All too Human

Thursday, 27 September 2018

Judith: Apocrypha

The Book of Judith (second or early first century b.c.e.) is an imaginative, highly fictionalized, romance that entertains as it edifies. From a literary perspective, the book is an artistic masterpiece, constructed in two parts (1:1–7:32, 8:1–16:25), with each internally ordered by a threefold chiastic pattern. Numerous correspondences between the two halves of the story provide elegant compositional symmetries. The Book of Judith is a story of balance and counter-balance that makes the point that God’s people have all they need to survive if they rely wholeheartedly on the covenant.
Judith, the character from whom the book takes its name, is not mentioned in the story’s first half (1:1–7:32). In the opening chapters, God’s divine sovereignty over Israel comes into direct conflict with Nebuchadnezzar’s political sovereignty over all the nations of the western world. Holofernes, commander-in-chief of the Assyrian armies of Nebuchadnezzar (which, of course, is impossible historically since Nebuchadnezzar is a Babylonian!), leads a massive force in a punitive campaign against the western vassal nations—including Israel—who refused to send auxiliary forces against the Medes. The people of Israel block his retaliatory advancement against all the nations of the west at their little town of Bethulia (related to Hebrew for “virgin”), which strategically guards his route of access to Jerusalem. Despite the warning of Achior the Ammonite that the Jews cannot be conquered unless they sin against their God, Holofernes lays siege to Bethulia, cutting off its water supply. After thirty-four days, the exhausted Bethulians are ready to surrender, even though it will mean worship of Nebuchadnezzar (3:8). Uzziah, their town magistrate, urges a compromise to give God five additional days to deliver them, temporarily postponing what seems inevitable apostasy, slavery, and destruction of the Jerusalem sanctuary.

In Part 2 (8:1–16:25), Judith, a pious widow in Bethulia, comes forward to challenge the five-day compromise that has imposed conditions on God’s sovereignty. Once she takes the stage, she surrenders it to no other character, figuring in every scene until the book’s end. She sends her maid to summon the town magistrates, Uzziah, Chabris, and Charmis to her house. Upbraiding them for putting themselves in the place of God (8:12), she argues that God is simply testing them, and has the power to help them at any time (8:15). She urges, “Do not try to bind the purposes of the Lord our God; for God is not like a human being, to be threatened, or like a mere mortal, to be won over by pleading” (8:16). Judith proposes that they wait for deliverance and together call upon God who will listen, if so disposed (8:17). She insists that God will not disdain Israel because they know no other god and that capture by the Assyrians will mean the desolation of the temple as well as their way of life. Judith counsels, “Let us set an example for our kindred” (8:24).

Uzziah responds that all she has said is true and that this is not the first time her wisdom has been shown (8:28–29). But, the people were thirsty; the magistrates made an oath; and she can best help by praying for rain. On her account, the Lord will fill the cisterns and the people will no longer faint from thirst (8:31). Thus he saves himself from losing face by rescinding his foolish vow to hand over the town to the Assyrians in five days if God does not act (7:30–31), blaming the people who forced him to this oath, victimizing the victims as Jephthah did his daughter (Judg 11:35).

Giving up the idea that she and the town officials can set an example together, Judith decides to act independently. Explaining that she will do something all the generations will remember, she tells them to meet her at the town gate that evening when she and her maid will go out. Before the five days of their compromise are gone, she pledges “the Lord will deliver Israel by my hand” (Jdt 8:33). She refuses to tell them exactly what she is about to do (8:33–34).

