In any case, Dinah"s twelve brothers had a nasty trick up their sleeves. While the Hivite men"s newly unsheathed swords were healing up-or as the Bible puts it, "on the third day, when they were still in pain"-two of the brothers, Simeon and Levi, came around to settle a score.1 The Hivite men, stumbling around cupping their codpieces, were unable to wield their swords literally or metaphorically. Simeon and Levi slaughtered all the men of the city. The other brothers did not partic.i.p.ate directly in the ma.s.sacre but were happy to plunder the victims, seizing all their property, including their wives and children.
Back home, Pa.s.sive Jake heard the news and was horrified. He complained to Simeon and Levi that their actions would bring trouble to him from the other Canaanite peoples. But the boys replied that they could not allow Shechem to get away with treating their sister like a wh.o.r.e. With brothers like that, no wonder Dinah wasn"t married yet.
Bed "Em and Wed "Em Careful reading of this story raises a lot of questions, many of which are addressed in a literary way in Anita Diamant"s Hebrew-chick-lit novel The Red Tent. Did Shechem actually rape Dinah? If so, why did he fall in love with her and want to marry her? Usually rapists view their victims as objects rather than long-term partners. If he was in love with her, why didn"t he try to marry her through regular channels? Was he really that impulsive and/or h.o.r.n.y?
What about Dinah? What were her feelings? Was she also in love with Shechem? And what about Jacob? Why so laid back? Didn"t he care about his only daughter? Why would he even consider allowing her to marry a man who raped her, if that"s what Shechem did?
We think there"s more than the usual Genesis bizarreness going on here, which is why we were gratified to find a theory from Joseph Fleishman, a Bible scholar who teaches at Bar-Ilan University in Tel-Aviv, Israel. Fleishman thinks the wedding disaster was due to a clash of cultures between the Canaanites and Jacob"s family.2 He argues that the Canaanites, among whom were included the Hivites, practiced "marriage by abduction." According to this custom, a groom did not ask the bride"s father for consent beforehand, but rather kidnapped her with the intent of marriage and then consummated the marriage by having s.e.x with her. (This is still quite common in Arkansas.) Any negotiations between the groom"s family and the bride"s family took place after the marriage was consummated. And such negotiations were conducted not for the purpose of changing the marriage but to establish a proper relationship between the two families, so as to decide who got the mules and the back forty.
Interpreting the story of Dinah in this light, Fleishman holds that Shechem did not rape Dinah. The verb "took," he says, has a dual function.3 It means that he physically kidnapped her. But it also refers to marriage. Therefore, when he "lay with her," Shechem"s purpose was not to rape her but to make her his wife. Shechem"s looking a lot better in this light. The third verb in this verse, which states that he "humiliated" her (the NRSV translates the second and third verbs together as "he lay with her by force"), refers to Dinah"s sense of shame at having been bedded before being wedded, which seriously damaged her reputation in the local True Love Waits Club. Shechem was truly in love with Dinah, and to soothe her feelings of humiliation he "spoke tenderly" to her (literally, "spoke to the heart").4 He did not view her as a temporary s.e.x object but as his future wife. This is also why Dinah stayed in Shechem"s house after their s.e.xual tryst.5 According to Fleishman, Shechem"s actions were an acceptable way of marrying outside of one"s own clan or tribe in Canaanite culture. That is why Shechem"s father, Hamor, treated the situation matter-of-factly and went to negotiate with Jacob in a businesslike manner. The problem was that Jacob and his sons weren"t real keen on marriage by abduction. Jacob"s silence suggests that he felt he had no choice but to accept the marriage post facto, as long as the Hivites were willing to undergo circ.u.mcision. As a stranger living in the midst of Canaanite society, what else could he do? But his sons felt differently. They saw Shechem"s treatment of their sister as a serious violation of their family"s honor, and they took revenge like a riled-up bunch of McCoys.
Family Feud Fleishman"s interpretation gracefully answers the questions raised about this story. It accounts for Shechem"s desire to marry Dinah after having s.e.x with her. It also explains why Jacob may have been willing to allow the marriage. It even hints at what Dinah might have been feeling. These explanations make Fleishman"s idea very attractive.
Furthermore, the idea of marriage by abduction has historical precedent, not least of which is the rich textual evidence found in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, MGM"s 1954 musical. The musical, loosely based on Stephen Vincent Benet"s story "Sobbin" Women," tells of brothers who kidnapped women and took them back to their cabin in the Oregon mountains. If you like acrobatic dance and a lot of politically incorrect gender dialogue, this is your kind of movie.
But the sobbin" women story actually goes back further to another politically incorrect bunch, the ancient Greeks. Plutarch, the leading playwright of his day, wrote a story called "The Rape of the Sabine Women."6 It tells how the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus, got wives for the stinky, uncouth group of men who inhabited his city. Romulus proclaimed a celebration and invited many of Rome"s neighbors, including the Sabines. As the celebration was about to begin, he signaled the young Roman men to come into the crowd and carry away women of their choice, kind of like spring break in Daytona Beach.
