History of the Jews (9 page)

This may not matter very much, for what the Book of Judges does convey is much more important. First it illuminates the essentially democratic and meritocratic nature of Israelite society. It is a book of charismatic heroes, most of whom are low-born, obtaining advancement through their own energy and abilities, which are brought out by divine favour and nomination. Thus, when Eblon the King of Moab, the oasis-sheikh who ‘possessed the city of palm trees’, oppressed part
of the Benjaminites, ‘the Lord raised them up a deliverer’ in the shape of Ehud, ‘a man left-handed’, always a grave disadvantage in those times, especially for a poor man. Ehud was too lowly to have a weapon. So he ‘made him a dagger which had two edges, of a cubit length’, hid it ‘under his raiment’ and got the local Israelites to contribute to a gift, by which he obtained admission to the sheikh. Eblon was ‘a very fat man’, who was ‘sitting in a summer parlour, which he had for himself alone’. Ehud took out his home-made weapon, thrust it into the sheikh’s belly ‘and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out’. This successful political assassination, carried out with great daring and skill, made Ehud a local commander, who then went on to subdue Moab: ‘And the land had rest fourscore years.’
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Not only poor, left-handed men, but even women rose to heroism and so to command. Deborah, another figure from the oasis-country, was a fiery religious mystic, who prophesied and sang. She ‘dwelt under the palm tree’ and local folk ‘came up to her for judgment’. This extraordinary woman, married to one Lapidoth (though we hear nothing of him), organized a coalition army against Jabin, one of the senior kings of Canaan, and destroyed his army. As if this were not enough, the defeated Canaanite general, Sisera, took refuge in the tent of the still more ferocious Israelite woman Jael, ‘wife of Heber the Kenite’ (Cain-ite). Jael gave him a bed, allowed him to fall asleep, then pulled out a tent-peg, ‘took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground’.
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Whereupon Deborah, in the special sing-song tone which was the mark of the prophet, burst into a victory hymn, a savage and beautiful poem which descants on this appalling and treacherous act of violence.

Then there was Jephthah, lowliest of all, the son of a prostitute, who was thrust out of his father’s house, while still young, by his elder brothers because of his mother’s trade. Jephthah had no choice but to dwell in the badlands and form a band: ‘And there were gathered vain men to Jephthah, and went out with him.’
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When the Ammonites attacked, this bandit leader, in a reversal of the natural order which was becoming typical of Israelite history, was sought out by the prominent members of the local Israelite establishment, who asked him to become their war-captain. He agreed, on condition he remained their leader in peace too. After a surprising attempt to negotiate a peaceful agreement-the stories in Judges are never without unusual twists, and this passage contains a fascinating glimpse into contemporary diplomatic-religious procedure—
Jephthah swore a great oath to the Lord to solicit his help. Having received it, he defeated the enemy in battle and took twenty cities ‘with a very great slaughter. Thus the children of Ammon were subdued.’ But the terms of his oath were to sacrifice to the Lord whoever met him from his house when he returned home, and in the event this was his only child and daughter, who ‘came out to meet him with timbrels and dances’. So in this strange and horrible story, Jephthah feels obliged to fulfil his vow and sacrifice his child, and the daughter meekly accepts her fate, stipulating only a respite of two months so that she and her maidens ‘may go up and down upon the mountain, and bewail my virginity, I and my fellows’.
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We do not even know the name of this innocent and tragic creature.

