The Eutychus Perch by Hurricane at Hypocrisy.com

We Gentiles miss the point of some passages in the Hebrew Scriptures because we fail to understand the Jewish sense of humor.  The Book of Jonah, for example, is meant to be taken as the very funny story of a man who tries to escape from God by leaving the territory he thinks God is limited to, but then is very happy to learn that even the belly of a submerged fish is within God’s domain.  At the end Jonah is grumpy because, even though his preaching has resulted in wholesale repentance (and who wouldn’t listen to a prophet in rags who smells like the belly of a fish?), he’s afraid God is going to spare the hated Ninevites.  You see, if the destruction you foretell doesn’t take place, you’re to be stoned as a false prophet.  So God has to give Jonah a lesson in perspective.  Funny stories often have a serious point to them.

The Book of Judges, though, is a comic masterpiece, matching genre to subject matter.  For the author, everything is topsy-turvy in Israel, and he writes accordingly.  We read about a long series of judges, none of whom ever does any judging.  You have a crack regiment of left-handed slingshot artists from the tribe of Benjamin, which means “son of my right hand.”  There is Gideon, whose astounding military victory leads the people to ask him to be their king.  He says, “Naw, I don’t think so.  God is supposed to be our only king.”  Then he goes home and names his son Abimelech, which means “my father is king.”

Chapter four of Judges has the story of a dramatic victory of God’s people over the Canaanites, but again everything is out of kilter.  It seems the obvious choice of a man to lead the Israelite army in battle against them is Barak, whose name means “thunderbolt.”  Barak doesn’t like the odds of a bunch of foot soldiers going out against 900 iron chariots, though, so a prophetess named Deborah, which means “bee,” stings him hard, essentially calling him a wimp, which he is.  Finally he agrees to attack, but only if Deborah goes with him.  Well, sir, this is the age of male dominance, and she says, “Fine, but I’m warning you that a woman will get the credit.”

The Lord fights for Israel and gives them so great a victory that even muy macho General Sisera of the Canaanite army flees for his life.  His people have been on friendly terms with a segment of the Jews known as the Kenites.  Their name is a little strange, because it seems to mean they were descended from Cain, who murdered his brother Abel.  For this reason they were somewhat marginalized from mainline Israelite society.  The Kenites were blacksmiths and did contract work for the Canaanites on their iron chariots and the like, so Sisera felt he would be safe in the tent of a lady named Jael.  Well, Jael’s name means “mountain goat” (whose idea was it to put that on her birth certificate?), but it also sounds like “Yahweh is God.”  Along with her family history of bashing people’s heads in, that should have been a clue for Sisera about where his friend’s ultimate loyalties lay.

Jael invites the exhausted Sisera in and says, essentially, “You look all in, Sisera honey.  Lie down here and I’ll give you something to drink.”  Well, it seems she gives him fermented goat’s milk, which on an empty stomach knocks him cold, whereupon this presumed descendant of the killer Cain takes a tent peg she has handy and drives it through his . . . temple.  That’s what all the translations say, but the word is used only once in the Hebrew Bible and no one knows for sure what it means.  The commentators are befuddled about why the author chose that puzzling term.

I’m convinced, though, that it’s one more play on words by the author of Judges, who would have made it big in the Borscht Belt.  I think that, before this story was written down, it was told to soldiers sitting around their campfires on the nights preceding battles.  Here’s the scene:  Implicit in the narrative is the fact that General Thunderbolt is madly trying to catch Sisera and dispatch him.  The phrase “through his  ______” in Hebrew is b’raqoth, which sounds very much as if it contains Barak’s name.  This woman has literally stolen his thunder.  I’m sure the storyteller would pronounce b’raqoth with a knowing smile, and the troops would howl with laughter at the joke on the wimp.  They would also be expected to get the message about the courage that was expected of them.

Actually, she probably caught him in the jugular.

So Jael the super-hero is a hypocrite.  Pretending to be a friend of the Canaanite general who gives her and her husband employment, pretending to render him that famed Middle Eastern hospitality, offering him the sustenance that guarantees that she will protect him forever, she treacherously kills him.  In time of war, hypocrisy can be useful.

Last 5 posts by

• The Atheist's Christmas Rights - January 2nd, 2009
• The Hollywood Hypocrisy Factory - December 18th, 2008
• I Love Fuppaw - December 13th, 2008
• Peasant Wisdom - December 6th, 2008
• Meta-Hypocrisy - November 21st, 2008