sentimentalists as something very shocking. But let us remember how
the civilized world felt when, not long since, the Austrian tyrant
Heynau outraged noble Hungarian and Italian women, subjecting them
to brutal stripes and indignities. When the civilized world heard
that he had been lynched by the brewers of London,--cuffed, and
pommeled, and rolled in the dust--shouts of universal applause went
up, and the verdict of society was, "Served him right." Deborah
saw, in the tyrant thus overthrown, the ravisher and brutal tyrant
of helpless women, and she extolled the spirit by which Jael had
entrapped the ferocious beast, whom her woman's weakness could not
otherwise have subdued.
There is a beautiful commentary on the song of Deborah in Herder's
"Spirit of Hebrew Poetry." He gives a charming translation, to
which we refer any one who wishes to study the oldest poem by a
female author on record. The verse ascribed to Miriam seems to have
been only the chorus of the song of Moses, and, for aught that
appears, may have been composed by him; but this song of Deborah is
of herself alone. It is one of the noblest expressions of devout
patriotism in literature.
We subjoin a version of this poem, in which we have modified, in
accordance with Herder, some passages of our ordinary translation.
"Praise ye Jehovah for the avenging of Israel,
When the people willingly offered themselves.
Hear, O ye kings; give ear, O ye princes.
I will sing praise to Jehovah;
I will praise Jehovah, God of Israel.
Jehovah, when thou wentest out from Seir,
When thou marchedst from Edom,
The earth trembled and the heavens dropped,
The clouds also poured down water."
The song now changes, to picture the miseries of an enslaved people,
who were deprived of arms and weapons, and exposed at any hour and
moment to the incursions of robbers and murderers:--
"In the days of Shamgar, the son of Anath,
In the days of Jael,
The highways were unoccupied,
And travelers walked through by-ways.
The inhabitants ceased from the villages,
Till I, Deborah, arose.
I arose a mother in Israel.
They went after strange gods;
Then came the war to their gates.
Was there then a shield or a spear
Among forty thousand in Israel?"
The theme then changes, to celebrate those whose patriotic bravery
had redeemed their country:--
"My heart throbs to the governors of Israel
That offered themselves willingly among the people.
Bless ye Jehovah!
Speak, ye that ride on white asses,
Ye that sit in judgment, and ye that walk by the way,
They that are delivered from the noise of archers
In the place of drawing water,
There shall they rehearse the righteous acts of Jehovah,
His righteous acts towards the inhabitants of the villages.
Then shall the people go down to the gates.
Awake! awake! Deborah,
Awake! awake! utter a song!
Arise, Barak, and lead captivity captive,
Thou son of Abinoam!"
After this, another change: she reviews, with all a woman's fiery
eloquence, the course which the tribes have taken in the contest,
giving praise to the few courageous, self-sacrificing patriots, and
casting arrows of satire and scorn on the cowardly and selfish. For
then, as in our modern times, there were all sorts of men. There
were those of the brave, imprudent, generous, "do-or-die" stamp,
and there were the selfish conservatives, who only waited and
talked. So she says:--
"It was but a small remnant that went forth against the mighty.
The people of Jehovah went with me against the mighty.
The march began with Ephraim,
The root of the army was from him;
With him didst thou come, Benjamin!
Out of Machir came down the leaders;
Out of Zebulun the marshals of forces;
And the princes of Issachar were with Deborah.
Issachar, the life-guard of Barak,
Sprang like a hind into the battle-field!"
It appears that the tribe of Reuben had only been roused so far as
to _talk_ about the matter. They had been brought up to the point of
an animated discussion whether they should help or not. The poetess
thus jeers at them:--
"By the brooks of Reuben there were great talkings and inquiries.
Why abodest thou in thy sheepfolds, Reuben?
Was it to hear the bleating of the flocks?
By the brooks of Reuben were great talks [but nothing more].
Gilead, too, abode beyond Jordan;
And why did Dan remain in his ships?
Asher stayed on the sea-shore and remained in his harbor.
Zebulun and Naphtali risked their lives unto the death
In the high places of the field of battle."
