not understand the need to be
hospitable, Uriah failed as badly to obey a soldier's
imperative not to go away to war till his wife at
home had children by him to keep her busy, whether
still in the womb or of tender years. Not only did
such provision protect the man himself against the
kind of personal maltreatment Uriah suffered at
David's hands; it was, more largely, his civic duty
in the best public interest that he do so. For if he
were killed and had left no children, who would
replace him in the ranks of the state's soldiery
in the next generation? So the foolishly
irresponsible Uriah went off to fight, having
tended satisfactorily beforehand to neither aspect
of his marital business, either public or
private.
Unfortunately wed
to a man so neglectful of provision for the future,
what was a young, beautiful, and still childless
woman to do for her own protection and security in
years to come? Why, just what Bathsheba did, of
course, with her deeply concealed motive in the
revelation to David of herself a-bathing. It
was a good trick, and it very effectively
transferred Bathsheba herself as progenetrix of
Solomon from the incompetent husband Uriah to the
far better lifelong provider and protector of her
interests, King David. Not even Yahweh Himself
censured her for what she had done, though
it cost Uriah his very life, cost herself and her
new husband their firstborn - and cost both David's
male allies in his own time and his descendants
thereafter far, far more in the long run, as Yahweh
sent the prophet Nathan to tell David explicitly
(2 Sam. 12:7-15). But none of these women's tricks
are ever much regardful of longer-term consequences;
it is just the provision for her own lifetime that
the woman seeks and gains. What ensues across the
span of generations or of other male networks is
a male problem, since agnatic kinship is masculine,
and hence no matter to women, whose characteristic
business is contrastingly the business of their own
era alone.
Eliam's Bathsheba
(and Adonijah's crown)
[2] And yet, because
she is materially younger than David and longer-lived,
Bathsheba's era extends beyond David's, and so out
of male resources she must extract a provision once
more for the time when she will outlive her husband.
Skillfully she does so, feigning independent
intelligence and independent counsel to the declining
king, when in reality she and the prophet Nathan are
conspirators together to seat a new monarch before
the present one is quite dead (2 Kings 1:11 ff).
No King Lear, David has retained the crown beyond a
time when he is truly any longer fit for its duties,
and so the object of Bathsheba's second great
dissemblance must be to strip both David of
the monarchy which he can no longer exercise
satisfactorily and a self-appointed pretender,
the man Adonijah, of the royal power which he is in
the very process of usurping. Her ruse succeeds, and
David removes the crown from Adonijah to Bathsheba's
son Solomon, who will of course be Bathsheba's
guardian ever after (a thing he surely could not have
been had Nathan's foreboding about Adonijah's
destruction of Solomon come to pass). Thus does
Bathsheba's dissembling to David secure her own
future as Queen Mother after David dies. And no
sooner indeed does David commission Solomon than he
does die (2 Kings 2:10); for the story-pattern
is hardly ever fulfilled without some male death or
other. Then (2 Kings 2:12) "Solomon was seated upon
the throne of David, and his sovereignty was securely
established." It is just what Bathsheba had aimed at,
because she personally needed it.
Eliam's Bathsheba
(and Adonijah's life)
[3] Bathsheba's second
trick in her own best interest is not perhaps so
clever as her first; but her third one is. It comes
immediately after the coronation of her new guardian
Solomon. As though recognizing her preeminent power
in king-making, Adonijah goes to Bathsheba seeking
her intercession with Solomon to obtain for Adonijah
marriage with the deceased David's last but never
consummated concubine, the nubile young woman Abishag
of Shunem. The symbolic significance of such a wedding,
were it to happen, is not lost however on either
Bathsheba or her son Solomon. And Bathsheba's handling
of Adonijah's petition to her is brilliantly cunning.
Far from revealing to either Adonijah or Solomon the
least inkling of what must be any perspicacious
person's appreciation of the danger inherent in
fulfilling Adonijah's wish, Bathsheba again plays
the guileless innocent, and conveys Adonijah's petition
directly to Solomon in just the way Adonijah expressed
it to her. But Solomon is of course Solomon, and sees
through Adonijah's implicit plotting against him just
as Bathsheba could not help but know that he would.
