came in to tell his father and his mother that a fair damsel in Timnah,
a city of the Philistines, had captured the very citadel of his being.
Neither the protestations of his parents, nor their careful descanting
upon the virtues of the daughters of his own people could move the young
man. His heart was set. Neither parents at home nor the lion that met
him on the way to secure his bride could thwart his firm-set purpose.
Mother and father are for the moment forgotten, and the lion is torn
asunder by the strong arms of this young giant. Every obstacle is
surmounted and Delilah is in the arms of Samson.
Now, George Sand was doubtless correct in the rather prosaic remark: "It
is not so easy to see through a woman as through a man." Samson did not
quite penetrate the wiles of his lady love. Her beauty hid all else, and
Samson fell. "The whisper of a beautiful woman," says Diana of Poitiers,
"can be heard further than the loudest call of duty." The Nazarite vow,
so strong and binding, became in Delilah's hands, as she held the
shears, weaker than the withes she bound about the arms of the captured
giant. Robert Burns has, in a characteristic fashion, given what might
well be inscribed to Samson's memory:
"As Father Adam first was fooled,
A case that's still too common,
Here lies a man a woman ruled
The devil ruled the woman."
Delilah, the Philistine, is to be contrasted with the typical Hebrew
women, not only in the matter of feminine chastity for which they stand
out among ancient women as preeminent, but also in that fidelity to
husband and to native land which made the Hebrews the most stable and
persistent race with which the world is acquainted.
In marked contrast with this witch of the Philistine plains, stands out
the heroic daughter of Jephtha. Her purity, patriotism, and her deep
respect for the sacredness of a religious oath, place her at the very
opposite pole. "Great women," says Leigh Hunt, "belong to the history of
self-sacrifice." If this be true, Jephtha's daughter must be enrolled
among the great, as her heroic self-devotion shines through the dimness
of ancient history. Her father was one of Israel's deliverers in the
days of tribal division and political chaos. Returning from victory over
the hostile Ammonites, Jephtha purposes to give, as sacrifice to Jehovah
for bringing him success in arms, the first creature that comes forth to
meet him as he turns his face homeward. It is his own daughter, his only
child, going out to meet him with the timbrel and with dances. In his
eyes a "very daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely
fair." Will he break his vow? Will the young woman herself, this Hebrew
Alcestis, shrink from the sacrifice? "My father, thou hast opened thy
mouth unto the Lord, do unto me according to that which hath proceeded
out of thy mouth."
For a woman to die childless in Israel was looked upon as a calamity, a
mark of divine displeasure, and the daughter of Jephtha was a virgin. It
is for this reason that she begged the coveted privilege of two months'
respite that, with her maidens, she might withdraw to the neighboring
mountain and there "bewail her virginity." At the end of the required
period, returning to her father's house, she yields herself a sacrifice
to the hasty but well-meant vow of her patriotic father. So deeply did
her pure devotion to filial and patriotic ideals impress the daughters
of Israel, that every year they went out to lament, four days, in honor
of the daughter of Jephtha, the Gileadite, of whom N. P. Willis has drawn
this appreciative picture:
"Now she who was to die, the calmest one
In Israel at that hour, stood up alone
And waited for the sun to set. Her face
Was pale but very beautiful, her lip
Had a more delicate outline and the tint
Was deeper; but her countenance was like
The majesty of angels!"
Among no ancient people was the love of chastity in women so thorough
and imperative. There is probably no better illustration of this fact
than in the very ingenious method by which the men of Benjamin obtained
their wives, at a time when total extinction of the tribe seemed to
stare them in the face. An aged Levite, with his wife, who had been
unfaithful to him, but by his efforts had been reclaimed and with him
was returning home, is passing through the land of Benjamin. When they
reach the city of Jebus, afterward named Jerusalem, the famous centre of
Israel's later life, no one offered the customary hospitality, so the
man and his wife were about to lodge in the street, a disgrace to the
city, according to the common customs of entertainment. It is then a
temporary resident of the city invites the homeless ones into his house.