There are other stories of this nature from ancient Greece, including the well-known myth of Persephone"s capture by Hades. There is even a story about marriage by abduction elsewhere in the Bible.7 But is there any evidence outside of this story that marriage by abduction was a custom in Canaanite society? Not really. The ancient stories on which the idea of marriage by abduction are based, such as the one about the Sabine women and the one in Judges about the women at Shiloh, describe the practice as a last resort at a time of emergency. There is in fact no clear evidence of a regular practice like this in antiquity, including among the Canaanites. It is a conjecture on Fleishman"s part. His interpretation is plausible, but by no means certain.
So, one has to ask whether Fleishman"s theory is any more likely than the more traditional understanding of this story. The answer is, probably not. What happened in the story can be explained by human nature alone. Shechem"s rape of Dinah may have been a kind of ancient "date rape." When he got her alone (the story doesn"t explain how), he went too far. But he still had feelings for her. Maybe she had feelings for him as well. So he kept her with him, planning to marry her. Shechem got his father to negotiate with Jacob for Dinah"s hand. It was not the usual custom, but Shechem was a spoiled prince and accustomed to having his way. Hamor was willing to offer great riches to Jacob to make his son happy. He also had designs on the property of Jacob and his sons. But Jacob"s sons refused to be appeased and concocted a plan of revenge. The offense they took was only partly to do with the treatment of their sister. They saw Shechem"s behavior also as a personal affront.
Fleishman"s postulation of an unproven Canaanite custom isn"t really necessary to explain any of this. This story probably doesn"t depict a clash of cultures but rather a young couple"s relationship that got off on the very wrong foot.
18.
Was Lot a s.e.xually Abusive Father?
WE COME NOW to another Bible story that, were it made into a movie, would shock and repulse even today"s jaded audiences. The main character, Lot, is one of those antiheroes. It"s painful to watch as he makes one bad decision after another, his life literally crumbling around him.
One of the most repugnant scenes involves Lot"s daughters and the disgraceful thing they did with their drunken father in a remote cave. But the question we take up here is, who did what to whom exactly? And what might Lot"s story be telling us about the sordid desires of men who lived back then? Proceed with caution. This one gets ugly.
There Goes the Neighborhood Lot was Abraham"s nephew, which is perhaps the only reason he got any ink in the Good Book to begin with. The main part of his story pops up in Genesis 19, which tells of Lot"s family"s skin-of-their-teeth escape from wicked Sodom and Gomorrah. Those cities, as fundamentalists love to remind us, then took a flaming sulfur bath courtesy of G.o.d"s heavenly spigot.
But back up a few hours to when Sodom and Gomorrah were your typical anything-goes kind of towns. In walked two visitors, but these were not your typical wandering wayfarers. They were angels on a mission from G.o.d, not unlike the Blues Brothers several millennia later. The angels had come from heaven to see firsthand just how depraved things had gotten in these towns, whose stinky reputations had caused an outcry in heaven itself.
Lot knew (that"s a pun) the town well enough to know (there it is again) that the two strangers might as well have hung FRESH MEAT signs around their necks. After inviting the angels-in-disguise to his home, he "urged them strongly" not to spend the night in the town square.1 The angels complied, and sure enough, the other men of the city began buzzing around Lot"s house like flies on a dung heap, demanding that he bring out his visitors so they could rape (literally "know") them.
Ever the dutiful host, Lot begged his neighbors to back off and then offered them his daughters instead of his guests. Why he did this, we don"t know. Perhaps he had skipped a few parenting cla.s.ses. But it"s possible that ancient readers would not have viewed this with the same horror as we do. They might have thought Lot was simply being a good host. In any case, the men of Sodom didn"t want Lot"s daughters. They wanted the new guys.
As it turned out, the angels didn"t need Lot to protect them because, of course, they had angel powers. They struck the h.o.r.n.y gang blind and urged Lot and his family to escape. When Lot dallied, perhaps grabbing the silverware and photo alb.u.ms, they literally pushed him out of the city, telling him to flee. Lot, his wife, and his two daughters set course for a small town nearby named Zoar. Lot"s sons-in-law stayed behind in Sodom, thinking that Lot was joking about heading for safety. When G.o.d rained down fire and brimstone, they perished. Then, as Lot and the women in his life were fleeing against this backdrop of smoke and flames, Lot"s wife looked back at Sodom, against the orders of the angels, and turned into a pillar of salt. That"s three down.
Now we come to the part of the story that is the focus of this chapter. Lot and his daughters became afraid to stay in Zoar and moved to the nearby hills, settling in a cave. His daughters apparently became convinced that there were no other men on earth who would have s.e.x with them, so they decided to seduce their father and bear children by him. On successive nights, they got him drunk and had s.e.x with him, first the older, then the younger. They each became pregnant and in time gave birth to sons they named Moab and Ben-ammi. The two boys were the ancestors of the peoples known as the Moabites and Ammonites.
