awe, which was manifested among the Teutonic tribes--a reverence which
made women natural oracles. Doubtless in Israel, as everywhere, the
instinctive, intuitive nature of women was discovered by the men of
Israel as in other parts of the world. But women as oracles are isolated
and exceptional. There were witches, who were under the ban. The highest
spiritual influence and leadership in Israel was that of the prophet,
for he was regarded as the mouthpiece of God, and, though of a far
higher order, corresponded to the oracle among heathen peoples. Could a
woman hold this place of dignity and power? The first person of this
class mentioned in the literature of Israel is Miriam the prophetess. In
the days of political confusion, before the time of the monarchy,
Deborah the prophetess arose; and it was Huldah the prophetess who
directed the reforms instituted by King Josiah, when the worship of
Jehovah was purified, the temple repaired, and Mosaism restored to
power. Just as there were false prophets in the days of religious
decline, so there arose false prophetesses, like Noadiah, who attempted
to thwart the reforms of Nehemiah and put his life in jeopardy. In the
early days, the counterfeit of the prophetess, namely, the witch and
sorceress, was not unknown in the land of Palestine. The law, however,
was very stringent against such persons, though King Saul himself once
went disguised to consult the Witch of Endor. Scripture says: "Thou
shalt not suffer a sorceress to live." These are the words which were
thought to give sanction to the burning of witches in New England a
century or more ago.
In writing of the women in the days of the kings, one naturally turns
to the days of David, the first who brought Israel to a state of
political stability. The familiar saying, "The great men are not always
wise," is well illustrated in the matrimonial experiences of King David.
Many times was he married. Four of the wives of David are worthy of
note. The first may be called his wife of youthful romance, Michal,
Saul's daughter; the next, Abigail, the wife of manhood's admiration;
the third, Bathsheba, the wife of lustful passion; the fourth, Maachah,
the wife of old age's sorrow, for she bore unto him Absalom, the rebel.
It was a giddy and dangerous height to which David the youth had
suddenly arisen when the people were giving him, because of his prowess
in slaying Goliath of Gath, greater honor than the king. Even the young
Princess Michal could not disguise her admiration for the new and
youthful hero. But he must slay one hundred Philistines if he is to
possess Michal, says Saul, thinking David would lose his life in the
attempt. But the young man slew two hundred, and claimed his bride.
While her father was plotting the life of his young rival, Michal was
plotting more skilfully to save it; for, overhearing her father give
orders that her husband and lover should be slain, she let him down from
the window, substituting for her absent lord an image resting in her
bed, beneath the covering, in such wise as to support her statement to
the messengers, who came to take him before Saul, that David was sick.
Michal, having to make choice between her father and her husband, chose
the latter; and though she was long separated from him while David
warred with Saul, when at last David reigned he sent and recovered her,
his first love, and Michal became his wife again.
But there were women of affairs in Israel, as well as women of
sentiment and devotion. The story of Abigail, wife of Nabal, and how she
became espoused to David, is a pleasing chapter of woman's power to
excite the admiration of a manly heart by combining the grace and the
tact of the womanly character with worldly wisdom and courage. It is one
of the finest illustrations recorded of woman's independence in the land
of the Hebrews. The story of Bathsheba's marriage to David is well
known. Falling in love with Bathsheba's beautiful form, the king plotted
the life of her husband, put him in the front rank in the battle, and,
when he fell, took her to his own house as wife. And while Maachah
became the mother of a son who was to be a very thorn in the heart of
his father, the wickedness which brought about the marriage to Bathsheba
became the cause of the bitterest expression of penitential anguish in
all the range of literature. For an ancient tradition, embodied in the
introduction to the fifty-first Psalm, affirms that that poem of
heart-stinging grief was written when Nathan the prophet had shown King
David the heinous blackness of his sin toward Uriah the Hittite.
Diplomatic marriages were not uncommon in the ancient commonwealth of
Israel. They were not provided for in the law of Moses. Indeed, they
were distinctly prohibited both by the genius of that law and by its
positive enactments. And yet, no less influential a name than that of
Solomon might have been quoted as giving sanction to this method of
assuring national peace.