So Solomon destroys
Adonijah for high treason, thereby removing from him
conclusively the possibility of any further pretence
to dynastic legitimacy, and thereby terminating also
the last lingering shadow of threat to Bathsheba's
own standing in the royal household. For her security
under the care of the man whom she preferred to be her
protector, namely her son Solomon, Adonijah paid with
his life. In accomplishing this, her last trick,
Bathsheba had of course the help of a second female,
Abishag, who, though conjecturably unaware at any
time of her part in the affair, nevertheless did
create the occasion for Bathsheba's successful ploy.
Notice how, like Leah's unintentional complicity in
Rachel's trickery, or Hagar's in Sarah's, the second,
instrumental woman's rôle turns upon some
implementation - whether real or only mooted - of
matrimony other than the tricky woman's own.
The next two women
named in stories of the strictly canonical books are
less savoury characters than David's wives. One is
Ahab's infamous Jezebel (2 Kings 21). By a fraudulent
indictment and secret corruption of public officials,
she got from the man Naboth of Jezreel a piece of the
hapless fellow's inherited real estate that her
husband Ahab wanted but could not legitimately obtain.
Her strategem cost Naboth not only his land, but also
his life, and it came very near to destroying Ahab
too. Nevertheless, Ahab's support and protection of
Jezebel thereafter outlasted even his own lifetime
by some thirteen years, until finally Jehu put an
end to her (2 Kings 9).
Jehoida's Jehosheba
There is a misshapen
adduction of Athaliah's story in 2 Kings 11-12, where
a certain Zibiah is also named, but without any
narrative at all about her. The bad Athaliah of
2 Chronicles has a superficial aspect as wicked as
Jezebel's. Unlike Jezebel however, Athaliah had no
trick up her sleeve, and is accordingly the accomplice
- certainly unconscious in her case - of a craftier
other woman in the same story with her. Yes, the
other woman too is named, and it is really all
her story. She is Jehosheba, whose manifold
dynastic ties are described in detail (2 Chronicles
22:11-12). By concealing a boy named Joash from his
would-be assassins, Jehosheba purloins dynastic
legitimacy out of the House of Azahiah, with the
unintentional assistance of Athaliah, whose previous
murder of all the other royalty of Judah
assures that there will be no other pretender to
the throne of Judah when Joash shall come of age
and be ready for coronation.
As regent de
facto in Judah during Joash's minority,
Jehosheba's husband, the priest Jehoida, is the real
beneficiary of his wife's deceitful hiding of Joash,
and it is of course Jehoida who will take care of
his wife Jehosheba ever after, except that as a
result of Jehosheba's estranging the Judean royal
destiny from Ahaziah's legacy, he will be able to
do that far more ably than he could otherwise have
done.
So long as Jehoida
lived, all went well for the other beneficiary of
Jehosheba's conspiracy, namely Joash himself.
Jehoida survived for a hundred and thirty years,
which must certainly have been long enough for his
wife Jehosheba's needs. But after Jehoida's death,
Joash behaved badly and came to a bad end,
assassinated at last by a pair of murders whose
mothers are named in 2 Chronicles 24:26-27
- Shimeath the Ammorite woman, and Shimrith
the Moabitess. But while the career of Joash is
thus framed between a pair of named women at
beginning and end, we have narrative about only
the former pair and none about the latter.
By my count
there are not many more named women's tales left
now, and all four of them are in the either
uncanonical or merely deuterocanonical Books
of Tobit, Judith, Esther, and Daniel.