Low-Down Dirty Insult The somewhat sickening story of Lot is usually interpreted by scholars as a series of etiologies about the region around the Dead Sea. To refresh your memory, an etiology is a story that explains the origins of something-a name, a geological phenomenon, or a social custom, for example. The Lot story explains how the area went from being lush and fertile (according to Genesis 13:1011) to being hot and barren-because G.o.d rained fire upon it. It also explains why the Dead Sea is lifeless and has a sulfurlike odor and mineral formations along the sh.o.r.e. The odor comes from the burning brimstone or sulfur that G.o.d rained down, and Lot"s wife is a salt or mineral formation. Even the name Zoar is explained etiologically. "Zoar" means "small," and Lot calls it a small city.
The episode between Lot and his daughters is also often seen as an etiology and a rude jab at Moab and Ammon. These countries sat on the other side of the Dead Sea from Israel. (The present-day Jordanian capital, Amman, gets its name from ancient Ammon.) But the names Moab and Ammon are loaded with meaning. Moab looks and sounds like Hebrew me ab, which means "from father." Ammon is similar to Hebrew amm, meaning "people," and Ben-ammi means "son of my people." Both words can be seen as implying incest, and that"s how the Israelite writer meant for them to be understood. It was the world"s first "your mama" joke, if you will.
The story, then, was your typical knock on a despised rival. People do this today about neighboring states, countries, or even work colleagues. For instance, there"s a joke going around our state of Tennessee that makes fun of Arkansas and Mississippi, both of which border it. The joke goes: Why did the Arkansan move from Tennessee to Mississippi? Answer: He wanted to raise the IQ of both states. We"ll give you a moment to figure that one out.
Ammon, Moab, and Israel were neighboring states, so naturally, they made fun of each other. The point of the Lot story, as one biblical scholar put it, was to "prove" that the Moabites and Ammonites were descended from incestuous b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Take that.
When Is a Cave Just a Cave?
But the scholar J. Cheryl Exum (remember her from chapter 6?) departs from this standard view and takes the story down a very different road.2 She wants to show that Lot"s daughters weren"t the perverts-Lot was, and most of the men of his era too. She starts by picking off the low-hanging fruit, pointing out that several features of the story don"t make sense. For instance, if Lot was so drunk that he didn"t know he was having s.e.x with his daughters, how was he able to-how shall we put this?-rise to the occasion? And how did his daughters seem to know after just one experience with him that they were pregnant? (Neither of them had s.e.x with their father again.) Scholars have long noticed these curious elements and have accounted for them by their etiological interpretation. That is, what"s important in the story isn"t all the details but the sordid explanation it offers for the Ammonites and Moabites.
But Exum digs deeper into the daughters" motivation and asks why they would hop on Pop if the town of Zoar, presumably home to at least a few men, was right around the corner. Did they really think no man would have them? Or were there no men nearby, and if so, why did Lot not discuss this problem with his daughters? Furthermore, if the human race was in danger of extinction, what did the daughters" two sons do for wives? How did they reproduce, and why were Lot"s daughters not concerned about this matter? None of it pa.s.ses the smell test for Exum.
Exum suggests that the story is told all wrong. Lot, she says, was an abusive father who committed incest with his daughters, smoothing the way with alcohol to act out his repressed fantasies of desire. As is typical in abuse cases, he blamed the victims, and so the story implicates the daughters instead of dirty old Dad. These are not Exum"s original ideas, but her slant is slightly different from that of other feminist interpreters. Her method, as we saw in the "Abraham the Pimp" chapter, is to get the "narrator" of this story on the couch for some serious psychoa.n.a.lysis. To understand this we offer this refresher course on how things work in ExumLand. By "narrator" she does not mean the author of the story, because such an author would have died long ago. Besides, she believes that the story as we have it was produced by one or more editors combining several sources. Rather, she uses "narrator" to mean "the cultural or collective androcentric unconscious" that gave rise to the story.
We should have warned you to brace yourself for some highfalutin academic-speak. "Androcentric," for those of you who have successfully avoided studying Greek roots, means "focused on men." Exum treats Lot"s story like a dream and psychoa.n.a.lyzes it as a fantasy that operates with different meanings on different levels and betrays the subconscious not just of one man but of an entire male culture. As with Abraham earlier, she considers all of the characters in the story as "split-off parts of the narrator," representing the "fears, desires, wishes, and so on" that are parts of the "cultural male psyche." Her a.n.a.lysis is not designed to solve the problems presented by the story, such as the unusual features mentioned earlier, but to shed new light on them by showing how they operate on a subconscious level.
Through Exum"s prism, Genesis 19 can be divided into three parts. The first part, where the angels save Lot, depicts the narrator"s superego in full force. The superego always shows one"s conscious control over situations, self, and others. In this case, the angels embodied the superego and inhibited the s.e.xual fantasies manufactured by Lot"s id or libido. Exum then drags readers through a thicket of Freudian interpretation. She says that when Lot offered his daughters to the men of the city, it ill.u.s.trated the narrator"s control over his daughters" s.e.xuality. To allow himself to indulge in the fantasy of having s.e.x with them, the narrator first imagined h.o.m.os.e.xual s.e.x, which was even more abhorrent to him than incest. The blindness with which the angels struck the men was the narrator"s "self-punishment" for his incestuous fantasy. Blindness symbolized castration, so the men groped unsuccessfully for the "opening," an allusion to intercourse with the daughters.