When the Benjamites saw them go in, they took the woman from the house
and shamefully maltreated her, leaving her helpless upon the steps till
morning. The Levite, incensed at the terrible crime, took the woman, cut
her in pieces and sent the fragments throughout the tribes, telling the
story of the deed of some of the sons of Benjamin. It is pronounced by
all the worst blot upon the land since the sojourn in Egypt. The whole
people is aroused to anger. They collect men of war from the tribes, and
go up to battle against their brethren of Benjamin, till the entire
tribe seems about to be exterminated. Especially was the destruction of
their women grievous. What must be done when the dust of battle has
rolled away? Shall a tribe be lost to Israel? This must not be. The
sacred number must be preserved. How shall Benjamin obtain wives, for
all the rest of Israel had made a solemn oath that they would never give
their daughters to the sons of Benjamin because of this horrible crime
which had been so peremptorily punished. At length, the elders of all
the people devise a plan. Marriage with the Gentile peoples is, of
course, not sanctioned, and all the tribes of Israel have refused to
give their daughters to Benjamin--there is yet a way out of the dilemma.
Some one remembers that every year at harvest time there is given a
feast at Shiloh, where many Hebrew damsels come together to enjoy the
religious and festal dances. It is agreed that the sons of Benjamin
shall hide themselves in the adjacent vineyards, and while the maidens
are dancing, each man is to run out, seize a wife and make his way
swiftly homeward. But what say the fathers and brothers of the purloined
damsels to this high-handed procedure of the young men of Benjamin? The
elders agree to step in then and to advise all to acquiesce in
quietness, for the people had not violated their oaths. Their daughters
had not been given to Benjamin; they were stolen! So Benjamin obtained
wives and the tribal existence was preserved by the same method in which
Rome was repeopled at the expense of the Sabines.
Israel holds a high place among the people of the earth because of the
prevalence of piety among its women. Religion is deeply grounded in the
intuitions and feelings of the race, and derives force, at least, from
the sense of dependence upon higher powers, as Schliermacher has taught.
Since women are far truer in their intuitions and feelings than men and
the sense of dependence is more highly developed, it is not strange that
women everywhere are more religious than men. Among the holy women of
old none can be accorded higher place than Hannah, the mother of Samuel.
One may at first be astonished that childlessness is so frequently
mentioned as characteristic of women in the Scriptures. Among them,
Sarah, Rebekah, Rachael, the unnamed wife of Manoah, Hannah, and
Elisabeth,--mother of John the Forerunner,--are all familiar examples.
But barrenness was probably not more common among the Hebrews than among
other peoples. Only, in Israel, childlessness was accounted a calamity,
if not a direct visitation of the Almighty. Hence, every pious woman
wished to be released from the curse. The women themselves ridiculed and
ever despised those who were not blessed with offspring. Besides, every
man among the Hebrews wished to live in his descendants. To die without
children was to be "cut off" from the face of the earth, and to be
forgotten. There was a yearning to live forever in the land.
The contrast between the great emphasis which the Egyptian laid upon
immortality, the large place it held not only in their religious
teachings, but in the development of their civilization, as modern
excavations have revealed it, and the lack of such emphasis in the
writings of the Hebrew Scriptures has frequently been noticed, and by
many greatly wondered at. But the Hebrews gave little thought to
immortality in the next world. Their prophets spent most of their time
stressing the importance of righteousness in this life, and the people
emphasized the earthward side of immortality--that is, one's power to
live forever in one's posterity.
The writer in the one hundred and twenty-eighth Psalm expressed the
common Hebrew conception, as, in recounting the blessings of a truly
happy man, he said: "Thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy
shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee. Thy wife shall be as a
fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive
plants round about thy table." Or as another psalmist, in the same
spirit, prays: "That our sons may be as plants grown up in their youth;
that our daughters may be as cornerstones, polished after the similitude
of a palace." Many a time in the Hebrew Scriptures is this ideal
prominent. For a psalmist again writes: "As arrows in the hand of a
mighty man, so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his
quiver full of them. They shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak
with the enemies in the gate." And when the prophet Zachariah foretells
the coming glory of Jerusalem, which should supersede the then present
distress, he gives as one item of blessing: "And the streets of the city
shall be full of boys and girls, playing in the streets thereof."