In Tobit
(3:7 ff, 7:10-11, and 10:9-11), Raguel's
daughter Sarah conceals within herself a certain
Asmodeus ("that worst of demons"), wherewith she
deprives seven other men, who have prior claims to
it, of half her father's worldly property, which is
her dowry. It's not that she means any harm; she
isn't vicious, but the demon hidden in her is, and
death awaits each of her attempted bridegrooms until
with a certain amount of rigamarole, a dead fish,
and an angel's help, Sarah is able to bring about
transfer of the wealth to the eighth of her suitors
(and the first to survive that status), Tobit's son
Tobias. Thereafter Sarah harbours no further dark
secrets worth telling, and Tobias is the man who
will ever after be Sarah's guardian and supporter,
although for a time his parents suppose that he too
has perished in Raguel's country. The contingent
real loss of seven other male lives in addition
to the imminent peril of her ultimately successful
suitor is all very lamentable, but that's the way
it always goes in these tales.
Except that she
did not need to go as far with it as Delilah did
(and, we are assured, certainly did not, since she
was a woman of a different character entirely),
Judith too feigned affection to ruin a man. Too
vain and concupiscent to suspect anything so
dangerous to himself as Judith's ruse, Holofernes
was destroyed by it, as were contingently also a
horde of other men who had been his followers.
A young widow of
such singular qualities - both so beautiful and so
charming as Judith was, and so rich! (8:7-8) - may
not long after her husband's passing find widowhood
a difficult condition. How can such a woman fend
off many individual suitors whom she may not want
without so antagonizing the male community at large
in the place where she dwells as to make her position
in the community practically untenable? Judith
certainly understood, as did Homer's Penelope, the
utility of a prolonged display of funereal garb in
such circumstances, and the value too of keeping
herself secluded indoors (8:4-6). But after a while
such weeds wear thin and such withdrawal unravels.
Then what is a good woman to do? Above all, she must
keep herself out of any man's debt and show goodwill
to all, but partiality to none. If only there were
something of surpassing value she could give
to them - to all of them at once, equally and
indivisibly - then they might be forever in
her debt rather than she be ever in theirs.
Judith was surely not the first nor the last woman
who, having had and lost a good husband - or even
one not so good - might sanely not want or need
another to make her life complete thereafter. What
could she possibly do to secure her own future as
she wished it to be?
Yes, of course!
She could - and she did - take away from Holofernes
and his men, who already virtually possessed it, the
city of Bethulia itself, and she transferred it into
the keeping of Bethulia's own manhood instead, whose
desperate peril was such that they were already
practically dead men at the moment when she gave
them back both their city and their own continued
living in it. Her intervention and conversion of the
property from the one male group to the other occurs
at the last possible moment before the impending final
act of conquest would have ruined the property
together with all its value for Judith's future.
By this transfer, as the text of her story says
explicitly, she gained (16:21 ff) "...great
reputation throughout the country. She had many
suitors, but all her days, from the time her husband
Manasseh died and was gathered to his people, she
never gave herself to another man. Her fame spread
more and more the older she grew in her husband's
house; she lived to the age of a hundred and five
years." So from her victim Holofernes came
preeminently future security for Judith herself, and
not merely in the form of intangible goodwill amongst
her own people. For when Holofernes' army fled from
it (14:11) "The people looted the camp for thirty
days. They gave Judith the tent of Holofernes, all
his silver plate, his divans, his drinking bowls,
and all his furniture. She took this, loaded her
mule, harnessed her carts, and heaped the things into
them." Like Er's wife Tamar, Judith is thus able both
to enrich her deceased husband's estate and to avoid
ever having to forsake it, for it will sustain her to
the end. I daresay my own sale of just one of
Holofernes' drinking cups at Sotheby's, should I have
the great good fortune to possess such an historically
notable treasure, would bring in revenue enough to
keep me too to the end of my days; but alas, I'm no
named woman of Old Testament narrative, and so shall
never have that chance.
