Proverbs for Spinsters

"A house and riches are the inheritance of fathers, and a prudent wife is from the LORD."

The convergence of this little proverb from last Saturday morning with a recent re-relishing of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and, for an extreme contrast, a production of Guys and Dolls I attended yesterday in Cedar Rapids, has caused some speculation on how Solomon's wisdom on the estate of holy matrimony, were he alive today, might be articulated. I get that the contrast he is going for in the proverb is not between the respective sources of a prudent wife, and say, an imprudent wife, but between what you can bequeath to your children and what you cannot. Your kids can inherit your house and your money when you die, but you can't give them a prudent wife. Only God can give them that. True as ever today, as parents of boys would be quick to affirm. But Solomon never offers a comment on the source of a good husband. Maybe that's his goal in a meta-sense through the whole book, producing wise men. But what are we 21st century, doing-our-best-to-be-prudent-industrious-educated-and-pleasant, maidens to make of this? What might Solomon say to us? How about:

Health, intelligence, beauty or wealth are gifts from God, but prudence outshines them all and will attract a faithful husband.

Yeah, if he's paying attention and hasn't been scared to death by his previous encounters with, uh, less worthy women. Or, is that precisely what we "average unmarried females" are, less worthy? My point is, the plight of unmarried women is not something I see too much in the scriptures. There's Ruth, and I love that story so much I memorized the whole book. I'm quick to recognize that we have it a lot better than single women used to have it, as I'm sure Jane Austen would affirm were she to pop in for a visit. Spinsterhood even suits some of us undoubtedly, and I'm really not as bitter and disgruntled as this post probably sounds, but I have moments of feeling invisible when I read the Bible and wish some inspired pen had breathed out a book of wise proverbs for spinsters.

Psalm 46

¹God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

²Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;

³Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.

⁴There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.

⁵God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.

⁶The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.

⁷The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.

⁸Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth.

⁹He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.

¹⁰Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

¹¹The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.

I've been trying to memorize this lately so that I can think about it when I am tempted to worry. When I was kid, I listened to these Christian cassette tapes that were called G.T. and the Halo Express. They consisted of children being scared of things and an angel showing up and reminding them of the promises of scripture. And then those verses would be set to song. At the time I loved them. Now the super 80s music they used to accompany the verses is a downside, but I still remember the text, which was always from the NIV. The good news is that the King James version defamiliarizes the words just enough for me to forget the music from G.T. (even as I memorialize it here). But my favorite part of this one is when the psalmist talks about Jerusalem in v. 5: "God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early." And that right early. Amen.

Oh, and apropos music, the hymnal lists Martin Luther's "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" as based on Psalm 46. And there are no flies on that music. At least not for me.

Blind Eyes See and Seeing Eyes Blind

This morning I came upon this wonderful story that I only remember part of being told me in Sunday School. The part that I remember is the part where the city of Dothan is surrounded by an army from Syria, coming for Elisha the Holy Snitch, and Elisha's servant panics and wrings his hands to his master, and Elisha prays that God would open his eyes so he could see that "they that be with us are more than they that be with them," and he sees the fiery host. It's a great story, full of holy imagination for things we cannot see. But the second part of the story is a very cool reversal that I don't remember. The enemy comes down into the city and Elisha prays again, this time that God would smite them with blindness. And when they are blind, he leads them to Israel's king who has been eluding them raid after raid. And when they get there, in the middle of Samaria, in the presence of the king, then Elisha prays that God opens their eyes again, and we expect a great slaughter. The king asks Elisha if that's the plan, his eagerness palpable by repeating his question "My father, shall I smite them? shall I smite them?" But Elisha says no, that would be dishonourable; rather, he should feed them and send them home. And the king obeyed, "prepared a great provision for them" and then sent them on their way. And the story concludes, "So the bands of Syria came no more into the land of Israel."