It may therefore be readily surmised how a woman of Hannah's piety
might feel in the thought of her condition of childlessness. And while
the hardships of the barren woman in Israel could in no way compare with
those of some other peoples, as in Australia, where the childless woman
of the aborigines is driven out to a dire struggle for existence, yet
the feeling that her God was, for some cause, against her and that her
husband might in his secret heart despise her, must have been agony
indeed. "The brain-woman," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "never interests
us like the heart-woman; white roses please us less than red." Hannah
was preeminently a heart woman; the red blood of warm devotion coursed
through her veins. When at length her prayers, made in bitterness of
suffering, were answered, and heaven gave her a son, she named him
Samuel, for, she said, "God hath heard," and dedicated him wholly to
Jehovah, placing him at the service of the tabernacle. When the time
came to wean the lad, she journeyed with him to Shiloh, the place of the
sanctuary, with her offering, as the custom was, and "lent him" forever
to Jehovah, her God.
"I think it must somewhere be written that the virtues of the mothers
are occasionally visited upon their children, as well as the sins of the
fathers." These words of Dickens suggest one of the occasions in which
motherly virtues seem to have been visited upon the child, for Samuel
became the earliest representative of a long line of prophets who, for
many centuries, were the spiritual leaders of Israel. He was the father
and founder of a "school of the prophets," the earliest theological
seminary of which we have any record. The prayer of thanksgiving which
the records say Hannah uttered when God blessed her with this precious
gift of a son, influenced not only the famous _Magnificat_ of Mary, when
she was told of the birth of her greater Son, but also that of Zacharias
when the birth of John the Baptist was predicted by the angel who talked
with him in the temple.
History records several famous cases of friendship between men; that
between David and Jonathan, and that between Damon and Pythias of
Syracuse, have become proverbial. Fewer have been the friendship among
women. Indeed, some have argued the impossibility of such friendships.
But there is probably no more attractive story of womanly devotion in
all the range of literature than that which tells of the love between
Ruth and Naomi. The Book of Ruth is a beautiful idyll of early Hebrew
life, and the heroine here stands the test. The scene is laid in the
time when judges ruled in Israel; and in this, as in many instances in
the early days of Palestine, an epoch was born out of a famine.
Elimelech, with his wife, Naomi, and their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion,
hunger-driven, set out for the land of Moab. Death lays its claim to the
husband and father, and Naomi, with her boys, is left widowed in a
strange land. Mahlon and Chilion, now grown to manhood, marry two
daughters of Moab, by name Orpah and Ruth. A decade passes, and the sons
themselves die. Bereaved and broken in spirit, Naomi at length turns her
heart toward her native Judean hills. Finding her daughters-in-law
inclined to follow her into the uncertainty of her future subsistence in
her former home, Naomi counsels their return, each to her mother's
house. "And they lifted up their voice and wept." Orpah reluctantly
obeys, but Ruth cleaves to her mother-in-law, with those unsurpassed and
memorable words, which the author of the book of Ruth throws into Hebrew
measure:
"Intreat me not to leave thee,
Or to return from following after thee;
For whither thou goest, I will go;
And where thou lodgest I will lodge;
Thy people shall be my people,
And thy God, my God.
Where thou diest, will I die,
And there will I be buried.
The Lord do so to me, and more also,
If aught but death part thee and me."
"Some women's faces are in their brightness a prophecy, and some in
their sadness a history." As these two women stood with their faces set
toward Palestine, upon one was written a history of sorrow; upon the
other there fell the sunrise of a new day. In Ruth's determination to
follow Naomi, even to death,--for "a woman can die for her friend as
well as a Roman knight" when she has one, as Jeremy Taylor has
declared,--the young widow of Moab began a new life, which was destined
to make her the ancestress of Judah's royal house, the great grandmother
of David the king.