In the second part, the sons-in-law serve a similar function and also represent the superego. They stood in the way of the narrator"s fantasy through Lot of an incestuous affair with the daughters. Therefore, they were quickly disposed of so that the fantasy could proceed. The same was true of Lot"s wife, who was the final obstacle to the fantasy. Lot"s reluctance to leave Sodom and his request to go to Zoar instead of the hills was another effort by the narrator"s superego to prevent the exercise of the id"s fantasy, which needed to take place in an isolated place where Lot was alone with his daughters.
In the third part, the narrator absolved himself of the fantasy by blaming the daughters and the alcohol. The repeated mentions of these matters (alcohol four times, s.e.x with daughters five times) betray the narrator"s enjoyment at replaying the scene. Despite his claims to innocence, the narrator proudly rounded out his fantasy by imagining his s.e.xual potency in the daughters" birthing of two sons. Finally, Exum points out several terms used in the story that are s.e.xually suggestive. Not the least of these is the word "cave," where the s.e.xual fantasy is set. Exum echoes the suggestion of previous scholars that "cave" is a euphemism for v.a.g.i.n.a. How original.
Exum on the Couch The problems Exum points out in the story have long been recognized by biblical scholars, and Exum doesn"t imagine that her proposal resolves these problems. She only tries to explain why they are there and to give an intriguing alternative to the standard view. Fine. But the question is whether her interpretation improves on the more usual etiological one. We let Exum off the hook in chapter 6, but her treatment of the Lot story exposes the real weaknesses in her approach. First off, once you turn the story into a "dream," you put yourself into the realm of imagination where standard rules of biblical a.n.a.lysis go out the window. It"s like falling down the rabbit hole with Alice. By entering into the narrator"s fantasy life and insisting that therein lie the multileveled meanings and hidden desires, Exum clears the decks of any limits or controls on her own interpretations. The story suddenly means whatever she wishes.
Exum also plays fast and loose with Freudian theory, which, we should add, is outdated anyway according to our colleagues in the psychology department. For example, Freud posited the "Oedipus complex," according to which a man has a subconscious desire for an exclusive relationship with his mother. Freud thought the same could hold true for a daughter"s desire for her father, and later psychologists ent.i.tled this the "Electra complex." But this is the opposite of what Exum believes takes place in the Lot story. She says Lot desired his daughters. She has flipped Freud"s Electra complex on its head. To her credit, Exum admits her inconsistency and includes a rather lengthy disclaimer, but the bottom line is that she picks and chooses what she likes about Freud without remaining consistent or true to this approach. Perhaps she is right to do so, but her selectivity raises more red flags about her interpretation.
There is another, more disturbing aspect to Exum"s reading, and if we weren"t so secure in our manliness, we might take personal umbrage. By a.n.a.lyzing a collective unconscious, she seems to implicate all men, or at least all ancient Israelite men, as partic.i.p.ants in this ghastly fantasy. Surely this is an unfair stereotype. The days of making blanket inferences about all people of another race, gender, or culture are long gone. But Exum thinks it"s fair to speak of an entire male culture having sick, repressed desires. Perhaps the Freudian a.n.a.lysis should be turned on Exum, since her interpretation seems to reveal more about her biases than it does about the nature of the story or the storytellers, authors, and editors who produced it.
We"re tired of tangling with Exum. Let"s tackle something less Freudian and more straightforward and gross.
19.
Did Ishmael Molest Isaac?
MANY PEOPLE TRY to follow the Bible"s teachings so they can have a happy home. But the truth is, there aren"t many happy homes depicted in the Bible. The real inheritors of the Bible example are families who have experienced divorce, deception, adultery, and incest or have a murderer or rapist in the family. The Good Book is simply loaded with bad kin. And it"s a virtual handbook for how not to raise children. Most of us are better off doing as the Bible says, not as it shows.
In this chapter, we look at another ugly crime that may have to be added to the rap sheet of Bible family behavior: child abuse.
Brotherly Love As we"ve seen before, brothers in the Bible express their love in funny ways. They murder each other, sell each other into slavery, and betray each other. One of the Bible"s most detailed accounts of family discord centers on Ishmael and Isaac, Abraham"s sons by different mothers. As some of you Bible-savvy readers may recall, Abraham remained childless for decades after G.o.d promised he would be the father of many offspring. Then Abraham"s fortunes changed, and he had two children, one by Hagar, the Egyptian maidservant of his wife Sarah, and then one by Sarah herself. Again, that"s two women, one man, and two children. And they weren"t even living in Utah.
As anyone knows who has ever openly maintained s.e.xual relations with his wife and the maid, this situation led to some catty encounters. Fortunately for Hagar, shotguns had not yet been invented. Sarah simply drove Hagar out of the family. In fact, Sarah did this twice, first when Hagar was pregnant with Ishmael. But that time Hagar returned and an uneasy truce was established. Seventeen years later, Hagar was again forced to leave the family, but this time the breach was much more severe and the reason for her leaving more ambiguous. The Bible says that Sarah witnessed some sort of encounter between Ishmael and her son Isaac. But what did she see? That question sets the stage for our next foray into highly distasteful interpretations.