Even modern governments might be cited--not only of the East, but of
the countries of Europe--as pernicious examples of the very ancient
custom of cementing political friendship by the interchange of
daughters. The Tel El Marna tablets present a number of illustrations of
diplomatic correspondence between Oriental kings concerning daughters
who had been given as wives to brother monarchs as a seal of friendship.
Now this well-nigh universal custom of diplomatic marriages, though
discouraged by the law of the Hebrews, spoken against by their prophets,
and forbidden by the very genius of their religion, was not uncommon in
the land of Israel. Saul, the first king, can scarcely be said to have
welded the tribes into a stable and recognized nationality. David, his
successor, was a warrior, who depended for his successes more upon
military prowess than upon the skill of diplomacy. The third King of
Israel fell heir to a nation made by the master hand of his father. The
Hebrews were now recognized by contemporary peoples as a great nation,
and, being respected for their power, peace reigned in Palestine.
Solomon, a man of peaceful temperament, resolved to sway the sceptre and
enhance his influence by the arts of diplomacy rather than by the
instruments of war. Among these arts was that of knowing how to be
wisely and numerously wed. He it was who introduced the harem, in the
modern meaning of the word, into Palestine.
The living wives--in number seven hundred--that are said to have been
possessed by King Solomon shows that the prayer made by the people when
first they sought a king "like all the nations" had been answered. Here
was the beginning, as some of the prophets thought, of Israel's
subsequent disaster and final undoing as a kingdom. To them Jehovah was
the one unifying cause, the great power that was to preserve their
national integrity, their very existence as a people. To admit foreign
wives into the palace, bringing with them their gods, and becoming
perchance the mothers of their future kings was to defile the religion
of the realm at its heart, to undermine the worship of Jehovah in the
house of him who should be its main defender. In the life and reign of
King Solomon we have the strange contradiction which is not infrequently
discovered between theoretical wisdom and practical folly, between
private life and public conduct. No man of ancient days appears to have
understood woman better than Solomon, nor said more wise things
concerning them. His dealing with the rival claimants of a certain baby,
his wisdom in answering the hard questions of the Queen of Sheba have
made his name famous. And yet it was his lack of practical wisdom in
arranging his own household that sowed the seed of discord and
dissolution which were later to cause great distress and at last
disruption.
IV
THE ERA OF POLITICAL DECLINE
Altogether the most glorious reign in all the history of the Hebrew
commonwealth was that of Solomon. David his father's military prowess
and his own skill in diplomacy had brought peace with foreign nations,
and rapid internal development. But even now germs of decay were
perceptible. The custom of diplomatic marriage with daughters of heathen
kings, the incoming of luxury, which was destined to undermine the
social, political, and religious hardihood which had previously
characterized the people, were destined powerfully to influence the life
and character of Hebrew women. For here, elements of weakness will often
first show themselves. It was inevitable that with the harem should come
immorality, luxury, effeminacy, and the encroachments of foreign
influence, through the women of many lands bringing their forms of
worship and also their deities with them. It was in anticipation of all
these dangers that the law forbade the king to "multiply wives to
himself." It will be remembered that it was the increased taxation
necessary to keep up such an establishment as that which Solomon brought
into being in Israel that led at his death to a disruption of the
kingdom into two antagonistic parts. It was the violation of this law
that later led the northern kingdom of Israel into one of the bitterest
struggles, one of the most cruel wars of extermination, ever enacted
among a people which has suffered many grievous national experiences.
King Ahab married a Princess of Phoenicia, the daughter of Eth-baal,
King of the Zidonians. With her came her worship of Baal, the very name
of which divinity was imbedded in the name of her father, Eth-baal.
For force of character, Jezebel is probably unexcelled in the Scripture
records. But that character was, unfortunately, villainous. Moliere
affirms that "It is more difficult to rule a wife than a kingdom." Ahab
must have found it so, and surrendered both enterprises to Jezebel.
