Wudjaevhavblevdit!
God loves a really, really good joke! 'Specially when he's the prankster!
Not just any old belly-bustin' thigh-slappin' generic good-old ethnic joke, but a joke that's just peachy for the inside crowd that knows the nuances of a double entendre in the lingua franca.
First off, it helps to know a little of the background. Goes way back. Thousand years or more. To the oldest daughter of Lot gettin' her old man drunk so he wouldn't know he was getting laid and unbeknownst to him, carrying on the family line. Yeah, she raped her old man. And the family line became the Moabites.
Centuries pass. A lot of accumulated folklore legends. Stories that flesh-out the "self" in a tribe of peoples from all the "others." Stories that try to both identify and to explain their corporate identity and history.
And when this joke is finally told in the post-exilic period, the sordid history of these peoples has been one accumulated fubar - fouled up beyond all redemption. At least it would seem so to a casual observer. For these people themselves were nearly annihilated as an "other" to the Babylonians. . . and now were in a post-exile status trying to rehabilitate what had gone so sourly wrong. And it was their never-ending cycles of apostasy, of hardship, of crying out to the Lord, and of subsequent rescue . . . and the ubiquitous apostasy of worshipping one of the other Canaanite gods, that was the nexus to all of this.
And that is partly what makes this joke so funny. So disgustingly sick. That it was instigated by the Divine Warrior, as their god was called, as a tactical stunt in their sacral war in one of these cyclic events against an ancient, and persistent "other."
As these post exilic peoples were collecting, and redacting, and composing their fragmentary written, oral, folklore and legendary stories of their history, they hit upon the time after their ancestors had entered Canaan, their promised land. Moses was now gone. Joshua was now gone. And now, several hundred years worth of saviors . . . yes, "saviors" that the Divine Warrior would raise up to "judge" the people would emerge. To be "judged," however, was to be led in successful defensive warfare. And these twelve named judges became local heroes whose military victories, generally presented as the result of the gracious Lord's intervention, earned them widespread renown. If you have the stomach for it, you can read all about these "saviors" in the Book of Judges. It is not pretty.
And as their narration is laid out, again, it is the recurrent situation where God was ticked. Because his people, the Israelites, were doing evil in his sight. Again.
To make this doubly nefarious , Joshua had failed in his mission of sacral war to annihilate, to terminate, to destroy, to kill every living thing in Israel's new neighborhood. And so here, the Moabites, those descendents of Lot's daughter's incestuous tryst, were still alive to foment their mischief.
And as the story goes, the Lord "strengthened" these Moabites, to the point they had become the oppressors over the oppressees (the Israelites) for 18 miserable years.
Time for "the cry" in that repetitive cycle of events.
Enter Ehud. Except with Ehud, as the story goes, he wasn't "filled with the spirit" like the previous savior Othniel was.
But a "savior" he would still become, because even though he was not filled with the spirit, he was, nevertheless, raised up by the Divine Warrior.
And now for the word-plays, the double entendres, the stick-it-to-'em, fraternityish practical jokes. A swashbuckler story of hilarious pretense.
Something about it being sooo funny and cool to be on the inside of a good ethnic prank. It is just sooooo self-righteous-istic to be on the "right" side. So what of those "others." For that was the point of this whole narrative history, to separate the "us" from all those "others."
'Cept Ehud wasn't quite fully one of the "us." 'Cause he was "left-handed." And from the tribe of Benjamin (which means literally, 'son of the right hand') no less, where there was a distinct proclivity toward left-handedness, that adds a plot twist. And then those connotations of left-handedness. Ranging from the 'cack-handed' meaning excrement-handed, to the Australian euphemism for a left-handed person, 'molly-dooker' where "molly" is an effeminate man and "duke" is slang for hand, to the notion that the left hand is always somewhat occult and illegitimate, inspiring terror and repulsion.
The notion of "hand" plays (no pun intended) a role in this tale. For the same word is used elsewhere in the Hebrew text with the connotation of "penis or phallus." Where the prophet in Isaiah [Isaiah 57:8] chastises the adulterous Israelites for widening their beds and gazing upon the 'hand' of their 'lover,' and it is what the beloved in the Song of Solomon [5:4] thrust into his 'lover's' opening.
But to the casual observer reading this story, this left-handed, i.e. peculiar and unnatural guy, can then hide a specially constructed lethal weapon on his right thigh and not be detected. Cool. Great point in a great plot.
At least to a casual reader.