Once the magistrates leave, Judith prostrates herself and cries out to God, begging the strength to be like Simeon, who took vengeance against the Shechemites who violated his virgin sister, Dinah. She implores God to hear her widow’s prayer (9:4), crediting God with full knowledge of past, present, and future (9:5–6). Judith asks God to see the pride of the enemy, to send fury on their heads, to give her—a widow—a strong hand, to strike down the enemy “by the deceit” of her lips (9:10), and to “crush their arrogance by the hand of a woman” (9:10). In an androcentric setting, there is no greater dishonor for a male than to die at the hand of a female (see Judg 9:53–54; 2 Sam 11:21).
Judith is the only biblical woman who asks God to make her a good liar. In Jdt 9:10 and again in 9:13, she petitions God for “deceitful words” that will wound those who have planned cruelties against the Jerusalem Temple and their homeland. Judith is part of a larger company of women in the Bible who practice deceits that have positive national and personal consequences, including Rebekah who tricks her husband, Isaac, for the sake of their son Jacob (Genesis 27); Tamar who steals the next generation by tricking her father-in-law Judah into impregnating her (Genesis 38); the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who lie to the king of Egypt about why they have not killed the Hebrew males at birth (Exod 1:19); Moses’s sister who offers to call a nurse for the daughter of Pharaoh, but calls the baby’s own mother, (Exod 2:7–8); the daughter of the Pharaoh who adopts and names the child Moses, in direct violation of her father’s instruction (Exod 2:10); Rahab, who preserves the lives of Joshua’s spies by lying to the king of Jericho (Joshua 2); and Jael, a Kenite, who smashes the skull of the enemy general seeking the hospitality of her tent (Judges 4–5).

When her prayer is finished (Jdt 9:14), Judith dresses beautifully, “to entice the eyes of all the men who might see her” (10:4). Taking ritually pure foods to eat (10:5), she and her maid go out that night to the camp of the enemy. She meets the Assyrian patrol and tells her first lie when she says, “I am a daughter of the Hebrews, but I am fleeing from them, for they are about to be handed over to you to be devoured. I am on my way to see Holofernes the commander of your army, to give him a true report” (10:12–13). Her words and beauty greatly excite the soldiers who choose one hundred men from their ranks to assist her to the tent of Holofernes (10:14–17).
She prostrates herself before Holofernes, who tells her his first lie, saying he has never hurt anyone who chose to serve Nebuchadnezzar (11:2; conveniently forgetting how he destroyed the shrines and sacred places of seacoast peoples after they had surrendered in 3:1–8). Equal to the encounter, and playful with her use of the address “lord,” which Holofernes hears as deference to him, but Judith means as reference to God, Judith promises to tell him nothing false (11:5). She explains she will go out into the valley and pray to God each night and God will tell her when the Bethulians have sinned by eating sacrifices, so that Holofernes can safely attack Bethulia (11:16–19). Well-pleased, Holofernes praises her beauty and wise speech, pledging, “If: you do as you have said, your God shall be my God, and you shall live in the palace of King Nebuchadnezzar” (11:23; compare Ruth 1:16).

Four uneventful days pass in the enemy camp before Holofernes sends his personal attendant Bagoas to invite Judith to a banquet in his tent (Jdt 12:10–12). Judith accepts the invitation and dresses in her best finery (12:14–15). Seeing her, Holofernes is ravished, “for he had been waiting for an opportunity to seduce her from the day he first saw her” (12:16). She drinks and eats what her maid prepares (12:18–19). He drinks “much more than he had ever drunk in any one day since he was born” (12:20).

Evening comes and all withdraw from the tent, save Judith and Holofernes who is stretched out, on his bed, dead drunk (13:2). Judith’s maid waits outside, as instructed. Judith prays twice for God’s help (13:4–5, 7), then taking Holofernes’ own sword, she strikes his neck twice and cuts off his head (13:8). She gives his head to her maid, who puts it in the food bag, and the two women go out of the camp, as was their nightly habit to pray, except this night they return to Bethulia (13:10).
The people run to welcome Judith and her maid, and Judith displays the head of Holofernes, telling how God protected her so that no sin was committed to defile or shame her (13:15–16). The people bless God (13:17), and Uzziah hails her as “blessed by the Most High God above all other women on earth” (13:18). Judith then instructs the people to wait until daybreak and then attack the Assyrians (14:1–4). When Achior the Ammonite is brought to verify that the head belongs to Holofernes, he faints (see Add Esth 15:7), blesses Judith, believes firmly in God, and is circumcised (14:6–10).
The Israelites successfully rout the Assyrians and plunder their camp. Joakim, the high priest of Jerusalem, arrives to celebrate the victory. A triumphant procession of the women and the men, with Judith in the lead singing a hymn of praise like that of Miriam and Moses in Exodus 15, makes its way to Jerusalem where all worship God for three months (16:1–20).

