It’s too late in December for anything but stories.
So: stories! Unfortunately they’re a little bloody, but they feature strong and irritated female leads, and they're from the Bible!
This post is kinda long and even so, it doesn’t reach any conclusions. But, as in the case of last week’s report, these Things About Mary seem too powerful to rush to a conclusion. Here are some pieces; I hope you’ll find them meaningful and help me put them together. (NB 1: I’m indebted to Catholic scholars for this connection. Unlike evangelicals, they take Mary seriously in her own right, not just as Jesus’ mom.) (NB 2: in the narratives below, Israel—the ancient tribe, not the modern state—is always in the role of the oppressed. This fact and its implication for the modern state of Israel have recently been noted by many, many Jewish writers. For instance: I strongly recommend subscribing to Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg's newsletter or listening to this beautiful episode featuring Rabbi Sharon Brous, if you haven't already.)
Story 1: Yael
(See Judges 4 - 5, and check out art made about this story)
It’s a few centuries before Mary’s pregnancy. Judge/prophet Deborah leads Israel, which is suffering under violent occupation by Canaan. According to the text, “Sisera [the general of the Canaanite army] has nine hundred chariots fitted with iron and has cruelly oppressed the Israelites for twenty years, so they cry to God for help.”
Deborah answers the call.
She commands her general, Barak, to gather troops to fight Sisera. He’s all “yes OK for sure!…but only…if you…go with me?” Deborah grits her teeth and says fine, sure, I was hoping to divide and conquer, but I guess I’ll add “ride along with the army” to my infinite to-do list.
(This essay is brought to you by a mother in December.)
Deborah mutters under her breath that since she’s accompanying him, the honor of defeating the Canaanite army will belong to a woman. In a hyper-patriarchal military context, this is a major burn.
When the armies of Israel and Canaan meet up to fight, the vaunted Canaanite chariots get stuck in the mud, and Israel beats Canaan handily. General Sisera flees into the night, leaving his army to be routed.
Meanwhile!
In a tent on a quiet plain lives a woman named Yael, a member of a non-Israelite nomadic tribe that has a peaceful relationship with Canaan. Yael doesn’t have a dog in this Israel/Canaan fight. She and her family live off the grid, minding their own business, attracting no unwanted attention from the brutal Canaanite regime.
But she’s sympathetic to Israel in its plight, in its oppressive occupation.
After the Israel/Canaan battle, who should show up at Yael’s tent but Sisera—Sisera, the craven Canaanite general who’s left his soldiers dying in the mud.
He bosses her: I’ve got to get some sleep, he says. You stand guard outside your tent. If anyone comes looking for me, tell them I’m not here. Also, I'm thirsty. Fix that.
She gives him milk and tucks him in. It’s all very maternal.
Sisera falls asleep. As commanded, Yael leaves her tent.
Then she loosens one of the long iron pegs securing the tent to the ground. She finds a mallet. And quietly, she treads back into the tent, kneels next to Sisera, and POUNDS THE TENT PEG THROUGH HIS HEAD AND (the biblical account is avid to include this detail) ALL THE WAY INTO THE GROUND. !!!!
Yael finds Barak, the Israelite general, and shows him Sisera’s dead body.
And lo, Barak remembers Deborah’s prophecy. The honor of killing Sisera belongs to a woman: this woman, not even an Israelite. Two women in this story, Deborah and Yael, each shaking her head, sighing, and getting shit done.
Deborah extols Yael in a long, gory ode. Here’s part of it; put the bold bits in your pocket for later.
Most blessed of women be Jael,
the wife of Heber the Kenite,
most blessed of tent-dwelling women…
Her hand reached for the tent peg,
her right hand for the workman’s hammer.
She struck Sisera, she crushed his head,
she shattered and pierced his temple.
Most blessed of women, this crusher of the head of a tyrant.
(This hymn is worth reading in its entirety. Lots of complicated womanhood here.)
Story 2: Judith
(See the book of Judith—considered apocryphal in both Judaism and Christianity—or Rabbi Ruttenberg’s excellent retelling, and check out art made about this story)
It’s now a century or so before Mary’s pregnancy. Israel is, again, under military threat, this time from Assyria and its brutal general, Holofernes.
Holofernes’s army has arrived at the Israelite village of Bethulia, home to a hot, rich, smart, kind, pious, pleasant-smelling widow (THE IDEAL WOMAN) named Judith. Bethulia’s leaders and citizens want to surrender to Holofernes; we’re toast, they say, just get it over with. Judith finds this faithless and callow and detestable. She and her maid Artemisia dress in their best finery, pack a bag full of kosher snacks (key point), leave Bethulia, and present themselves at Holofernes’s camp.