Ishmael and Isaac were half-brothers, fourteen years apart in age. This means that at the time of this mysterious incident Ishmael was a full-blown adolescent and Isaac was just learning to pee outside the tent. Because this scene comes immediately after the mention of a banquet that Abraham threw in honor of Isaac"s being weaned (and who hasn"t enjoyed such wonderful weaning celebrations?), it"s possible that Ishmael would have been about seventeen years of age and Isaac about three. To the best of our knowledge, the women had lived together in peace since Ishmael"s birth. But whatever Sarah saw Ishmael do to Isaac was bad enough for her to toss out household stability and demand that Abraham banish Hagar and Ishmael forever.
So what exactly did Ishmael do? The Hebrew word used to describe his action is metsaheq, a form of the verb "to laugh."1 (This is one of a series of puns in Genesis on the name "Isaac," which means "he laughs.") But "laughing" doesn"t appear to fit the context, so most English translations of the verse render the word as "playing," and a few opt for "mocking," "scoffing," or "taunting." On first glance, it appears that Ishmael was making fun of his little brother. Ishmael"s act was mischievous maybe, but not exactly unique or evil.
No Laughing Matter But author Jonathan Kirsch perceives more sinister goings-on in this story.2 Kirsch is an attorney and a journalist, meaning he has the distinct pleasure of belonging to two of the most despised professions in America. Perhaps to redeem his reputation, Kirsch has written several popular books on the Bible. But as the t.i.tle of this one suggests, The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible, the book incorporates a healthy dose of sensationalism. According to Kirsch, Sarah"s reaction is much too strong if what she saw was mocking. The punishment doesn"t fit the crime. "We are asked to believe that, thanks to a single adolescent taunt by one sibling toward another, Sarah drives mother and son into the desert to die," he writes. We appreciate his skepticism, but we wonder if he"s exaggerating things to increase his chances of getting on Oprah.
This issue is not new to biblical scholarship. This pa.s.sage has puzzled commentators for centuries. Some early rabbis thought Ishmael was going beyond making fun and was trying to harm, or even kill, Isaac. For example, Rabbi Eleazar suggested that the two brothers went out to the field and Ishmael began to shoot arrows at Isaac.3 (Maybe Rabbi Eleazar had done this to his half-brother and was just projecting.) But nothing in the text supports this interpretation. As is often the case with early rabbis, this attempt to fill in a gap in the story has no basis. Sorry, gentlemen.
More intriguing is the proposal by the not so early (but never late) Rabbi Akiba. He says that Ishmael was fornicating with married women. How on earth did he get from "laughing" to "fornicating" (interested bachelors want to know)? He found the same verb metsaheq in the Joseph story, where Potiphar"s wife used it to accuse Joseph of making a move on her.4 The other place it"s used, ironically, is with Isaac and Rebekah.5 The pair was in Gerar, where Isaac attempted to pa.s.s off his wife Rebekah as his sister because he feared the local men would kill him if they knew they were married. The ruse was discovered when Abimelech, the king of Gerar, happened to glance out his window and see Isaac metsaheq Rebekah, which caused the king to realize that either they were in fact married or they had a very strange sibling relationship. Most English versions translate the word metsaheq here as "fondling." (Why was Isaac fondling his wife in public? n.o.body knows, but we can just picture the servants leaning out the palace windows and shouting, "Hey, buddy! Get a room!") In any case, given the clear s.e.xual meaning of the verb on those other occasions, Rabbi Akiba claims that Sarah saw Ishmael seducing and making love to married women, thereby dishonoring them.6 The problem with this theory is that Isaac is completely missing from it. But that"s not all Rabbi Akiba"s fault. In the version of the Hebrew Bible he was reading, the name "Isaac" is missing. For the rabbi, Genesis 21:9 reads, "But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing" (NRSV). Most English translations, including the NRSV, add "with her son Isaac." Why the difference?
Again, the answer goes back to Star Trek, or at least to Star Trek sounding words. The Greek and Latin versions of the Bible are respectively called the Septuagint and the Vulgate, which we think would make great Star Trek villain names. Both the Septuagint and the Vulgate include the words "with her son Isaac." These translations of the Hebrew Bible are older than the ma.n.u.scripts on which our Hebrew Bible is based. For that reason, many prominent scholars think the words "with her son Isaac" are original to the story.
So Rabbi Akiba didn"t have the full story, but before dismissing him on a technicality, we must ask why the words "with her son Isaac" are missing from the Hebrew version. According to interpreters like Kirsch, the true nature of this pa.s.sage was so disturbing that some readers preferred to erase it from the text. They did not want to deal with the possibility that this pa.s.sage, in Kirsch"s words, "records an incident of incestuous child molestation, a notion so shocking that it may have been literally written out of the Bible by the rabbinical censors."7 According to this view, the text originally described Sarah observing Ishmael metsaheq Isaac. This rather disturbing interpretation has some merit. It explains Sarah"s strong reaction. It is supported by the use of the Hebrew word metsaheq, which can carry a s.e.xual connotation. There is no way to know for sure if Ishmael molested Isaac, but it seems entirely possible, and it certainly fits the dismal pattern of Bible family behavior.