In the end, Judith goes back to her estate in Bethulia. “Many desired to marry her, but she gave herself to no man all the days of her life after her husband Manasseh” (16:22). At one hundred five years of age, she frees her faithful maid and distributes her property to all those who were next of kin to her husband (compare Num 27:1–11; 36:1–11; Tob 6:11–13). This dispersal of her estate supports the unexpressed fact that Judith is a childless widow.

Judith is conventional in upholding inheritance and purity rights, in prayer and fasting, in her ideas about God’s providence. She is unconventional in upbraiding the male leaders of her town for what they have said about God, though she does this within the privacy of her own home. No other woman in the Bible has another woman in charge of her estate; no other childless woman refuses to marry. On her account, “No one ever again spread terror among the Israelites during the lifetime of Judith, or for a long time after her death” (16:25).

Bibliography

Craven, Toni. Artistry and Faith in the Book of Judith. California: 1983.
Ibid. “Women Who Lied for the Faith.” In Justice and the Holy: Essays in Honor of Walter Harrelson, edited by Douglas A. Knight and Peter J. Paris, 35–49. Atlanta: 1989.
Hopkins, Denise Dombkowski. “Judith.” Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, 279–285. Kentucky: expanded edition, 1998.
Meyers, Carol, General Editor. Women in Scripture. New York: 2000.
Moore, Carey A. Judith: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Garden City, NY: 1985.

The Prophet Isaiah

Isaiah, Hebrew Yeshaʿyahu (“God Is Salvation”), (flourished 8th century bce, Jerusalem), prophet after whom the biblical Book of Isaiah is named (only some of the first 39 chapters are attributed to him), a significant contributor to Jewish and Christian traditions. His call to prophecy in about 742 bce coincided with the beginnings of the westward expansion of the Assyrian empire, which threatened Israel and which Isaiah proclaimed to be a warning from God to a godless people.

Isaiah’s vision

The earliest recorded event in his life is his call to prophecy as now found in the sixth chapter of the Book of Isaiah; this occurred about 742 bce. The vision (probably in the Jerusalem Temple) that made him a prophet is described in a first-person narrative. According to this account he “saw” God and was overwhelmed by his contact with the divine glory and holiness. He became agonizingly aware of God’s need for a messenger to the people of Israel, and, despite his own sense of inadequacy, he offered himself for God’s service: “Here am I! Send me.” He was thus commissioned to give voice to the divine word. It was no light undertaking; he was to condemn his own people and watch the nation crumble and perish. As he tells it, he was only too aware that, coming with such a message, he would experience bitter opposition, willful disbelief, and ridicule, to withstand which he would have to be inwardly fortified. All this came to him in the form of a vision and ended as a sudden, firm, and lifelong resolve.

Personal history

Presumably, Isaiah was already prepared to find meaning in the vision before the arrival of that decisive moment. Information about that period of his life is inconclusive, however, and consists mainly of inferences drawn from the biblical text.
At times the prophet’s private life shows through the record as an aspect of his public message. Once when he went to confront a king, he took with him, to reenforce his prophetic word, a son with the symbolic name Shear-yashuv (“A Remnant Shall Return”). Again, to memorialize a message, he sired a son on the “prophetess” (his wife) and saddled the child with his message as a name: Maher-shalal-hash-baz (“Speed-spoil-hasten-plunder”), referring to the imminent spoliations by the Assyrians. If the sons had not been wanted as walking witnesses to the prophet’s forebodings, posterity would not know of this wife or these sons.
Of Isaiah’s parental home it is known only that his father’s name was Amoz. Since he often spoke with kings, it is sometimes suggested that Isaiah was an aristocrat, possibly even of royal stock. The same reasoning, however, might apply to any number of prophets; from Nathan in David’s time onward, prophets had dealings with kings and were, like Isaiah, well informed about public affairs. Moreover, Isaiah’s sympathies were emphatically with the victimized poor, not with the courtiers and well-to-do. Also, it is sometimes argued that he was of a priestly family, but his knowledge of cultic matters and the fact that his commissioning seemingly occurred in the Temple in Jerusalem are slender evidence for his priestly descent as against his unreserved condemnation of the priests and their domain: “I am fed up with roasting rams and the grease of fattened beasts,” he has God proclaim in a famous passage in the first chapter.
One could argue with equal force that Isaiah is descended from a family of prophets (though his father, the otherwise unknown Amoz, is not to be confused with the prophet Amos). He is thoroughly schooled in the traditional forms and language of prophetic speech. It is an educated speech—strong, vivid, the finest of classical Hebrew. Isaiah is particularly well acquainted with the prophetic tradition known to his slightly older contemporary, Amos. Four eminent Hebrew prophets addressed themselves to the people of Israel and Judah in the latter half of the 8th pre-Christian century: Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah. Strangely, no evidence suggests that any of these knew in person any of the others. Seemingly, they were apart and alone, yet Isaiah and Amos follow essentially the same lines of thought and differ significantly only in that Amos had addressed the northern kingdom (Israel) while Isaiah would emphatically include Judah and Jerusalem. The basic similarities in style and substance strongly suggest influence, direct or indirect, of the one on the other—and both invoke a recognizable Israelite tradition.

