to have lifted up prophetic voice against the moral and religious decay.
Prophets there were, but apparently no prophetesses, except those whom
Jeremiah rebukes with scathing earnestness,--women who prophesied
according to their own feelings and desires rather than in harmony with
the eternal principles as applied to the then present conditions.
Indeed, in the entire period of decline which preceded the fall of
Samaria in B.C. 722 and of Jerusalem in B.C. 586, no prophetess appears
in the record, except that Isaiah speaks of his wife as the prophetess.
This involves an entire change in the meaning of the word.
But there were patriotic women, just as there were patriotic men,
during the days of decline. There was no greater suffering than that of
women when they saw the Babylonian soldiery laying Jerusalem in ashes.
Hugging their babes to their breasts, some were hewn in pieces, while
others suffered shameful indignities and were led away among the
captives, to sojourn in a strange land. The prophets had foreseen the
coming anguish of the women; and when Jeremiah foretold the restoration
of Israel to her land, he proclaimed that the eyes of Rachel, which had
wept for her children "because they were not," should at length be
dried, and her mourning turned into rejoicing. Thus the picture drawn in
that elegiac poem--the greatest of all Hebrew threnodies, known as the
Lamentations of Jeremiah--when he saw the sacred city in ruins, was
reversed:
"How doth the city sit solitary
That was full of people!
How is she become as a widow!
She that was great among the nations,
And princess among the provinces,
How is she become tributary!
"She weepeth sore in the night
And her tears are on her cheeks:
Among all her lovers
She hath none to comfort:
All her friends have dealt treacherously with her,
They have become her enemies."
This was but the enlargement and national application of the distress
experienced by the women of Israel during the siege and final overthrow
of the city in which all Jewish hopes centred.
Of the Hebrew women during the period of the exile, we know
comparatively little. And yet no woman of later Biblical Judaism made so
deep an impression upon the Jewish mind as did Esther. By her beauty and
the wise cunning of her uncle, she became the wife of King Ahasuerus,
the famous Persian who attempted to measure arms with the Greeks--an
effort which turned out so disastrously for the gigantic but
undisciplined Persian army. The story of Vashti's deposal, because she
refused to lend herself to the immodest proposal of the king, befuddled
by the wine of banqueting and revelry; of the subsequent selection of
Esther as queen; of her entreaty for her people, against whom a
deep-laid and cruel plot was soon to be executed,--is a familiar
narrative.
That a Jewish woman should have been elevated to such a position in the
Persian palace seems so improbable that some have been inclined to doubt
the accuracy of the story which the Book of Esther records, especially
since profane history tells of but one wife of Ahasuerus, Amestris. But
the argument from silence is always precarious. Vashti and Esther may
easily have been extra-legal wives of the king, even though Amestris
were his only legally recognized wife. The well-known custom of Oriental
monarchies makes such a view highly probable. At all events, there
stands the well-known feast of Purim, the "festival of the Lots," as a
monument in Jewish religious life of the substantial accuracy of the
events recorded in the Book of Esther.
The power of Esther's life and of her service to her people in exile
may be in a measure estimated by the fact that no book in all the Bible
was so much copied, or was so generally in possession of the Jewish
families as that of Esther. Indeed, it was asserted by Maimonides and
believed by many that when at the coming of Messiah all the rest of the
Old Testament should pass away, there would still remain the five books
of the law and the Book of Esther. Written as it was, upon separate
scrolls, it was in thousands of Jewish houses. Even at the present day
rolls containing Esther are the prized possession of Jewish families;
and these are sometimes even now passed down from parents to their
children upon the wedding day. On the day of Purim, the book is read in
public as a part of the service, that the way in which Esther became the
savior of her people may never be forgotten. The power of Esther's story
over the Jewish mind has seemed the more remarkable, since it is the
single book in the Hebrew Canon which does not contain the name of God.
But on the other hand, there is no Hebrew writing that is so intense in
its national spirit; none which breathes and burns so deeply with the
characteristic genius of "the peculiar people."