On the other hand, there are problems with Kirsch"s theory. First, he overlooks the fact that metsaheq is a pun on Isaac"s name. Some scholars suggest that what Sarah saw was Ishmael "Isaac-ing," that is, playing or laughing in such a way as to remind her that Ishmael, not Isaac, was Abraham"s firstborn and therefore his potential heir. That"s why she wanted Ishmael gone and why she told Abraham: "Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac."8 And why is the phrase "with her son Isaac" missing from the report of what Sarah saw? This may also be because of the pun. Not only does metsaheq sound a lot like "Isaac" in Hebrew, but the two words look alike too. This means that a scribe"s eye could have accidentally skipped from metsaheq to "Isaac" and left out the phrase "with her son Isaac." (This type of mistake is called a haplography, another word you can use to entertain and impress party guests.) This explanation of what Sarah saw isn"t nearly as sensational as Kirsch"s theory, but it has just as much chance of being right-maybe even more. Perhaps Kirsch"s instincts as a lawyer and journalist led him to put forth a t.i.tillating interpretation when a more plausible one was close at hand. In this case, the weight of the evidence is against him.
20.
Was Moses Suicidal?
MOSES EXPERIENCED a lot of strange stuff-G.o.d spoke to him from a burning bush that wasn"t consumed by the flames, walls of water piled high around him at the Red Sea, and G.o.d himself appeared to him in a cloud of smoke, lightning, and thunder at Mount Sinai.
But perhaps the weirdest episode in Moses"s life-and one of the weirdest pa.s.sages in all of the Bible-involved a spooky night in the wilderness with his wife and newborn son.1 This text has bedeviled Bible scholars for thousands of years. It"s inscrutable. It"s bizarre. And it"s just the kind of thing we dig. We"ll call this one "The Case of the b.l.o.o.d.y Bridegroom and the Freaky Foreskin."
It Happened One Night It started out like any normal day. The sun was shining. The birds that dared to live in the barren desert east of Egypt were singing. And Moses had just been commissioned by G.o.d to go to Pharaoh and demand that the Israelites be set free from their enslavement. Before heading to Egypt, Moses stopped by his father-in-law Jethro"s place in Midian to pick up the wife and kids. They would camp all the way to Egypt, like a family on vacation. But between Jethro"s house and Egypt, a macabre scene unfolded one night. The Bible tells us that while Moses and family were camped out on the side of the road (because the KOA was full), the Lord dropped by and tried to kill him. But Moses"s wife, Zipporah, took a flint, cut off her son"s foreskin, touched Moses"s feet with it, and said, "Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!" So the Lord left him alone. Then Zippy added, "A bridegroom of blood by circ.u.mcision."
You are correct-it makes no sense. It sounds like a ghost story or a scene from a David Lynch film, and its Lynch-like ambiguity has made it notoriously difficult for scholars to interpret. The pa.s.sage throws around "hims" and "hes" like someone is having a p.r.o.noun sale, but fails to say who the p.r.o.nouns are referring to-meaning that we don"t know exactly who is doing what to whom. We don"t even understand the key action-whose feet are touched with the child"s foreskin, Moses"s or the infant"s-because the original Hebrew text in verse 25 simply says "his." His who? we"d like to ask. The pandering translators of the NRSV and other English versions of the Bible (you know who you are) say flatly that Moses"s feet were touched, but this is at best a guess, and a limp attempt to clarify things for the reader that are not actually so clear.
Also, as you know from past lessons in genital euphemisms, the word "feet" in the Bible sometimes refers to the genitals. If that"s the case here-and the nature of the story points in that direction-then the weirdness factor of the scene goes even higher.
Commentators have typically explained this scene as an attempt by G.o.d to kill Moses that was thwarted when Zipporah performed an emergency circ.u.mcision on her young son and then rubbed the foreskin on some part of Moses"s body. Even if that is what the text portrays, what on earth does it mean? Why did G.o.d want to kill Moses? How did G.o.d try to do it? What was the point of the circ.u.mcision? What was the deal with rubbing the foreskin on Moses? Who was the "bridegroom of blood," and what did that t.i.tle mean?
Suicide, She Wrote Into this mora.s.s of questions steps Pamela Tamarkin Reis, an insightful, self-taught scholar who didn"t begin serious study of the Hebrew Bible until she was in her fifties. Without a Ph.D. or formal training, Reis has come up with many creative and plausible answers to textual questions that have never occurred to most traditionally trained scholars. Reis claims that her "state of ignorance" allows her to approach tough pa.s.sages without preconceptions. And that strategy has worked for her: Reis has routed many other experts by having fifteen articles published in fifteen years in some of the most reputable journals in the field. Most of them are compiled in a book t.i.tled Reading the Lines: A Fresh Look at the Hebrew Bible, for those of you who like doing extra-credit work.
