Part 3 (2/2)
Now back to our original subject: public urination. Buried in this story is a choice vulgarity uttered by David, the man after G.o.d's own heart, that relates to this most male of activities. We turn to the work of Peter J. Leithart, a theologian and pastor, who points out that the expression David used for ”male” in this pa.s.sage literally means ”one who p.i.s.seth on the wall.”3 He is not making this up. Grab the King James Bible you inherited from your grandmother, dust it off, and look up 1 Samuel 25:22. Yes, the Bible says, ”p.i.s.seth,” in a wonderful collision of playground crudity and hifalutin English.
Leithart suggests that David used vulgar language as a kind of locker-room pep talk to drive home his point about Nabal's insult to him and his men.4 But Leithart also a.s.serts that this lowbrow expression is more than a stand-alone statement. It ties into several features of the story. Thus, at the beginning of the story, Nabal is called a ”Calebite,” a name nearly identical in Hebrew to the word for ”dog.” Dogs are well known for urinating on walls and anything else with a vertical profile, and they have the great fortune of not being constrained by law from doing so. David and his men are likened to a protective wall around Nabal's shepherds.5 The idea is that Nabal was like a dog, p.i.s.sing on the protection that David and his men had provided in the wilderness. Them's fightin' words.
To add to this image, Nabal's name is very similar to the word for ”bottle” or ”wineskin” (nebel), and he is portrayed as having been filled with wine. In fact, Leithart argues, the expression usually translated ”when the wine had gone out”6 should be rendered ”while the wine was going out.” He believes, in other words, that Abigail told her husband about her meeting with David while Nabal was seeing a man about a horse. For you non-Texans, that means he was taking a leak, full as he was from wine he had drunk the night before. Again, Abigail showed real smarts: if Nabal had become angry at her for meeting with David, she would have had a head start while he finished shaking the dew off his lily. In the overall scheme of the story, this element fits nicely with the meaning of David's vulgarity.
p.i.s.s-Poor a.n.a.lysis?
Does Leithart's p.i.s.sy proposal work? Yes, with two minor adjustments. The first is to point out (because we are nitpicky Bible experts) that the word for ”wall” in the phrase ”one who p.i.s.ses on the wall” is not the same as the one used by Nabal's servant in referring to David and his men (verse 16). Both words, however, do denote a similar structure, so they might conjure up the same idea in the minds of readers. We'll give that one to you, Leithart.
Second, the time reference in verse 37 is not quite as certain as Leithart claims. The grammatical construction there usually denotes simultaneous action. But it does not have to be translated ”while.” It could just as accurately be rendered ”as soon as,” ”when,” or ”after” the wine went out of him. What we're trying to say is that Nabal might have been whizzing or he might have just finished whizzing. In either case, Leithart is right that the expression refers literally to the wine leaving Nabal. This implication is often missed in translations that go for the G-rating and simply say something to the effect that Nabal had sobered up.
Leithart is also right about the literal meaning of the phrase for ”male” being ”one who p.i.s.ses on the wall,” as you can plainly see in the King James Bible. This may seem crude to us today, but it may not have been in previous times and cultures. The King James Bible, which was a model of proper English at the time it was produced, clearly shows that what is considered vulgar or inappropriate language may change over time. The verb ”to p.i.s.s” was considered polite social talk in sixteenth-century England but is now regarded as profane. We don't know what Hebrew expressions the ancient Israelites might have considered profane or vulgar-none of their Dictionaries of Bad Words have survived. David's expression may have been intended to rile up his troops. Or he may have simply been stressing his intention to kill all the males. That left only Abigail, a female, to avert disaster. Still, it is a safe bet that the image of someone urinating on you would be as unwelcome then as it is today. So we buy Leithart's suggestion that David was alluding to Nabal as a dog urinating on the ”wall” of David and his men.
Leithart is also on target in noting the literary sophistication of this story. Its eloquent narration highlights the importance of the episode. With David's marriage to Abigail, he gained wealth and prominence among the Calebites that had belonged to Nabal. Since the Calebites were the leading clan in Judah, it was not long before David moved up to become king over Judah and from there to the throne of all Israel. The episode of the death of Nabal and his marriage to Abigail was more than a pit stop for David-it marked a watershed moment in his career.
