The Story of Hannah: A Reflection on The Torah and Inspiration
Friday, May 27, 2011 at 3:45AM | by Otter Some of us at the old Sonlight Homeschool Curriculum forums were arguing (back when argument was a form of getting at the truth at Sonlight) about Deuteronomy 22:13-21, which mandates that a girl must be put to death if she is found to be a non-virgin on her wedding night.
We were mainly interested in what this might say about inspiration, and several people were taking pains to defend the Torah against a charge of injustice. Someone argued that the text was making a point about virginity, about its importance. That thought was followed by this:
These non-virgins were condemned to death for breaking the law, yet could be granted mercy by a righteous man. Christ granted mercy to the woman caught in sin. We are all condemned to death by the law, but through the righteousness of Christ, we are granted mercy.
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Hannah is a peasant girl living in the year 860 B.C. in a little village on a hillside in the Northern Kingdom. She's fifteen.
She's gathering olives from the grove one day when a man from a neighboring farmstead rides in on a donkey, accosts her father, and sits on the ground with him. Her father goes into the tent, gets a little wine in a skin, and they drink some. The thick red wine runs into their beards as they speak in the strange mixed tones of business and small-talk. The man gestures animatedly at Hannah, who blushes and turns to her work.
Her father leads the man over to her. "Hannah," he says, "come here." She goes, eyes on the ground, modestly.
"This is Aisah, and he has asked to marry you. I have agreed."
Hannah dutifully agrees, a little sadly, but always having known this day would come. She will have a month to prepare, to wonder with her friends whether Aisah will be a good husband, and to receive their congratulations. There will also be time for Aisah to gather the steep bride-price he has promised to her father: twelve goats (two to be males without significant blemishes), twelve skins of wine; a good supply of bronze farming implements (his uncle is a smith, and farm implements are very dear); and six bushels of rye.
Not an inconsiderable sum: but Hannah, he believes, will be worth it. The farmstead she is part of is large and prosperous, and so they will never starve. Also, her father is politically connected in Samaria, and that may be useful. Finally, she has no brothers, and her father is getting a bit on in years. There's just a chance that he might stand to inherit, and to recoup the bride-price. By no means a given. But maybe.
As an afterthought, he reflects on the fact that he's finally (FINALLY!) gotten a bride, something his parents have been angrily insisting on as they grow older. They need to see sons before they die. Sons: more valuable than gold, really. They will learn his own father's name, and the family traditions. They are the hope for the future.
The wedding comes soon enough. It's lavish, and Hannah is wonderstruck that her little village (and her parents, and her new husband) have poured out such riches on this day. The entire village is in colorful garments, work is suspended, and she blushes furiously, because whenever she shows her veiled face cheers and "hallels" break out from the excited (and slightly drunk) villagers.
She processes with her friends, meets the procession of Aisah in the town gate. The elders are all there, a little tipsy, and the music is loud in the streets. Her hand is hot with mingled excitement, fear, and embarrassment as everyone watches the binding of the couple before witnesses. And then the dancing begins.
A singer sings an erotic love song: she feels the heat rising in her face as she hears the strange words and remembers the things her mother whispered to her that morning, the strange words that were supposed to unlock for her a mysterious door but instead seemed to bolt it shut.
The singer sings, My beloved is to me a bag of myrrh / that lies between my breasts, and the people all laugh and clap. He goes on: He thrust his hand into the opening [howls and grins] and my inmost being yearned for him [the women all smile].
She is led into her mother's chamber, and there, with her mother watching, she loses her virginity.
It's quick: the guests are all waiting for the moment in which the bloody sheets are triumphantly displayed by Hannah's mother. Then the celebration will break out anew, last until nightfall, and leave the entire town with a headache in the morning. So Aisah wastes little time in introducing the girl to her new life.
But something goes wrong.