Now comes the description of the battle. It appears that a sudden
and violent rain-storm and an inundation helped to rout the enemy
and gain the victory; and the poetess breaks forth:--
"The kings came and fought;
The kings of Canaan in Taanach, by the waters of Megiddo;
They brought away no treasure.
They fought; from heaven the stars in their courses
They fought against Sisera.
The river Kishon swept them down,
That ancient river, Kishon.
O my soul! walk forth with strength!
Then was the rattling of hoofs of horses!
They rushed back,--the horses of the mighty."
And now the solemn sound of a prophetic curse:--
"Curse ye Meroz, saith the angel of Jehovah,
Curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof,
Because they came not to the help of Jehovah,
To the help of Jehovah against the mighty!"
Then follows a burst of blessing on the woman who had slain the
oppressor; in which we must remember, it is a woman driven to the
last extreme of indignation at outrages practiced on her sex that
thus rejoices. When the tiger who has slain helpless women and
children is tracked to his lair, snared, and caught, a shout of
exultation goes up; and there are men so cruel and brutal that even
humanity rejoices in their destruction. There is something repulsive
in the thought of the artifice and treachery that beguiled and
betrayed the brigand chief. But woman cannot meet her destroyer in
open, hand-to-hand conflict. She is thrown perforce on the weapons
of physical weakness; and Deborah exults in the success of the
artifice with all the warmth of her indignant soul.
"Blessed above women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite!
Blessed shall she be above women in the tent!
He asked water and she gave him milk;
She brought forth butter in a lordly dish.
She put her hand to the nail,
Her right hand to the workman's hammer.
With the hammer she smote Sisera,
She smote off his head.
When she had stricken through his temple,
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay prostrate.
At her feet he bowed, he fell.
Where he bowed, there he fell down dead!"
The outrages on wives, mothers, and little children, during twenty
years of oppression, gives energy to this blessing on the woman who
dared to deliver.
By an exquisite touch of the poetess, we are reminded what must have
been the fate of all Judæan women except for this nail of Jael.
"The mother of Sisera looked out at a window.
She cried through the lattice,
Why delay the wheels of his chariot?
Why tarries the rattle of his horse-hoofs?
Her wise ladies answered: yea, she spake herself.
Have they not won? Have they not divided the prey?
To every man a virgin or two;
To Sisera a prey of divers colors, of divers colors and gold
embroidery,
Meet for the necks of them that take the spoil."
In the reckoning of this haughty princess, a noble Judæan lady,
with her gold embroideries and raiment of needle-work, is only an
ornament meet for the neck of the conqueror,--a toy, to be paraded
in triumph. The song now rises with one grand, solemn swell, like
the roll of waves on the sea-shore:--
"So let all thine enemies perish, O Jehovah!
But let them that love thee shine forth as the sun in his strength."
And as this song dies away, so passes all mention of Deborah. No
other fragment of poetry or song from her has come down from her
age to us. This one song, like a rare fragment of some deep-sea
flower, broken off by a storm of waters, has floated up to tell
of her. We shall see, as we follow down the line of history, that
women of this lofty poetic inspiration were the natural product of
the Jewish laws and institutions. They grew out of them, as certain
flowers grow out of certain soils. To this class belonged Hannah,
the mother of Samuel, and Huldah, the prophetess, and, in the
fullness of time, Mary, the mother of Jesus, whose _Magnificat_ was
the earliest flower of the Christian era. Mary was prophetess and
poet, the last and greatest of a long and noble line of women, in
whom the finer feminine nature had been kindled into a divine medium
of inspiration, and burst forth in poetry and song as in a natural
language.
[Illustration: DELILAH THE DESTROYER]
DELILAH THE DESTROYER.
The pictures of womanhood in the Bible are not confined to subjects
of the better class.
There is always a shadow to light; and shadows are deep, intense,
in proportion as light is vivid. There is in bad women a terrible
energy of evil which lies over against the angelic and prophetic
power given to them, as Hell against Heaven.
In the long struggles of the Divine Lawgiver with the idolatrous
tendencies of man, the evil as well as the good influence of
woman is recognized. There are a few representations of loathsome
vice and impurity left in the sacred records, to show how utterly
and hopelessly corrupt the nations had become whom the Jews were
commanded to exterminate. Incurable licentiousness and unnatural
vice had destroyed the family state, transformed religious services
into orgies of lust, and made woman a corrupter, instead of a
saviour. The idolatrous temples and groves and high places against
which the prophets continually thunder were scenes of abominable
vice and demoralization.