It strikes me that there's a lot of blindness in this story, including the initial blindness of the king of Israel who is made to see that extending hospitality can execute peace more effectively than extending the sword. Makes me wonder what I'm blind about.

on rejection

This morning I read 1 Samuel 8, which recounts Israel's request for a human king. This request is tantamount to the people rejecting Samuel, who has acted as priest and prophet at God's appointment since his youth. But also, the Israelites' desire for a king is an effective rejection of God, as demonstrated by the exchanges first between Samuel and the people and then between Samuel and God:

⁴Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah ⁵and said to him, Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations. ⁶But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed to the LORD. ⁷And the LORD said to Samuel, Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.

The thing that strikes me here is how personally painful this rejection feels, especially to God, who sounds downright sad: "for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them." I know that God's emotions shouldn't surprise me, but they do. Clearly God is not a human, but God is a person and has the emotions of a person. Or I guess the better way to say it might be that since we are made in his image, we have emotions, just like he does. Maybe because of the incarnation, I think of Christ as the part of the Trinity with emotions. But I think that view of God is not nearly holistic enough (which I realize my view never will be, finite and all). Anyway, this made me feel sad for God, who was sad when his people, whom he has preserved despite their waywardness, want to be like everyone else, which means looking to a human rather than to him. It is good for me to hear his sad voice here and remember that his desire for our obedience isn't just the result of some rigid standard, but of the affection of a person who is more committed to us than we can know.

The Faithful in Parentheses

This past weekend I attended a really good production of Hairspray at the dinner theatre Circa '21 here in Rock Island, and left the show most impressed not with the portrayal of the lead character, Tracy Turnblad, but with the performance of the actor playing the non-major character Penny Pingleton. She stole the show every time she walked on the stage. This, combined with thinking on Ali's last post, produced a reflection surrounding this past weekend's reading: that Sunday School stories often confused "spectacular" with "more important" and overlooked unspectacular stories that are to be found in the very same texts as their more spectacular counterparts. The take home message, intentionally or unintentionally, was that God always works in spectacular ways, and that if we are true followers, our lives ought to be spectacular too.

Take for instance the story of Elijah's confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel. Remember that story from Sunday School? Yet just ahead of that story, in the first 15 verses of 1 Kings 18, we meet Obadiah, whose faithfulness to God did not at all resemble Elijah's and whose story I do not recall hearing in Sunday School. His faithfulness did not involve a spectacular public showdown with evil, but rather quiet civil disobedience, and is given to us in the narrative in a parenthetical comment: "(Now Obadiah feared the LORD greatly. For it was so, when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the LORD, that Obadiah took an hundred prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water.)"

Or hearken back to that most difficult book of Judges. Chapter 3 tells the exciting story of Ehud the Benjamite judge who defeated the evil King Eglon of Moab. It reads like a James Bond synopsis. But the very last verse of chapter 3 is dedicated to the judge who succeeded Ehud, just one verse: "And after him was Shamgar the son of Anath, which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox goad: and he also delivered Israel." Our imaginations are left to fill in mostly blanks about Shamgar. Did he work as a cattle herder and pick the Philistines off one unsuspecting victim at a time, unspectacularly, secretly? Seems plausible to me, and in its own way amazing, but easily overlooked. There are many other such contrasts both in scripture and in history it seems to me. I feel this tension in different aspects of my own vocation.

One must acknowledge that in the scriptural narrative, as in all complex narratives, a sense of importance is rightly given to major characters by how much we are told about them. Fair and good. One could say that in the grand arc of scripture, Elijah plays a more prominent role than does Obadiah. But Obadiah was not less faithful or pleasing to God. And in the final analysis neither they nor any others are going to care two bits about whether they were minor or major characters in God's story. This is an important context for Sunday School teachers in their relaying of Biblical stories and selecting curriculum. 1. It's God's story they are telling, the story of God in the world, and 2. Their students may be "major" or "minor" characters in God's story, but that is not half as important as whether they are found faithful.

the old, old story

So school got out Alice Cooper-style this year, and I lighted out for home and spent a good month in Omaha (with little trips to Missouri and Illinois). And to my shame, I accidentally left my Bible in South Carolina. I've been back for about ten days now, and I'm working on getting caught up in my reading. And so I'm back in Judges, just coming up on Samson. But before that, I read the story of Gideon, who had already been on my mind this month.

