The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (40 page)

You mean
that’s
in the Bible?

Yes, dear reader,
that’s
in the Bible.

But wait—it gets worse.

Four hundred virgins, no matter how fecund, are simply not sufficient to provide bedmates to the six hundred surviving Benjaminites at the Rock of Rimmon, and so the remorseful Israelites are compelled to look farther afield for suitable women. Someone points out that a harvest festival is held every year in the vineyards of Shiloh, and the festival is the occasion for singing and dancing by the maidens of the district. And so the surviving Benjaminite soldiers are promptly dispatched to Shiloh. “Go and lie in wait in the vineyards, and see … if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance,” the soldiers are told by their former enemies, “then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife” (Judg. 21:20–21).

By such brutal means, we are told, the endangered species of Benjaminites is saved from extinction, the unity of Israel is restored, and all is made well again. “The children of Israel departed,” says the author of
Judges, “every man to his tribe and to his family” (Judg. 21:24). Again we are reminded of the story of Lot, where the earnest desire of Lot’s daughters to repopulate a God-blasted landscape leads to seduction and incest; here, abduction and rape are the means to repopulate the ravaged tribe of Benjamin. Both Genesis 19 and Judges 19 are disturbing examples of how moral order, always precarious in the Bible, “is turned upside down [when] one lives in an age governed by human selfishness.”
³

After the orgy of violence that follows the gang rape and murder of the concubine—mass murder, mass abduction, mass rape—the traditional reference to the incident of the traveler and his concubine as the Gibeah Outrage seems almost ironic. Only one woman is cast to a mob of rapists at Gibeah, but six hundred women share the same fate at the Rock of Rimmon. The real outrage is that tens of thousands of men, women, and children are slain—and hundreds of young women are sexually enslaved—as the cycle of sin and despair in Israel achieves a kind of moral fission.

The outrages against women that take up so much of the Book of Judges explain why even the earliest feminist Bible critics tended to regard the Holy Scriptures as hopelessly tainted by the sexism of the stern patriarchy that created the Bible in the first place. More than a century ago, pioneering feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton published a collection of biblical commentary titled
The Woman’s
Bible, in which she complained that the Bible had long been used to enslave and oppress woman. Nothing before or since has exceeded her flat condemnation of the Bible as a rhetorical weapon directed at women.

“Whatever the Bible may be made to do in Hebrew or Greek,” wrote Stanton, “in plain English it does not exalt and dignify woman.” She declared herself unimpressed by most, if not all, of the women in the Bible. “In fact the wives of the patriarchs, all untruthful, and one a kleptomaniac,” she cracked, “but illustrate the law, that the cardinal virtues are seldom found in the oppressed classes,”
⁴
and she summed up what she saw as the sorry role assigned to women by Holy Writ:

Some contemporary feminist Bible scholars still feel the same way. For example, they are troubled by the fact that the women depicted in the Bible resort so often to guile and deception to achieve otherwise praiseworthy ends. The deceit practiced on various men by Rebekah, Tamar, Ruth, Rahab, and others strikes Bible scholar Carole Fontaine as “morally ambivalent,” especially when the trickery is based on sexual allure or actual seduction. Rebekah connives with her son, Jacob, to trick her husband into bestowing the blessing of the firstborn on the younger son by cooking up a savory stew. Tamar seduces her father-in-law by dressing up as a harlot. Ruth, at the urging of her mother-in-law, carries out an elaborate seduction of a rich landowner on his threshing floor. And Rahab, a good-hearted hooker, conspires with a pair of Israelite spies to turn away the soldiers of the Canaanite king.