But the connotation of that sword being a "gomed" in length is the connotation "to be hard." And the handle, the "hilt," has the connotation of "erect."
Just to set the innuendo here, this saucy connotation was described as far back as the 13th century, and even the Jewish Historian Josephus left out the "sexy" stuff when he wrote his rendition of this story.
So here we have a "left-handed" guy with a "hard" and "erect" concealed weapon. A weapon that is "straight" and yet "different" from the curved weapons typically used to hack up enemies.
A devious left-handed straight guy who "comes to" the fat King Eglon.
With a "secret" message.
With the opening and closing of doors - a set of words that are well anchored in metaphors for sexuality in ancient Israel - and the expression "come into' so often used of sexual penetration.
Oh yes! King Eglon, which means "Young Bull" or "Fat Calf" in Hebrew. How fitting. Even though fatted calves were sometimes used for Hebrew sacrificial offerings, it was also the young bull and calf that was the symbol for the god Baal. The rival god so hated by Yahweh.
The gory details of the rape of King Eglon by Ehud are euphemistically recorded in Judges 3:20-25 as a hilarious performance of stabbing this sword so far into this corpulently fat man's belly that the handle disappears, and the dirt comes out.
King Eglon was fat. Such a sanguine way of so delicately stating such a nefariously negative personal characteristic. Must have generated a lot of good laughs. That fat Moab SOB. A cipher for any number of things: gullibility, stupidity, greed. In the ancient world it was also an indicator of opulence, and especially associated with the effeminate man. What better way to humiliate the caricature of one's enemy?
When Ehud "enter's" King Eglon's presence, the King "rises up." Eglon is clearly being staged as one obliged to perform the traditional woman's part in a sexual encounter, that is, as the one who is penetrated and passive. His fatness is thus not mentioned solely to signify greed or gullibility but to indicate his role in a male rape scene. The description of this happening in a room with no public access insinuates it was the private royal toilet.
King Eglon, the "fatted calf," ready for slaughter. A name that signifies illegitimate adoration or of sacrifice. Well suited for presentation as both a sexual object and also sacrificial victim of rape/murder.
But a hearer of this tale had to be really on the inside to know that.
On the outside, just a raunchy story of denigrated ethnic "humor" and satire.
The hilarity of raping an effeminate fat man and murdering him.
But the expositors of this story didn't stop there. A big deal is made of Ehud being a "Benjamite." With the implication they are setting him up for the forthcoming fall of another Benjamite, the yet-to-come King Saul.
The sexual language, imagery and double entendre are graphically used in Judges 3 in order to ridicule and discredit such foreigners and to legitimize the oppressed history of Israel. This story lays a foundation for devaluations of these people that will be readily sanctioned, condoned and accepted by readers, both ancient and modern.
Here, the nation of Moab, figured as the despicable, humiliated, penetrated role of women, under the "hand" of Israel . . . getting her just due from the penetrated act of Lot's daughter.
King Elgon, a fat buffoon, humiliated, raped, murdered . . . as the butt of a sinister joke. Getting his just do!
Ehud, described as a lefhanded combat ace, a hardened professional warrior ... yet comes across as repugnant, deceitful and cruel.
Yet, there is a veiled attempt to flaunt Ehud as a credentialed "straight," "virile," red-blooded" male in the face of homoerotic connotations.
In Middle Eastern culture, Ehud could emerge with his masculinity enhanced, as there was no shame in doing the buggering, only in being buggered.
But hey! This is satire. This is humor. This. Is. Funny.
Hell, it is so gauche to pick on some feriner. Some faggot. Some feckless freak that is not one of us.
This story makes one hell of a point.
And the point is that a Divine Warrior, Yahweh, enters the narrative as a collaborator or even instigator, of a malicious rape/murder of a lampooned character.
Whether this story in Judges 3 (and all of Joshua through Kings for that matter) is fiction, and pray to God that it is, or the literal, historical From-God's-Mouth-To-Your-Ear truth, when the most powerful character within the Hebrew Bible --Yahweh . . . the deity-- invokes a complicit collaboration with vile and malicious ethnic humor denigrating "the other", it truly does raise a serious question.
For this gay man, there is nothing redemptive about that story.
And yes, I can hear it now. "If you weren't one of those friggin' faggots, you would be comforted. He! He!"
Wudjaevhavblevdit!
[For more background on this and other stories of the Hebrew Bible, refer to the Queer Bible Commentary, Edited by Deryn Guest, Robert E Goss, Mona West, Thomas Bohache, SCM Press, London, 2006; and the Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV) footnotes.]