Isaiah’s experience bridges the classes and occupations. Whatever his family circumstances, still in his youth he came to know the face of poverty—and the debauchery of the rich. He was at home with the unprotected, the widowed and orphaned; with the dispossessed, homeless, landless; and with the resourceless victims of the moneyed man’s court. He was also acquainted with the rapacious authors of the prevailing misery: promulgators of discriminatory laws, venal judges, greedy landgrabbers, fancy women, thieving and carousing men of means, and irresponsible leaders, both civil and religious. In other words, he was intimately aware of the inequities and evils of human society—which may have been no worse in Israel in the 8th century before Christ than many critics believed they were almost everywhere in the 20th century after Christ.

Isaiah’s theology

It is in his theology that Isaiah leans most heavily on Israelite tradition and shows an acquaintance with the thoughts of Amos. Isaiah shared with him and with the people the long-standing tradition that a special bond united Israel and its God. Since patriarchal times there had been an agreement, a solemn “Covenant” between them: Israel was to be God’s people and he their God. He had chosen them and cared for them. His solicitude for their welfare had been clearly established. Such was the traditional message. Isaiah knew and honoured this ancient tradition, but, more significantly, he also shared the conviction of Amos that this arrangement was wholly conditional, contingent on the people’s conduct. Behaviour such as Amos saw about him in Samaria and Isaiah saw about him in Jerusalem could cancel that Covenant—had in fact done so; that is the meaning of the vineyard parable in the fifth chapter of Isaiah. There God is compared to the careful and industrious cultivator of a vineyard—Israel—who, angry at the “wild grapes” of injustice and violence that is his crop, threatens to take away his care and protection.
As Isaiah knew him, Israel’s God did not fit into the picture of utter injustice and consequent misery rampant in 8th-century Israel. To that people’s God, as Isaiah knew him, persons mattered. God was, in fact, more concerned about people than about how his subjects performed for him their oft-rehearsed rituals. A literal interpretation of the 13th verse of chapter 29 and verses 10 to 15 of chapter 1 would suggest that God finds the motions of worship repugnant, and this may well have been Isaiah’s meaning. He was overawed by the holiness—the otherness—of his God and must have thought that the customary gifts of meat, grain, and flattery were unseemly or, at the least, irrelevant. Although, like Amos, Isaiah appears most often to speak in absolutes, it is indeed possible to interpret these two passages less strictly (as some scholars do) and to say that he spoke in relative terms and that, in his scale of religious values, he merely ranked moral conduct above ritual conformity.
Isaiah’s theology included the sometimes comforting view that God shapes history, traditionally entering the human scene to rescue his people from national peril. But, according to Isaiah’s discomfiting surmise, God could intervene quite as properly to chastise his own aberrant nation, and he could employ a human agent (e.g., a conquering foe) to that end.

More readily than Amos, perhaps because a decade had passed, Isaiah could identify the agent: Assyria. Isaiah’s call to prophecy roughly coincides with the beginning—after a period of relative inactivity—of the westward expansion of the Assyrian empire under the victorious generalship of Tiglath-pileser III (reigned 745–727 bce). Current events did not escape the prophet’s attention. Isaiah appears to have read the omens, as Amos had done; he could clearly see in Assyria the instrument of God’s wrath: “Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury! Against a godless nation I send him…” (10:5–6).

