Part 2 (1/2)

A generation later, Isaac continued the sordid family tradition when he told the men of Gerar that his wife Rebekah was his sister in order to save his own skin.5 This time the ”sister” didn't even make it to the king's house. Abimelech, who is identified as ”king of the Philistines,” happened to observe the couple engaging in s.e.xual play and he became furious with Isaac for creating a situation that would have allowed an improper s.e.xual encounter between one of his men and Rebekah.

The Troubling Questions Whoever first said that bad news always comes in threes might have had these stories in mind. For us and other scholars, these episodes bring up several troubling questions: Why did the patriarch think he was in danger? There is nothing in the stories to suggest that any of these foreign rulers wanted to kill, or even harm, Abraham and Isaac. In fact, each time the deception was revealed, the response was just the opposite: the king was generous or wished Abraham or Isaac well. Abraham's and Isaac's initial paranoia that their wives' beauty would lead to their own destruction proved to be entirely without merit.

Didn't the patriarch care about what would happen to his wife? By masquerading as her brother, each man virtually guaranteed that his wife would be taken into another man's house. It appears that Abraham and Isaac were only afraid of what might happen to themselves, not to the women. Their survival instinct had completely taken over, and they subjected Sarah and Rebekah to whatever situations they might encounter in another man's house. This is a particularly poignant issue because in the second version Abraham had just received word from G.o.d that Sarah would conceive and have a son. For all he knew, she might already be pregnant, but this didn't seem to factor into his decision.

Why did we not hear from the wife? Sarah and Rebekah are central to the plots of the narratives, but they remain completely silent throughout all three episodes. We are not even told what they were thinking as their husbands asked them to lie for them. Actually, ”ask” is too kind a word. Abraham didn't request Sarah's a.s.sistance-he demanded it: both times his words to her were put in the imperative form: ”Say you are my sister.” Isaac did his father one better. He didn't even try to coerce Rebekah into joining the charade. Maybe he was afraid she would blow her line. Instead, he boldly declared to the men of Gerar, ”She is my sister.” Apparently neither woman had a vote or a voice.

Why is the story repeated three times? It is rare if not unique in the Bible to have three such similar stories so close to each other, let alone occurring within the same family. These are indeed the only stories in the whole Bible in which a man tries to pimp his wife. Upon closer inspection, there appears to be a progression in how the scenes are presented: the first time it appears that Sarah had s.e.xual relations with the foreign ruler; the second time she was brought into his house, but they were not physically intimate; and the third time Rebekah did not even get in the door because the king spied the couple and discovered the truth.

Is this arrangement intentional? What do we make of all this outlandish behavior?

Abraham on the Couch Such questions have attracted the interest of Bible scholars for a long time, and typically they have tried to address only one or two of these issues without proposing a comprehensive solution that might explain them all. Dominating these discussions have been questions like: Which story is the oldest? Why are they different? And how do they compare ethically?

Then along came J. Cheryl Exum, a well-known professor of Bible at the University of Sheffield in England. She offers an entirely different approach to the question.6 Exum thinks that the characters of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reflect the deep-seated motivations of a male narrator to-yes-encourage his wife to have s.e.x with someone else. This will take some 'splaining.

Unlike many other scholars, Exum views the three stories as parts of a whole rather than as separate, unrelated units. The method Exum adopts is quite unusual, at least by the normal standards of biblical scholars.h.i.+p. She offers a psychoa.n.a.lytical reading that tries to illuminate what she calls the ”narrative unconscious” of the text. Her conclusion is that these stories all address the secret fantasy lurking in a man's mind that his wife will have s.e.x with another man. In Exum's words, ”Because there is something fearful and attractive to the (male) narrator about the idea of the wife being taken by another man, a situation that invites the woman's seizure is repeated three times.... Telling the story of the patriarch's repet.i.tive behavior offers the occasion for a 'working out' of the neurosis.”7 In Exum's view, this explains why Abraham and Isaac come up with a plan that ensures that their wives will have s.e.x with other men. This is precisely what they want to happen. Seen in this way, the stories are about the desire and fear of the narrator. He desires to have his choice of the woman validated, and this will happen if another man finds her attractive. If the other man tries to take her, this might even increase the husband's desire for her. At the same time, there is an element of fear. s.e.xual relations with another man will give the woman a point of comparison. The other guy might have read The Joy of s.e.x and therefore be a better lover. Maybe the woman will enjoy his bedroom tricks. According to Exum, these stories are an attempt to resolve the thoughts and feelings that have their origin in the man's hidden fantasy that his wife will be taken by another man.