Next to last comes
Esther, whose case, like Ruth's or Abramic Sarah's,
is again too well known and too obvious to bear
overmuch comment. Esther's potent and well concealed
secret is her Jewishness - hidden from male
understanding not only during Esther's progressive
displacement of her unwitting female accomplice
(Ahasuerus' former Queen Vashti[or
Artaxerxes' Astin]) but also concealed at
the heart of her twice extended banquet mystery
until, in an act of perfect timing, its revelation
can most certainly dispossess a male (Haman, whose
assets Esther desires to expropriate), and most
certainly secure her own future in the keeping of
another male (Mordecai), to whom those same assets
are to accrue. And (wouldn't you just know it!)
Haman, son of Hammedatha from the land of Agog,
loses not only the office of grand vizier, but
also his very life, as Esther's fellow Jew and
life-long protector Mordecai replaces him
next-in-rank to the King, thus assuring Esther's
future well-being together with that of all her
people thereafter.
Susanna and the
elders is our last tale - well, almost our last tale -
of a named woman. Hilkiah's daughter and Joakim's
wife Susanna has everything a woman can want in the
culture of the Book of Daniel: a prosperous and
politically powerful husband; children; virtue;
beauty to make old men dream. She has everything
for her present and future needs - everything, as
it happens, except an invulnerable reputation;
but who does, until it has been tested? And so
Susanna's is tested.
One must be careful,
however, not to misunderstand the nature of the test.
Simply put, Susanna's story is a traditional bawdy
tale upon which some prude has imposed a straight
face. The laughter which the basic story is meant
to provoke is never far from the surface, ready to
break out into loud merriment at the slightest hint
of insobriety - as it must, for example, during the
episode of the two elders' mutual discovery of their
inflamed passion for Susanna. That episode is pure
slapstick; and so too, but for a determined
suppression of further laughter, is everything else
in the two old fools' behaviour.
The two dirty old
men alone with Susanna in her garden try to steal
her reputation as an honest wife from her. It happens
this way. She desires to bathe in her garden on a hot
day. So she secures the garden gates in order not to
be surprised during her ablutions by anyone from
outside, and she sends her maids-in-waiting indoors
to fetch requisite olive oil and unguents. But while
they are away, the two licentious elders, who have
hidden themselves in the garden before she closed it,
confront Susanna and demand that she submit to be
futtered by them. Should she refuse, they promise
to invert the trick of Potipher's wife, and accuse
her of adultery with a fictitious third and
younger man than themselves.
The key to
understanding Susanna's story is the mission she
imposes on her maids to go indoors and bring things
for her bath out to her in the garden. Without that
detail, it would be impossible to detect the nature
of Susanna's pretence, or to realize that Susanna's
case is somewhat more complicated than any other
named Old Testament woman's, inasmuch as she must
make an astute choice amongst several
alternative beguilements before she can put
any one of them into effect. But once we have been
told about the maids' errand, we can perceive
straightway that Susanna's initial plight is the
usual opening to a well-known type of humorous
folktale. In further episodes of the folktale, the
challenged woman (who is still hot and dirty, not
having bathed yet) should warn the two ridiculous
old lechers that her maids, whom she has sent to
fetch appurtenances for her bath, will surely
return to her momentarily. Any so gross impropriety
as the two elders have proposed in the scene which
those other women might observe on their return to
the garden would be ruinous for all concerned. The
old men should accordingly go away now, and return
to Susanna later that night, or at some other more
`convenient' (or cunningly contrived) time, when
Susanna, having bathed, will be even more delicious
than she could be in too great and dangerous haste
at the present instant. So she might gratify their
desire later in a more leisurely and personally
more hygienic as well as less perilous manner; for
as everyone certainly knows, a leisurely pace is
what old men need most in such matters.
In the interval
between that later hypothetical scene and the present
one, Susanna (or her modulated counterpart in a
thousand tellings of the folktale) should - with
suitably anguished mien - disclose privately to her
husband everything that has happened, and should urge
that he and his henchmen meet the culprits as
substitutes for herself in the pending assignation.