No danger of the Jewish race is more insisted on in sacred history
and literature than the bad power of bad women, and the weakness of
men in their hands. Whenever idolatry is introduced among them it is
always largely owing to the arts and devices of heathen women.
The story of Samson seems to have been specially arranged as a
warning in this regard. It is a picture drawn in such exaggerated
colors and proportions that it might strike the lowest mind and be
understood by the dullest. As we have spoken of the period of the
Judges as corresponding to the Dark Ages of Christianity, so the
story of Samson corresponds in some points with the mediæval history
of St. Christopher. In both is presented the idea of a rugged
animal nature, the impersonation of physical strength, without
much moral element, but seized on and used by a divine impulse for
a beneficent purpose. Samson had strength, and he used it to keep
alive this sacerdotal nation, this race from whom were to spring the
future apostles and prophets and teachers of our Christianity.
Like some unknown plant of rare flower and fruit, cast out to
struggle in ungenial soil, nipped, stunted, browsed down by cattle,
trodden down by wild beasts, the Jewish race, in the times of the
Book of Judges showed no capability of producing such men as Isaiah
and Paul and John, much less Jesus. Yet, humanly speaking, in this
stock, now struggling for bare national existence, and constantly
in danger of being trampled out, was contained the capacity of
unfolding, through Divine culture, such heavenly blossoms as Jesus
and his apostles.
In fact, then, the Christian religion, with all its possibilities
of hope and happiness for the human race, lay at this period
germinant, in seed form, in a crushed and struggling race. Hence the
history of Samson; hence the reason why he who possessed scarcely
a moral element of character is spoken of as under the guidance
of the Spirit of the Lord. A blind impulse inspired him to fight
for the protection of his nation against the barbarous tribes that
threatened their destruction, and with this impulse came rushing
floods of preternatural strength. With the history of this inspired
giant is entwined that of a woman whose name has come to stand as
a generic term for a class,--Delilah! It is astonishing with what
wonderful dramatic vigor a few verses create before us this woman so
vividly and so perfectly that she has been recognized from age to
age.
Delilah! not the frail sinner falling through too much love; not the
weak, downtrodden woman, the prey of man's superior force; but the
terrible creature, artful and powerful, who triumphs over man, and
uses man's passions for her own ends, without an answering throb of
passion. As the strength of Samson lies in his hair, so the strength
of Delilah lies in her hardness of heart. If she could love, her
power would depart from her. Love brings weakness and tears that
make the hand tremble and the eye dim. But she who cannot love
is guarded at all points; _her_ hand never trembles, and no soft,
fond weakness dims her eye so that she cannot see the exact spot
where to strike. Delilah has her wants,--she wants money, she wants
power,--and men are her instruments; she will make them her slaves
to do her pleasure.
Samson, like the great class of men in whom physical strength
predominates, appears to have been constitutionally good-natured and
persuadable, with a heart particularly soft towards woman. He first
falls in love with a Philistine woman whom he sees, surrendering
almost without parley. His love is animal passion, with good-natured
softness of temper; it is inconsiderate, insisting on immediate
gratification. Though a Nazarite, vowed to the service of the Lord,
yet happening to see this woman, he says forthwith: "I have seen a
woman in Timnath, of the daughters of the Philistines; therefore
get her for me for a wife. Then said his father and his mother, Is
there never a woman of the daughters of thy people, that thou goest
to take a Philistine woman to wife? But he said, Get her for me; for
she pleaseth me well."
She is got; and then we find the strong man, through his passion
for her, becoming the victim of the Philistines. He puts out a
riddle for them to guess. "And they said to Samson's wife, Entice
thy husband that he may declare unto us the riddle. And Samson's
wife wept before him, and said, Thou dost but hate me, and lovest
me not: thou hast put forth a riddle unto the children of my people
and hast not told me. And she wept before him seven days, and on the
seventh day he told her." A picture this of what has been done in
kings' palaces and poor men's hovels ever since,--man's strength was
overcome and made the tool of woman's weakness.