Strangest of all are the three chapters of the Book of Judges which describe the rise and fall, and the martyr’s death, of Samson. He was another low-born member of society, a Nazarite, with wild, long hair, dedicated, in some way now obscure to us, to divine service. There is no question that Samson, despite the mythical elements in the narrative, which turn him into an Israelite Hercules, is a real person, a curious mixture of juvenile delinquent and hero, a strongman and a half-wit, with a paranoid streak of violence, a love of vandalism and arson, and a taste for low debauchery and wicked women. He is the outstanding example of the point which the Book of Judges makes again and again, that the Lord and society are often served by semi-criminal types, outlaws and misfits, who become by their exploits folk-heroes and then in time religious heroes. Israel was by its religious nature a puritanical society, but it is remarkable how often the Lord turns to sinners or responds generously when they turn to him. Thus Samson, disgraced, blinded and with fetters of brass, shouts to the Lord: ‘O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be avenged of the philistines for my two eyes.’
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God apparently responded, though the Bible does not actually say so. Some of Samson’s exploits are the least plausible recorded in Judges, but the background to his story is authentic. The pressure of the Philistines from the coast was then just beginning to be felt, but there was no warfare between them and the Israelites, and Samson does not lead an army. On the contrary: there is constant contact and trade, even intermarriage, and this is attested by the archaeological evidence, such as the Philistine artifacts found in the Israelite town of Beth-Shemesh.
¹⁴²
The marvels of Judges are always built upon a substratum of truth.

This raises the second point about the period. The Israelites were enlarging the imaginative gifts we have already noticed, and seen from
this point of view Judges is one of the greatest collections of short stories in the whole of world literature. There is an underlying unity of theme but an astonishing variety of incident. The economy of means is admirable. Vivid characters are sketched in a sentence or two and leap from the page; an ingeniously selected detail brings the background to life; the narrative is swift and deft.

There is also a feature of the Bible which we notice here for the first time: the superfluous but unforgettable detail. Thus in Chapter 12 we are told that the escaping Ephraimites who were taken at the Jordan passage were forced to say the word ‘Shibboleth’ because the Gileadites knew they could not pronounce the sibilant ‘sh’; hence when they said ‘Sibboleth’ they were identified and slaughtered.
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The detail is not in any way important to the story, but it struck the narrator so forcibly—as it strikes us—that he could not bear to leave it out. We find this instinct again in the story of the young David in the first Book of Samuel, appearing before Achish King of Gath feigning madness, so that he ‘scrabbled on the doors of the gate and let his spittle fall down upon his beard’, provoking Achish to the furious comment: ‘Have I need of madmen, that ye have brought this fellow to play the madman in my presence?’
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Or again the brilliant writer responsible for the Second Book of Samuel feels he has to give us some fascinating details about Solomon’s officer Benaiah, son of Jehoiada, ‘who had done many acts. He slew two lion-like men of Moab: he went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow. And he slew an Egyptian, a goodly man: and the Egyptian had a spear in his hand; but he went down to him with a staff, and plucked the spear out of the Egyptian’s hand, and slew him with his own spear.’
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This instinct was not merely or chiefly literary: it was historical. Israelite love of the past was so strong that they crammed their narratives with picturesque information even when the didactic purpose was unclear, or non-existent. The tales in the books of Judges and Samuel are not just short stories. They are history. Indeed, in the books of Samuel they are beginning to be great history. There is in Israelite-Jewish literature of this period none of the aimlessness of pagan myth and chronicle. The narrative is set down with an overwhelming purpose, to tell the story, both elevating and minatory, of a people’s relationship with God, and because the purpose is so serious, the story must be accurate—that is, the writer must believe in it, in his heart. So it is history, and since it deals with the evolution of institutions, as well as war and conquest, it is peculiarly instructive history to us.

Indeed the Book of Judges, naïve though it is in some ways, is in
another an essay on constitutional development, for it shows how the Israelites were obliged by harsh facts to modify their democratic theocracy to the extent of establishing limited kingship. Early in the book, Chapters 6-8, it tells the story of Gideon, another poor and lowly man, who ‘threshed wheat by the winepress’, and was raised up by God to be a ‘mighty man of valour’. Gideon was originally a commander on a small scale, with a mere 300 men, but his eventual success was so great that he was, for the first time in Israel’s history, offered the hereditary kingship: ‘Then the men of Israel said unto Gideon, Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son also: for thou hast delivered us from the hand of Midian.’ Gideon replied: ‘I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the Lord shall rule over you.’ This good and humble man, in rejecting the crown, was stressing that Israel was still a theocracy.