12.
Does the Bible Command Bikini Waxing?
THE LAST PLACE you might expect to find a divine dictate for pubic shaving is in the last four books of the Pentateuch. These books are considered so dry and tedious that even evangelicals, known for their biblical devotion, rarely make it through alive. Viewed as a vast wasteland of verbal tedium, akin to reading the federal penal code, the books contain long lists of laws G.o.d gave to Moses soon after the Israelites escaped from Egypt and began their forty-year sightseeing tour of the desert. The most famous regulations found here are the Ten Commandments. But among the litany of rules are some hidden gems, and this chapter takes up an especially good one.
First, a quick legal lesson for your own good. The Israelite codes in the Pentateuch included two types of laws-those that supplied punishments and those that didn't. The Ten Commandments are an example of the second kind: they did not come with a punishment. But many other Hebrew laws did. For example, here's a colorful one you don't see practiced much anymore except maybe in Saudi Arabia: ”When the daughter of a priest profanes herself through prost.i.tution, she profanes her father; she shall be burned to death.”1 And try these others on for size: ”Whoever curses father or mother shall be put to death”2 (meaning no kid today would survive).
”You shall not permit a female sorcerer to live.”3 ”You shall not have s.e.xual relations with any animal and defile yourself with it, nor shall any woman give herself to an animal to have s.e.xual relations with it: it is perversion.”4 ”You shall not make any gashes in your flesh for the dead or tattoo any marks upon you: I am the LORD.”5 The strange thing about these laws is that they indicate people must have been doing these things-getting tattoos, having s.e.x with animals, cursing Mom and Dad, and practicing sorcery. Some ”chosen people.” No wonder G.o.d let all (but two) of them die in the desert.
The Problem in a Nutsh.e.l.l Now let's s.h.i.+ne our bright light of research on perhaps the strangest crime mentioned in the Bible: grabbing a man's cojones. The Scripture states: If men get into a fight with one another, and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his genitals, you shall cut off her hand; show no pity.6 This has probably happened to all of us. You get into a fight with another guy, and your wife rushes into the fray and grabs the guy's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es to try to break it up. Ouch! These days a simple ”I'm sorry” and perhaps a friendly lawsuit restores order. But in Old Testament times, such a common mistake was punishable by much more than that. In fact, this is the only law in the Hebrew Bible that demands physical mutilation as punishment. (You might interject, if you were alert enough, ”What about the law that says 'an eye for an eye'?” Well, smarty-pants, that legislation, which is called the lex talionis, means ”law of retaliation,” which you probably did not know, and is more about limiting vengeance by inflicting equivalent damage on the guilty party. And anyway, it doesn't specifically prescribe mutilation.7) After reading this pa.s.sage from Deuteronomy, the women are probably asking, ”Why would the code demand the amputation of the woman's hand when all she did was give the guy's b.a.l.l.s a firm squeeze? His pain would subside after a few minutes, but her hand would never grow back.” Scholars, those overeducated, underpaid people currently teaching your children job skills, try to answer this question in several ways.
Some s.a.d.i.s.tic scholars take the text at face value. The woman's hand should be amputated because that's what she deserved, they say. These scholars tend to be men with humiliating t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e-grabbing experiences in their past. But they have one strong point: if a woman back then put a viselike grip on a man's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, he could lose his reproductive powers. That was a serious crime and perhaps worthy, at least in those days, of the Saudi royal hand chop.
The other way these scholars justify hand amputation is to see the crime as a really bad social faux pas. By roughing up (or even just touching) the genitals of a man who is not her husband, the woman has shamed herself, her husband, and her victim, and she must suffer the consequences. If she didn't, all the other ladies would get the idea they could go around grabbing their neighbors' nuts at a whim. Not good for social order.