Not just any old belly-bustin' thigh-slappin' generic good-old ethnic joke, but a joke that's just peachy for the inside crowd that knows the nuances of a double entendre in the lingua franca.
First off, it helps to know a little of the background. Goes way back. Thousand years or more. To the oldest daughter of Lot gettin' her old man drunk so he wouldn't know he was getting laid and unbeknownst to him, carrying on the family line. Yeah, she raped her old man. And the family line became the Moabites.
Centuries pass. A lot of accumulated folklore legends. Stories that flesh-out the "self" in a tribe of peoples from all the "others." Stories that try to both identify and to explain their corporate identity and history.
And when this joke is finally told in the post-exilic period, the sordid history of these peoples has been one accumulated fubar - fouled up beyond all redemption. At least it would seem so to a casual observer. For these people themselves were nearly annihilated as an "other" to the Babylonians. . . and now were in a post-exile status trying to rehabilitate what had gone so sourly wrong. And it was their never-ending cycles of apostasy, of hardship, of crying out to the Lord, and of subsequent rescue . . . and the ubiquitous apostasy of worshipping one of the other Canaanite gods, that was the nexus to all of this.
And that is partly what makes this joke so funny. So disgustingly sick. That it was instigated by the Divine Warrior, as their god was called, as a tactical stunt in their sacral war in one of these cyclic events against an ancient, and persistent "other."
As these post exilic peoples were collecting, and redacting, and composing their fragmentary written, oral, folklore and legendary stories of their history, they hit upon the time after their ancestors had entered Canaan, their promised land. Moses was now gone. Joshua was now gone. And now, several hundred years worth of saviors . . . yes, "saviors" that the Divine Warrior would raise up to "judge" the people would emerge. To be "judged," however, was to be led in successful defensive warfare. And these twelve named judges became local heroes whose military victories, generally presented as the result of the gracious Lord's intervention, earned them widespread renown. If you have the stomach for it, you can read all about these "saviors" in the Book of Judges. It is not pretty.
And as their narration is laid out, again, it is the recurrent situation where God was ticked. Because his people, the Israelites, were doing evil in his sight. Again.
To make this doubly nefarious , Joshua had failed in his mission of sacral war to annihilate, to terminate, to destroy, to kill every living thing in Israel's new neighborhood. And so here, the Moabites, those descendents of Lot's daughter's incestuous tryst, were still alive to foment their mischief.
And as the story goes, the Lord "strengthened" these Moabites, to the point they had become the oppressors over the oppressees (the Israelites) for 18 miserable years.
Time for "the cry" in that repetitive cycle of events.
Enter Ehud. Except with Ehud, as the story goes, he wasn't "filled with the spirit" like the previous savior Othniel was.
But a "savior" he would still become, because even though he was not filled with the spirit, he was, nevertheless, raised up by the Divine Warrior.
And now for the word-plays, the double entendres, the stick-it-to-'em, fraternityish practical jokes. A swashbuckler story of hilarious pretense.
Something about it being sooo funny and cool to be on the inside of a good ethnic prank. It is just sooooo self-righteous-istic to be on the "right" side. So what of those "others." For that was the point of this whole narrative history, to separate the "us" from all those "others."
'Cept Ehud wasn't quite fully one of the "us." 'Cause he was "left-handed." And from the tribe of Benjamin (which means literally, 'son of the right hand') no less, where there was a distinct proclivity toward left-handedness, that adds a plot twist. And then those connotations of left-handedness. Ranging from the 'cack-handed' meaning excrement-handed, to the Australian euphemism for a left-handed person, 'molly-dooker' where "molly" is an effeminate man and "duke" is slang for hand, to the notion that the left hand is always somewhat occult and illegitimate, inspiring terror and repulsion.
The notion of "hand" plays (no pun intended) a role in this tale. For the same word is used elsewhere in the Hebrew text with the connotation of "penis or phallus." Where the prophet in Isaiah [Isaiah 57:8] chastises the adulterous Israelites for widening their beds and gazing upon the 'hand' of their 'lover,' and it is what the beloved in the Song of Solomon [5:4] thrust into his 'lover's' opening.
But to the casual observer reading this story, this left-handed, i.e. peculiar and unnatural guy, can then hide a specially constructed lethal weapon on his right thigh and not be detected. Cool. Great point in a great plot.
At least to a casual reader.
But the connotation of that sword being a "gomed" in length is the connotation "to be hard." And the handle, the "hilt," has the connotation of "erect."