There is no blood. When Aisah is done, he eagerly inspects the sheets. At first he is confused. He looks in confusion at Hannah's mother in the corner, where she has been nodding complacently. At once though, she freezes where she stands, as though her whole body realized at the same time that her mind did what this means.
Aisah turns on Hannah, lying there in pain and bewilderment on the bed. He is red with anger.
And the word he uses for her is bitter, venomous, and stings her to her soul, as his backhanded slap across her upturned cheek stings her flesh.
What's wrong? she asks herself wildly. I did what mamma told me to do! What could I have done differently? What have I done? Her face is more red from shame than it is from his cruel slap, which he renews. She is his now. If he wants to slap her, by God, he will.
Her mother is at the door, shouting her father's name, in terror or anger she cannot tell. Her new husband is shouting at her, and she cannot hear anything but the rushing of blood in her own ears, her own hot skin, and, she notices somehow, the sound of a dog barking outside the window from which the sheet was supposed to have been waved in triumph.
Her father is there. Her mother is talking quickly. His face turns to stone. He turns to her, her merry loving father, and spits the same word that her new husband used. She doesn't know what to say. She has no words for this: she wishes her mother would hold her, or her father would say, "Come back to me, you are mine." She is afraid now, and her whole world is dying.
Aisah shouts at her father, who shouts back. Aisah looks as though he is about to strike her father, but then he turns, paces to the door. She hears the word, "Law."
Soon the elders of the village are with her. She stares at the ceiling through tears that will not stop. Why is everyone talking so fast, she wonders. Will they not tell me what it is that I have done? I was so happy... but now... She feels an elder lifting her leg, draped again hastily in her wedding robe.
She is being dragged by her hair, and she feels other hands on the scruff of her neck, hauling her by the wedding garments. Was it this morning that her friend, Leah, had teased her with laughter about how the garments would come off? No-one is laughing now. She wishes she could find her father, wishes she could see his reassuring smile.
She can smell him: the spicy scent of cedar mixed with the musty smell of goats. Ah. Those are his hands. Dragging her by her hair.
She is thrown into the dust. She can still hear the dog barking, an urgent sound.
Her father throws the first stone.
The last words she hears: "As Yahweh commands..."
There is blood on her white garment.
* * *
Hannah stands before God.
She is still weeping.
"What did I do?" she asks.
She hears no voice, but she feels something stir around her mind, like an answer to a difficult question that she knows the answer to, forming in her mind now. "You did nothing wrong."
"They said... they said that you said..."
There is a pause before the answer comes.
"I did."
"Then why?"
She still feels the shame, the fear. God is supposed to wash these things away. But sometimes those we love have the power to make it difficult even for God. Or maybe God makes it hard on Himself.
God clears his divine throat.
"Well, I needed to make a point about virginity."
She looks at him, the ancient of days.
For a long time she looks.
At last she looks away.
She isn't blushing anymore with shame.
"Oh," she says, bitterly.
Reader Comments (13)
Wow, what a wonderfully written story and excellent way of making a point. Well said.
Your tale illustrates very well how silly it for humans to attempt to explain God. We do indeed tend to experience our own lives in full, rich, engaging, personal detail, and—particularly where suffering is concerned—tend to see God as absent, abstract, wooden, bloodless, disengaged, and woefully inadequate.
As to the original discussion regarding the law, is the argument that there should be no laws concerning virginity, or that God should have provided a fail-safe virginity test for the culture in question?
Susan, I think the argument is that a god who provided the command without a fail-safe virginity test (assuming it really is or once was good to put to death non-virgin brides) is not worth worshiping.
Or alternatively that the text isn't "inspired" at all, but rather something to be regarded with intense suspicion.
Thanks for the response, Otter.
(To clarify my previous comment: I was suggesting that your friend was foolish to attempt to explain God; I assume your story was an illustration of your friend’s explanation, not your own attempt to explain God.)