There was perhaps no time in the history of the Hebrews when social
life received a more severe shock than during the days of the reforms
instituted by Nehemiah about the middle of the fifth century before
Christ. When the Jews returned from their exile in Babylonia many of
them married women of gentile blood and religion, daughters of those who
had peopled the land of Palestine during the exile. Children of Jews
were being born and taught heathen language and heathen worship by their
mothers. Nehemiah, under appointment as governor, when he saw that Jews
had married "wives of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab," commanded that all
foreign women be immediately divorced, and that only Jewish women should
be taken for wives. Great was the temporary suffering involved, to be
sure, but the aim in view, namely that of keeping the people henceforth
free from idolatry seemed to justify even so drastic a measure. A
grandson of the high priest, himself in priestly line, had married
Nicaso, daughter of Sanballat, the Horonite, the very crafty and
troublesome ruler of Samaria. When Nehemiah demanded of him that he give
up his wife he refused. The governor accordingly expelled him from
Jerusalem, chasing him out of his presence, as the Biblical narrative
informs us. Josephus says that when the people demanded that he give up
his alien wife or his priestly office,--as the law flatly forbade
priests from having foreign wives,--he decided first in favor of his
office. But when Sanballat, his father-in-law, heard of it, he told him
not to move hastily, but if he would keep Nicaso his wife, he,
Sanballat, would build him a temple of his own, so that he might be not
only a priest, but high priest, and Nicaso's husband at the same time.
This appealed to Manasseh's judgment, and he chose the plan of his
father-in-law. Thus was built the temple on Mount Gerizim, which became
thereafter the centre of Samaritan life and worship. It was concerning
Mount Gerizim that the Samaritan woman at the well spoke when she said
to Jesus: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say that in
Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship."
The suffering of the women during the grievous persecution of the Jews
under Antiochus Epiphanes, "the illustrious"--nicknamed Epimanes, "the
madman"--was frightful in the extreme. Some men, but fewer women,
yielded to the pressure of the effort to destroy the Jewish religion by
forcing the Greek pantheon, Greek games and theatre, and the Greek
culture upon the Jews. The struggle into which the people were plunged
brought the self-sacrifice of the women into prominence. A typical case
of suffering is given in the Second Book of Maccabees. King Antiochus
had laid hold of a mother and seven sons, and commanded that they
violate their law by eating swine's flesh. The eldest was first put to
the test. He refused to obey. The king commanded that the tongue of him
who spoke thus defiantly should be cut out, his limbs mutilated, and his
living body roasted in hot pans, and that his mother and her younger
sons should witness the awful sight. One after another the sons were
cruelly dealt with and slain. Each one was given opportunity to save his
life by eating the forbidden flesh, but each refused. At length the
youngest only remained. The king appealed to the mother, standing by, to
advise her boy to obey and save his life. But the sturdy Jewish mother
turned to this son and strengthened him in his determination to die
rather than prove faithless to the religion of his fathers by obeying
the merciless tyrant. He too was then murdered, even more cruelly than
the rest. And at length, the mother herself lost her life upon the same
altar of faithfulness, rather than transgress the law. Of such sturdy
stuff were the Jewish mothers of this awful period made. There is little
wonder that the sons of such women succeeded in winning their
independence and in setting up again a Jewish state, which had been
suppressed for more than four centuries.
A look into this period would be incomplete without reference to one of
the apochryphal or deutero-canonical books of the Old Testament, highly
prized by the Jews as containing a picture of pious home life among the
Jews in the captivity. A devout Jew, as the story goes, with his wife
Anna and his son Tobias were among those whom Shalmaneser, King of
Assyria, had taken captive from the land of Israel and placed in the
city of Nineveh when Samaria fell about B. C. 722. Loyal to his religion,
Tobit, even in exile, refused to eat the bread of the Gentiles; but by
dint of hard work and fidelity he at length became purveyor to the king.
