In the name of what promise, and what law, is the conquest of the promised land justified? Ivan Segré proposes a reading of the book of Judges, whose structure reveals the need to put to death the phallic, warmongering impulse that, yesterday as today, alienates Israel from its foundation.
The biblical narrative is based on a major event: the exit from Egypt. But strictly speaking, this is the Mosaic side of the story. The other side is the conquest of the Promised Land, whose main character this time is Moses’ disciple Joshua. The book that bears his name recounts the first stage of the conquest of the land at the expense of the idolatrous peoples who inhabited it; a first stage whose incompleteness is essential, since the conquest of the Promised Land never ceases to be incomplete throughout the Bible. The next book is Judges, which begins as follows: “After Joshua’s death, the children of Israel consulted the Lord, saying, “Which of us should go first against the Canaanite to attack him?” The Lord answered, “It is Yehuda who must march; I will deliver the land into his power.””
So it was Yehuda, or the tribe of Yehuda, who was to lead Israel’s armies and replace Joshua, who had until then been leading the fight against Canaan, the idolatrous enemy. Throughout the first chapter, the following verses recount Israel’s assaults, which are victorious, but only partially: pockets of idolatry remain. At the beginning of the second chapter, an angel of the Lord intervenes and admonishes Israel in the following terms:
“An envoy of the Lord came from Gilgal to Bochim and said on his behalf: ‘I had brought you up out of Egypt and into the land I had promised by oath to your fathers, and I had said, ’I will never break my covenant with you; but in your turn do not compromise with the inhabitants of this land, destroy their altars!” And you didn’t listen to my voice. What have you done there! So I have resolved not to drive them out from before you; and they will cling to your sides, and their gods will be a stumbling block to you.“” (Judges 2, 1-3).
The first is that it highlights the central motif of the biblical narrative, namely the intertwining of the exit from Egypt and the entry into the Promised Land. Indeed, liberation only makes sense if it leads to a fruitful use of freedom, which presupposes the construction of a human world, precisely that of the promise. A call for liberation that is not normed by a “promise” is of little value, and all the less so when it is, at the very core of liberation, the activation of the promise that frees human beings from their chains. In other words, the consistency of the promise is tested in the very process of liberation. In more cabalistic language, this can be expressed as follows: the ten plagues of Egypt are the reverse of the ten words. In more philosophical or political language, we would say that the process of liberation, even within the violence it may eventually unleash, already bears witness to the principles that fertilize the construction of the new society.
The second point raised by the angel’s intervention relates to the narrative economy of the biblical text: in what way did the children of Israel stray from the straight and narrow in the first chapter of the book of Judges, so that they could be admonished in these terms: “you have not listened to my voice”? Reading and re-reading the first chapter, nothing transpires. But on rereading the angel’s interpellation, it’s written in black and white: “Do not compromise with the inhabitants of this land, destroy their altars”. Until then, the conquest had been military and territorial. It has not been a conquest of the spirit, a conquest that would have required the main thrust of the assault to be on the “altars” of idolatry.
Liberation only makes sense if it leads to a fruitful use of freedom, which presupposes the construction of a human world, precisely that of the promise. A call for liberation that is not normed by a “promise” is of little value.
Introduced at the outset, in chapter 2, verses 1-3, this motif may seem to disappear in the rest of the book of Judges. Even though it forms the essential framework, that of Israel’s failure to destroy the “altars”, a spiritual or ethical failure that amounts to leading a victorious military conquest while assimilating the values of one’s enemies – a failure that reaches its climax when the tribe of Dan conquers a territory only to erect an idol on it. We are now at chapter 18, at the end of a book that comprises 21 chapters:
“[…] They proceeded to Laish, a people tranquil and unsuspecting, and they put them to the sword and burned down the town. There was none to come to the rescue, for it was distant from Sidon and they had no dealings with anyone; it lay in the valley of Beth-rehob. They rebuilt the town and settled there, and they named the town Dan, after their ancestor Dan who was Israel’s son. Originally, however, the name of the town was Laish. The Danites set up the sculptured image for themselves; and Jonathan son of Gershom son of Manasseh, and his descendants, served as priests to the Danite tribe until the land went into exile. They maintained the sculptured image that Micah had made throughout the time that the House of God stood at Shiloh.“ (Judges 18:27-31).
Returning to the angel’s interpellation, the argument of the book of Judges is therefore clear and distinct: Israel’s pitfall consisted in untying the two sides of the project, leaving Egypt and entering the promised land, so that the conquest took on the contours of an ultimately idolatrous outburst of violence. To paraphrase Horace, the Canaanites conquered their fierce conqueror: “The children of Dan erected an idol for their own use”. The meaning of leaving Egypt was lost in the course of military conquest. This, let’s insist, is the argument of the book of Judges, trenchantly modern and, indeed, a world away from the clichés of Julien Benda in his Trahison des clercs (TN: Treason of the Clerics ):
“Like the ancient prophet of Israel, the modern cleric teaches men: ‘Deploy your zeal for Jehovah, god of hosts’”. Such has been for half a century the attitude of those men whose function was to thwart the realism of the people and who, with all their power and in full decision, have worked to excite it; an attitude which I dare to call for this reason the treason of the clerics.[1]”
Alas, Benda has probably never been able to read the Bible, for precisely Israel’s ancient prophecy is nothing other than unceasingly renewed fidelity to the angel’s interpellation. Conversely, the nationalistic deviation – narrow-minded, phallic, warmongering – from conquest is, in the Hebrew Bible, a symptom of assimilation to idolatrous values. This is Alef-Bet. But the book of Judges doesn’t stop there: assimilation to idolatrous values takes on yet another dimension at the end of the book.