As the poetic story of Ruth proceeds, it records several interesting
ancient marriage customs among the people of Israel. In marked contrast
with the Hindoo custom of condemning widows to a life of scarcely
bearable hardships, the Hebrew law was so framed as to make widowhood as
far as possible a temporary state. The custom of Levirate marriage
enforced upon the brother or nearest of kin to the deceased husband the
obligation of taking the widow of his brother to wife, in order that the
brother might not be without heir and memory in the land. Ruth's
deceased husband had rights in the ancestral estate, and the Hebrew law
was careful that estates should not pass out of the hands of the
original owners, if it were possible to prevent it. Ruth, the widow,
suddenly appears at Bethlehem, the old home of her husband's people. It
is the time of the barley harvest. Naomi plays the role of the scheming
mother. She would have her beautiful young daughter-in-law find a
husband among her kindred, that her lamented son might have an heir to
honor his memory and that the portion of the estate which was Elimelech
her husband's might be redeemed. The love plot sends Ruth into the field
of Boaz, a wealthy farmer and near kinsman of Elimelech, to glean after
the reapers, for no man was permitted by the law to deprive the poor of
whatever pickings they might find when the reapers had passed. The quick
success of the plot, the fascination that Boaz feels for the graceful
but unknown woman, the command given the reapers to leave behind by
purposeful accident a little more of the grain than was usual and be
gracious to the girl; the invitation at mealtime to come and partake of
the repast of parched corn with the reapers; the resolve of Boaz that
should there be found no nearer kinsman--whose duty it would first be to
take the young woman to wife--he himself would choose her. All these
incidents pass in rapid and romantic succession. The observation is
apparently true that "women are never stronger than when they arm
themselves with their own weakness." Boaz at once pledged himself to be
the damsel's friend and protector. The next of kin declines or waives
his right to the young widow, for he does not care to redeem Elimelech's
portion of the land, a necessary part of such a matrimonial transaction.
Boaz therefore summons the young man, next of kin, who has declined to
redeem the land of his deceased brother and raise up heirs for him, to
appear at the gate of the city as the law required. Here ten elders sit
to witness and make legal the transaction. The shoe of the refusing
kinsman is taken from his foot, in the presence of the assembled people,
and given to Boaz, symbolizing the relinquishment of all rights in the
premises. Then follows the custom of spitting in the face of the "man
with the loosed shoe," which became a term of reproach, and was applied
to the man who refused to fulfil toward a deceased kinsman the duties of
the Levirate marriage. Time passes and the aged Naomi, whose mother
named her "winsome," forgets the bitterness of her later years as she
holds in her arms the infant Obed, in whom she exultingly sees the
pledge that the house of her son shall live on, and a prophecy that his
name will become famous among his people. "And Obed begat Jesse and
Jesse begat David," the king.
III
THE DAYS OF THE KINGS
As we pass out of the unsettled age of the judges into the period when
the commonwealth of Israel began to take definite shape, we come upon a
corresponding change in the life of the Hebrew woman. The heroism in
female virtue was perhaps no less frequent, but when the "heroic age" is
behind us there is less opportunity for women to stand out in so strong
a glare. And, indeed, all through this history the remark of Ruskin is
close to the truth when he says: "Woman's function is a guiding, not a
determining one." While epoch-making women occasionally appeared in the
earlier period, they became fewer and fewer as the social order became
more settled.
It was not till the days of the kings that the Mosaic law, in the
broadest sense of the term, could exert any very potential influence
over the life and conduct of the people. In a disorganized condition of
society, of which it was said, "Every man did that which was right in
his own eyes," to enforce Mosaic precepts would have been an
impossibility, even had the people at large been acquainted with that
law. Now, the law of Moses became one of the most powerful factors in
giving to the women of Israel the high place they held in the
commonwealth. The fifth of the "Ten Words"--which commands were the very
nucleus about which the whole law was developed--reads: "Honor thy
father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the
Lord thy God giveth thee." Thus, in this, the very first law of the
Decalogue respecting duties to man, the duty of honoring the mother was
made equally imperative with that of showing honor to the father. And it
may be truly affirmed that Israel's remarkable permanence and
persistency as a people may be traced to its domestic health, and that
this vigorous domesticity is due largely to a better understanding of
the true relation of the sexes than is discoverable among any other
ancient nation.
