Oriental Women

by Edward B. Pollard

The suffering of the women during the grievous persecution of the Jews under Antiochus Epiphanes, "the illustrious"--nicknamed Epimanes, "the madman"--was frightful in the extreme. Some men, but fewer women, yielded to the pressure of the effort to destroy the Jewish religion by forcing the Greek pantheon, Greek games and theatre, and the Greek culture upon the Jews. The struggle into which the people were plunged brought the self-sacrifice of the women into prominence. A typical case of suffering is given in the Second Book of Maccabees. King Antiochus had laid hold of a mother and seven sons, and commanded that they violate their law by eating swine's flesh. The eldest was first put to the test. He refused to obey. The king commanded that the tongue of him who spoke thus defiantly should be cut out, his limbs mutilated, and his living body roasted in hot pans, and that his mother and her younger sons should witness the awful sight. One after another the sons were cruelly dealt with and slain. Each one was given opportunity to save his life by eating the forbidden flesh, but each refused. At length the youngest only remained. The king appealed to the mother, standing by, to advise her boy to obey and save his life. But the sturdy Jewish mother turned to this son and strengthened him in his determination to die rather than prove faithless to the religion of his fathers by obeying the merciless tyrant. He too was then murdered, even more cruelly than the rest. And at length, the mother herself lost her life upon the same altar of faithfulness, rather than transgress the law. Of such sturdy stuff were the Jewish mothers of this awful period made. There is little wonder that the sons of such women succeeded in winning their independence and in setting up again a Jewish state, which had been suppressed for more than four centuries.

A look into this period would be incomplete without reference to one of the apochryphal or deutero-canonical books of the Old Testament, highly prized by the Jews as containing a picture of pious home life among the Jews in the captivity. A devout Jew, as the story goes, with his wife Anna and his son Tobias were among those whom Shalmaneser, King of Assyria, had taken captive from the land of Israel and placed in the city of Nineveh when Samaria fell about B. C. 722. Loyal to his religion, Tobit, even in exile, refused to eat the bread of the Gentiles; but by dint of hard work and fidelity he at length became purveyor to the king. By the revolving wheel of fortune, Tobit is at length reduced to poverty. Here Anna his wife, with devoted womanly faithfulness, comes to the rescue with her skilful fingers, weaving and spinning for a livelihood; for her husband was now both poor and blind. One day Anna, wearied and provoked, reproaches her husband for his blindness--such calamities were esteemed a divine curse in Israel, whereupon Tobit prayed that he might die. On the self-same day, a young Jewess, Sara, daughter of Raguel, a captive in Ecbatana of Media, was offering up a similar prayer that the end of her life might come. For her father's maid had charged her with killing her seven husbands, who had died one after another, each on the very first night of the wedding feast, though the strange deaths had been the work of Asmodeus, the evil spirit, who was not willing that the maiden should wed. Now these two widely separated and unrelated prayers were to be brought together into one romantic story by the help of an angel, who becomes a guide to the son of Tobit, young Tobias, who is about to start out in life in quest of a fortune. The angel guides him to Ecbatana, bids him make the eighth to offer marriage to Sara, whose seven husbands had perished on the nuptial night. Though Tobias had never seen the young woman before, he was to her the next of living kin and so should be (according to the Mosaic law) the one to offer his hand to the youthful, much-married widow. Would the young Tobias prove strong enough bravely to face the record of the seven deaths? The angel here comes to the rescue, and calls Tobias's attention to the heart and liver of a great fish which had been caught in the Euphrates as the two had journeyed together from Nineveh to Ecbatana. These, burned with perfumes in the bridal chamber, drove the evil spirit Asmodeus away, and the marriage festivities went on merrily. The life of Tobias had been saved. He takes his newly wedded wife back to his father's house in joy and triumph, cures his father's blindness by the same magic charm which had saved his own life in the bridal chamber, and peace and wealth and long life follow in rich profusion.

This story is chiefly of interest to us as it shows the continuation, even into the period of exile, of the Levirate marriage custom. While the story of the marriage of Sara, daughter of Raguel, is a Jewish romance, the literature of the inter-biblical period is not without its tragedies, in which woman plays an important rôle. Among these is the well-known story of Judith and Holofernes.