Prophetic mission

If, then, Isaiah was prepared by schooling in tradition and life for the vision that set him on his prophetic course, the preparation involved the mingling in his nature of such elements as those sketched above. In the year that King Uzziah died (742 bce), according to chapter 6, Isaiah was one of a crowd gathered for an occasion at the Jerusalem Temple when of a sudden it occurred—and he became a prophet: “Go, and say to this people….” The experiences that had gone into the shaping of his young life—his acquaintance with the arrogant rich and the suffering poor; his seeming knowledge of Amos and his heritage of tradition, ethnic and religious; his dismay at the threat of Assyria; above all, perhaps, a new and overwhelming sense of the majestic holiness of God—all merged, coalesced, and he knew that his God was sending him with words for his people and that, reluctant or not, he was compelled to go. From the start or retrospectively, he was aware of a frantic need—impossible to satisfy—to call his people back from the brink of peril. His vision was his moment of insight and resolve when, with complete clarity and instantaneously, he knew what he must do and say.

In its present sophisticated form the record of this experience is hardly contemporary with the event; he did not go home from the Temple and write down chapter 6. The record is the reflection not of a confident and eager youth but of a man buffeted by long experience, embittered and despairing. Three times in other chapters the prophet says of his people that they have “refused” to hear him; it was as though he, a messenger, had been ordered irrationally to “close their minds, plug their ears, veil their eyes,” as he says in chapter 6 of his errand to those to whom he was sent. The message that he had to deliver was bad news—unwelcome tidings. And when he spoke of it, as repeatedly he did, he chose such unambiguous language and spoke with so much moral certainty that, as men normally do, his hearers tuned him out; he was foredoomed to speak unheard. A great deal of anguished living intervened between the vision itself and the writing of it. His words “How long, O Lord?” are an expression of utter weariness.
If chapter 6 marks the beginning of his career as prophet, the judgment oracle about the conquest of Jerusalem in chapter 22 probably brings his grim story to a close. It is at any rate the latest Isaianic product that can be dated with any degree of certainty. The last recorded words of Isaiah, in chapter 22, do nothing to relieve the sombre tone of his message, but they do shed further light on his mood and personality. After he had exclaimed in the vision in chapter 6, “How long, O Lord?” he learned to his dismay that even a last remaining 10th of the populace must in turn succumb; just so here the oracle ends with assurance of total disaster: the nation’s guilt can be purged by nothing short of death—“Surely this iniquity will not be forgiven you until you die….” Chapters 6 and 22 set the tone of his message and the hue of his mood, and from the first to the last the gloom has not lifted.
This 22nd chapter contains the most personally revealing of all Isaiah’s words. Quite unexpectedly, the Assyrians have lifted the siege and departed, and the amazed defenders of Jerusalem, flushed and jubilant, give way to celebration; Isaiah cannot share the holiday spirit since for him there has been only a postponement. Nothing has changed, and in his “valley of vision” he sees the day of rout and confusion that God yet has in store for Zion. And so it is that he lays bare his private grief:

Look away from me, let me weep bitter tears; do not try to comfort me for the destruction of my beloved people.

Message to Israel

The historical allusions in the scattered chapters of Isaiah’s work agree with the title verse, according to which he was a contemporary of the Judaean kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. His prophetic call is precisely dated by him “in the year that King Uzziah died.” At least a part of chapter 7 refers to the event of the year 734 when Ephraim and Syria jointly threatened King Ahaz of Judah. In 732 Tiglath-pileser conquered Damascus, the fall of which Isaiah had anticipated. In 722 Samaria, the capital of Ephraim, fell to King Sargon of Assyria, which event Isaiah had also foreseen. By the end of the century (701) Sennacherib had laid siege to Jerusalem—and had subsequently withdrawn. Chapters 1:4–8; 10:27–34; 28:14–22; 30:1–7; and 31:1–4 point to those difficult days when Jerusalem was beleaguered and King Hezekiah feverishly sought help from Egypt. Isaiah brought sparse comfort to his kings—even when the siege was lifted, as noted in the passage cited from chapter 22.