But there's an interesting fact about this text that we haven't disclosed. The Hebrew uses two different terms for the word ”hand.” To start, the woman reaches out her yad (hand), but at the end of the pa.s.sage her kaf is cut off. Kaf in ancient Hebrew means ”hand” and sometimes refers euphemistically to a person's private parts. We'll show you how in a few minutes. Naturally scholars get little kicks out of suggesting that the punishment is actually a type of genital mutilation, perhaps c.l.i.toridectomy. (One of the first scholars to propose this was Lyle Eslinger in a 1981 article with an awesome pulp fictionsounding t.i.tle: ”The Case of the Immodest Lady Wrestler in Deuteronomy 25:1112.”8) A shortcoming of both these alternatives is that they still see the woman's punishment as some kind of physical mutilation or maiming, which far exceeds the crime. As we mentioned before, no other crime demands mutilation as punishment.
A Slap on the Wrist The scholar Jerome T. Walsh throws us a life preserver.9 He points out that while in some places the word kaf means ”hand,” elsewhere in the Bible it refers to a particular part or quality of the hand. In some references, the yad (hand) has a kaf (specific part of the hand). For example, Jezebel, easily the baddest babe in the Bible, meets her fate in a gruesome and sort of funny way-several eunuchs daintily throw her out a window and she's trampled to death by horses and eaten by dogs. Talk about piling it on. When the soldiers not-so-daintily rush downstairs to retrieve her corpse, all that remains are her skull, feet, and the kafs of her two yads.10 What is this kaf? In light of usage elsewhere in the Bible, it most likely refers to the palms of Jezebel's hands. Sometimes a kaf refers to a bowl or spoon used in the temple's ceremonies. It can also refer to the branch of a palm tree. It describes the hollow of a sling,11 like the one used by David to kill Goliath. The sole of the foot is also called a kaf.12 All of these objects are curved or cupped. When the word kaf is used in reference to the hand, it usually describes grasping or holding rather than striking or pointing. So when kaf is used to denote part of the hand, it must mean the palm.
But how do you cut off someone's palm? Perhaps you don't. Walsh thinks kaf has a s.e.xual connotation. You knew we'd take it there.
Walsh supports his theory by pointing to the wrestling match between Jacob and a mysterious unknown figure, which we discussed in chapter 10.13 After wrestling together all night, the other combatant ends the match by touching Jacob on the kaf-yerek. This is typically translated as ”hip joint” or ”hollow of the thigh,” but Walsh thinks Jacob's opponent has borrowed a tactic from the immodest lady wrestler in Deuteronomy, because the Hebrew word yerek, ”thigh,” can sometimes refer to the reproductive organs, as we saw. You may recall, for example, that two pa.s.sages referring to Jacob, who must have had a kaf-yerek worth talking about, describe his descendants as those who come forth from his yerek.14 ”Hip” or ”thigh” would hardly be an accurate translation here.
Even more instructive is a steamy s.e.xual fantasy in Song of Solomon in which a hot and bothered young lady envisions a tryst with her man.15 Using the plural form of kaf, she describes ”myrrh” flowing over the kafot-hamanul, which spineless Bible translators usually render as ”handles of the bolt.” Right-”handles of the bolt,” my foot. (Or rather, my kaf-yerek.) Song of Solomon is one long s.e.x poem, thick with erotic metaphors and wordplay, which suggests strongly that this Hebrew phrase alludes to the woman's genital area, not the Masterlock on her chamber door.
This a.n.a.lysis of kaf allows Walsh to conclude that in some cases it describes ”the open concave curves of the pelvic region, and would correspond most closely to the English word 'groin' or perhaps 'crotch.'”16 Okay, so Walsh got to use the words ”groin” and ”crotch” in a scholarly journal. Fine. But how do you cut off someone's groin? Remember, that's the punishment we're talking about here. Or is it? Walsh goes against all translations and commentaries, which agree that the woman's kaf is to be cut off. He believes they misunderstand the Hebrew verb qatsats-them's fighting words among Bible geeks. In Hebrew, verbs can appear in many different conjugations, each with its own impact on the verb's meaning. The basic verbal conjugation is called the qal form. Another common conjugation is the piel, which intensifies the meaning. For example, if the qal meaning of a verb is ”to break,” the piel meaning might be ”to smash to pieces.”