Many Jewish women have passed into literature and art. Rebekah at the wellside, Miriam watching by the reeds or singing the pæan of victory with timbrel, Ruth gleaning in the field of Boaz, Delilah the voluptuous, and Athaliah the monster, have exerted their influence both upon the makers of art and writers of drama, but probably no Hebrew woman before the birth of Jesus has made a deeper impress upon the imagination of men than Judith, the beautiful woman and patriot of Bethulia. A woman once saved the city of Rome from overthrow. Several times in the history of Israel was it given to a woman to be the deliverer of the people. The names of Deborah, Esther, and Judith have come down the centuries as those of women who risked their lives for the salvation of their people from the enemy, and succeeded because of their tact and prowess.

The story of Judith and Holofernes is told in the apocryphal Book of Judith. The Assyrians are at war with Israel, whose cities are being besieged and wasted in the merciless onslaught. Holofernes, the Assyrian general, at length lays siege to Bethulia in his onward march to the holy city of Jerusalem. The people are reduced to straits most direful and bitter. Women and little ones perish in the streets, and the people cry out to their leaders to sue Asshur for peace. The rulers, thus urged, promise within five days to yield to their besiegers. It is then that Judith, wealthy and pious, a widow of the city, comes forward to strengthen the fainting heart of the governors and to bid them trust God and stand firm. She promises, in the meantime, that she herself will aid them. Praying earnestly that God will help her in her purpose, she lays aside the habiliments of widowhood, and, arraying herself in garments of gladness, goes forth with her maids to the camp of Holofernes. Charmed with her beauty and grace, the Assyrian gives a feast, to which the bewitching Judith is invited. Holofernes makes merry, and, drinking to drowsiness, lies down in his tent to sleep. Others depart in the night, leaving him and the Jewess alone. Seeing her opportunity, Judith seizes the scimiter that hung on the pillar of Holofernes's bed, and, laying hold upon the hair of the sleeping man's head, severed it from his body, and made her way in the darkness back to the city. In the early morning a sally was made from the city gates, and the Assyrians, finding their captain headless, were thrown into utter confusion and completely routed. Thus did Judith become the deliverer of Israel. The women of the city ran together to see her who had been their savior, made a great dance for her, sang her praises, and bestowed their benedictions, placing garlands of olive upon her brow.

Portia's shrewd dealing with Shylock, the Jewish money lender, called forth the frequent applause of the onlookers: "A Daniel come to judgment, yea, a Daniel!" It is in the History of Susanna, an apocryphal addition to the canonical Book of Daniel, in which the great prophet is presented in the rôle of arbiter. He appears in a cause against a woman, Susanna, a Jewish lady of great beauty, the wife of a wealthy and distinguished Hebrew whose home was in Babylon. Susanna excited the amours of two judges, elders of the people, who were frequently at her husband's home; but she spurned all their advances, till, angered and resentful, they united in a plot to destroy her, and accused her of unfaithfulness to Joachim, her husband. The penalty for adultery was death, and the people crowded to the trial; for if there was conviction, stoning would follow. The two elders, standing, with their hands upon the innocent woman's head, tell the story agreed upon, how they saw the wife of Joachim in the very shameful act of which they accused her; and the assembly, believing the testimony of the two elders and judges of the people, condemned Susanna to death. At this juncture, the young man Daniel appears upon the scene, much as Portia in the trial of Antonio, and, by adroitly cross-questioning the two witnesses separately, involved them in contradictions, revealing the cowardly plot against the virtuous woman and convicting them of false witnessing. And since the law of Moses prescribed the same penalty for those who bore false testimony as that which would have come to the accused, the elders were put to death, and Susanna was given honor before all the people. This is but one of the many examples in Hebrew history which reveal the unusually high moral character and purity of life that prevailed among the Hebrew women.

