Esther and Judith

Esther is a woman who can be admired for being a heroine, but her way of going about it was not exactly the idea women would today. Yes, her people were in danger of being killed, and yes, she managed to save them, but the morals of the story are not exactly relevant to women of today.

First, she was basically told what to do by her adopted guardian and cousin, Mordecai. He told her that the Jews were in danger of being killed, and he formulated the entire plan. Esther did what she was told without question. That can be a good thing in most situations, but the story almost seems like if Esther had not listened to Mordecai, then the Jews would have perished. The moral there is that women need to rely on men to get things done. Yes, Esther did go through with the plan, but because Mordecai told her to.

Another moral of the story is that women must be manipulative to get what they want. Esther basically uses her charms as the queen to get King Ahaserus to issue a decree saying that the Jews will be allowed to defend themselves in the event of an invasion of their lands in order to stop his advisor, Haman, from killing them all. This idea of manipulation does not really have to apply to women nowadays. Women do not have to manipulate in order to get what they want; they can work for it.

Judith can be seen as a heroine, as well, but she also used manipulation in order to get what she wanted.

Being a widow, Judith had nobody to answer to. When she heard of Nebuchadnezzar's plan to invade all of Egypt, she decided to take matters into her own hands and save the Israelites, since nobody else wanted to do it. She met with Holofernes (advisor to Nebuchadnezzar who was to lead the Assyrians to invade), seduced him (but did not sleep with him), and cut his head off. She brought his head back home with her, and the Assyrians did not invade the town.

Both of these stories hold women highly, but also show that women need to have a man's approval before they go out and do something, as was the case with Esther, and that manipulation is the way to go about getting what you want. Women should not be seen as manipulative as a whole unit. This idea puts all women in a negative light, and not all of us are that way.

Jephthah's Daughter

Judges 11 tells the story of Jephthah and his daughter.  Jephthah was a warrior and prayed to God to deliver the Ammonites into his hands.  He promised God that if hs defeated the Ammonites, then he would sacrifice whatever came out to greet him first as a burnt offering to God.  It just so happened that his one and only virgin daughter, unnamed in the biblical text, came out to greet him.  He told her of the promise he had made to God, and she asked him to allow her two months in the mountains to mourn.  She returned after the two months and Jephthah kept his promise.

How do we view Jephthah in this story? He was perhaps careless and arrogant with his vow, seeing as he only had his daughter and his wife as family.  Why wouldn't they greet him first?  Perhaps he was expecting an animal of some sort to greet him.  In the New Testament, he his held in high regard.  Perhaps he is held in a positive light because he was a good warrior and he kept his promise.

God does not speak in the story.  Why was God silent?  Could it be that God was silently judging, or possibly that the narrator just did not bother to include dialogue between God and Jephthah?  We may never know the answer because, as we have learned in class, the Bible is cryptic.

There are many parallels with the story of Isaac and Abraham in Genesis 22.  Both are to sacrifice their "only" child (Abraham had Ishmael, but he is not mentioned much) as burnt offerings.  The mountains are another parallel between both stories, serving a different purpose in each.  Abraham takes Isaac to the mountains to sacrifice him, and Jephthah's daughter runs to the mountains as a place of refuge and mourning.

In the Genesis story, God intervenes before Abraham kills Isaac, substituting a ram, whereas he does not intervene with Jephthah's daughter.  Why did he not intervene? Was it to punish Jephthah for being careless with his vow? Or was Abraham just more special or more worthy of keeping his offspring in God's eyes?  Again, the Bible is cryptic.

This tragic story is often looked over or forgotten.  I had not read it until Monday, and I wondered why I had never come across it before.  Why should this story not be told?  Is it because people would question, like our class did?  Do teachers not want their students to know that God does not always intervene?  Does this passage make God look bad?  Not necessarily.  Maybe what we can take from this is to make good on promises and to not be careless with them.

Tamar and Judah

In Genesis 38, Tamar is the daughter-in-law of Judah. She marries the oldest son, Er, who God struck dead for reasons unknown. The next son, Onan, was to marry her in order to give his brother offspring. He would not do so, and "spilled his seed on the ground" when he slept with her. This made God angry, and he struck Onan dead. The last son, Shelah, was next in line to marry Tamar, but Judah sent her away until he grew up, or so he said. Judah went into town with Shelah to shear his sheep, and Tamar went to see that he was grown and that he had not been married to her, so she dressed up where she would not be recognized. Judah saw her and mistook her for a prostitute, and slept with her. She took his forms of identification to know who the father of her child was if she conceived. When Tamar became pregnant, she showed the items and said they belonged to the father of her children. Judah recognized them and said "She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn't give her to my son Shelah" (Gen 38:26). She gave birth to twin boys, one of which is an ancestor of Jesus.

Why is the reason for Er's death unknown? All that we have to go on is that he was "wicked in the Lord's sight" (Gen 38:7). What does this mean? What could he have done to deserve this punishment? Maybe he could have killed a man. We do not know, because the Bible is cryptic.

So how did Tamar go about reproducing with Judah? Was it unintended and just happened because she was looking to see if Shelah had grown up? Or did she plan this out in advance? My understanding is that it was the latter, because she took the time to change out of her widow's clothes.

Was it Dinah's Fault?

In Genesis 34, Dinah, daughter of Jacob, is forced to have sex with Shechem. Shechem falls in love with her afterwards and goes and asks for her hand in marriage. Jacob agrees to the marriage on the condition that all of Shechem's men be circumcised. While all of the men are still in pain from circumcision, two of Dinah's brothers, Simeon and Levi, go and slaughter Shechem and all of his men. When Jacob confronts them about it, they reply: "Should [Shechem] have treated our sister like a prostitute?"(Gen 34:31).

The Bible leaves the question of whose fault it was that Dinah was raped open to interpretation.

The selection from Legends of the Jews, however, concludes that it was Jacob, Dinah, and Shechem were at fault. It is Jacob's fault for not allowing Esau, his brother, to marry her. It is Dinah's fault for going out and being seen by Shechem. It is Shechem's fault for not controlling himself and thus committing adultery.

In my opinion, it is purely Shechem's fault. If he wanted her so badly, he should have married her first. He was a grown man and needed to utilize self-control and, for lack of a better phrase, "keep it in his pants", especially since he knew the rules about committing adultery.

I also understand why Simeon and Levi slaughtered Shechem and his men. If anything like that happened to my sister, I would want justice. I would not want my dad to marry her off to the man who defiled her, because he would not be good for her. I would want the perpetrator dead. I think that Simeon and Levi were completely in the right.