The root of the verb qatsats appears about fifteen times in the Hebrew Bible. The great majority have it in the piel form, which intensifies it to mean ”to cut off,” among other things. It's found, for example, in the Book of Judges in the description of another weird punishment: ”Adoni-bezek fled; but they pursued him, and caught him, and cut off his thumbs and big toes.”17 The other times it appears in its less intense form, including in the text we're talking about here. In the Book of Jeremiah, it refers to a group of people who live in the desert and are called the qetsutse peah. The second word means ”edge” or ”side,” and the phrase appears to designate a group of people who had strange haircuts on the sides of their heads (we kid you not).18 Walsh argues that this meaning best fits the verb in Deuteronomy 25:12. He says, ”It seems reasonable, then, to infer that qatsats (qal) means not 'to amputate,' but 'to cut or shave [hair],' particularly when it is used in conjunction with a term that can refer to a part of the body where hair grows.”19 He therefore concludes that the punishment for a woman who grabs the b.a.l.l.s of a man (who is not her husband) during a fight is the removal of her pubic hair. The text he proposes is, ”You shall shave [the hair of] her groin.”
Why would pubic shaving be considered punishment? Many modern women shave the hair down there as part of a regular grooming routine. But in ancient Israel, shaving hair was a form of humiliation. The clearest example, according to Walsh, is in Isaiah 7:20, where G.o.d played the role of a barber who promised to use the king of a.s.syria as a razor to shave off all the hair of the Israelites, to embarra.s.s and disgrace them as prisoners of war. The text distinguishes between the hair of the head and the ”hair of the feet,” which is a common Hebrew metaphor for genitals. (G.o.d was indeed threatening to shave their heads and their groins.) So shaving the pubic region was truly humiliating for a woman in ancient societies.
The Bare Truth How do you like that? We went from biblical Hebrew to women shaving their p.u.b.es. This should increase our teenage readers.h.i.+p. But who's to say Walsh isn't just p.a.w.ning off a theory on us for his own amus.e.m.e.nt? Why do we even listen to this guy?
For one thing, he knows ancient Hebrew. It would be impossible to come up with this reading without being tuned in to the language's nuances. The distinction he makes between the meanings of the verb in its qal and piel conjugations is often overlooked even by the most experienced Bible scholars-us included.
His approach is also appealing because it makes the punishment fit the crime. We can almost hear Moses announcing, ”Ladies, listen up. If you grab a guy's b.a.l.l.s, even in an effort to save your husband during a fight, you're going to get shaved where the sun don't s.h.i.+ne. Got it? Now, moving on to stolen donkeys....” The offending woman's public humiliation at having her pubic hair shaved matches the offended man's shame at having some chick give him the knuckle-baller. It's not ”eye for an eye,” but it's pretty darn close. Walsh's interpretation also resolves the problem of this being the only offense in the Bible for which physical mutilation is the penalty.
So we think the Bible may well command bikini waxing or at least pubic shaving-but as a punishment, not a beauty aid. My, how times have changed.
13.
Was Jael a Dominatrix?
ONE OF OUR FAVORITE T-s.h.i.+rts reads, OLD GUYS RULE. That was certainly true in ancient Israel. It was a patriarchal society (old guys ruled!), and genealogies were traced through male lines. That's why most of the stories in the Bible (have you noticed?) are about men. Women usually appear in stereotypical ”good” roles as wives and mothers (think June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, or Edith Bunker if you're into vintage TV like we are) or in ”bad” roles as prost.i.tutes and temptresses (think Pamela Anderson. Okay, now stop thinking of Pamela Anderson). Women in the Bible are rarely portrayed as CEOs or political leaders, which is one reason why the Bible ain't so popular with the Ms. magazine set.
But there are important exceptions in the Bible to ”old guys rule.” One of them is the story of Jael.1 You've probably never heard of Jael, but her story is remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, Jael and most of the people in the story except for the ”bad guy” are women. It's like a Hebrew version of Charlie's Angels, and like Charlie's Angels, these women stepped way outside of the stereotypical roles and proved to be courageous warriors.
Also, very remarkably, there are two versions of this story in the Bible, one written in prose2 and one written in poetry.3 The poem is one of the oldest in the Bible, meaning that this story was an ancient and highly regarded tradition in Israel. Apparently, G.o.d's chosen people liked female action heroes as much as modern audiences do.