By the revolving wheel of fortune, Tobit is at length reduced to
poverty. Here Anna his wife, with devoted womanly faithfulness, comes to
the rescue with her skilful fingers, weaving and spinning for a
livelihood; for her husband was now both poor and blind. One day Anna,
wearied and provoked, reproaches her husband for his blindness--such
calamities were esteemed a divine curse in Israel, whereupon Tobit
prayed that he might die. On the self-same day, a young Jewess, Sara,
daughter of Raguel, a captive in Ecbatana of Media, was offering up a
similar prayer that the end of her life might come. For her father's
maid had charged her with killing her seven husbands, who had died one
after another, each on the very first night of the wedding feast, though
the strange deaths had been the work of Asmodeus, the evil spirit, who
was not willing that the maiden should wed. Now these two widely
separated and unrelated prayers were to be brought together into one
romantic story by the help of an angel, who becomes a guide to the son
of Tobit, young Tobias, who is about to start out in life in quest of a
fortune. The angel guides him to Ecbatana, bids him make the eighth to
offer marriage to Sara, whose seven husbands had perished on the nuptial
night. Though Tobias had never seen the young woman before, he was to
her the next of living kin and so should be (according to the Mosaic
law) the one to offer his hand to the youthful, much-married widow.
Would the young Tobias prove strong enough bravely to face the record of
the seven deaths? The angel here comes to the rescue, and calls Tobias's
attention to the heart and liver of a great fish which had been caught
in the Euphrates as the two had journeyed together from Nineveh to
Ecbatana. These, burned with perfumes in the bridal chamber, drove the
evil spirit Asmodeus away, and the marriage festivities went on merrily.
The life of Tobias had been saved. He takes his newly wedded wife back
to his father's house in joy and triumph, cures his father's blindness
by the same magic charm which had saved his own life in the bridal
chamber, and peace and wealth and long life follow in rich profusion.
This story is chiefly of interest to us as it shows the continuation,
even into the period of exile, of the Levirate marriage custom. While
the story of the marriage of Sara, daughter of Raguel, is a Jewish
romance, the literature of the inter-biblical period is not without its
tragedies, in which woman plays an important role. Among these is the
well-known story of Judith and Holofernes.
Many Jewish women have passed into literature and art. Rebekah at the
wellside, Miriam watching by the reeds or singing the paean of victory
with timbrel, Ruth gleaning in the field of Boaz, Delilah the
voluptuous, and Athaliah the monster, have exerted their influence both
upon the makers of art and writers of drama, but probably no Hebrew
woman before the birth of Jesus has made a deeper impress upon the
imagination of men than Judith, the beautiful woman and patriot of
Bethulia. A woman once saved the city of Rome from overthrow. Several
times in the history of Israel was it given to a woman to be the
deliverer of the people. The names of Deborah, Esther, and Judith have
come down the centuries as those of women who risked their lives for the
salvation of their people from the enemy, and succeeded because of their
tact and prowess.
The story of Judith and Holofernes is told in the apocryphal Book of
Judith. The Assyrians are at war with Israel, whose cities are being
besieged and wasted in the merciless onslaught. Holofernes, the Assyrian
general, at length lays siege to Bethulia in his onward march to the
holy city of Jerusalem. The people are reduced to straits most direful
and bitter. Women and little ones perish in the streets, and the people
cry out to their leaders to sue Asshur for peace. The rulers, thus
urged, promise within five days to yield to their besiegers. It is then
that Judith, wealthy and pious, a widow of the city, comes forward to
strengthen the fainting heart of the governors and to bid them trust God
and stand firm. She promises, in the meantime, that she herself will aid
them. Praying earnestly that God will help her in her purpose, she lays
aside the habiliments of widowhood, and, arraying herself in garments of
gladness, goes forth with her maids to the camp of Holofernes. Charmed
with her beauty and grace, the Assyrian gives a feast, to which the
bewitching Judith is invited. Holofernes makes merry, and, drinking to
drowsiness, lies down in his tent to sleep. Others depart in the night,
leaving him and the Jewess alone. Seeing her opportunity, Judith seizes
the scimiter that hung on the pillar of Holofernes's bed, and, laying
hold upon the hair of the sleeping man's head, severed it from his body,
and made her way in the darkness back to the city. In the early morning
a sally was made from the city gates, and the Assyrians, finding their
captain headless, were thrown into utter confusion and completely
routed. Thus did Judith become the deliverer of Israel. The women of the
city ran together to see her who had been their savior, made a great
dance for her, sang her praises, and bestowed their benedictions,
placing garlands of olive upon her brow.
