Softly humming for miles over dusty hills and brittle scrub, one wild ground bee happened across the gory remains of a predator. And instead of continuing down into the fertile vineyards of Timnah, this bee returned and danced before the hive to persuade his swarm to dwell within the carcass of a lion. For me, this is the magnificent peak of the entire Samson narrative. The blind Samson toppling the temple of Dagon on his enemies; Delilah’s persistence and Samson’s inability to withhold his strength; the jawbone; the gate of Gaza: all of these seem recognizably tragic or epic. It is only when the bumblebees arrive that we enter something like a picaresque episode, a fairy tale.
Admittedly, the series
of events around the city of Timnah would have to be classified as an abrupt
and violent sort of fairy tale, though, in defense of the Book of Judges,
unhappy outcomes are at least equally likely (if not more so) in the genre. The
innocent and the deadly often coincide, though not only as deception (the
proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing) or hypocrisy. Rather, powerful persons and
objects appear alternately benevolent and then strangely indifferent to human
welfare. Every token or prophecy oscillates between the sweet and the bitter.
Perhaps a fairy tale is simply the blending of bright heroic adventures with
the ambiguous shadow of the oracular. Samson ripping apart a lion with his bare
hands is an adventure; Samson eating honeycomb from his newly inhabited victim
is an oracle.
There is something
charming about Samson sharing this honey with his parents while keeping the
source secret. It is as if he is enjoying a private joke. Hercules famously
killed the Nemean lion and paraded around in its skin, not only as a public
sign of his victory but because the impervious hide kept him from injury. That
adventure was grander and less funny than this strange story of Samson killing
an ordinary lion, in which he finds material for a riddle to pose to the young
men of Timnah before his wedding. But when his young bride-to-be presses him
into sharing the answer and she, in turn, reveals it to the participants in
Samson’s contest (who demand it upon pain of immolation for her and her
father’s entire household), we are baffled. How could the stakes for this
contest be so impossibly high? And why does Samson’s response to being
humiliated appear to us disproportionate? He does in fact pay the reward of
thirty garments to those who answered the riddle, yet to do so he kills thirty
men from the city.
Perhaps the nuptials
were always on shaky ground. Samson is, after all, attempting to marry outside
his tribe; he is already notorious as a slayer of Philistines. Certain lines
(“Did you come here to beggar us?”) suggest that the guests are aware that
losing this bet will impoverish them. But this explanation is unsatisfactory.
Why would the bride’s family and the leading men of the town even agree to the
wedding or an expensive contest in the first place? Why would the young men
attempt to sabotage the event by threatening the murder of a family of their
own tribe rather than Samson directly?
The haunting final
scene of the Timnah episode rests upon a parallel structure. A nursery rhyme
commingles with the threat of coming slaughter. Robert Alter notes that both
the answer to the riddle by the young men (“What is sweeter than honey? And
what is stronger than a lion?”) and Samson’s response (“Had you not plowed with
my heifer, you would not have solved my riddle”) are lines of verse with three
accents in each verset, like the original riddle Samson posed: “Out of the
eater came something to eat, and from the strong came something sweet.” Samson
remains governed by the hypnotic meter of his own riddle even in the midst of
his shame and rage.
All of this horror is
made possible because a swarm of bees came to live in a lion’s carcass. The
emergence of this omen was contingent and for this reason all the more
significant. Samson responded to this marvel with a riddle, a genre we
associate with children and trivial games. Riddles are playful, and we may be
tempted to contrast unfavorably the dressing up of answers in pleasing rhymes
or images with the serious business of straightforward communication.
For the writers and
compilers of the Hebrew scriptures, however, both the construction and
exposition of riddles was a central feature of intelligent discourse. This is
demonstrated by the prominence of the word מָשָׁל
(mashal) in the wisdom
literature. Its definition is notoriously fluid, though it is given a range of
meanings such as “riddle,”“simile,” “allegory,”“maxim,” and even “parable,” all
of which suggest a poetic, metrical, or even musical context. This is
wonderfully conveyed in the Coverdale translation of Psalm XLVIII: “I will
incline mine ear to the parable: and shew my dark speech upon the harp.” Or
consider the passage which is later taken up in the Gospel of Matthew and
applied to Christ: “I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark
sayings of old.” And even if many have taken Christ’s parables as pragmatic
aids for the teaching of pleasantly rustic folk, first-century Hebrews would
have recognized this style as the mark of a sage.
In the Greco-Roman
world, divine wisdom was also associated with ambiguous riddling poetry.
Pilgrims both poor and powerful would travel to the spiritual capitals of
Delphi and Dodona to consult the oracles there. Ecstatic utterances would be
translated into poems composed in dactylic hexameters. The role of prophetic
interpretation was not to make the unintelligible intelligible; it was to
transfigure the excess of Pythian mania into a vaguely traceable and partially
musical enigma. Divine inspiration and human artifice blend like well-mixed
wine in the ancient understanding of wisdom. Man seeks the gods in natural
signs and processes. Yet the divine seems to require human activity in a
particular way: divination must be both ritually constrained and artistically
creative.