We have now a record of the way this wife was taken from him, and
of the war he declared against the Philistines, and of exploits
which caused him to be regarded as the champion of his nation by the
Hebrews, and as a terror by his enemies. He holds them in check, and
defends his people, through a course of years; and could he have
ruled his own passions, he might have died victorious. The charms of
a Philistine woman were stronger over the strong man than all the
spears or swords of his enemies.
The rest of the story reads like an allegory, so exactly does it
describe that unworthy subservience of man to his own passions,
wherein bad women in all ages have fastened poisonous roots of
power. The man is deceived and betrayed, with his eyes open, by a
woman whom he does not respect, and who he can see is betraying him.
The story is for all time. The temptress says: "How canst thou say,
I love thee, when thy heart is not with me? Thou hast mocked me
these three times, and hast not told me wherein thy great strength
lieth. And it came to pass when she pressed him daily with her
words, and urged him so that his soul was vexed to death, that he
told her all his heart." Then Delilah runs at once to her employers.
"She sent and called the lords of the Philistines, saying, Come up
this once, he hath told me all his heart. And she made him sleep
upon her knees; and called for a man, and bade him shave off the
seven locks, and his strength went from him. And she said, The
Philistines be upon thee, Samson, and he awoke and said, I will go
out and shake myself, as at other times, and he wist not that the
Lord was departed from him. But the Philistines took him, and put on
him fetters of brass, and he did grind in their prison house."
Thus ignobly ends the career of a deliverer whose birth was promised
to his parents by an angel, who was vowed to God, and had the gift
of strength to redeem a nation. Under the wiles of an evil woman he
lost all, and sunk lower than any slave into irredeemable servitude.
The legends of ancient history have their parallels. Hercules,
the deliverer, made the scoff and slave of Omphale, and Antony,
become the tool and scorn of Cleopatra, are but repetitions of the
same story. Samson victorious, all-powerful, carrying the gates
of Gaza on his back, the hope of his countrymen and the terror of
his enemies; and Samson shorn, degraded, bound, eyeless, grinding
in the prison-house of those he might have subdued,--such was the
lesson given to the Jews of the power of the evil woman. And the
story which has repeated itself from age to age, is repeating itself
to-day. There are women on whose knees men sleep, to awaken shorn
of manliness, to be seized, bound, blinded, and made to grind in
unmanly servitude forever.
"She hath cast down many wounded,
Yea, many strong men hath she slain;
Her house is the way to Hell,
Going down to the chambers of Death."
[Illustration: JEPHTHA'S DAUGHTER]
JEPHTHA'S DAUGHTER.
This story, which has furnished so many themes for the poet and
artist, belongs, like that of Samson, to the stormy and unsettled
period of Jewish history which is covered by the Book of Judges.
Jephtha, an illegitimate son, is cast out by his brethren, goes off
into a kind of border-land, and becomes, in that turbulent period, a
leader of a somewhat powerful tribe.
These times of the Judges remind us forcibly, in some respects, of
the chivalric ages. There was the same opportunity for an individual
to rise to power by personal valor, and become an organizer and
leader in society. A brave man was a nucleus around whom gathered
others less brave, seeking protection, and the individual in time
became a chieftain. The bravery of Jephtha was so great, and his
power and consideration became such, that when his native land was
invaded by the Ammonites, he was sent for by a solemn assembly of
his people, and appointed their chief. Jephtha appears, from the
story, to have been a straightforward, brave, generous, God-fearing
man.
The story of his vow is briefly told. "And Jephtha vowed a vow unto
the Lord and said, If thou wilt without fail deliver the children
of Ammon into my hands, then it shall be that whatsoever cometh
first out of my door to meet me, when I return, shall be the Lord's,
and I will offer it as a whole offering unto the Lord." The vow
was recorded, a great victory was given, and the record says, "And
Jephtha came to Mizpah, unto his house, and behold, his daughter
came out to meet him with timbrels. She was his only child, and
beside her he had neither son nor daughter. And it came to pass,
when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas! my
daughter, thou hast brought me very low; for I have opened my mouth
to the Lord, and cannot go back. And she said, My father, if thou
hast opened thy mouth to the Lord, do to me according to that which
hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the Lord hath taken
vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even the children of Ammon.