Note what Exum is not saying. She does not believe that the stories reflect the unconscious of a particular individual, like Abraham or Isaac. Rather, she speaks of a collective, male-centered unconscious, whose spokesperson she calls ”the narrator.” She sees the texts as communal products that were given their final shape by males. The psychology and mind-set of the stories therefore inevitably reflect those of their male authors and editors, in her view.

Exum proposes that we think of the characters as split-off parts of the narrator. Just as when a person under a.n.a.lysis is able to recognize aspects of himself or herself in the various characters of a dream, the characters in the Genesis stories are vehicles that allow the biblical narrator to work out the neurosis he is experiencing. In order to interpret the movement from one version of the story to the next, Exum adopts a Freudian model that makes use of his famous three-part division of the human psyche. Exum throws out lots of ids, egos, and superegos in her scholarly paper, but we'll try to sum them up neatly and quickly.

In the first story, Pharaoh functions as the superego, which monitors a person's actions to ensure that they are not immoral. Abraham, with his unconscious desire to hand over Sarah to another man, is the id, which seeks to act out repressed fantasies and desires. The text, according to Exum, is the ego, where these conflicting impulses are worked out and Pharaoh takes Sarah as his wife.

The second version advances the psychological drama by allowing Abimelech (the superego) to justify himself before G.o.d, who functions as the external moral law. This explains why the king proclaims his innocence when G.o.d chastises him in a dream for almost taking Sarah for himself. Similarly, Abraham (the id) justifies his deceit to Abimelech (the superego) by pointing out that he did not lie since he and Sarah share the same father. Abraham even tries to blame the external moral law for his predicament by pointing a finger at G.o.d for making him leave his father's house in the first place. As Exum points out, if Abraham had been truly innocent, he probably wouldn't have protested as much as he did.

By the time we reach the third version, the superego functions independently of outside influence and constraints. The king sees for himself that the couple is in fact married, and so he avoids even the suggestion of impropriety. The fascination with the fantasy has been abandoned since the men of Gerar are not interested in Rebekah, even though she and her husband have been among them for a ”long time.” Isaac (the id) has finally worked through the neurosis that has been a preoccupation since chapter 12, and he is able to enjoy conjugal relations with his wife after resolving the problem. As Exum points out, the patriarch ultimately feels like the winner of a contest. ”Having Abimelech, the rival, witness his s.e.xual activity with the matriarch is the patriarch's ultimate turn-on, his incontestable victory over his rival desire.”8 Exumining the Proposal As out of left field as Exum's psychological interpretation might seem, it adequately addresses all four of the questions we posed earlier. It explains why the patriarch thinks he is in danger: his fear is displaced. He secretly desires that his wife be taken by another man, but fears the result. It also explains why the patriarch doesn't seem to care what will happen to his wife. In Exum's reading, he cares deeply-perhaps so deeply that he doesn't even realize it. The twist is that what he wants to happen to her is not the kind of thing men normally acknowledge, even if many of them share Abraham's and Isaac's fantasy that their wife will be taken by another man.

Exum's proposal also resolves the question of why we don't hear from Sarah and Rebekah-this is a guy thing. The male psychology and mind-set that created the stories are just not interested in developing the woman's character in the narratives beyond her role as a s.e.x object. Finally, Exum explains why we have three different versions of the same story and why they are in this order. They express three different moments of a psychological movement from imagining the fantasy to rejecting it. The order shows the resolution of a psychological problem.

This interpretation also has the advantage of preserving the integrity of the text as we have it and not requiring that we appeal to different sources to explain the repet.i.tion of the story.

We'll have plenty more to say about Exum's approach in a later chapter. But for now it's worth pointing out that, make of it what you will, Exum has done a fine job of answering the questions Bible scholars like to ask about this pa.s.sage.

7.