In Judges the wild bees
that make a home in a lion’s carcass are material for Samson’s riddle, but they
are also an image of those who prophetically interpret omens and oracles. The
bees confound the dichotomies of nature and artifice. The hive is a highly
sophisticated communal work of engineering (even if most would describe
beehives as unremarkably “natural” and not an “artifact”). In the seemingly
erratic path of a bee scouting for pollen or a suitable dwelling place one can
make out a chart of the terrain being investigated and see mapped out the steps
of a public dance. Potential sites for new hives are even subject to communal
deliberation, the existence of which complicates strict divisions between
irrational, un-meaning nature and rationally meaningful human activity. Our
oldest extant archaeological evidence of apiaries and domesticated honey
production comes from Israel’s Beth Shean valley. The bees in our story chose
to remain undomesticated. Instead of occupying prebuilt structures of clay and
straw, they chose something ruined and forgotten—even fearsome. They made no
mutually beneficial exchange with human civilization, electing instead to
remain free and wild.
The wild, it should be
noted, is by no means identical to the wilderness. We think of anything that
cannot be put immediately to human purposes as “wild” and imagine the wild as
an infertile wasteland or a void. Samson’s initial response, a secret joy,
suggests a different understanding. The wondrous, oracular, ominous, and
strange manifestations of nature and its wisdom can be communicated and shared
without losing their wildness: this is why we riddle together.
Only one other story in
the Old Testament features a honeycomb as consequential as the one Samson
encounters. The fourteenth chapter of the First Book of Kings is similar to
Judges in its atmosphere of fairy tale adventure: there is soldiering, hidden
knowledge, divination. Following the martial exploits of Jonathan and his
armor-bearer, the Philistine garrison is in disarray and full retreat. For some
unspecified reason, Saul binds the army with an oath: “Cursed be the man that
eateth any food until evening, that I may be avenged upon mine enemies.”
Elsewhere, Jonathan comes into a forest and across a ground-hive which is
gleaming with honey. Since he is unaware of his father’s deadly oath, he
reaches out his staff and eats.
The effect of this
honey is variously translated in English, but my favorites are those that
follow the Douay-Rheims and the Authorized Edition: “His eyes were
enlightened.” The reader’s mind races effortlessly back to Genesis, to
different trees and another forbidden food, where other eyes were opened. What
if Eve, like Jonathan, had been innocent of the prohibition? Would death and
shame have followed or deifying refreshment? When the soldiers inform Jonathan
of his father’s oath, Jonathan casts doubt on the wisdom of the prohibition,
but he does so from a place of innocence as well as experience. He tasted the
virtue of the honey without losing his own. “Then said Jonathan, My father hath
troubled the land: see, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened,
because I tasted a little of this honey.” But still the prohibition has been
violated and Saul has publicly sworn that anyone who is guilty, even his own
son, shall surely die. With the high priest, Saul begins casting lots in order
to discover the guilty party.
It is easy for modern
readers, familiar with the iconoclastic denunciations of the prophets, to
forget that faithful Israelites engaged frequently in divination, albeit
without reference to the flights of birds or spilled entrails. Instead, the
official Hebrew method used by Joshua, David, and Saul was a kind of cleromancy
involving the sacred breastplate and linen ephod of the high priest. Two
stones, the Urim and the Thummim, would provide answers to simple binary
questions “yes” or “no,” or in the case of the eater’s identity, “this group”
or “that group.” By process of elimination Saul divines that the oath-breaker
came from within his own family and finally recognizes Jonathan as the culprit.
In fairy tales we encounter two
seemingly antagonistic tropes: the immunity of innocent souls from harm; and
the power of oaths, magical tokens, wards, and spells to operate regardless of
individual intentions. In an old Norwegian tale a mill endlessly churns out
salt after its owner forgets the magic word; in Scripture Uzzah is struck dead
for attempting to catch the Ark of the Covenant as it topples. The magical or
sacred is presented as immutable, with chaotic and occasionally tragic consequences
for those unfortunately ignorant of its ritual operations. In the Hungarian
legend “The Boy Who Could Keep a Secret,” the hero refuses to reveal his dream
when threatened with imprisonment and even death. He withholds his secret dream
from his own mother and from the princess whom he loves (a fortitude Samson
might have envied). In the end, his dream is fulfilled and his heroic silence
vindicated. In Holy Writ innocence and the power of oaths are set against each
other: Jonathan is innocent of disobedience yet guilty of breaking a solemn
oath to God. Surprisingly, perhaps for the first time in Scripture, a divine
oath is put aside without consequence.
Unlike in the case of Jepthah and his
daughter, the people are horrified at the prospect of this coming execution and
intervene: “And the people said unto Saul, Shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought
this great salvation in Israel? God forbid: as the Lord liveth, there shall not
one hair of his head fall to the ground; for he hath wrought with God this day.