Reis takes up the "bridegroom of blood" pa.s.sage in her own unique way, piecing together clues and evidence like a part-time Bible sleuth.2 Her novel interpretation of the pa.s.sage was sparked by a synagogue sermon. The rabbi that day mentioned that some early Jewish commentators suggested that Moses had divorced Zipporah to marry another woman, the Cus.h.i.te wife mentioned elsewhere in the Bible.3 This got Reis thinking about the possibility that Moses and Zipporah did not get along and that the emergency surgery Zipporah performed was done not to save Moses but to spite him. What if Zipporah, Reis asked herself, was not a heroine "but an enraged wife on a tear?" So began her investigation.
The Bible does describe Moses sending Zipporah back to her father Jethro, an act some scholars interpret as a divorce.4 After looking at the possible reasons for such a breakup, Reis settled on the fact that Moses never acknowledged his true origin or divulged his ident.i.ty as an Israelite. She thinks Zipporah may have been duped into marrying Moses because she thought he was the prominent upper-cla.s.s Egyptian he appeared to be. When she discovered at their place of lodging that he was a runaway fugitive of slave ancestry, it was more than she could bear. She snapped and performed this spontaneous circ.u.mcision, which goes to show what some women will do if pushed too far.
With this as her working hypothesis, Reis then pondered some of the other mysteries the text contains. She got her next breakthrough at a used-book sale. While rummaging through moldering tomes, she opened one and read the sentence: "The father turned the business over to his daughter." The sentence "stuck with me like a tune one cannot get out of one"s head," Reis wrote later. "In bed at night, I thought about it and mused over the fact that a foreigner could understand every word of it-"father," "turned," "business," "over," "daughter"-and still not know what the sentence meant."5 Cue the lightbulb over the head. Reis decided that the Moses story might contain idioms whose meanings are missed by modern readers. An idiom, just to remind you, is an expression like "kicked the bucket" or "down in the mouth" or even "you suck" whose meaning is not predictable just by examining the usual meanings of its const.i.tuent elements. In this case, the phrase "the Lord met him and tried to kill him" doesn"t make sense to us.6 As Reis points out, why does G.o.d have to "try" to kill Moses? Why not just zap him with a lightning bolt and get it over with? Also problematic is the reference to G.o.d leaving Moses alone, which doesn"t appear to make much sense within the context of the story.7 Reis concludes that these two phrases are not meant to be taken literally because they are colloquialisms that would have had different meanings for their original audience. Just as you would never arrive at the meaning of "kick the bucket" by examining each word more closely, so the idioms in this pa.s.sage can"t be broken down grammatically. Instead, Reis suggests that the pa.s.sage actually describes Moses"s suicidal state as he wrestled with who he was and what he should do. According to Reis, the statement that G.o.d tried to kill him was an idiom meaning that G.o.d caused Moses to contemplate taking his own life, and G.o.d leaving him alone was another way of saying his self-destructive thoughts had pa.s.sed.
Honey, We Need to Talk...
The cause of all Moses"s angst, according to Reis, was that he was in the throes of an ident.i.ty crisis. After all, he"d been scooped out of the river by Pharaoh"s daughter, raised as a wealthy Egyptian, and later married into the family of Jethro, a prominent Midianite priest. But G.o.d was now ordering him to reconnect with his Hebrew roots by going to Pharaoh and demanding that he let the Israelites go free. Talk about a midlife career change.
In Reis"s reconstruction of the events, Moses was partly responsible for the mess he found himself in because he had never come clean about his past. From the very beginning of their courtship, Moses did not dissuade Zipporah or her father from believing he was a prominent Egyptian. Even his last words to his father-in-law kept up the charade that he was a born-and-bred native of the land of the Nile. "Moses went back to his father-in-law Jethro and said to him, "Please let me go back to my kindred in Egypt and see whether they are still living.""8 But it all came to a head for Moses as he and Zippy prepared to bed down for the evening on their way to Egypt. He had been able to hoodwink Jethro and perpetuate the lie about his Egyptian ancestry, but Zipporah was bound to find out once they got to Egypt and met Moses"s brother Aaron, who had been conscripted by G.o.d to help Moses convince Pharaoh to free their people. The thought of telling his wife that their entire relationship was built on a lie was too much for Moses to bear. The jig was up. His options had dwindled to only two. He could tell Zipporah the truth and suffer the consequences, or he could take his own life and avoid that unpleasant confrontation. Reis believes that the phrase "the Lord met him and tried to kill him" is a euphemism for the latter option.
Moses, of course, did not kill himself. He fessed up and faced the wrath of his wife. Reis thinks Zipporah was so enraged that she decided to mock the ritual most closely a.s.sociated with Israelite religion-infant circ.u.mcision. She reached for the nearest sharp rock and cut off her infant son"s foreskin as a way of saying, in Reis"s words, "You are a Hebrew? Then why not perform the disgusting and barbarous rite of the Hebrews?"9 We know what you"re thinking. Why would Moses"s Israelite ancestry have come as a surprise to Zipporah? They were married after all-surely she must have noticed he was circ.u.mcised.