“We find our compatriots so faithless and callow and detestable,” they say, “that we have defected. We want you to win, you big strong men, and to that end we’ll tell you secret information about our city if you let us live with you.”
Holofernes and his men are like, “OBVIOUSLY, and OK, here’s a tent for you! And please carry on with all of your religious rituals, including leaving the camp each night to bathe! We’re sure this will all be fine, because you are obviously besotted with us, and who can blame you?”
(If you are seeing the foolishness of toxic masculinity as a central character in both of these stories, you are correct!)
After a while, Holofernes does precisely what Judith knows he will: he invites Judith to dinner, tells her that she’s pretty enough to have sex with him, and proceeds to get wasted on wine.
Once they’re alone in his tent, Judith feeds Holofernes salty cheese from her snack bag (snack bag callback #1), and helps him quench his resulting thirst with…more wine. OUR GIRL. The text helpfully notes that, under Judith’s flattering care, Holofernes drinks “more wine than he has ever drunk on any one day since he was born.” LOL! Since he was born, even!
Holofernes passes out. Judith takes a big deep breath, prays for strength, picks up Holofernes's sword, and…cuts off his head.
Then Judith hands the head to Artemesia, who PUTS IT IN THE SNACK BAG.
OUR.
GIRL.
They leave the camp for their ritual ablutions, doubtless with Holofernes’s boys wolf-whistling in the background. But this time (duh) they keep walking…all the way back to Bethulia, where the city elders sheepishly hang Holofernes’s head on a pike. Holofernes’s colleagues find his body, see his head, and scatter, defeated.
Bethulia’s town elder praises Judith. Again, note the bold parts:
“You are blessed by the Most High God above all other women on earth, and blessed be the Lord God, who created the heavens and the earth, who has guided you to cut off the head of the leader of our enemies.”
Most blessed of women, this crusher of the head of a tyrant.
“Blessed among women”
THIS IS IMPORTANT. This phrase, “most blessed of women” or “blessed above all other women,” isn’t a common epithet in the sacred texts. In fact, it appears in the Bible only these two times, only in these two cases of women deploying body and brain and guts in decisive, victorious, revolutionary action.
UNTIL.
Until a 13-year-old, unmarried Israelite peasant, under the oppressive thumb of yet another occupying force, gets pregnant and rushes out of town, presumably waiting for the gossip to die down.
She shows up unannounced at the house of her postmenopausal cousin Elizabeth, also a peasant, heretofore childless and therefore a pariah...who’s also unaccountably pregnant.
As in Yael’s and Judith’s stories, the man in Elizabeth’s life (her husband, Zechariah) has been erased from the narrative because of his faithless foolishness. Elizabeth, then, has center stage, and her first words to Mary are:
Blessed are you among women.
Three times, then. Revolutionary head-crusher, revolutionary decapitator, … and Mary.
It’s in this context—after Elizabeth has called her Yael, called her Judith—that Mary sings the Magnificat, her revolutionary hymn.
I simply cannot stop thinking about this parallel, which we must understand as deliberate: Yael and Judith, two women faithfully, intrepidly taking matters into their own hands and delivering victory over tyranny. And Mary. Miriam.
Of course this isn’t just parallelism, since Mary doesn't murder anyone. There’s a literary turn of some sort here, from violent to nonviolent resistance, from sword to womb. I’m leaving that on the table for further rumination. But there is just no question that Luke 1 quakes with revolutionary power, that Mary stands firmly in the tradition not just of the quintessential mothers Sarah and Hannah, but also of the quintessential revolutionary femmes fatales Yael and Judith.
Mary x Yael x Judith x 2023
As I think about this Mary and read her words, I feel like I’m holding an earthquake in my hands. And it matches: it matches December 2023, when my heart is already quaking with fury and grief and fear for the lives of women and children in the very land Mary inhabited. When the evils of tyrannical occupation are so present.
I’d love to hear what you make of this connection: Mary x Yael x Judith. I imagine I’ll continue writing about Mary and would love to incorporate your thoughts, should you have a single moment to dash them off. Next week I’ll send a poem I recently came across that matches this energy, this energy of these women who rise up and root down and crush tyranny.
(Of course there are other passages to submit into evidence: the curse in Genesis 3; the death of Abimelech in Judges 9. But we’ve already gone on too long!)
While you’re “holding the tension” this Advent and Christmas, I hope you find something—solace? Companionship?—in this trio.
WHEW. I love you dearly and am extraordinarily grateful if you've made it to the end of this one! So grateful that I'll leave you with one more fragile Sisera/Holofernes before he realizes that he's Kenough. xoxoxo!
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