One day a prophet - some say an angel — rises from Gilgal, not far from their first point of crossing the Jordan river, to deliver bad news to the people:They have become too enamored and mixed with the local people, their customs, children, goddess and gods -- and so the covenant with Adonai is off, no more protection - until they all repent and renounce the other gods.
The people wept so much they renamed the place:
וַֽיִּקְרְא֛וּ שֵֽׁם־הַמָּק֥וֹם הַה֖וּא בֹּכִ֑ים וַיִּזְבְּחוּ־שָׁ֖ם לַיהֹוָֽה׃
So they named that place ‘Weeping’ and they offered sacrifices there to Adonai.
The altar is likely their attempt at comfort food, forgiveness smoke, and pleas for renewal of the covenant. It’ll work. But the weeping is just getting started, and with it this chapter introduces the on/off pattern of fidelity, faith and failure that is at the core of this book - and in some way, of our lives.
The pattern, 5 steps, works something like this:
The people start to worship other local deities, neglect the covenant with Adonai who demands their exclusive loyalty in return for security and land
Adonai gets mad and sends enemies to overpower the Israelite people and remind them who’s in charge
The people suffer, weep, turn back to Adonai in remorse and request for help
Adonai sends the new charismatic Judge to win the day
A quiet period of peace ensues for a few decades and then we go again..
Consider how mythic imagination works through history to provide such patterns - in the world at large and in our inner lives. I’m sure that there are many sensitive, important details here about patterns of addiction and recovery, our own lesser observed patterns of neglect and remorse, renewal and awakening; even our inner paths of more or less self love, of being in service, when we sometimes choose to binge trash tv instead of yoga. We turn for help when the turd hits the fan, forget to say thank you most of the time, and then weeping opens our heart to mystery. Repeat.
But why is this pattern of behavior so core to this book, to this constructed history of Israel, to the ongoing struggle between the different ways we try to make sense of the divine?
The authors of Judges, in line with the firm only-one-god approach we’ve seen from Moses onwards, draw a deep line in the sand to try and deal with the seduction of embodied deities. What they are trying to convince the people to believe in is a more complex sophisticated model of a god that’s not a thing - but a thought - an idea - an abstract sensation.
This theology was - is - in some ways sublime - but not for everyone, and not when packaged with violent, maybe even fanatic demands. The people got over their weeping and turned to the local Canaanite altars where Baal and Ashera, the God and Goddess of the region offered more tactile and sensual religious vibes. They ditch kosher.
This pattern between different kinds of gods and how the worship of the sacred mattered to political events and loss or gain of power - will determine the pathos of this book and it’ll be interesting to notice how those waves roll in and out of the narratives ahead.
In The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible, Prof. James Kugel sketches one of the ways this chapter charts a moment in the evolution of faith:
“As the biblical period goes on, God becomes bigger and more remote. The same God who buttonholes the patriarchs and speaks to Moses face-to-face is perceived in later times as a huge, cosmic deity -not necessarily invisible or lacking a body, but so huge as to surpass our own capacities of apprehension, almost our imagination.”
After weeping, the tribes disperse, each to their home, with the new local friends and family, mixing things up, recounting Joshua’s death and starting a new chapter with growing divisions between them, absent leadership, and a trail of tears towards some sort of yearning for that deep safe feeling sacred, of being at home.
image: ZANYA DAHL, Crying Solider
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I think it matters what "local deities" means. Something is being cast as religious idolatry and covenental apostasy. In that context arisea the fantasy of divine retribution. This fantasy then can account for ordinary tragedy and instill guilt, remorse, and return.
What if the words "local deities" were translated as earth-attachment, or land-love, or agri(field)-culture? What if the wilderness wandering of a previously degraded (deracinated) population instilled a longing to connect to the earth and the nurture of the earth---the tilling and tending that were there in the Eden? And what if the loss of that earth-love in devotion to a complex theological abstraction set the stage for earth-estrangement?
"Local deities" might equal "reverence for place," for the local is always the setting for our living, and it matters how "the local" is conserved. It seems to me, at the end of 2022, that this is precisely my responsibility: to regain that reverence for the locality in which I live and to promote and experience the vital, necessary connection between the human in the humus, the earthiness of Adam.