Portia's shrewd dealing with Shylock, the Jewish money lender, called
forth the frequent applause of the onlookers: "A Daniel come to
judgment, yea, a Daniel!" It is in the _History of Susanna_, an
apocryphal addition to the canonical Book of Daniel, in which the great
prophet is presented in the role of arbiter. He appears in a cause
against a woman, Susanna, a Jewish lady of great beauty, the wife of a
wealthy and distinguished Hebrew whose home was in Babylon. Susanna
excited the amours of two judges, elders of the people, who were
frequently at her husband's home; but she spurned all their advances,
till, angered and resentful, they united in a plot to destroy her, and
accused her of unfaithfulness to Joachim, her husband. The penalty for
adultery was death, and the people crowded to the trial; for if there
was conviction, stoning would follow. The two elders, standing, with
their hands upon the innocent woman's head, tell the story agreed upon,
how they saw the wife of Joachim in the very shameful act of which they
accused her; and the assembly, believing the testimony of the two elders
and judges of the people, condemned Susanna to death. At this juncture,
the young man Daniel appears upon the scene, much as Portia in the trial
of Antonio, and, by adroitly cross-questioning the two witnesses
separately, involved them in contradictions, revealing the cowardly plot
against the virtuous woman and convicting them of false witnessing. And
since the law of Moses prescribed the same penalty for those who bore
false testimony as that which would have come to the accused, the elders
were put to death, and Susanna was given honor before all the people.
This is but one of the many examples in Hebrew history which reveal the
unusually high moral character and purity of life that prevailed among
the Hebrew women.
It is one of the noteworthy and distressing facts of late Jewish
history that in the later teaching of the rabbis woman is placed upon a
distinctly lower plane. Her inferiority to man is frequently emphasized.
And yet there was one factor which came into the life of Judaism, after
the Babylonian exile, which gave to Jewish women an advantage which they
had not previously enjoyed. It was the establishment of the synagogue.
The secondary place given to women in the temple worship has already
been referred to. The man, as head of the family, was representative of
the family and responsible, therefore, for the performance of the
ceremonies required of every Hebrew household. With the destruction of
the temple and the dispersion of the Jews, the temple rites were
rendered impossible. When the synagogue arose to fill the vacancy made
by these conditions, women were given a place in attendance at the
instruction given in these new centres of Jewish life. And while they
were never strictly considered members of the congregation, yet, seated
in a separate part of the room, they heard the Scriptures read and
expounded; and it was not unknown for women even to read on the Sabbath
as among the seven appointees for the day. The _Torah_, or law, however,
was considered rather too sacred and important to be committed to their
exposition.
Judging from a remark in the _Halacha_ it is just to infer that in the
days when the Jews had become dispersed throughout the Roman world,
there were two facts that had a very powerful influence upon Jewish
women, one of them of Hebraic, the other of Greco-Roman origin. For the
_Halacha_, in speaking of the women leaving their homes, said that there
were two causes which took the women away from their domestic duties:
one was the synagogue, the other, the baths,--not, indeed, an altogether
uncomplimentary comment upon the women of the times, for it would seem
they believed in the oft-coupled virtues of cleanliness and godliness.
From the days of John Hyrcanus, the influence of the Jewish rulers had
been decidedly in favor of Hellenic culture. Thus the revolution brought
about by the Maccabean revolt seemed about to be undone by the
successors of the Maccabees. Jewish independence had been won in an
effort to resist Antiochus Epiphanes and others in their attempts to
destroy Judaism by making the Greek religion and customs prevalent
throughout Palestine. Would the sons and successors of the sturdy
Maccabeans give away the fruits of the hard-won victory? When to
Alexandra was bequeathed the government by her husband, she decided to
espouse the cause of the Pharisaic party, who hated the encroachments of
foreign influence. But, alas, for the queen's inability to cope with a
situation so strained! In her effort to appease the opposite party she
put weapons into their hands, which were soon turned against her. As an
old woman of seventy-three, she saw her two sons in bitter contest, at
the head of opposing forces, each trying to rule over a tumultuous,
faction-torn nation. She passed away, deploring a condition which she
was utterly unable to correct. It was not till Pompey brought his Roman
legions to the gates of Jerusalem, and set up the Roman eagles in the
holy city itself that intrigue and battling for the Jewish throne was
brought to a close. Then Jewish independence was no more.