Jael's Tale Jael's brief, heroic story is set in the time of the judges, the national leaders who ruled Israel before there were kings. The judge at the time was a woman named Deborah. She was also a prophet. One day Deborah received a message from G.o.d for Barak, the commander of the Israelite army. G.o.d said to attack the Canaanites, who had subjugated Israel. But Barak, either because he was a ma.s.sive weenie or because he had such great confidence in Deborah's leaders.h.i.+p, refused to go to war unless she accompanied him. Deborah agreed to go with him but warned that as a result the enemy general, Sisera, would be killed by a woman.
Sure enough, G.o.d caused Sisera's army to panic, and the Bible says that they were all killed except for Sisera, who fled on foot. He came to the tent of a woman named Jael, whom Sisera took to be a typical shrinking violet and not the femme fatale she proved to be. Jael invited him in to rest and gave him some milk to drink-the first step in her devious plan. Sisera, like a pleased kitty who'd been out all night, fell asleep. While he was sleeping, Jael took a tent peg and a hammer and drove the peg through his temple, killing him. Do we have to explain why we absolutely love this story?
There is even a postscript. After reporting his death, the final scene in the poem takes us back to Sisera's palace. His mother was looking anxiously through the palace window and wondering aloud why he was taking so long to return. Her ladies-in-waiting rea.s.sured her that Sisera was simply enjoying the spoils of war (or, perhaps, some warm milk and a tent peg through the head-ha ha!). That detail about ”spoils” implies that Sisera's mother and her attendants thought Sisera was enjoying illicit battlefield s.e.x with the captive Israelite women and that he would bring home the women's garments for his mother. They were right in one respect-Sisera was getting nailed, though not in the way they imagined.
If the Tent's A-Rockin'...
Susan Niditch, a prominent Bible scholar who teaches at Amherst College in Ma.s.sachusetts, isn't so sure that Sisera got pegged through the head. Niditch sees s.e.x everywhere she looks in this story.4 For example, she points out that Jael came to Sisera in secret (NRSV: ”went softly”).5 The expression ”come to” (Hebrew ba el) occurs commonly in the Bible as an idiom for s.e.xual intercourse. The phrase ”in secret” is also found in the story of Ruth in the scene at the thres.h.i.+ng floor, another steamy Bible moment.6 But the main verse on which Niditch builds her case is Judges 5:27, which states that Sisera fell dead at Jael's feet. This too has strong s.e.xual connotations. (When you're a hammer, everything's a nail, isn't it?) Niditch points out that a more literal translation is that Sisera fell ”between her legs.” She further observes that in this same verse Sisera is described as ”kneeling” or ”bowing” (NRSV: ”sank”) and falling ”between her legs,” so that his posture was that of a would-be lover. This verse also says that Sisera ”lay” at Jael's feet. This is another well-known idiom for s.e.x in Hebrew as well as in English. Finally, Niditch notes that the last word in 5:27, translated ”dead” in the NRSV, means ”despoiled, devastated.” She quotes Jeremiah, where the same word is used in a metaphorical description of Jerusalem as a woman who has been violated by her lovers.7 Niditch concludes that the language of the Jael story, especially in Judges 5:27, is deliberately ambivalent. It evokes both violent death and s.e.x at the same time. Niditch says that this combination of s.e.x and death is a common theme in battle epics and that the story of Jael makes sense in this light because, as women have long been aware, s.e.x can be a way of a.s.serting power.
Pegged Niditch's observations about the double meanings in this story have a great deal to recommend them. In many ways-even some not noticed by Niditch-s.e.x and female-male relations appear subtly as themes in these two chapters. For instance, the first line of the poem alludes to the prominence of women in the story and perhaps in Israelite society at the time when it says, ”When locks were long in Israel.”8 That means the women, for once, were on top. The prose writer also amps up the s.e.xual tension by saying that Jael penetrated Sisera with a peg-a phallic weapon-thus reversing s.e.xual roles. This reversal of roles is exactly what Deborah had prophesied to Barak.
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