But Reis believes that wasn"t the case because Moses was never circ.u.mcised. She thinks the practice had fallen into disuse during this time, and she cites several texts from the Book of Joshua to support her view. After Moses had died and just after their entry into the promised land, G.o.d told Joshua to "circ.u.mcise the Israelites a second time."10 So many people partic.i.p.ated in this ma.s.s ritual that the next verse tells us the place came to be called Gibeath-haaraloth, Hebrew for "the hill of foreskins."
This group circ.u.mcision had to be undertaken because the younger generation of men who had just entered the land were not circ.u.mcised during the period of wandering in the desert.11 Reis argues that the same could be said about the men of the previous generation, including Moses, who were also never circ.u.mcised. The reference to the disgrace of Egypt being rolled away, which is an etiology to explain the origin of the place name Gilgal,12 is for Reis a way of speaking about the failure of the Israelites to observe the circ.u.mcision commandment while they lived under Pharaoh"s rule. Moses was therefore able to pa.s.s himself off as one of the Egyptians because when they were all in the locker room together, his body looked like theirs.
When his suicidal thoughts pa.s.sed and he told Zipporah the truth, she cut off their son"s foreskin and touched it to Moses"s foreskin, or "feet," in order to, in Reis"s words, "make a sign in blood on the flesh where there should have been a sign in the flesh."13 Because the word for "bridegroom" in Hebrew is the same as the word for "son-in-law," Reis thinks the phrase that is usually rendered "a bridegroom of blood" is actually a mistranslation and should be read as "a son-in-law of blood." Zipporah was rebuking Moses, expressing her anger upon discovering his real ident.i.ty and poking savage fun at the b.l.o.o.d.y, barbaric ritual of the Israelite community she had unwittingly married into. According to Reis, Zipporah"s put-down ("I have you, a son-in-law of blood!") was her way of contrasting her unhappy marriage with those of her six sisters, whose marriages were in keeping with their father"s high social status.14 A Woman"s Wrath These are provocative and interesting suggestions. But there are drawbacks and shortcomings to Reis"s proposal, and she ends up raising as many questions as she answers.
First, as she notes, nowhere else in the Bible does it say that G.o.d tries to kill someone. In other words, the expression upon which her theory is built is extremely rare. Because there are no other texts to compare this pa.s.sage to, she must look elsewhere for support. She says that the proposed idiom of G.o.d trying to kill someone reflects the ancient Near Eastern view that G.o.d could control one"s mental state. She does a nice job trying to support her idea with material from later in Exodus, where G.o.d seems to play Pharaoh"s thoughts and actions like a divine puppeteer. And the fact that this material also comes from the Moses story is indeed suggestive, but it isn"t enough to substantiate Reis"s interpretation, and other factors work against her reading.
One problem is the statement that G.o.d "met" Moses and tried to kill him.15 Reis says the meeting is metaphorical, but in fact whenever the Hebrew verb pagash is found in the Bible it is never used in this way. There are ten occurrences of it, including this one, and each time it describes a physical meeting between people or, in a couple of cases, animals. The pa.s.sage is therefore speaking of a physical confrontation, an encounter between G.o.d and Moses, and is not describing divine mind control at a distance, as Reis suggests. This interpretation is supported by the use of the very same verb only three verses later when G.o.d commands Aaron to "go into the wilderness to meet Moses."
A further problem is Reis"s claim that Moses was not circ.u.mcised. In fact, the very Joshua material she cites challenges that idea. In Joshua 5:5, it says that all the Israelite men who left Egypt for the exodus were circ.u.mcised. Although the text does not mention him explicitly, this presumably included Moses. If he were in fact circ.u.mcised, it would be a blow to Reis"s interpretation because Zipporah, and perhaps Jethro, would then have known about his origin. On the other hand, it is possible that the Egyptians themselves practiced circ.u.mcision during this period, an issue that is debated by scholars. If so, then his circ.u.mcision would have been indicative of either an Israelite or Egyptian upbringing. Reis dismisses the latter option by claiming that Egyptians didn"t practice circ.u.mcision at this time, but this is not necessarily true. The reason for Reis"s insistence on the matter is obvious-her entire argument falls apart if circ.u.mcision is not a uniquely Israelite custom or if Moses is circ.u.mcised.
In addition to the problems just noted, Reis also bases her conclusions on inference and hypothetical reconstruction of what happened, like her claims that Zipporah didn"t know Moses was an Israelite and that he was suffering from an ident.i.ty crisis. These are plausible ideas, but they are not supported by the pa.s.sage. In sleuthing, you aren"t allowed to make up your own facts.
Reis generally does first-rate work and has offered creative solutions to other vexing textual problems. She also is living proof that you don"t have to have an advanced degree to engage in serious critical study of the Bible. But she hasn"t completely solved "The Case of the b.l.o.o.d.y Bridegroom and the Freaky Foreskin." Ultimately, the text in this strange pa.s.sage, full of gaps and ambiguities, complicates any effort to make sense of it. In all likelihood, we"ll never know for sure exactly what happened on that dark and mysterious night when Moses and Zipporah pulled off the road and had this gruesome encounter.
21.
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