A great granddaughter of Alexandra was destined indirectly at least to
play a prominent role in later Jewish history. This was Mariamne. Herod,
afterward known as the Great, had hoped by marrying this descendant of
both the contending Jewish parties, to unite the influence of the two
branches of the Asmonean house. In this, however, Herod was
disappointed, and he proceeded to accomplish by force what he had hoped
to do by wiles. In the frightful war of extermination waged by Herod
against the whole Asmonean line, which he feared might endanger the
rulership secured to him by the Roman power and his own political
prowess, there figured a Jewish woman who, because of her sagacity, is
not to be passed over in silence. She was Alexandra, a granddaughter of
the queen of the same name. When Herod attempted to place in the office
of Jewish high priest a young man who would be simply a tool for him,
Alexandra advocated the candidature of Aristobulus,--her son and a
brother of Mariamne,--who by birthright was in line of official
succession. Alexandra shrewdly wrote to Cleopatra that the wily woman of
the Nile might use her influence with Antony to force Herod to terms.
Herod was compelled to yield and appointed Aristobulus, but determined
that Alexandra as well as the new high priest should be put out of the
way. One day after both Herod and Aristobulus had been enjoying a
banquet given by Alexandra, Herod successfully plotted the killing of
the high priest in a fishpond attached to the house of feasting, Herod's
minions holding him playfully under the water until he was drowned. But
Alexandra was not so stupid as to fail to take in the situation. Through
Cleopatra she again succeeded in forcing Herod upon the defensive. Being
summoned to appear before Antony, Herod succeeded, however, in again
ingratiating himself with the Roman, and he returned as strong as ever
to Jerusalem.
But his return was not altogether happy; for on his departure, he had
given command that should his interview with Antony be ill-fated,
Mariamne, his Jewish wife, should be slain, that no other man might have
her for wife. The secret leaked out, and came to Mariamne's ears. She
violently resented the treatment of Herod and on his return reproached
him for his cruelty; but the insanely jealous and wily Herod was not to
be changed by reproaches. On his absence from home on the occasion when
he went to meet Octavius, the new star which arose on Antony's downfall,
Herod again commanded that both Mariamne and Alexandra be put to death
should he not return alive. Mariamne on his return received him with
cold resentment. With the help of Herod's mother and sister the
estrangement became more and more bitter. The king's cupbearer was
bribed by them to declare that Mariamne had attempted to poison her
husband. The jury, as well as the evidence, being well-arranged
before-hand, the unfortunate Mariamne was led away to execution in B.C.
29, to be followed next year by Alexandra, who had watched her
opportunity and, taking advantage of an illness of Herod, had attempted
to gain possession of Jerusalem and overthrow the reign of Herod. It was
a bold stroke for a woman. It failed, and she was executed. With her
death the line of Asmonean claimants to the throne was ended.
But the end of this chapter in which womanly hate and intrigue played so
prominent a part was not yet. When Herod's sister, Salome, who had taken
so large a part in the death of Mariamne, saw Herod's sons return from
their studies in Rome, with the looks and royal bearing of their mother,
Mariamne; when she perceived the people's joy at their likeness to the
late Jewish queen who had been so cruelly murdered, her jealousy became
most bitter, and she began to plot against them as she had against their
mother. Herod for a time seemed unmoved and married one of them to
Berenice, Salome's own daughter. This only intensified Salome's hate;
and step after step of domestic hatred and unhappiness led at length to
the order by Herod that the two sons of his Jewish wife, Alexander and
Aristobulus, should be strangled at Sebaste, where years before their
mother Mariamne had become his bride. No wonder Augustus Caesar could
utter his famous pun in the Greek language which may be reproduced in
the words: "I would rather be Herod's _swine_ than his _son_!"