Even so, some historians believe that the house of Gideon would none the less have become the royal line of Israel had not Gideon’s son, Abimelech, developed into a monster and committed one of the most stupefying crimes in the entire Bible, slaughtering seventy of his father’s male children.
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That ruled out the tragic house of Gideon, but much of the rest of the Book of Judges shows by implication the unsatisfactory nature of the disunited tribal system, with the repeated moral: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel and every man did what was right in his own eyes.’ The story of Jephthah ends in a brief and violent episode of Israelite civil war. The last three chapters of the book narrate the atrocious rape-killing of the Levite’s concubine in the Benjaminite town of Gibeah, which leads to a desperately cruel dispute between the Benjaminites and the other tribes, a sort of miniature Trojan War. And in the meantime the Philistine menace was increasing as the tribes of Israel fought among themselves. The way the facts are presented may be
ex post facto
royalist propaganda—as some scholars argue—but the facts themselves were plain enough. An external enemy brought the tribes together and Israel adopted a central system of command for war because it had no alternative.

The Philistines were a far more formidable opponent than the indigenous Canaanites whom the Israelites were in the process of dispossessing or turning into helots. Indeed, there are recurrent hints in the Bible that the Israelites had feelings of guilt about taking the Canaanites’ land,
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a curious adumbration of Israeli twinges about homeless Palestinian Arabs in the late twentieth century. The Israelites, however, hid any remorse in the belief that the conquest was a pious act: it is ‘because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you’.
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The Philistines, by contrast, were
themselves aggressors; no room for doubts there. They formed part of the most predatory race of the Late Bronze Age, the so-called Peoples of the Sea, who wrecked what was left of Minoan civilization in Crete and came close to taking over Egypt. When the great nineteenth-dynasty pharaoh, Rameses
III
, drove them out of the Nile area, in the battles magnificently portrayed at Karnak, these
Pulesti
turned north-east and established themselves on the coast which still carries their name, Palestine. The five great cities they built there, Ascalon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gath and Gaza, have not been systematically excavated and there is still a lot to be learned about their culture. But they were unquestionably warlike. They already had iron weapons. They were organized with great discipline under a feudal-military aristocracy. Around 1050
BC
, having exterminated the coastal Canaanites, they began a large-scale movement against the interior hill-lands, now mainly occupied by Israelites. They seem to have conquered most of Judah, in the south, but nothing east of Jordan or in the northern Galilee. The tribe of Benjamin suffered most from them, and spearheaded the resistance.
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The period beginning with the national campaign against the Philistines is exceptionally rich in documentation. By this time the Israelites had developed a passion for writing history. Most of this material has disappeared for ever. The Book of Judges gives tantalizing references to lost chronicles. We also hear of the ‘Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel’, the ‘Books of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah’, ‘The Book of the Acts of Solomon’ and many other works. But those that survive, especially the two books of Samuel and the two books of Kings, are history on the grand scale, among the greatest works of all antiquity. They incorporate in places material from the royal archives, such as lists of government officials, provincial governors and even the menus of the royal kitchens.
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From these times it is possible to establish synchronisms between the king-lists given in the Bible and non-Biblical sources such as the Egyptian pharaoh canons and Assyrian
limmu
or eponym lists. These enable us to make accurate datings. In the early monarchical period the margin of error may be ten years or so, but later we get virtually absolute dates. Thus we can be fairly sure that Saul was killed about 1005
BC
, that David reigned until
c
. 966, and that Solomon died in either 926 or 925
BC
.

Moreover, the Biblical records give us astonishingly vivid portraits of the principal actors in the national drama, portraits which rival and even surpass those we find in the finest Greek historians more than half a millennium later. These characters are placed firmly in a consistent
ethical setting. But there is not merely good and evil in these historical moralities; there is every shade of conduct, and above all pathos, intense sadness, human love in all its complexity—emotions never before set down in words by man. There is too a veneration for abstract institutions, a sense of national choices and constitutional issues.