When--like the famous miller of Potsdam who would not part with his mill
even to the great Frederick--Naboth refused to sell the vineyard which
was so coveted by the king, Jezebel says tauntingly to the disappointed,
fretting husband: "Dost thou rule over the Kingdom of Israel?" This Lady
Macbeth cries: "Give me the dagger." She prepares a great feast, invites
Naboth as a guest of honor, accuses him falsely and has him killed.
Triumphantly she now can present her husband with the much-coveted
vineyard. Her horrible death in the revolution which the fast-driving
Jehu led is held up by the prophets as a warning to subsequent
generations, for, unburied and eaten by dogs, Jezebel's body was cast
away, so that none could afterward honor her memory or say: "This is
Jezebel." And in the same revolution, by a Nemesis so common in history,
Jezebel's son Joram was slain in the field of Naboth. That her name made
a deep impression upon the Hebrew mind, however, may be seen in the fact
that in the book of Revelation, written nearly ten centuries afterward,
an heretical and idolatrous influence is referred to as "that woman
Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess to teach my servants to
commit fornification and to eat things sacrificed to idols."
In marked contrast with the motherly devotion which generally
characterized the "daughters of Rachel" stands out the example of
Athaliah the unnatural; since she was the daughter of Jezebel, the fact
is not strange. To the truthfulness of the remark of La Bruyere that
"Women are ever extreme, they are better or they are worse than men,"
history has often testified. The woman who is usually satisfied to sit
behind the throne has occasionally had ambitions to sit upon it. So it
was with Athaliah. The law of the Hebrews, while it made provision for
inheritance of daughters along with the sons, does not contemplate the
dominion of a queen. Only one woman ever sat upon the throne of the
Hebrews.
When King Ahaziah, the reigning King of Judah, had been slain by Jehu in
a revolution directed against Joram, King of Israel, and all the seed
royal, Ahaziah's mother, seized with ambitions to be herself the
sovereign, proceeded to put to death all the possible heirs to the
throne. Fortunately for the Davidic dynasty, however, a sister of the
dead king rescued one of his sons, an infant, from the bloody massacre,
and hid him in one of the apartments of the temple. When the proper time
came, the high priest Jehoiada brought forth the lad, now seven years of
age, and with the aid of mighty men, proclaimed him king. Athaliah was
surprised and overwhelmed and was slain; but she had given Judah six
years of unrighteous government.
The religious influence of Jezebel in the northern kingdom and of
Athaliah, her daughter, in the southern was of greater consequence in
the shaping of the history of the times than their lack of moral worth.
Jezebel was an ardent worshipper of Baal; indeed, she was the patroness
of Baal's prophets, the very bulwark of idolatrous practices in Israel.
Over against her stood the prophet Elijah, the representative of what
was apparently a lost hope. Jezebel had driven the prophets of Jehovah
into the dens and caves of the earth. It is commonly thought that while
men have more vices than women, women have stronger prejudices. But here
is a woman of whom it may be stated--altering a remark made concerning
Nero--"There is no better description of her than to say she
was--Jezebel."
The Baal worship which she would foster, and did greatly succeed in
fastening upon Israel until its overthrow by Shalmaneser, King of
Assyria, was a debasing nature-worship, which tended to destroy manhood
and drag womanhood into shame. And while there was set up no material
monument of her power in Israel, yet it required generations for the
pernicious influence of her life to die away. If, as Dean Stanley
suggested, that Hebrew epithalamium, the forty-fifth Psalm, was written
in honor of Jezebel's marriage to Ahab, none of its ideals concerning
the new-made queen was ever realized in Israel. She must stand in the
history with Jeroboam whose constant literary monument is disclosed in
the oft-repeated words, "He made Israel to sin."
