III The Days of the Kings
As we pass out of the unsettled age of the judges into the period when the commonwealth of Israel began to take definite shape, we come upon a corresponding change in the life of the Hebrew woman. The heroism in female virtue was perhaps no less frequent, but when the “heroic age” is behind us there is less opportunity for women to stand out in so strong a glare. And, indeed, all through this history the remark of Ruskin is close to the truth when he says: “Woman’s function is a guiding, not a determining one.” While epoch-making women occasionally appeared in the earlier period, they became fewer and fewer as the social order became more settled.
It was not till the days of the kings that the Mosaic law, in the broadest sense of the term, could exert any very potential influence over the life and conduct of the people. In a disorganized condition of society, of which it was said, “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes,” to enforce Mosaic precepts would have been an impossibility, even had the people at large been acquainted with that law. Now, the law of Moses became one of the most powerful factors in giving to the women of Israel the high place they held in the commonwealth. The fifth of the “Ten Words”—which commands were the very nucleus about which the whole law was developed—reads: “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” Thus, in this, the very first law of the Decalogue respecting duties to man, the duty of honoring the mother was made equally imperative with that of showing honor to the father. And it may be truly affirmed that Israel’s remarkable permanence and persistency as a people may be traced to its domestic health, and that this vigorous domesticity is due largely to a better understanding of the true relation of the sexes than is discoverable among any other ancient nation.
That honor for parents makes for the permanence of a people both reason and history affirm. Any nation which honors its ancestry will hold tenaciously to ancestral ideals. Notwithstanding China’s limitations in other directions, that nation, because of its worship of the fathers, has lived through many centuries and seen more powerful nations rise and fall.
The position of Israel as a separate people abides in strength because both father and mother have for ages been respected; and even though most of her sons and daughters are no longer “upon the land which the Lord their God gave them,” they are still holding with wonderful firmness to the faith and ideals of their fathers. The Mosaic teachings concerning woman are not a little responsible for this remarkable state of racial longevity. The Hebrew woman’s standing before the law gave her great advantage over her sisters of the other Semitic and Oriental peoples. The Mosaic law tended greatly to lessen the inequalities and mitigate the hardships of womankind. Even a woman captured in war was protected against the caprice of her captors. Under the law, her life was equally as precious as that of a man, and therefore the taking of a woman’s life was punishable with the same severity as was the murder of a man. The law was especially solicitous of her welfare during the period of child bearing, and greatly lessened the sorrows and isolation of widowhood.
While divorces were given almost at the will of the man, yet he could not without formality at once eject the woman from his house. He must give her a “writing of divorcement,” which set forth the fact that she had been his wife. Thus was she protected from subsequent suspicion that she had lived with a man unlawfully. Wives of bond-servants were to go out free with their husbands on the seventh year of service, unless the master himself had given the wife to his manservant, in which case the woman and her children still belonged to the master.
Daughters were allowed inheritance as well as sons, though in earlier times than those of the kings they did not inherit their father’s property except there were no sons. Fathers were not allowed to discriminate against a firstborn son and pass the inheritance to another because the mother of the oldest child happened to have lost favor in his eyes.
Laws forbidding unchastity and vice were explicit and severe. One who had taken criminal advantage of another’s daughter was to marry her and pay the father the usual dowry; if not, he was to be amerced fifty shekels of silver, the ordinary dowry of virgins. If a husband suspected his wife of being unfaithful to him, an elaborate, but not severe, ordeal was laid upon the woman, called “drinking the waters of jealousy.” If she passed this examination successfully, her husband had no power further to punish her; if not, she was to suffer for her shame.
The widow and the fatherless were given special consideration under the law. In the feast days when the people’s hearts were merry and they were rejoicing in the increase of their lands, the widow was not to be forgotten. In business transactions the people were to take heed that the widow suffer not injustice. Her garments could never be taken in pledge, and judges were enjoined to see that no violence was done to her rights. The fallen sheaf in the harvest field, the forgotten gleanings of the olive trees, the droppings of the vintage were not to be withheld from her.