This they should do, discovering and undoing the bad
elders. Or else, more amusingly, the husband - or the
threatened young wife herself - might arrange instead
to have the miscreants' old wives meet their husbands
at the trist, and leave old women to wreak condign
vengeance on old men. Or else - but enough of this;
modulations abound, and it is not those other stories
that concern us beyond a useful recognition of how
they determine the possibilities of Susanna's career.
For although Susanna's problem is only a modulation
of all those other folktale heroines', it remains
nonetheless Susanna's own peculiar problem.
And Susanna's peculiar
problem is just this: her husband, like Rebekah's old
Isaac, Bathsheba's Uriah, or Hawwah's Adam, is crucially
flawed as a benefactor and guardian of her. Her Joakim
is not, namely, the sort of husband who implicitly
trusts his wife, and who in any question of honour
automatically comes to her defense, more confidently
believing her than others. To do as (other) classic
folktale heroines may do in such a plight is not
therefore a servicable strategy for Susanna. First,
such a strategy might conceivably fail: what if the
two comically addlebrained elders, sensing danger for
themselves despite their obsessive yearning, were to
shun the subsequent trist after all? For this too is
a valid modulation of the folktale pattern. And even
were they to be successfully tricked in that fashion,
it would be a pyrrhic victory for a woman whose
fundamental innocence is doubted even by a husband whom
she has not previously wronged or given any other
excuse for mistrust. The text of Susanna's story as
t stands in the apocrypha explicitly confirms that she
has not. Yet any woman discovered to be so devastatingly
guileful as Susanna would have been had she followed
the stock folktale script in destroying a pair of
unwanted old adulterers might well also be recognized by
an uncertainly trustful husband as clever enough to get
and conceal any more welcome young adulterer any time
she might happen to feel like it. The sum of this and
suchlike tales everywhere in the Old Testament
demonstrates nothing else so conclusively as the reality
that whereas guile is indispensable to women, they must
also never be discovered in it.
Susanna's needs are therefore twofold; she must both
fend off the dirty old men and win for herself
better esteem on her husband's part than she evidently
enjoys. She needs, in other words, not to wait, but
rather to seize the present opportunity instantly, and
to extract from it her own future well-being without
further parley. So she resorts to a variant of Absalom's
sister Tamar's tactics; she does a bit of pretending
that the wicked males' offense against her is not
exactly what it really is, but something else. The
comical old men have, it is true, made a nasty indecent
proposal, but Susanna pretends that it was much more
than mere words; she cries out for help as though the
two had actually made a physical assault on her. Thus
trapped by Susanna's womanly pretence even before her
maids have returned to the garden to put a safer if
less dramatic end to the old men's importunity, the
elders do all they can to fend off the looming peril
to themselves: they join with Susanna in her outcry,
claiming afterwards only that their reason for it was
different from hers (as indeed it was).
Having tried thus to
ruin her good reputation, the two evil elders next
attempt to use a property that is uniquely theirs to
destroy the rest of Susanna. That property is their
office as magistrates, and the reputation for probity
which of course attends it. In this way Susanna's
rejected extra-marital lovers try to become instead
her rivals in guile. But when Susanna tells the boy
Daniel, among others, her honest secret as to what
really happened to her in her garden, Daniel uses it
to take away the wicked elder's own reputations
(for magistratic honesty) and consequently also their
office of judge, which he himself assumes in their
stead. The two errant elders forfeit their very lives
in the process. All this Daniel achieves with wise
and incontrovertible proofs of Susanna's necessary
innocence. So Susanna's good reputation is not only
restored to her, but also secured for the future by
Daniel's concurrently risen reputation for judicial
insight, which certainly far surpasses that of her
own husband Joakim. Never again will anyone accuse
Susanna of such misdeeds without having to reckon
with Daniel's amazing powers of discernment, and so
Susanna will be henceforth harmless, despite her
own Joakim's manifest inadequacy of judgement.
Now we have
considered all but one of the named women with
stories of their own in the Old Testament, whether
strictly canonical nor not. I have deliberately
put off the remaining one because she belongs to
the very beginning of things, and we didn't start
at the beginning. She was...