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Immediately after chapter 18 concludes with the idol erected by the tribe of Dan, the last three chapters 19, 20 and 21 of the book of Judges recount the episode of the “concubine” and the ensuing civil war within Israel. Let’s summarize the story: a man quarrels with his “concubine”, who immediately returns to her father’s house; the man goes to “speak to her heart” and convinces her to leave her father’s house and return to his own; on the way back, the couple is surprised by nightfall, but the man does not want to spend the night in Jerusalem, then “city of the Jebusites”, “a city of strangers, who are not Israelites” (Judges 19:12); he preferred to spend the night in Gibea, an “Israelite” town in Benjamin’s territory. Alone among the town’s inhabitants, an old man offers them hospitality, just as Lot did when the three angels arrived in the city of Sodom (Genesis 19). And the rest of the text confirms that this is indeed a parallel between the two episodes:
“And he took him into his house. He mixed fodder for the donkeys; then they bathed their feet and ate and drank. While they were enjoying themselves, the townsmen, a depraved lot, had gathered about the house and were pounding on the door. They called to the aged owner of the house, “Bring out that man who’s come into your house, so that we can be intimate with him.” The owner of the house went out and said to them, “Please, my friends, do not commit such a wrong. Since this fellow has entered my house, do not perpetrate this outrage. Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. Let me bring them out to you. Use them, do what you like with them; but don’t do that outrageous thing to this fellow.” But the others would not listen to him. So the man seized his concubine and pushed her out to them. They raped her and abused her all night long until morning; and they let her go when dawn broke.” (Judges 19:21-25).
The passage distinctly echoes the similar episode in the city of Sodom, in Genesis 19, when the three angels found refuge in the house of Lot:
“They had not yet lain down, when the town council [and] the militia of Sodom —both young and old, the whole assembly without exception—gathered about the house. And they shouted to Lot and said to him, “Where are the ones who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may be intimate with them.” So Lot went out to them to the entrance, shut the door behind him, and said, “I beg you, my friends, do not commit such a wrong. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you please; but do not do anything to the others, since they have come under the shelter of my roof.” (Gen. 19, 4-8).
The structure is deliberately identical: strangers are passing through a town; no one offers them hospitality except a singular individual; all the people of the town storm his house, to “get to know” the strangers, i.e. to do them violence, to subject them to their pleasure; the host offers to hand over his daughter to satisfy the inhabitants’ urge. In the end, it’s the concubine who is handed over. In short, to sum up the structure in question: the foreigner, like the feminine, is held hostage by the male sexual drive. In the book of Genesis, the city of Sodom is annihilated by a heavenly decree; in the book of Judges, civil war is unleashed following the rape of the concubine, in order to punish the city of Israel guilty of such a crime. In view of the structure of the book of Judges revealed above, a question necessarily arises: what is the relationship between the collective rape of the concubine and the assimilation of idolatrous values? Or to put it another way, is the practice of subjecting the stranger and the woman to his pleasure, in the final analysis, the expression of an idolatrous principle?
Indeed, by the end of the book of Judges, the conquest of the promised land has gone so astray that the morals of the inhabitants of Sodom now characterize the citizens of Gibea, of the tribe of Benjamin. To claim to avoid the city of the Jebusites, because it is “a city of strangers, who are not Israelites”, is therefore what the narrative points out as literally illusory, even grotesque, since Sodom and Canaan, from now on, lodge within Israel itself, in Gibea.
The conquest of the Promised Land has now taken the form of a conquest over oneself. This is the other side of the conquest.
Apart from the nationalist pitfall, if there is another lesson to be drawn from this composition, it is that the mistreatment of the feminine – the rape of the concubine – is linked to the assimilation of idolatrous mores, at least in the first sense, that such behavior is par excellence the expression, or consequence, of what was written in the previous chapter: “The children of Dan erected the idol for their use”. This is what the editor of the book of Judges submits to the sagacity of his reader in terms of formidable clarity, and with the requisite crudity since, following the rape and murder of the “concubine”, her body is cut into twelve pieces, sent to each of the tribes of Israel: “And everyone who saw them cried out, ‘Such a thing has not been done, has not been seen, since the day Israel came out of the land of Egypt to this day! We must take it to heart, we must advise and pronounce!”” (Judges 19:30). Why cut up the concubine’s corpse, if not to show the female body reduced to “meat” offered up to predatory voracity?