It would be wrong to suppose that Isaiah came to Israel simply to announce the approaching disaster. Painfully sensitive to the rottenness of his society, Isaiah foresaw its consequent collapse. But he also knew and offered an alternative to tragedy: his people’s survival depended on their acceptance again of the ancient moral demands. By returning they might be saved. To obtain their return was his program. Or, differently and more properly stated, because he spoke for God and of God, his goal was to redirect his people into the ways acceptable to the God whom by their conduct they had alienated, and so to save them from catastrophe. He screamed dread warnings and pleaded for amendment. He gave way to despair only because his program had no success. His people seemed to him bent on self-destruction; that was the sickening course of their destiny as he saw it unfolding.
His impossible program comes through in the crisis of 701, during which he stands in violent opposition to the generals ready to go to Egypt for help against the Assyrians laying siege to Zion. Isaiah looked neither to allies nor to armaments for security. If it is God who decides the destiny of nations, security is for God to grant and for men to deserve. Isaiah held the daring view that the best defense is no defense—none other than the reconciling response to the moral demand. No men are secure when some are denied security. “This,” he said, “is rest [i.e., security]: give rest to the weary.”

A case can be made for a theory that Isaiah drew back at the brink, incapable of conceiving a world wholly emptied of his people. What supports this view is a paradox: the observation that, irrationally, he entrusted his rejected message to his disciples and preserved it in a book for the instruction of the survivors of a people doomed to leave no survivors.
There is no consensus as concerns the precise limits of the words of the 8th-century Isaiah or the degree of consistency with which he sustained his tragic monotone. Certainly in his book as it has come down, his nature is elusive—both stern and tender. Magnificently hopeful passages constantly mingle with the prevailing atmosphere of doom. Probably his son’s name, Shear-yashuv, means something like “a mere fragment will survive,” but possibly it has a hopeful ring: no total disaster—some shall survive. Possibly the name Immanuel (God Is with Us), prophesied for the child who shall be a sign from God that Judah will not be overcome by Israel and Syria, expresses the confidence that God will never forsake his people. And possibly other such assurances are in fact words of Isaiah himself, compelled by his love to palliate the blow.
But there is an alternative solution. Although Isaiah was far from popular in his day, he does appear to have attracted some followers: “Seal the teaching among my disciples.” These may have been the circle that kept alive his name and his words—in writing or learned “by heart”—the nucleus of what was to become, through a developing tradition, the biblical Book of Isaiah. And quite possibly successive generations of such Isaiah-men, piously keeping his words alive through radically changing times, added the sustaining messages of hope, well designed to seize the fancy of suffering humanity down the centuries.

Later interpretations of Isaiah’s message

Ironically, perhaps, the Book of Isaiah is most widely known and loved just for those comforting words—which may not be his. A passage in the Babylonian Talmud (one of the two Talmud compilations, the other being Palestinian) can say that from beginning to end the book is consolation. The presence of Isaiah scrolls in the archives of the Qumrān (Dead Sea) community is not surprising. By that time (c. 1st century bce) it had become the fashion to assume that prophets spoke not to their times only but of things to come, and in times of stress men studied prophetic texts intent on learning when redemption was to come.
The Greek translation of Isaiah by Jewish scholars (the Septuagint), accomplished before the Christian Era, reflects a developing tradition of interpretation; it renders the Hebrew ʿalma (“young woman”) as parthenos (“virgin”) in the verse (7:14) about Immanuel, thus drawing Isaiah further into the messianic ring. Now it is a virgin who “shall conceive and bear a son.” The promise of a more than ordinary king, a “messiah,” was enticing. According to the New Testament accounts, when Jesus entered a synagogue in Nazareth and got up to read, they handed him a scroll of Isaiah. He read the beginning of chapter 61, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me…,” and he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled.”
The Gospels lean more heavily on the Book of Isaiah than on any other prophetic text. Beyond any denominational differences is the utopian dream, the “swords-into-plowshares” passage in Isaiah 2. These and many gleaming words from the expanded Book of Isaiah live on in the present day and today’s culture. The word “prophetic” has now become a value-term, closely associated with the primacy of the moral demand and the bearing of justice on the stability of nations, quite in accord with the emphasis of the early Isaiah.