See, my mom has been taking Bible survey classes, and while I was home, I had the pleasure (and it truly was a pleasure) of hearing her rant about how we've all been taught wrongly about Gideon. "That Gideon," the Sunday school narrative goes, "now he had faith. When he wanted to know God's will, he put out the fleece. We should all be like Gideon. When you want to know God's will, put out the fleece." (I, for one, have no idea what it means in a twenty-first century context to 'put out the fleece,' but there you have it.) But mom's point is that God had already told Gideon his will (Judges 6:12-23). In fact, Gideon had a christophany, or at least so I take it to be, since the text refers to this visitor as "the Lord." The fleece test was Gideon getting a second opinion of sorts. And even that wasn't enough for him. It's not until God lets Gideon overhear his enemies discuss how fearful they are that he believes he can win. This suggests that Gideon in that moment trusted the words of his enemies more than the words of God. Anyway, mom was hating on Gideon all month in reaction against his lauded Sunday School status. It was a fun time, especially coming from a mom who could not have more faithfully raised us on Bible stories. I appreciated her honesty about her revised reading and her frustration about overly-simplistic explications of the Bible.

While I don't mean to hate on Sunday School, I wonder if there are stories you would say you were mistaught? Or how have your Bible reading practices changed in adulthood? Or with more education?

Women in Judges

Did anyone else find Judges a gruesome read? For me, not least because of the horrific stories involving women. A wide spectrum, kind of moving from light to dark.

- Caleb’s daughter Achsah, a reward to Othniel, his nephew, for conquering Kirjathsepher. She asked her father for a blessing, specifically springs of water, and he gave it to her. (1:12-15)
- Deborah, (ch. 4) prophetess, wife of Lapidoth, judge of Israel. She must have been some woman for Barak to say he wouldn’t go to war unless she went with him. She was the whip cracker of the operation, “Up;” she said to Barak, “for is this is the day….” And when it was all over, the captain of the army was done in at the hand of a woman. It’s hard not to conclude Barak was a bit lame.
- Jael, wife of Heber, slayer of Sisera with a tent peg and a hammer through the head.
- The anxious mother of Sisera and her wise ladies show up in Deborah’s exultant song in chapter 5, expecting their victor home with the spoils, preparing to decorate their men with handwoven banners of honor, presumably become their shrouds.
- Jephthah’s daughter rushed out with timbels and dancing to celebrate her father’s victory, which got her sacrificed in fulfillment of her father’s rash oath. (ch. 11) She laments her unfulfilled dreams for two months with her girlfriends, but returns to face her death. Did Jephthah do it himself I wonder? Did he ever sleep again? Stranger still, Jephthah is counted among the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11. I have to wonder if verse 35 is the key “Women received their dead raised to life again, and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection.” Still, strange strange story. Makes me shudder.
- Thirty daughters of Izban, who it says had thirty sons and thirty daughters. He traded his daughters away for thirty daughters from abroad, presumably wives for his sons, and his daughters as wives for some foreign men. The original mail order brides.
- Manoah’s wife, barren, visited by “an angel of the Lord,” who turned out to be the LORD himself. As a result she gave birth to Samson, a whole other can of worms as a mother, I can only imagine.
- Samson’s women. I count three. His wife, the daughter of the Philistines in Timnath whose father gave her to his buddy after she had tricked him; a harlot he took up with in Gaza; and finally, Delilah, who it says he loved.
- Micah’s mother, from whom he stole a lot of silver, returned it eventually, whereupon she made a graven image with it and gave it back to him, encouraging his idolatrous ways and giving birth to a strange syncretism that seems to have a had a widespread following.
- The Levite’s concubine is as dark and X-rated a tale as I ever hope to read. She left him and went home to her father’s house, he came to win her back, finally extricated her from her father again, only to offer her as a peace offering to the deviant men of Benjamin, who ended up killing her after an all-night orgy, whereupon the Levite in some kind of weird holy indignation chopped her up and couriered her body parts to each of the twelve tribes of Israel as some kind of wakeup call to the evil days in which they found themselves.
- The women of Jabesh-gilead and the dancing daughters of Shiloh, finagled and co-opted to save the tribe of Benjamin from extinction.

All I can say is, what a relief to get to Ruth and Naomi!