Israel’s war against itself ensues, strictly analogous to that waged by the prophetess Deborah against Jabin, king of Canaan, in chapter 4 of the same book of Judges. And it is then that the structure of the book of Judges springs into full view, precisely in chap. 20, verse 18, when the armies of Israel, at the beginning of the civil war, “went up to Bethel to consult the Lord, saying, ”Which of us should march first into battle against the Benjamites?” The Lord answered, “Yehuda shall be first””. The conquest of the Promised Land has now taken the form of a conquest over oneself. This is the other side of the conquest.
And this other side is feminine, in the sense that it continues a motif that appeared earlier, when Yael, a woman disciple of the prophetess Deborah, brought the general of the Canaanite armies, Sisara, into her tent and “took a peg from the tent, grabbed a hammer, crept up to him quietly and drove the peg into his temple, leaving it stuck in the ground” (Judges 4:21). The killing of the Canaanite general by a woman’s hand is not an insignificant act; it signifies that true conquest is the building of a “house”. And Yael’s “house” is now built on the death of the phallic drive. Sisara, in fact, is the man of war whose rapacity is instinctive, the man of predation, the man-animal. Thus, in the Song of Deborah, Sisara’s mother awaits her son and, not seeing him coming, reassures herself:
“She looked out of the window, Sisara’s mother; through the grating she uttered her complaint: ‘Why does his chariot delay in appearing? Who holds back the running of his chariots?” Her wise companions reassure her; she herself finds an answer to her complaints: “No doubt they kidnap, they share the booty; one maiden, two maidens per warrior; for Sisara, the richly dyed fabrics, the spoils of the bright embroideries, the double embroideries that shine on the necks of the captives…”” (Judges 5:28-30).
But Sisara does not return. He lies in Yael’s tent, the pin of an upright driven into his skull. House of Yael, Song of Deborah, Victory over Sisara.
True conquest is the building of a “house”. And Yael’s “house” is now built on the death of the phallic drive.
Clearly, the book of Judges invites us to link these two elements of the story: the erection of an idolatrous altar and the gang rape of the concubine. But what is the relationship between these two crimes? On the basis of a factual description, idolatry seems to be reduced to the act of worshipping an idol. However, if we bear in mind what is meant by this fundamental motif of the Hebrew Bible, the idol is not simply a statue, or any other idolized object, it is what is erected in place of otherness, what erases it, eclipses it, even annihilates it, so that the idolatrous impulse is, in the final analysis, the result of an unlimited narcissism whose watchword would be: my enjoyment alone is the law. This being the case, the connection between the erection of an idol and the gang rape of the concubine is rigorously logical.
It is clear, then, that if the conquest of the Promised Land, set out at the beginning of the book of Judges, is about destroying idolatrous altars, it is not about obeying a jealous and tyrannical God, but about founding a society in the Promised Land that is free from idolatrous determination, i.e., from his law. On this basis, the discovery of the structural effects of the book of Judges lends itself to many readings, and to many comparisons. We can be sure, for example, that from the very beginning of the next book, Samuel I, the same motif is at work when it is said of the two sons of the priest Heli, “perverse men” (Samuel I, chap. 2, v. 12), “that they debased the worship of the Lord” (ibid. v. 17), not only by appropriating for themselves the best parts of the sacrifices brought to the altar (ibid., v. 13-16), but also by abusing the women who went there (ibid., v. 22). In short, they transformed the altar of the God of Israel into an idolatrous altar where only their own pleasure was law. This, in fact, is the structural plot of the Bible: the assimilation of idolatrous values within Israel, at its very heart, and the prophetic outburst of singularities faithful to the law of coming out of Egypt, from Deborah to Jeremiah.
That the idolatrous background of the “Nations”, that is, of humanity, far from being the archaic fable of an Old Testament, is structural, is what a current “news item” brings to light with a crudity worthy of a biblical tale; and I’m thinking, of course, of the rapes of Gisèle Pélicot, an unconscious body handed over to an individual predation so often repeated that it becomes collective.
But if there’s another blatant topicality to the book of Judges, it’s also that of a Jewish nationalism whose desire for conquest and thirst for destruction evoke the murderous folly of the men of the tribe of Dan who, after razing the city of Laish and slaughtering all its inhabitants, built another city there and “erected the idol for their use”. Indeed, Israel’s extreme nationalist right has no vision of society, no understanding of tradition, its only watchword being the eradication or subjugation of the Arab presence in the Promised Land in favor of the Jewish presence. But a Jewish presence that did away with the Presence is precisely what the entire Hebrew Bible has gone out of its way to disqualify.
Alas, the Bible is not, in the eyes of Judeo-fascists, a work of the Spirit which, through study, enjoins you; it is a title deed which they claim to enjoy. This is why, to the phallic side of the conquest, we must, again and again, oppose its feminine side: according to the phallic side, pleasure and force are the law; according to the feminine side, sanctification is the law. For us, at least, this is the lesson of the “concubine” episode.
It would therefore be incumbent on all Jewish antifascist movements to agree, today, in Israel and elsewhere, on the meaning of the Hebrew word “sanctification”, their common foundation having to be its Jewish usage, irremissibly linked to the major event of the biblical narrative: the exit from Egypt.
Ivan Segré
Notes
| 1 | Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs, Paris, Grasset, 1927, p. 225-226 |