So the people rescued Jonathan, that he died not.” There is no further gloss
that suggests that God was displeased by this or felt cheated out of some
sacrifice. In the Binding of Isaac, there is at least a nominal substitution of
the ram for the son. Our first parents’ trespass in the garden of Eden brings
death into the world. Jepthah follows through on the sacrifice of his daughter.
But in the face of Jonathan’s invincible ignorance the seemingly inexorable
machinery of magical prohibitions and sacred oaths stops.
The Israelites protest the execution
and manage to stop it. (Here a Greek chorus would have fallen upon deaf ears.)
This is strange. We are used to the idea of prophets interceding for the
people, but here the people themselves do so on behalf of a son threatened by a
royal father. We are reminded of the many occasions from Moses through Jeremias
upon which prophets attempt to stay the divine wrath of God incurred by His
children. The shock of the prophetic must be emphasized. In the face of
explicit judgements and sometimes divine commands to cease intercession,
solitary heroic figures seek to do the impossible: to change the mind and will
of God. One imagines that Nietzsche was consumed with envy whenever he read the
Hebrew prophets.
The theological puzzle of divine
impassibility and intercessory prayer interests me less here than the union of
moral rectitude and fairy-tale magic the prophets embody. They are a tribe of
dream-haunted innocents who are invincible. Even kings cannot compel them to
reveal their secrets; it is rather they who expound the secret dreams of kings.
They conquer even the divine wrath and turn it to mercy, something acknowledged
in scattered hints throughout the prophetic literature of the Old Testament
even by God Himself (“Though Moses and Samuel stood before me”).
The prophetic is supposed to be the
opposite of the mythic and oracular. It brings the clear words of divine
judgement which sweep away all-too-human caviling and pagan obscurity. Myth and
omens evaporate before the heat of revelation. Countless volumes of biblical
scholarship and philosophy are predicated on these oppositions. But honey is
too sticky. Both Ezechiel and Jeremias are fed scrolls tasting of honey, which
recalls the description of manna in Exodus: “And it was like coriander seed,
white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.” This food, which
some rabbis and Christian fathers speculated was the very bread of angels, is
for the prophets simultaneously a word which must be uttered. Ezechiel’s
consumption of the honey-scroll in the third chapter is immediately followed by
the return of the vision of the throne room and the chariot, the sound of wings
beating as powerfully as churning waterfalls, and wheels that shake the earth.
After this, Ezechiel sits stunned for seven days.
These visions, it should be noted, are
recorded as taking place by the canal which connected the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers. The Babylonian point of origin is more than geographic. As Peter
Kingsley has brilliantly argued, the parallels between Ezechiel’s vision and
Babylonian mythopoetic writings and images are not coincidental. The figure of
God enthroned over the firmament with the royal materials of lapis lazuli and
amber are “far too exact just to be a coincidence, and there can be no question
of the Babylonian version deriving from the Jewish.” The honied taste of the
prophetic scroll is matched by the honied appearance of celestial amber. No
other mineral more closely resembles crystallized honey. The manna which was
said to taste like honey in Exodus is curiously described in Numbers as having
the appearance of bdellium, a mysterious crystallized resin or aromatic gum.
One possibility taken up by the translators of the International Standard
Version is amber. The image of manna as flakes falling from the celestial amber
throne room is difficult to resist. The jars of three thousand-year-old honey
discovered with King Tut remind us that this viscous food is as resistant to
spoilage as crystal. It is fitting that the sweet immortality of honey is
present at this intersection of the prophets and Babylonian myth. The
quasi-divine substance—now hardened, now
fluid—oozes across and through all the cell-like categories of divination,
prophecy, myth, and oracles to emerge as a single radiant crystal.
The marriage of the prophetic and the
mythic might also be referred to as the apocalyptic. In the Apocalypse of Saint
John a honeyed scroll is consumed; otherwise there are only two other
references to honey in the New Testament. The first is the description of John
the Baptist’s diet of locusts and wild honey; the second is the meal of broiled
fish and dripping honeycomb which Jesus eats after his resurrection. According
to Leviticus, honey was not acceptable as a burnt offering, but it was
acceptable as an offering of first-fruits (possibly being poured out as a
libation). Saint Paul refers to Christ’s resurrection as the first-fruits of
our own, and the meal in Luke’s Gospel, after Our Lord has “expounded unto them
in all the scriptures the things concerning himself,” is a meeting of
first-fruits. He was poured out for us like an offering of honey. All the
multitudes of previous scriptural references to honey, divine speech, and
wisdom from Leviticus, Psalms, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Jeremias, and
Ezechiel had previously culminated in the diet of John the Baptist, whom Christ
called the greatest of the prophets. Like John’s wild honey and His own
parables, Christ Himself was both riddle and revelation. In the Apocalypse,
another John tells us that instead of meat sacrificed to idols, the elect will
dine on the fruit of the Tree of Life and secret manna—manna that, one
imagines, will taste as curiously sweet as honey.
Andrew
Kuiper’s work has appeared in Church Life Journal, Touchstone, and many other publications.