Was the Toilet Ehud's Escape Hatch?

WE HAVEN'T DEALT YET WITH p.o.o.p, so we're excited to finally get to this chapter. This next case of ”Is that really in the Bible?” reads like a TV crime drama script infused with tasteless details by a potty-obsessed five-year-old. If the movie Psycho kept a generation of people from taking showers for fear of being stabbed by Norman Bates, this chapter may accomplish the same thing for latrines.

Like us, you may have at one time or another experienced that primal human fear of being killed on the toilet. (Ever read Stephen King's Dreamcatcher?) Perhaps it's simply a feeling of vulnerability as you crouch there defenseless-or perhaps those fears are grounded in something much more real. Biblical history, for example. Most of us have had unpleasant experiences on the toilet. But as bad as your experiences have been, a Bible guy named Eglon had it much worse. He was killed on his way to the ”throne.” As we'll see, this story, like many in the Bible, flouts modern good taste with real flair. Listen closely-that giant flus.h.i.+ng you hear is the sound of our scholarly reputations going down the pipes. Now let's get to the straight p.o.o.p.

Murder Most Foul This story is told in the Book of Judges. Judges were rulers who led Israel almost like kings, and they ruled by fiat (as some U.S. judges still do). The story we are dealing with here is not the longest or most widely known story in the Book of Judges-that honor goes to Samson and Delilah-but after seeing what unfolds, you may never forget these vivid details. Ehud's contributions to Israelite history are recapped in a slight nineteen verses that describe just one episode, but it's a doozy.1 Let's reconstruct the crime scene. It was a normal day in the Middle East. Moabites were plotting to kill Israelites; Israelites were plotting to kill Moabites. Both dreamed of a.s.sa.s.sinating each other's kings. As it is today, the Middle East was one big, happy family.

On this day, the king of Moab, named Eglon (or Fatty, if you like), took a magazine and headed for his favorite room in the house. He had reason to feel content. He was successfully oppressing the Israelites. He had plenty of food. In fact, the name ”Eglon” means ”young calf.” Eglon was living up to his name. Though the Bible rarely describes people's physical traits, it goes out of its way to say that Eglon ”was exceedingly fat.” Either the historian who put these words to goatskin was feeling a bit cheeky that day, or King Eglon's weight problem would factor into the plot. We'd bet on the latter.

While the pleasant day unfolded at the palace of King Fatty, another person entered-Ehud, or Lefty, because the text says he was ”left-handed.” (In another example of Bible humor that you only get if you spend endless years studying ancient Hebrew, Ehud is identified as ”of the tribe of Benjamin.” The name ”Benjamin” means ”son of the right hand,” so this is like saying, ”Lefty, son of Righty.” This would have had the ancient copyists rolling.) In came Lefty to the palace of King Fatty, who was working up a good dump in the upper chambers (we are not being gratuitous; this is actually part of the plot). Okay, the nicknames were fun, but to avoid confusion, let's go back to the real names. Ehud (”Lefty”) had brought with him an eighteen-inch double-edged knife, strapped to his right leg, and a gift. He was welcomed into the king's chambers, where he gave King Eglon the gift. But Ehud apparently forgot to think up a good method for getting the king alone so he could kill him. (”Hey, let's you and me go in the other room and have a bon-bon-eating contest” didn't come to mind, but probably would have worked.) Instead, Lefty laid on King Fatty the most hackneyed line in crime drama history: ”I have a secret message just for you.” Even preadolescent fans of mob movies could have sniffed that one out.

But Eglon, whose BS antenna must have been broken, was completely suckered by this. He eagerly dismissed his servants, and Ehud proceeded to the king's ”cool roof chamber,” where he was sitting on his throne. Without wasting any time, Ehud seized the knife with his left hand (naturally) and thrust it into the unsuspecting Eglon's belly-here's your message, Tub-o!-where it completely disappeared, enveloped in folds of fat. Eglon was not only too fat to dodge the blow, but he was now actually hiding his own murder weapon. With visions of the healthier lifestyle he never pursued running through his head, Eglon keeled over-and defecated! How's that for drama: not just blood and guts, but good old-fas.h.i.+oned c.r.a.p. The shock of the attack must have loosened the poor man's sphincters, and he dropped his payload. Ehud, apparently deciding to leave the knife stuck in the king rather than fish around for it with the awful stench taking over the room, locked the doors to the king's chamber and escaped the murder scene, cool as a cuc.u.mber.