That honor for parents makes for the permanence of a people both reason
and history affirm. Any nation which honors its ancestry will hold
tenaciously to ancestral ideals. Notwithstanding China's limitations in
other directions, that nation, because of its worship of the fathers,
has lived through many centuries and seen more powerful nations rise and
fall.
The position of Israel as a separate people abides in strength because
both father and mother have for ages been respected; and even though
most of her sons and daughters are no longer "upon the land which the
Lord their God gave them," they are still holding with wonderful
firmness to the faith and ideals of their fathers. The Mosaic teachings
concerning woman are not a little responsible for this remarkable state
of racial longevity. The Hebrew woman's standing before the law gave her
great advantage over her sisters of the other Semitic and Oriental
peoples. The Mosaic law tended greatly to lessen the inequalities and
mitigate the hardships of womankind. Even a woman captured in war was
protected against the caprice of her captors. Under the law, her life
was equally as precious as that of a man, and therefore the taking of a
woman's life was punishable with the same severity as was the murder of
a man. The law was especially solicitous of her welfare during the
period of child bearing, and greatly lessened the sorrows and isolation
of widowhood.
While divorces were given almost at the will of the man, yet he could
not without formality at once eject the woman from his house. He must
give her a "writing of divorcement," which set forth the fact that she
had been his wife. Thus was she protected from subsequent suspicion that
she had lived with a man unlawfully. Wives of bond-servants were to go
out free with their husbands on the seventh year of service, unless the
master himself had given the wife to his manservant, in which case the
woman and her children still belonged to the master.
Daughters were allowed inheritance as well as sons, though in earlier
times than those of the kings they did not inherit their father's
property except there were no sons. Fathers were not allowed to
discriminate against a firstborn son and pass the inheritance to another
because the mother of the oldest child happened to have lost favor in
his eyes.
Laws forbidding unchastity and vice were explicit and severe. One who
had taken criminal advantage of another's daughter was to marry her and
pay the father the usual dowry; if not, he was to be amerced fifty
shekels of silver, the ordinary dowry of virgins. If a husband suspected
his wife of being unfaithful to him, an elaborate, but not severe,
ordeal was laid upon the woman, called "drinking the waters of
jealousy." If she passed this examination successfully, her husband had
no power further to punish her; if not, she was to suffer for her shame.
The widow and the fatherless were given special consideration under the
law. In the feast days when the people's hearts were merry and they were
rejoicing in the increase of their lands, the widow was not to be
forgotten. In business transactions the people were to take heed that
the widow suffer not injustice. Her garments could never be taken in
pledge, and judges were enjoined to see that no violence was done to her
rights. The fallen sheaf in the harvest field, the forgotten gleanings
of the olive trees, the droppings of the vintage were not to be withheld
from her.
How deep-seated this sense of obligation to the widow was in Israel may
be discovered in the Book of Job. The friends who visited Job in his
bewildering grief could find no more probable cause for so severe a
divine chastisement upon the arch-sufferer than that Job had neglected
the widow or taken her in pledge. One effect of the attitude of the
customary law toward widows is discovered in a most signal way in the
Second Book of Maccabees, which relates that in the period of which it
tells, about B.C. 150, it was customary to lay up large sums of money in
the temple treasury for the relief of widows and of fatherless children.
Such women as Miriam and Deborah were factors to be reckoned with in the
political movements of their times. So it was with the prophetesses
generally, for just as the great prophets dealt with the politics of
state, so a prophetess could not always escape the problems of
statesmanship to which her time might give birth. Both prophet and
prophetess were looked upon as the chosen spokesmen for Jehovah. Because
of this, Huldah acted as a sort of prime minister and adviser of both
king and high priests in their Jehovistic reforms during the reign of
Josiah.