I — History and Myth of the Couple
Myth, parable, then history: the women of the Bible articulate the passage from the ancient matrilineal order to the patriarchal order that has remained ours. The essential thing to say here, it seems to me, is the progress there then was in characterizing an individual by his mother but also by his father. The abuse later made of this against women cannot diminish that effect. But for the first time in ancient history, a mother and a father appear as co-begetters of the son and the daughter.
Drawn from a book1 that was well received, here are a few resplendent women of the Bible, Deborah and Ruth, preceded by some historical considerations.
When a people is in danger, the undervalued group becomes united. The small Hebrew people organizes itself into houses of fathers — the expression is already in Genesis, where it is nonetheless a question of sons of Elohim and daughters of Adam. The houses of fathers are at the same time houses of chiefs for the safeguarding of the people (Gen. 49:28).
Jacob is called I’sh taam, an upright man, in the Bible and the Mishnah — rectitude without fusion: the upright man is no longer only the Shepherd, he shares the agrarian labor with the women, and he wages war. The woman gives birth.
The civil registry that linked the individual to a place is late: it dates from the French Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts in 1567. It was the first in Europe. Before that date, in the East as in the West, the individual was defined by his filiation to the father. Already when Abraham left Ur of the Chaldeans, his maternal filiation is no longer named. Yet Adoara, his mother, was perhaps Abraham’s initiator against the idols. Yet on the historical plane, the Hebrew miracle resided in this relentless determination to remember the double filiation, to the father and, upon death, to the mother. The great powers of the time, Empires established upon federations and tribes, had on their side the well-known advantage: the destruction of the small kingdoms and the dispersal of families. Now, the name, in Genesis, was given by the mother. In the Book of Exodus, names are called Shemot — in the feminine. But genealogy through the fathers, heads of houses, is the framework of wartime solidarities in times of agrarian economies. Hence the Levirate, which makes up for the missing link by the well-known substitution: to save the name of the deceased by raising up descendants for him.
The being-woman had represented the pre-monotheistic fusion with the mother. However, the mythical creation, according to the Kabbalah, of the primordial couple will express a symbolic order. It matters little whether the Hebrew word Tsela’ (Gen. II:22) designates Adam’s rib or his side; as in the Platonic myth, the term effectively designates a rib of flesh, of bone, and of blood; what matters is that Adam shares in genitality with Eve, or Haya. Now the difference between Adam (45) and Haya (19) yields the number 26, which is the divine number of YHWH. This inescapable difference inscribes lack within a reality impossible to surpass, which is the God of the couple. The fantasy of completeness is described as the only possible reality! By this fact the individual has a biological mother and a liturgical father.
The Hebrews settle but keep as their model nomadic pastoral society. The myth of Eve, in its absolute inversion of the real, was one possible management of the first difference. This inversion is the very characteristic of initiation rituals for adolescent males among primitive populations and right up to the twentieth century. Thus the begetting father of this second birth can intervene.
II — The Appearance of Forbidden Mixed Marriages.
Starting from Ur of the Chaldeans, the small pastoral Hebrew people will take to nomadic wandering. A real understanding of (animal) begetting made the patriarchal doctrine possible. One can observe it in the Bible when Jacob prepares to leave Laban, his father-in-law, with wives, concubines, and flocks. This knowledge explains the success of the patriarchal inversion.
The events fixed in the Pentateuch unfolded between the third and the first millennium before Christ. In those times, at the end of the Neolithic, an authoritarian Akkadian, then Egyptian and Assyrian, centralization was being exercised. One detects in the Torah the identity-based resistance of the small nomadic people against the centralizing urban system of Babylon and Assyria; the Old Assyrian Empire would get the better of the Hebrews in -587.
The Achaemenid Persian empire of Cyrus, tolerant, would permit the return of the Hebrews toward the Temple. It is then that the oral Bible would be written down. The prohibition of mixed marriages was put into words only then, in the -6th century. The precedents remained: Hagar gave Abraham his first son Ishmael; Moses married a Midianite, Zipporah, daughter of Jethro; Ruth, ancestor of David, was Moabite; Bathsheba, wife of David, was perhaps Hittite — would she have given a Jewess to Uriah the Hittite? Polygamy persisted until the 11th century after Christ. It was Rabbi Gershom who definitively prohibited it. Numerous matrilineal vestiges remain.
III — Deborah Beneath Her Palm Tree2.
The Song of Deborah, the oldest poem of the Old Testament according to Jean Bottéro, gives the reflection of a very ancient Hebrew history. She is a suffete, a woman, an inspired one. The suffete is not only a judge; the suffete can act. If Deborah is the word dabar, which also designates the bee, Deborah sits beneath the palm tree, the tree of trees in a tropical land. She is a woman of action, of presence, with Barak — the lightning — a man of war, a chief. And here is a text that speaks in ancient truth: “if you go with me, I will go.” Deborah will accompany him, without fighting, for she is the Presence. She is also justice in the everyday; she has the power to grant victory — the two senses are similar. Her Presence is one of the first translations of the Shekhinah in the feminine, before the textual reworking, a frequent vestige all along the Book of Judges, heterogeneous, archaic, which was not the object of the same care as the Torah properly speaking.