The king's servants, clearly the worst bodyguards in Moabite history, decided not to check on their boss for a long time. Apparently that familiar odor that said, ”Eglon wuz here,” was emanating from his room. a.s.suming that he was on his preferred throne relieving himself, they went back to playing the ancient Moabite version of pinochle. n.o.body, it seems, was eager to check on him. Perhaps the palace help always abandoned the building when Eglon felt the call of nature. But finally, after an embarra.s.singly long time, the servants got worried. No magazine was that long. They got the key and opened the locked door, only to discover the king sprawled dead on the floor and an awful mess that someone would have to clean up. Ehud, meanwhile, was long gone. Later that day he led his fellow Israelites in a rousing military victory over the demoralized Moabites, who were wondering exactly what to say in Eglon's public obituary (”Died at home surrounded by his recent works”?).

Does It Really Say That?

The story is gross. Are we embellis.h.i.+ng it? Certainly not. The Hebrew text tells us that the king's servants actually thought Eglon was on the toilet. The text uses the slang of the day-”he is covering his feet,” a Bible expression that refers to the fact that when you squat to take care of business, your clothing is usually around your ankles. (This charming little phrase is also found in 1 Samuel 24, when King Saul enters a cave to relieve himself. It was probably a little trick the writers used to ridicule kings they didn't like.) The other key word in the disgusting panoply of facts is parshedona, used in verse 22, which describes something that ”goes out.” It doesn't take a genius-or even two Bible scholars-to recognize that this tells us that something went out of Eglon when he died. This is such a gross word, in fact, that this is the only time it is found in the entire Hebrew Bible. There are no related forms in other Semitic languages. Unfortunately, that also gives prudish English translators some wiggle room to avoid translating it, which is why your Bible, no matter the translation, probably does not say that Eglon took one final dump when he died. Some English versions simply leave it out. Others bend the meaning so that it refers to Ehud going out to another part of the palace after murdering Eglon. But the story leaves no doubt that it means that Eglon p.o.o.ped on himself, which is a normal response to sudden trauma like having a guy stuff a knife into your blubber. In many English versions of the Bible, this word is daintily translated as ”dirt,” but the most honest translation is ”c.r.a.p.” That's how it's rendered in the ancient Aramaic and Latin translations, and that's the translation that makes the most sense in light of the gory details of the story.

But there is one more mystery to this drama. How was Ehud able to leave the crime scene and get away scot-free? Did he waltz out of the palace, past the hapless bodyguards without even disturbing their pinochle game? Or did he have another escape route? (Cue the dramatic music.) The answer revolves around another word that is difficult to translate.

Leaving Through the Men's Room Baruch Halpern, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, thinks architecture is the key to solving what he dubs the ”oldest locked-room murder” in literature. Halpern, like a Hebrew-literate detective with too much time on his hands, has pored over the various parts of Eglon's palace and plotted out Ehud's movements from the time he entered to the moment he slipped away.2 The spare account in Judges 3 provides little architectural detail, so Halpern relies on palaces excavated in other parts of the ancient Near East-like Megiddo in Israel, Tell Halaf in Syria, and Tell Tayanat in Turkey-to understand the layout of Eglon's royal residence.

Halpern says that Ehud first met Eglon in an audience hall, a large area where the king officially received visitors. When the king dismissed his servants so he might hear Ehud's ”secret message” (which turned out to be a squelching knife to the belly), they probably retreated to a porticoed antechamber separated from the audience hall by doors that they would have closed behind them. (If there are any ancient Hebrew language geeks out there, the word for this room is aliyya, which describes a chamber on the upper level of a structure.) The text tells us that Ehud ”came to” Eglon while he sat in this upper-level chamber,3 probably climbing a set of stairs from the audience hall to the king's throne. Once Ehud killed Eglon and the fat king evacuated his bowels, Ehud locked the doors to the upper room and exited via the misdaron.