Here’s a question that has often comes to my mind in this sort of discussion--I usually hesitate to ask it for fear of seeming kind of snotty, but I trust you to receive it as it’s intended, i.e., as a philosophical question, not a personal one: When you judge God and find him lacking, by what standard are you judging him? What dais do you stand upon that enables you to look down upon him and reach a verdict? It must be a very high one—what is built with?
Susan, not taking it as snotty at all.
But I'd say "The same dais that you use: we use our own judgment."
Putting it another way, when we say "God is good," presumably we have some idea of what "good" means. Otherwise we're talking incoherently.
If you say, "God is good, all the time!" and at the same time, "God is omnipotent and omnipresent!" you're saying that all things that happen in all times and all places (possibly excepting human free will) are "good." Which may be your point of view, but it makes one wonder what "good" means. If God's goodness involves the deaths of tens of thousands in a tsunami or earthquake, saying "God is good all the time" makes little sense of the word "good." What's that word even mean in such a context?
More to the point, if you say, "God is good all the time" and "God has commanded that girls who do not bleed on their wedding nights should be stoned to death," I feel obliged to question one of your two statements. And if God has _not_ so commanded, I feel obliged to undermine a strong sense of the inspiration of the command: it might be a command, but it is not a good God's command. Not by any meaningful definition of "good."
"Good" is a word that either has meaning in human dialectics or it has no meaning at all. It's pointless and (I think) really dangerous to go around saying, "God commands the slaughter of [X], and God is good, all the time." It's eventually going to get you into moral chaos if you start saying, "...but God's goodness is not like ours." Once you open that trap, you'll fall hastily into it. If God's goodness is not like ours, you have no business calling him "good." You don't know what the word means.
Susan, your comments/questions remind me of a recent discussion over at Jesus Creed blog. It was a response to a video promoting Francis Chan's new book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnrJVTSYLr8
As far as I can understand Chan is basically saying, "God knows best; who are we to judge?"
Jeff Cook's response was very much in line with my own thoughts after seeing the video:
http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/05/25/jeff-cook-to-francis-chan/
Michelle, I've not been able to open the links yet--pro'lly not a problem with the links themselves; I'm on someone else's computer at the moment, and it's behaving in a rather unpredictable manner. I'll look at them when I am on more familiar territory. Thanks in advance for sending them.
Otter, this
is true enough, but how does one make allowances for the fact that human definitions of good shift so dramatically from era to era, or from person to person? Either the nature of goodness actually changes through time (and our understanding/language about tracks closely along), or it stays the same and human reactions to it change throughout time (and we are sometimes tracking well and sometimes way off). When you express horror at the wholesale slaughter of one's enemies, or the stoning of brides for whom no evidence of virginity is produced, you are aware that in other places and times, these things were NOT necessarily met with horror by your fellow human beings. Are you content to reference the set of values prescribed by your early-21st-century, American, middle-class peers and call it an infallible guide to the standard of goodness? I am not. Most of us (myself very much included) tend to think and feel in concert with our contemporaries, which goes a long way toward explaining my thoughts and feelings about the commands of God as recorded in scripture and they MAY get me closer to the truth about the nature of goodness. But then again, they may not, you see.
I agree. Any number of atrocities have been committed in the name of God throughout human history, and in light of that I have to say I think you are 100% correct in saying it is a dangerous thing to affirm that "God commanded the slaughter of [X] and God is good, all the time." If I believe goodness is defined by the character of God as revealed in the Christian scriptures (which I do), what's to prevent my going off the rails and believing God is telling me to slaughter my enemies or sacrifice my son? Certainly my definition of goodness wouldn't stop me (though I'd like to believe there would be other safeguards). So, yeah. Dangerous. Absolutely.
But as for the rest of the paragraph:
I say, not at all. The opposite of saying "God's goodness is not at all like ours" would be "God's goodness is just like ours," and I really can't see how that mitigates the danger of moral chaos in the slightest. And it's not until you push either statement to the extreme end of their potential meanings (so unlike that we have no point of reference vs. so like that we cannot conceive any difference) that language fails us utterly and we ought to give up the discussion.