...who admitted her guilt to Eden's owner, butd
deceptively blamed its causation on the serpent.
Truly the serpent did suggest to her pilferage of
the Lord's forbidden fruit; but just as truly she
reflected on the beast's proposition, and made a
deliberate decision in her own best interest. One
cannot forget that Yahweh had never undertaken any
commitments to her whatever; it was the man who was
his gardener, and who therefore, in the usual way of
male relationships, had a male employee's (or
servant's) set of rights and duties with respect
to a male employer (or master) as provider for his
welfare. But what of the woman Hawwah's position?
Whom could she rely upon? She held no
commission in the Lord's service, and had been
nvented solely as an accommodation and companion
for Adam, not because any deity cared one way or
another about her personally. And I ask you: what
responsible, self-respecting woman whatever could
ong put up with that? Stories like hers make it
plain that even though the Old Testament may not
greatly succeed in explaining the God's mysterious
ways to mankind, it must be taken very seriously
as an explanation by apt examples of human nature
to deity.
So Hawwah did what
she had to do; she contemplated the serpent's
suggestion carefully, and upon due reflection:
"The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and
pleasing to the eye, and that it was desirable for
the knowledge it could give" (Gen. 3:6). Plainly
too, Adam needed help in regard to both knowledge
and wisdom if he was going to be fit to care for
her and her interests in after time. So she
transferred understanding from the male who
formerly had sole possession of it to the male
whom she could expect to be her loyal support in
the future, and she did that in such a way as to
make the stolen property irrecoverable to the
former; just as she also hid the anatomical organs
that securely linked her with the male whose ward
she elected to be in preference to the other male
whom she could not depend upon, perfectly
concealing all the while her real motive from
the male loser in her transaction. As things
turned out, her womanly interest in making humans
by other, more complicated means than Yahweh's
crude technology with mud and ribs produced
specimens both more diverse and more inventive
than the Lord's old clod Adam ever was; but the
latter stayed nevertheless protectively by her
as her provider while she was about her woman's
business of `making men.' And oh, it was surely
a perilous episode for Adam, who lost both his
life and his erstwhile easy living in the process.
Nor did the Lord himself escape with no more loss
than his purloined fruit of the tree of
understanding. With it went his gardener too;
and it would seem that the fenced paradise at
Eden wasn't very viable after the man's departure,
for despite great improvements in geographical
knowledge since Noah's time, no one has ever found
a trace of Yahweh's garden.
To recapitulate
the underlying pattern one last time; an Old
Testament tale narrating the deeds of any
named woman entails:
- A device of concealment, ruse, pretence, or other trickery employed by a woman, with or without the assistance of other female `accomplice(s);'
- thereby a masculine person or persons
- loses a valuable male property
- to another male or males
- who will provide for the woman's well-being subsequently, and
- masculine coefficients of the transaction either perish
outright or are mortally imperiled, or both.
As the tales where we have
found the pattern routinely display, moreover, there is also
a seventh element which we have noticed from time to time,
but not yet sufficiently analyzed, and it is, namely:
- a matrix of extended male alliances and
interdependencies subsisting on one, or the other,
or on both sides of the transaction occasioned
by a woman's guile.
But the male network is
another story, and I must defer analysis of it to another
time.
*
Notes
- See "Comparative Observations" in:
Serbo-Croatian Heroic Poems; Epics from Bihac, Cazin,
and Kulen Vakuf, translated and annotated by David E.
Bynum, New York and London, 1993, pp. 675-788.
- David E. Bynum, The Daemon in
the Wood; a Study of Oral Narrative Patterns, Cambridge,
MA, 1978, pp. 277-299.
Version History
v. 1 Original title: Dangerous Women: Male Malfeasance
and Feminine Sorties in Some Old Testament Narratives. Read
at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the Society of
Biblical Literature, Chicago, Illinois.
v. 2 Revision, extension, and hypertext markup 14 September, 2000.
* * *