Now things get interesting. This word misdaron is only found here in the entire Bible. It is a key piece of evidence for us to figure out how Ehud escaped without detection. Add to it another puzzle piece, which is a word translated in many versions as ”cool.” It is used twice to describe the king's upper room.4 But Halpern points out, and we agree, that in the hot climate of Jericho, where the story takes place, the upper part of a building is the hottest part. For this reason, he proposes the alternative reading of ”beams,” based on the word's meaning in Psalm 104 (this is how Bible detective work moves forward). This tells us, then, that the king's throne room was an upper room supported by beams. Picture that: an upper room suspended above wooden beams. Now we're coming closer to figuring out what the misdaron was through which Ehud escaped the crime scene.

Modern English versions of the Bible typically translate misdaron as ”porch” or ”vestibule,” but there is no linguistic support for this. Just because you want it to say something nice like ”porch” doesn't mean it does. Halpern thinks it more likely that misdaron refers to a latrine or toilet. He notes that indoor plumbing and toilets were commonly found in royal palaces from the mid-second millennium BCE on-well before the time period in which the Book of Judges is set.

Also, the Semitic root on which misdaron is based can mean ”to be blinded, puzzled,” which Halpern believes can be a.s.sociated with the Israelite att.i.tude of concealment toward excrement. The same att.i.tude is reflected in the expression ”to cover one's feet.” He thinks the misdaron is the ”hidden place” under the beams that served as the depository of the king's urine and feces. We will now quote Halpern so you can get the full disgusting impact of his meaning: ”The king's droppings from above could only have fallen through the floor down below. And to this nether region, under the beams, royal janitors no doubt had access.”5 Others have suggested that Ehud left the upper room through other routes, but their arguments are not particularly persuasive. Some propose that the throne room had a back door, which might help explain the translation ”porch” or ”vestibule” for misdaron. But if such an alternative entrance had been available, we would expect the king's servants to have used it when they became concerned that something might be wrong with him inside the locked upper room. Why would they get a key to unlock a door the king had locked instead of peeking in the back door?

Others say Ehud left the upper room the same way he entered it: by taking the stairs back down to the audience hall after he locked the king in. But Halpern observes that the text doesn't support this interpretation because the expression that's used-”he closed it upon himself”-is used only to describe a door being locked from the inside. Ehud was definitely inside the throne room with Eglon's corpse when he secured the door.

There are other reasons to think Ehud left through the latrine. If he went out the back door undetected, how would the servants know that he had left and that it was time for them to return to their master? The text suggests a cause-effect relations.h.i.+p between his departure and their return to Eglon. ”After he had gone, the servants came.”6 In Halpern's opinion, Ehud and the courtiers probably b.u.mped into each other soon after the king met his end. After slithering his way through the hole in the floor that functioned as the royal john, Ehud cautiously tiptoed his way through the c.r.a.p-catching room underneath. He probably exited through a door under the stairs that was used by the janitors to gather his excellency's excrement. Ehud was now back in the audience hall at the foot of the stairs leading to the upper chamber. At this point, he opened the doors that led to the porticoed antechamber, where the king's attendants were waiting to be summoned. As he strolled past them, they did not suspect a thing about what had transpired in the few moments since they saw their master alive for the last time. They returned to the audience hall. As the odor of the king's final bowel movement wafted through the air and Eglon didn't appear, they became concerned. Bounding up the stairs and fumbling with the key, they finally opened the door to the king's en suite quarters to discover a gruesome sight. ”'Behold! There was their lord fallen dead on the floor' (verse 25), with his load dropped beside him. No blood; dagger enveloped; no sign of fiddling with the lock.”7 Israel: 1. Moab: 0.

The story of Eglon and Ehud, aka ”Fatty” and ”Lefty,” is unique. Ehud's escape through the royal toilet adds the final deliciously repulsive touch to a story already rife with vomit-worthy images. Of course, since the Bible leaves so many details unstated, any attempt to say precisely what happened is speculative. But as Bible scholars, we find Halpern's explanation fairly convincing. It clears up lingering questions about the story that would otherwise remain unanswered.

And as guys who appreciate an occasional diversion into the disgusting, we think this makes one heck of a story.

8.

Was Onan a Jerk?