Just to set the innuendo here, this saucy connotation was described as far back as the 13th century, and even the Jewish Historian Josephus left out the "sexy" stuff when he wrote his rendition of this story.
So here we have a "left-handed" guy with a "hard" and "erect" concealed weapon. A weapon that is "straight" and yet "different" from the curved weapons typically used to hack up enemies.
A devious left-handed straight guy who "comes to" the fat King Eglon.
With a "secret" message.
With the opening and closing of doors - a set of words that are well anchored in metaphors for sexuality in ancient Israel - and the expression "come into' so often used of sexual penetration.
Oh yes! King Eglon, which means "Young Bull" or "Fat Calf" in Hebrew. How fitting. Even though fatted calves were sometimes used for Hebrew sacrificial offerings, it was also the young bull and calf that was the symbol for the god Baal. The rival god so hated by Yahweh.
The gory details of the rape of King Eglon by Ehud are euphemistically recorded in Judges 3:20-25 as a hilarious performance of stabbing this sword so far into this corpulently fat man's belly that the handle disappears, and the dirt comes out.
King Eglon was fat. Such a sanguine way of so delicately stating such a nefariously negative personal characteristic. Must have generated a lot of good laughs. That fat Moab SOB. A cipher for any number of things: gullibility, stupidity, greed. In the ancient world it was also an indicator of opulence, and especially associated with the effeminate man. What better way to humiliate the caricature of one's enemy?
When Ehud "enter's" King Eglon's presence, the King "rises up." Eglon is clearly being staged as one obliged to perform the traditional woman's part in a sexual encounter, that is, as the one who is penetrated and passive. His fatness is thus not mentioned solely to signify greed or gullibility but to indicate his role in a male rape scene. The description of this happening in a room with no public access insinuates it was the private royal toilet.
King Eglon, the "fatted calf," ready for slaughter. A name that signifies illegitimate adoration or of sacrifice. Well suited for presentation as both a sexual object and also sacrificial victim of rape/murder.
But a hearer of this tale had to be really on the inside to know that.
On the outside, just a raunchy story of denigrated ethnic "humor" and satire.
The hilarity of raping an effeminate fat man and murdering him.
But the expositors of this story didn't stop there. A big deal is made of Ehud being a "Benjamite." With the implication they are setting him up for the forthcoming fall of another Benjamite, the yet-to-come King Saul.
The sexual language, imagery and double entendre are graphically used in Judges 3 in order to ridicule and discredit such foreigners and to legitimize the oppressed history of Israel. This story lays a foundation for devaluations of these people that will be readily sanctioned, condoned and accepted by readers, both ancient and modern.
Here, the nation of Moab, figured as the despicable, humiliated, penetrated role of women, under the "hand" of Israel . . . getting her just due from the penetrated act of Lot's daughter.
King Elgon, a fat buffoon, humiliated, raped, murdered . . . as the butt of a sinister joke. Getting his just do!
Ehud, described as a lefhanded combat ace, a hardened professional warrior ... yet comes across as repugnant, deceitful and cruel.
Yet, there is a veiled attempt to flaunt Ehud as a credentialed "straight," "virile," red-blooded" male in the face of homoerotic connotations.
In Middle Eastern culture, Ehud could emerge with his masculinity enhanced, as there was no shame in doing the buggering, only in being buggered.
But hey! This is satire. This is humor. This. Is. Funny.
Hell, it is so gauche to pick on some feriner. Some faggot. Some feckless freak that is not one of us.
This story makes one hell of a point.
And the point is that a Divine Warrior, Yahweh, enters the narrative as a collaborator or even instigator, of a malicious rape/murder of a lampooned character.
Whether this story in Judges 3 (and all of Joshua through Kings for that matter) is fiction, and pray to God that it is, or the literal, historical From-God's-Mouth-To-Your-Ear truth, when the most powerful character within the Hebrew Bible --Yahweh . . . the deity-- invokes a complicit collaboration with vile and malicious ethnic humor denigrating "the other", it truly does raise a serious question.
For this gay man, there is nothing redemptive about that story.
And yes, I can hear it now. "If you weren't one of those friggin' faggots, you would be comforted. He! He!"
Wudjaevhavblevdit!
The Refectory Manager
[For more background on this and other stories of the Hebrew Bible, refer to the Queer Bible Commentary, Edited by Deryn Guest, Robert E Goss, Mona West, Thomas Bohache, SCM Press, London, 2006; and the Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV) footnotes.]
posted by The Refectory Manager | 1:23 AM
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