We're talking about the meaning of a word, and it _does_ change over time. So let's all get okay with that.
There _was_ a time when it was "good" (I guess) in Jewish dialectic to stone non-bleeding brides. I can think of lots of reasons why that would be the case: primogeniture, survival economics, relative practical worth of boys and girls to the community....
But I want to impose a dialectic external to Judaism on that, and say, "Well, no, actually. Even given all that, no matter how good it was, even if it was inspired by some supernatural being, it's not good enough. It's even evil, akin to putting to death a person for having hemorrhoids in its bizarre radomness." And yes, that's an argument about the meaning of the word "good," and one I intend to win, as any participant in a dialectic should.
I don't know that goodness has a "nature." It's a word we use. We invest it with meaning. It means something like "those things that benefit some people in some way."The execution of non-bleeding brides certainly was good for somebody at some time. No question about that. So was the genocide of Midianites and so was the slaughter of homosexuals. But it was never good for the brides, the Midianites, and the homosexuals, and I think it's a confusion to say it was "good" just because those for whom it _was_ good said God said it.
Putting it all much more simply, you get a voice here. What do _you_ think? Is that a "good law"? If you get a voice, what do you say?
I'd say it's a damn sight better than the law. Never mind "infallible."
I _do_ see.
But that's simply to relinquish your moral capabilities. You _must_ say what you think is right, and to simply say, "Wow, that's God's command, so it must be good" is to make a mockery of that gift of moral agency. You're yielding up your responsibility to make a decision about what is really true and what is really right.
I'm perfectly aware that most atrocities serve some purpose that is "good" for somebody. When you reason about any command or regulation, you can usually identify what legitimate need it serves.
But that's not good enough. You need a tougher test.
Well, it forces you to ask, not "Has God said this?" but rather "Is this right to do?"And that's got to be the heart of any moral, ethical decision worth its salt.
If it's wrong, then it's just wrong, no matter who said it or what purpose it serves.
Otter and Michelle—
Long-winded responses to each of you below! Please feel free to administer your praises/rebuttals/public floggings to me here, but if you would enjoy a further response from me, I’d prefer to do it off-line. (Michelle, Otter ought to be able to supply you with my e-mail if you’d like to do that). I have SUCH a hard time pulling out of these discussions (whether that’s due to my courteous reluctance to leave you hanging, or an immature impulse to have the last word, you can decide), and I don’t mind continuing them—but I can’t keep up the timely responses that public forums seem to require. E-mails, on the other hand, I can deal with in a more leisurely and less obsessive fashion.
Otter!
Look, dude, if you’re going write something and post it out here for all the unwashed masses to read and respond to, but you’re also expecting our adherence to specific rules of engagement, you’re going to have to be more explicit about what the rules are. Why on earth can’t I talk about “the nature of goodness,” for example? (I kinda thought I had a lot of Western philosophy backing me up there, actually.) If I’m asking myself, “Is this right to do?” why I am prohibited from also asking, “Has God said this?” in the course of discovery? When you make a statement such as, “If it's wrong, then it's just wrong, no matter who said it or what purpose it serves,” are you hoping to appeal to a mutually recognized moral law or just shoving your opinion in and expecting a rebuttal? I can’t tell which of your pronouncements reflect common rules of engagement for formal debate that are going over my head and which just form your arguments within the debate. Which is making it a little puzzling to know how to move forward.
However. Soldiering on, and all that.
If you merely want to ask, “I find this law appalling. Don’t you?” I can say, “Yes, I find it appalling as well,” and we can be done with it. But if you’re asking “Do you think this law is a good one?” and you want a serious answer, then I’m going to bring my whole self and all that I believe to the question, and that includes a formidable heap of assumptions that you and I do not share in common. If you’re going to warn me off every time I approach one of those, we’re not going to get very far.