In contrast with the proud and cruel queen whose aim had been to slay
Elijah and all who stood for Jehovah worship are certain obscure women
who protected and comforted the prophet. "You will find a tulip of a
woman," says Thackeray, "to be in fashion when a humble violet or daisy
of creation is passed over without remark." We shall not fall under the
implied condemnation by forgetting the nameless widow of Zarephath who,
though found gathering a few sticks to make a meal of the last handful
of flour and a little oil left in the cruse, yet when asked took the
fleeing Tishbite into her frugal home and shared with him her poor
repast. For fully a year did Elijah live under the widow's roof, and the
meal in the barrel wasted not, nor did the oil in the cruse fail, till
the famine was broken by the coming of the long delayed rains.
A people's religion will register its mark quickly upon its women. A
most suggestive Semitic conception is found in the use of the figure of
marriage to describe the relationship between a people and their god, or
perhaps more accurately, between a land and its governing divinity. This
entire conception finds its best illustration in the term _Baal_, which
means husband, or lord. The god was conceived of as father and the land
as mother of the people and of all the products of the soil.
The influence of the Baal cult upon Israelitish society, especially upon
woman, cannot be understood without reference to the nature of that
worship. Picture before your mind's eye the rustic prophet Amos, with
wandering staff in hand, impelled by a divine impulse, making his way
northward, and carrying a divine message to the people. He reaches
Bethel in the southern part of the kingdom of Israel--a city that from
time immemorial had been a sanctuary. He is shocked at the terrible
orgies practised about the altars there in the name of religion; at the
unbridled passion and lewdness in the name of the god and goddess of
fertility, Baal and Ashtoreth; at the men and women revelling in shame,
that the increase of the land might be celebrated and productiveness
symbolized.
It is while looking upon such a scene of bestialized worship and
debauched womanhood that Amos cries out in prophetic grief:
"The virgin of Israel is fallen,
She shall no more rise.
She is forsaken upon her land
There is none to raise her up."
The domestic life of the prophet Hosea furnishes perhaps the best
illustration of the condition and dark possibilities of womanhood in
Israel during this era of religious lapse and of consequent moral decay.
When religion sanctions prostitution at the altar, profligacy is not
unnatural. Hosea had married one Gomer, daughter of Diblaim. Soon she
forgets her marriage vows and gives herself to a life of shame. Hosea,
not then a prophet, more than once tried to reclaim the erring wife of
his love; but she again falls into evil ways. His home is destroyed; and
as he thinks of the meaning of this fatal blow to his domestic
happiness, he can but see in it a divine call to go forth to correct a
condition of society which could foster such vice and make such sorrows
possible. The whole meaning of his ministry, as he starts out with his
children as object lessons of his and the people's great humiliation, is
but an enlarged reproduction of his own bitter experience.
That the god and his land were related as husband and wife, was a very
familiar conception in Israel, as well as with the nations round about.
Even Isaiah proclaimed that the land of the Hebrew should be called
Beulah, that is, "married," a land wedded to Jehovah, in pure and
abiding love. But it remained for the worship of Baal, which means both
"lord" and "husband," to fasten upon Israel the basest practices between
the sexes, as a part of the worship of the god to whom the land was
married.
Hosea sees in his own poignant grief an epitome of Israel's relation of
apostasy from Jehovah. She should have been a wife of purity, keeping
her covenant vows with her Lord, but instead, she had gone away to
consort with other gods and was playing the harlot against her first
love. Repeated efforts had failed to reclaim her, and now she is given
up to horrible vice as she sacrifices her virtue at the altar of Baal.
It is a fearful arraignment, hot with his own experiences and saturated
with tears. The words of Hosea are themselves the best representation of
society of the day, as we speak under the figure of his own bitter
grief:
"Plead with your mother, plead, for she is not my wife and I am not her
husband. Let her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her sight and
her adulteries from between her breasts." This is the earnest plea for a
purified Israel and a redeemed womanhood.
The day is to come, says the prophet with the broken heart, when "she
shall follow after her lovers but she shall not overtake them. Then
shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it
better with me than now." "For she did not know," says Hosea for
Jehovah, "that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her
silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal." And looking forward to a
day when the sensual worship of Baal which so debauched womanhood,
should be no longer known in Israel, the prophet, again as the
mouthpiece of Jehovah, still carrying out the same figure of wedlock,
says to Israel: "And I will betroth thee unto me forever; yea, I will
betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in loving
kindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in
faithfulness; and thou shalt know Jehovah. And it shall come to pass in
that day that I will hear, saith Jehovah, I will hear the heavens, and
they shall hear the earth; and the earth shall hear (with) the corn, and
the wine, and the oil."