The Amorites sow terror, because of the superiority of their metal weaponry. Sisera, their chief, completes the army’s rout by fleeing toward the tent of Jael, another woman of action. She is the wife of Heber. It is she, and not Barak — the Lightning — who will have the glory of having vanquished Sisera. It must be read as a myth: the blow is struck by a divine force; the register, without pseudo-morality, recalls the shimmer of the Iliad and the deeds of Gilgamesh. Jael drives in the head of the enemy, like a giantess of the race of the Titans. In the Middle Ages, the Christian martyr-saints will rise to leave the scene, or the frame of the painting, their heads in their hands. Code and language, writing, symbol — this passage is one of the oldest in the Bible.
IV — Ruth.
“I had chosen this first name, it’s true, for those tales of my mother’s, but also for that Ruth of the Bible, that young woman come from the land of Moab, and for whom Boaz let fall more ears of grain than was usual during the harvest. I loved that manner the Bible had of opening a closed world, of letting another enter it, one come from elsewhere…” Roland Doukhan, Bérechit, p. 143
The story of Ruth is fundamental; it illustrates the suppleness of customs and even of human laws, as applied to the organization of Hebrew societies: it took Boaz only one night to grant himself the right to marry a Moabite, a woman belonging to the Ammonites and Amalekites. The law was modified by maintaining the prohibition for the men of Moab and by opening the doors of the Assembly of the Just to the women of Moab. The story is astonishing and remarkable. The author of the book of Ruth is unknown; it is possible that the episode served as a reaction against the draconian measures taken by Ezra and Nehemiah against marriages with foreign women, after the first return to the Holy Land.
A family, that of Elimelech and Naomi, is forced to leave Bethlehem, where famine rages, once again. Once again, distress engenders an element of unforeseeable salvation: Elimelech, Naomi, and their two sons settle in the land of Moab, which welcomes them, as Egypt did in the time of Joseph; and the sons marry Moabites, Ruth and Orpah. Father and sons die. Some ten years have passed, and Naomi wishes to return to the land of Israel; she urges her two daughters-in-law to return to their families and their gods. Orpah leaves Naomi, but Ruth rivets her steps and her life to this woman to whom she has become attached. The one is old, weary, estimable, and respectful of her daughter-in-law’s freedom. The other is young, spontaneous, full of vitality, indifferent to anonymous gossip, wise and faithful to her own feelings. She follows Naomi. The story of their arrival in the Holy Land takes place against a backdrop of wheat, of harvests, of clear skies, but material life is hard for two women not protected by a clan. The precariousness and the importance of subsistence are expressed in terms of grains and sheaves, gleaned, accepted, received (III:11). Ruth goes to the fields where the poor have the right to glean, and — chance and providence — this field belongs to Boaz, kinsman of Elimelech and goël of Naomi. A Hebrew term of the same root as gâal, to redeem, to ransom, to protect, the goël is the nearest blood relative: he has duties of protection and rights of preemption over the land. Thus it is because Naomi’s goël exists that she can resell Elimelech’s domain in the first instance to her goël. The goël, in fact, is not Boaz. The latter will await the nearest kinsman in the place where the transaction can be heard by the Elders, “who are seated there,” so as also to explain the law to all. That same night, Boaz, a lawmaker endowed with the active intellect, modified the law, with the Elders’ approval, and rendered union with a Moabite licit. It is therefore he himself who, invoking the duties of the Levirate, safeguarded Elimelech’s family domain, and his lineage, by marrying the young and beautiful Ruth. The Levirate, common to all the peoples of the Near East, was practiced well before the formulation in Leviticus of the prohibitions on incestuous unions. By taking such good care of Naomi, Ruth won the sympathy of all, and above all of the one who, endowed with the same freedom as she, would know how to modify the law in favor of the women of Moab. From this union, miraculous through the force of human feelings, thanks to the swiftness of Boaz’s intervention, thanks to the wisdom of Naomi’s counsel, life is given to Obed, distant ancestor of King David, recognized by the three monotheisms. No fewer than so many substitutes were needed to bring forth David’s forefather. For the Abrahamic monotheisms, the story of Ruth is exemplary. It is of no small importance that the Anointed King, David — Daud for Islam, the ancestor of Jesus for Christians — should have had for his ancestress Ruth the Moabite. The tenacious solidarity of two women was needed — one old and wise, one young and generous, wise too — for such a marvel to be born: Obed, servant of God. David knew that he had Moabite ancestors, since he sought refuge for his father and mother with the king of Moab, when King Saul was carrying out his persecution against him.
V — The Daughter in the Zohar (13th c.)
She aspires to be called by a name. She clothes herself in a precious and radiant adornment. She has no access to the name of Elohim (Ex. 32:8), then she strangely becomes Judge Elohim like Deborah. It is from this little-known text, the Zohar, that we hold the explanation of an enigmatic secret or of a very ancient reality. Here is this astonishing text.
“On this occasion the Daughter is called ‘Sovereign,’ as it is written: ‘Behold the ark of the covenant, sovereign of all the earth’ (Josh. 3:11). In so doing, the Daughter clothes herself in masculine garments to be in accord with all ‘the masculine individuals.’ Then ‘I make it advance’ from on high ‘up to the house of Elohim,’ so that Elohim may have the aspect of the Daughter. By what means? With the joyous voice and the thanksgivings of a celebrating multitude.”3
Evidently such texts are little recognized or known!