It is one of the noteworthy and distressing facts of late Jewish history that in the later teaching of the rabbis woman is placed upon a distinctly lower plane. Her inferiority to man is frequently emphasized. And yet there was one factor which came into the life of Judaism, after the Babylonian exile, which gave to Jewish women an advantage which they had not previously enjoyed. It was the establishment of the synagogue. The secondary place given to women in the temple worship has already been referred to. The man, as head of the family, was representative of the family and responsible, therefore, for the performance of the ceremonies required of every Hebrew household. With the destruction of the temple and the dispersion of the Jews, the temple rites were rendered impossible. When the synagogue arose to fill the vacancy made by these conditions, women were given a place in attendance at the instruction given in these new centres of Jewish life. And while they were never strictly considered members of the congregation, yet, seated in a separate part of the room, they heard the Scriptures read and expounded; and it was not unknown for women even to read on the Sabbath as among the seven appointees for the day. The Torah, or law, however, was considered rather too sacred and important to be committed to their exposition.

Judging from a remark in the Halacha it is just to infer that in the days when the Jews had become dispersed throughout the Roman world, there were two facts that had a very powerful influence upon Jewish women, one of them of Hebraic, the other of Greco-Roman origin. For the Halacha, in speaking of the women leaving their homes, said that there were two causes which took the women away from their domestic duties: one was the synagogue, the other, the baths,--not, indeed, an altogether uncomplimentary comment upon the women of the times, for it would seem they believed in the oft-coupled virtues of cleanliness and godliness.

From the days of John Hyrcanus, the influence of the Jewish rulers had been decidedly in favor of Hellenic culture. Thus the revolution brought about by the Maccabean revolt seemed about to be undone by the successors of the Maccabees. Jewish independence had been won in an effort to resist Antiochus Epiphanes and others in their attempts to destroy Judaism by making the Greek religion and customs prevalent throughout Palestine. Would the sons and successors of the sturdy Maccabeans give away the fruits of the hard-won victory? When to Alexandra was bequeathed the government by her husband, she decided to espouse the cause of the Pharisaic party, who hated the encroachments of foreign influence. But, alas, for the queen's inability to cope with a situation so strained! In her effort to appease the opposite party she put weapons into their hands, which were soon turned against her. As an old woman of seventy-three, she saw her two sons in bitter contest, at the head of opposing forces, each trying to rule over a tumultuous, faction-torn nation. She passed away, deploring a condition which she was utterly unable to correct. It was not till Pompey brought his Roman legions to the gates of Jerusalem, and set up the Roman eagles in the holy city itself that intrigue and battling for the Jewish throne was brought to a close. Then Jewish independence was no more.

A great granddaughter of Alexandra was destined indirectly at least to play a prominent rôle in later Jewish history. This was Mariamne. Herod, afterward known as the Great, had hoped by marrying this descendant of both the contending Jewish parties, to unite the influence of the two branches of the Asmonean house. In this, however, Herod was disappointed, and he proceeded to accomplish by force what he had hoped to do by wiles. In the frightful war of extermination waged by Herod against the whole Asmonean line, which he feared might endanger the rulership secured to him by the Roman power and his own political prowess, there figured a Jewish woman who, because of her sagacity, is not to be passed over in silence. She was Alexandra, a granddaughter of the queen of the same name. When Herod attempted to place in the office of Jewish high priest a young man who would be simply a tool for him, Alexandra advocated the candidature of Aristobulus,--her son and a brother of Mariamne,--who by birthright was in line of official succession. Alexandra shrewdly wrote to Cleopatra that the wily woman of the Nile might use her influence with Antony to force Herod to terms. Herod was compelled to yield and appointed Aristobulus, but determined that Alexandra as well as the new high priest should be put out of the way. One day after both Herod and Aristobulus had been enjoying a banquet given by Alexandra, Herod successfully plotted the killing of the high priest in a fishpond attached to the house of feasting, Herod's minions holding him playfully under the water until he was drowned. But Alexandra was not so stupid as to fail to take in the situation. Through Cleopatra she again succeeded in forcing Herod upon the defensive. Being summoned to appear before Antony, Herod succeeded, however, in again ingratiating himself with the Roman, and he returned as strong as ever to Jerusalem.