It was only after the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in B.
C. 586, and the consequent exile of the Hebrews, that this nature
worship which so endangered womanly virtue was exterminated.
During the long, synchronous reign of Uzziah, King of Judah, and of
Jeroboam II., King of Israel, in the eighth century before the Christian
era, prosperity both at home and abroad had given the people of both
kingdoms great wealth. The Syrians had for a long series of years been a
breakwater against the growing power of Assyria. In the meantime, there
was unsurpassed opportunity for internal development, commercial
expansion, and the accumulation of wealth. Riches had led to luxury, and
commerce had made the people more hospitable to foreign ideals, both
social and religious.
It was in the reign of Uzziah's successor, Jotham, that a new and
eloquent voice was lifted up on behalf of reform, calling the people
back to the ideals of the fathers and of the prophets. This new force in
Jerusalem was the young Isaiah, whose striking vision in the year King
Uzziah died caused him to give up a profane life for the prophet's
office; and upon none of the Hebrew prophets do the condition and
character of woman seem to have made so deep an impress. Among the very
earliest of his public utterances, so far as they have been preserved to
us, is that severe arraignment of the women of Jerusalem for their
wanton haughtiness, their wasteful extravagance, their love of show,
their self-indulgence and vice. Thus in detail does the prophet draw for
us the moving picture of female pride: "Moreover, the Lord saith:
Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth
necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing (or tripping delicately) as
they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: therefore, the Lord will
smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and
the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day the Lord will
take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments (anklets) about their
feet, and their cauls (net works), and their round tires like the moon
(crescents), the chains (or ear pendants), and the bracelets, and the
mufflers, the bonnets (head tires), and the ornaments of the legs (ankle
chains), and the headbands, and the tablets (or smelling boxes), and the
earrings, the rings, and the nose jewels, the changeable suits of
apparel (festal robes), and the mantles, and the wimples (probably,
shawls), and the crisping pins, the glasses (hand mirrors), and the fine
linen, and the hoods (or turbans), and the vails. And it shall come to
pass that instead of sweet smell (of Oriental spices) there shall be
stink; and instead of a girdle, a rent; and instead of well set hair,
baldness; and instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth; and
burning instead of beauty. Thy husbands shall fall by the sword, and thy
mighty in the war. And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being
desolate, shall sit upon the ground."
In this period, the women as they went along scented the air with the
perfume from the boxes that hung at their girdles; they lolled idly and
luxuriantly upon ivory beds and silken cushions sprinkled with perfume,
and they gossiped to the sound of music.
In predicting the great disaster and slaughter that were to come upon
the people through the Assyrian invasion, made successful by the
effeminacy of the people, the prophet discloses not only the dire
extremity to which the people were to be reduced, but reveals the
feminine ideal among the Hebrews, already alluded to in this volume,
namely, that which makes motherhood the aim of every Hebrew woman and
the absence of it a calamity. In that day seven women shall take hold
of one man, saying, "We will eat our own bread and wear our own apparel;
only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach." Widowhood
and celibacy were equally sources of deepest grief among the women of
Israel, and both were to be among the results of the luxury and vice of
the land.
Woman, as well as man, in this era of decay, had fallen into the habit
of the most cruel covetousness, and, when occasion offered, the rich and
powerful women oppressed the poor. The herdsman-prophet Amos, coming
from his home in the rural districts of Judah, was shocked at the
corruption into which even the women of Samaria, the capital of the
northern kingdom of Israel, had fallen, and so, with a rustic boldness
that would not mince matters of such grave concern, he compared the
women to the fat cattle of the land of Bashan, saying to the wives and
mothers of the corrupt and luxury-loving city: "Hear this word, ye kine
of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor,
which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring and let us
drink!"