“‘[W]oman the Provider,’ associated with food, drink, and shelter,” writes Fontaine, “turns deceiver, thereby rendering the familiar nurturing figure suddenly dangerous to unsuspecting males who fall into her ‘snares.’”
⁶

Of course, the use of deceit and seduction by these biblical women can be understood and explained even by critics who are put off by such depictions. To be fair—and perfectly frank—the fact is that women in the biblical era did not have any weapons
other
than trickery to work their will in the real world. A woman in ancient Israel was far more likely to be a wife, a concubine, a handmaid, or a harlot than, say, a queen or a prophetess; and, in any case, the Bible was interpreted to forbid the use of weaponry by women (Deut. 22:5). No matter what their standing, women were always under the domination of a male figure, first a father, then a husband, and sometimes a son. Except when summoned to bed by a man, they were confined to the women’s tent
and the company of other women. So it should not surprise us that the biblical women who assert themselves at all are compelled to use the offer of food, shelter, or sexual gratification—the only tools available “to those who lack power to achieve their ends in other ways.”
⁷

Sexism in the Bible, then, is sometimes strictly in the eye of the beholder. Bible critic Esther Fuchs, for example, reads the account of God’s visit to Abraham at the terebinths of Mamre, where Sarah laughs out loud when she overhears the divine promise that she will yet bear a son in old age, and concludes that Sarah is depicted by the biblical author as “confined, passive, cowardly, deceptive, and unfaithful.”
⁸
Yet the very same passage strikes novelist Joseph Heller as worthy of celebration: Sarah’s laughter is an act of audacity and courage by a woman of “generous, high-spirited good nature.” “Old Sarah’s fun—she laughed and lied to God,” King David is made to say in Heller’s God
Knows
, “and I still get a big treat out of that.”
⁹

What is often overlooked in these debates is the fact that the Bible—and the culture that the Bible defines and describes—treated women with greater care and respect than they generally enjoyed elsewhere in the ancient Near East. Daughters of Israel, for example, are entitled to inherit property under certain limited circumstances (Num. 27:3–8); a man is not permitted to sell his wife into slavery (Deut. 21:14); a daughter who is sold into servititude is entitled to her freedom if her master violates her rights under biblical law (Exod. 21:7–11); and, as we have seen, a childless widow is entitled to the extraordinary benefits of a levirate “marriage” (Deut. 25:5–10). (See chapter seven.) Such grudging allowances may not much impress some contemporary readers, but the fact that women have
any
legal status under biblical law is “almost unique in the ancient world,” as Bible scholar Gila Ramras-Rauch points out.
¹⁰

What’s more, an open-eyed reading of the Bible reveals that women play a crucial and dynamic role in the destiny of humankind, in both Jewish and Christian tradition. Inevitably, a woman figures decisively in the recurring theme of “the birth of the chosen one,” starting with the matriarchs of the Hebrew Bible and culminating with the Virgin Mary in the Christian Bible. As we have already seen, Lot’s daughters and Judah’s daughter-in-law are examples of how the bearer of the “chosen one” is not passively impregnated with the seed of a patriarch; rather, these women take it upon themselves to defy the will of powerful men
and sometimes God himself in order to bring about the crucial birth. Indeed, the Bible frequently singles out “the woman as initiator of events,” as Ramras-Rauch puts it. “From Eve through Sarah and Esther, women have shaped sacred history through word and deed.”
¹¹

Still, a certain sexist sting can be felt in unexpected places in the Bible. Remarkably, even a woman so thoroughly victimized as the Levite’s concubine still comes in for a bit of victim-blaming by the biblical author, at least in one version of the Bible. According to the Masoretic Text, an early and authoritative Hebrew version of the Bible, the Levite and the concubine are estranged because she “played the harlot against him” (Judg. 19:2 JPS), thus setting into motion the sequence of mishaps that reaches a sudden and unexpected crescendo of violence on that night in Gibeah.