It’s as if you’re saying:
“Susan, look at this chunk of the Mosaic law here in Duet. 22:13-21. I want to you evaluate the goodness of this law. Tell me what you _personally_ think about it, in your own voice, no holds barred. Now, one catch: you mustn’t drag in any of your ideas about the divine inspiration of Scripture, or about how goodness might best be defined by referencing the character of God, or anything crazy like that—just pretend that none of that is relevant to you, and don’t let it affect your understanding of the text one way or another. I know it seems weird for me to ask you to form a serious ethical opinion of the matter without referencing the foundations of your own ethical system, but I really want to hear what YOU think, after you’ve cleared away all that crap I don’t really agree with. I can’t take it seriously, and I can’t take _you_ seriously as a free moral agent when you talk that way. So, for the purposes of this discussion, you’re just going to have to drop all your pre-conceived notions about, well, life and reality and everything and _then_ tell me what you think.”
Which is the same thing as saying, “Tell me what you think, but pretend you’re someone else.”
Michelle—
Have now watched the video and read the response. Yep, I track with Chan (as far as the clip goes; I don’t know anything else about him), but then, he’s preaching to the choir, isn’t he? As for the response from Cook, thanks for including that as well—it may help me hit the reset button in the wrangled argument I have going with Otter, as well as helping me refine my thoughts.
I could not agree more with Cook in his first point: wrestling with God is THE way to go. Israel, God’s people, got her very name from Jacob’s wrestling match with God—a heritage I find very comforting when I am going at it, hammers and tongs, with God. The first commandment requires full-on engagement with God, mind, body, heart, you name it. Reason is obviously no exception.
Regarding his second point: I swear, I am in perpetual confusion about what people mean when they say, “I don’t believe in a God who would do X.” Do they mean, “I don’t believe in the existence of a God who would do X” or “I won’t follow a God who would do X.” They seem to conflate the two (quite different!) meanings in such a way that I am always left with the uneasy feeling that I am speaking with someone who views reality as merely “optional.” If a given being exists, I’m afraid we are stuck with his morals and attributes, whether we approve or otherwise. Cook, at least, specifies belief as being related to trust and devotion, yet he _still_ seems to have the sequence arse-backward. Basically, he’s still saying “If you can prove that this God is worth following, then I will grant Him existence.” What the . ..?! Can he deny someone existence if they don’t meet with his approval? Sounds like a nifty trick; I wish Cook would teach me how.
Third point: Um, yeah, I got in trouble with Otter about this. It puts me very much in mind of a scene in C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair. Eustace and Lucy try to explain “sun” and “lion” to the Witch, who denies their existence. “What is a sun? What is a cat?” the Witch asks. Eustace and Lucy try to describe the sun and lion by drawing an analogy to a lamp and a cat, but the Witch will have none of it; she insists they are merely extrapolating the lamp and the cat into a bigger lamp and a bigger cat and trying to call it something different. I don’t have a word for the-justice-of-God-which-is-recognizably-analogous-to-the-justice-of-man-but is substantively-different-as-well, but that’s what I’m trying to get at.
Susan, a thoughtful response, and I thank you for it.
I don't think I expect anybody to leave out their view of inspiration, but I think that their views of inspiration are as answerable to their view of the justice of the law as (deep breath here) their view of the justice of the law is to their view of inspiration.
In other words, I think that I'm not saying, "Leave inspiration out of it." But I'm definitely saying, "So does inspiration excuse the blatantly unjust?"
Your response to Michelle is very helpful in this regard, and I'll let that stand in for Susan's Last Word, which is a good one, but not ultimately satisfying to me. (But the words you were groping for probably were not, but were suggestive of, Platonic justice.)
Excellent post, Otter! (Thank Michelle for directing me here.) I have blogged a lot about similar excuses made for the often unconscionable things mandated by Torah, but yours has an artistic and emotional flair that will hit home more than my posts. Thanks for this.