And she said unto her father, Let this thing be done for me: Let
me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains
to bewail my virginity, I and my fellows. And he said, Go. And he
sent her away for two months, and she went with her companions and
bewailed her virginity upon the mountains. And it came to pass at
the end of two months, that she returned to her father, who did with
her according to his vow."
And what was that? The popular version generally has been that
Jephtha killed his daughter, and offered her a burnt sacrifice.
Josephus puts this interpretation upon it, saying that "he
offered such an oblation as was neither conformable to the law
nor acceptable to God; not weighing with himself what opinion the
hearers would have of such a practice." A large and very learned and
respectable body of commentators among the Jews, both ancient and
modern, deny this interpretation, and, as appears to us, for the
best of reasons.
Jephtha was a Jew, and human sacrifice was above all things
abhorrent to the Jewish law and to the whole national feeling. There
is full evidence, in other pictures of life and manners given in
the Book of Judges, that in spite of the turbulence of the times,
there were in the country many noble, God-fearing men and women who
intelligently understood and practiced the wise and merciful system
of Moses.
Granting that Jephtha, living in the heathen border-land, had
mingled degrading superstitions with his faith, it seems improbable
that such men as Boaz, the husband of Ruth, Elkanah, the husband of
Hannah, Manoah and his wife, the parents of Samson, and the kind
of people with whom they associated, could have accepted, as Judge
of Israel, a man whom their laws would regard as guilty of such a
crime. Besides, the Jewish law contained direct provisions for such
vows. In three or four places in the Jewish law, it is expressly
stated that where a human being comes into the position of a whole
offering to God, the life of that human being is not to be taken;
and a process of substitution and redemption is pointed out. Thus
the first-born of all animals and the first-born of all men were
alike commanded to be made whole offerings to the Lord: the animals
were slain and burnt, but the human being was redeemed. No one can
deny that all these considerations establish a strong probability.
Finally, when historians and commentators are divided as to a
fact, we are never far out of the way in taking that solution
which is most honorable to our common human nature, and the most
in accordance with our natural wishes. We suppose, therefore, that
the daughter of Jephtha was simply taken from the ordinary life of
woman, and made an offering to the Lord. She could be no man's wife;
and with the feelings which were had in those days as to marriage,
such a lot was to be lamented as the cutting off of all earthly
hopes. It put an end to the house of Jephtha, as besides her he had
no son or daughter, and it accounts for the language with which
the account closes, "She knew not a man,"--a wholly unnecessary
statement, if it be meant to say that she was killed. The more we
reflect upon it, the more probable it seems that this is the right
view of the matter.
The existence from early times among the Jews of an order of women
who renounced the usual joys and privileges of the family state,
to devote themselves to religious and charitable duties, is often
asserted. Walter Scott, a learned authority as to antiquities, and
one who seldom made a representation without examination, makes
Rebecca, in Ivanhoe, declare to Rowena that from earliest times such
an order of women had existed among her people, and to them she
purposes to belong.
We cannot leave the subject without pausing to wonder at the
exquisite manner in which the historian, whoever he was, has set
before us a high and lovely ideal of womanhood in this Judæan girl.
There is but a sentence, yet what calmness, what high-mindedness,
what unselfish patriotism, are in the words! "My father, if thou
hast opened thy mouth to the Lord, do to me according to thy
promise, forasmuch as the Lord hath taken vengeance on thine
enemies, the children of Ammon."
Whatever it was to which she so calmly acceded, it was to her the
death of all earthly hope, calmly accepted in the very flush and
morning tide of victory. How heroic the soul that could meet so
sudden a reverse with so unmoved a spirit!
HANNAH THE PRAYING MOTHER.
The story of Hannah is a purely domestic one, and is most valuable
in unveiling the intimate and trustful life of faith that existed
between the Jehovah revealed in the Old Testament and each separate
soul, however retired and humble. It is not God the Lawgiver and
King, but, if we may so speak, God in his private and confidential
relations to the individual. The story opens briefly, after the
fashion of the Bible, whose brevity in words is such a contrast to
the tediousness of most professed sacred books.