But the phrase “play the harlot” does not appear in the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Bible that serves as the basis for many Christian Bibles, which says that the concubine “became angry with him” (RSV) and thus suggests only an ordinary squabble between husband and wife.
¹²
Indeed, we might conclude that she is the one sinned against, especially since the Levite displays such ardor in making his way to her father’s house “to speak kindly unto her, to bring her back” (RSV).
¹³
In any event, the Levite’s father-in-law seems very glad indeed to see him when he arrives in hot pursuit of his mate.
*

The fact that the woman is described as a concubine, by the way, is probably
not
intended by the biblical author to demean her. A concubine is technically defined as a “a legal wife of secondary rank,”
¹⁴
a woman who “dedicate[s] herself to one particular man exclusively,” and who “could partake of many aspects of regular marriage.”
¹⁵
A concubine was
not
equivalent to a mistress or a harlot, at least according to biblical tradition and rabbinical law; the Bible regards concubinage as an
unremarkable and perfectly honorable position in a household, and four of the twelve tribes of Israel descend from the sons of Jacob’s concubines. But contemporary readers tend to feel otherwise, and at least one feminist Bible critic argues that the concubine ought to be regarded as a kind of sexual chattel: “Legally and socially, she is not the equivalent of a wife,” insists Phyllis Trible, “but is virtually a slave, secured by a man for his own purposes.”
¹⁶

Trible goes even further in
Texts of Terror
, her collection of revisionist readings of the Bible, and suggests that the Levite himself may well be the murderer of the concubine and not merely an unwitting accomplice to her murder. The Septuagint plainly states that the concubine is dead when the Levite finds her outside the door of the old man’s house in Gibeah. But the Masoretic Text is not so plainspoken: we are only told that the Levite calls to her, and she makes no answer. So Trible asks us to entertain the notion that the concubine was still alive on the morning after the gang rape, that she clung to life on the long journey back to the hill-country of Ephraim and died only when the Levite took out his butcher knife and went to work on her body.

“Is the cowardly betrayer,” asks Trible, “also the murderer?”
¹⁷

Such crimes and misdemeanors on the part of the Levite, real or imagined, are ultimately less troubling than the blood-shaking acts of violence against women that are so graphically depicted throughout the Book of Judges. The Gibeah Outrage is the single most grotesque example of what feminist Bible critic Anne Michele Tapp characterizes as “gyno-sadistic biblical texts,”
¹⁸
and the stories of Lot’s daughters and Jephthah’s daughter are only slightly less off-putting. “They are passive, resigned and helpless,” she writes of all of these nameless women and their stories of abuse. “They suggest that women lived only as objects to be bartered, abused and sacrificed by men.” What’s worse, Tapp insists, the moral example of these Bible stories was (and perhaps still is) not merely sexist but actually life-threatening. “The ideologies expressed through these [stories],” writes Tapp, “are both degrading and deadly for women.”
¹⁹

Yet, remarkably enough, another feminist Bible scholar proposes that the author of the Book of Judges
is
a woman. What’s more, she asks us to consider whether the physical violence and sexual abuse described in Judges is not so grotesque, so preposterous, that it amounts to an elaborate work of parody. Adrien Janis Bledstein wonders if whether the
Book of Judges was composed by “a deeply religious woman who is satirizing men who play God,” a woman who is “[using] humor to deflate the arrogant.”
²⁰
And Bible scholar David Penchansky is willing to entertain the same intriguing notion: he detects “some radically feminist perspectives within the Hebrew Bible,” and he goes on to imagine that Judges is the work of “a woman secretly harboring sympathies for the goddess, perhaps Asherah.”
²¹

By tradition, authorship of Judges was ascribed to the prophet Samuel, but the conventional wisdom among scholars is that the book was probably compiled from various stories and poems of the ancient Israelites by the same person (or, perhaps, persons) who authored the Book of Deuteronomy, a source known as “D” or the Deuteronomist. In fact, the Deuteronomist (or a source called the “Deuteronomistic historian”) is thought to have authored—or assembled and edited—not only Deuteronomy itself but also the six books that follow in the Hebrew Bible, including Joshua, Judges, the First and Second Books of Samuel, and the First and Second Books of Kings.
²²