How deep-seated this sense of obligation to the widow was in Israel may be discovered in the Book of Job. The friends who visited Job in his bewildering grief could find no more probable cause for so severe a divine chastisement upon the arch-sufferer than that Job had neglected the widow or taken her in pledge. One effect of the attitude of the customary law toward widows is discovered in a most signal way in the Second Book of Maccabees, which relates that in the period of which it tells, about B.C. 150, it was customary to lay up large sums of money in the temple treasury for the relief of widows and of fatherless children.
Such women as Miriam and Deborah were factors to be reckoned with in the political movements of their times. So it was with the prophetesses generally, for just as the great prophets dealt with the politics of state, so a prophetess could not always escape the problems of statesmanship to which her time might give birth. Both prophet and prophetess were looked upon as the chosen spokesmen for Jehovah. Because of this, Huldah acted as a sort of prime minister and adviser of both king and high priests in their Jehovistic reforms during the reign of Josiah.
That women generally took a deep interest in political matters may be perceived in the way in which the exploits of David appealed to the imaginations of the women when Saul’s star was setting and David’s appearing above the horizon; for young women went out to meet the coming hero and king with musical instruments, singing a song whose refrain was:
“Saul hath slain his thousands,
David his tens of thousands.”
The power of the feminine idea may be forcefully seen in the very common conception of the nation itself as a young woman. Both prophet and poet—and the prophets were usually poets—refer many times to the “daughter of Zion,” meaning the people of Israel.
The prophet Jeremiah, foreseeing the coming destruction of the army of Babylon, says: “I have likened the daughter of Zion to a comely and delicate woman” who is about to be ravaged by the invader. And Isaiah, seeing the time at hand for the people to return from Babylonish exile, cries out: “Loose thyself, O captive daughter of Zion.”
Affection for the native land was strong among the women as well as among the men. Lot’s wife did not turn because of curiosity, but by reason of the strong attachment to locality; she looked back longingly toward her forsaken and burning home. The little Hebrew maid, torn by an invading army of Syrians from her native land, was quick to tell Naaman, the leper,—her new master,—of the virtues of her country and impelled him to seek out Elisha, the prophet of Israel.
The social position of Hebrew women was exceptionally free and independent. While a daughter’s matrimonial plans were largely in the hands of father and brother, and wives were expected to look up to their husbands with all reverence, yet the recorded examples of independent action and influence among the women reveal a place of social equality and power, a lack of masculine restraint and domination that would do credit to more modern times.
Deborah accompanied, if she did not lead, the soldiers into battle and cheered them on to victory. The daughters of Shiloh, unaccompanied, were accustomed annually to attend festal dances in the vineyards of Benjamin. Women often went without escorts upon difficult and dangerous missions. Prophetesses frequently exerted not only a powerful but at times a decisive influence.
Marriage customs among the Hebrews in the days of the kings were not greatly different from those of other Oriental people of the same era. They differed but slightly from those of an earlier period. As a rule, marriage was not born out of impulse of the heart; though there were many marriages that surely ripened into love. If, as Jean Paul Richter says, “Nature sent woman into the world with a bridal dower of love,” we have an explanation of the fact that there are many happy marriages in Israel, notwithstanding the fact that the arrangements continued to be largely in the hands of the parents. A daughter belonged to her father till of age: after this she could not be betrothed except by her own consent. Among the Hebrews betrothal was of the nature of an inviolable contract, and could be annulled only by divorce. If not in early days, yet in the later periods of Hebrew history there were writings of betrothal which set forth the mutual agreements between the parties. Later, there followed the marriage contract, also in writing. The amount paid for a maiden came to be at least two hundred denars, and just one-half as much for a widow. The father was to provide dowry according to his ability, and an orphan girl’s dowry was bestowed by the community.
The marriage ceremony consisted of leading the bride from her father’s house to that of the bridegroom. At which time there was a season of festivity and rejoicing. The marriage of a maiden usually occurred on Wednesday evening, that of a widow on Thursday. The “children of the bride chamber,” the name by which the invited guests were called, made merry at the “marriage feast,” which was always provided and lasted several days. As the procession passed along, going from the bride’s to the bridegroom’s house, people along the route might join in the festivities.
Grains of corn, nuts, and other edibles were the confetti tossed good-humoredly at the bridal pair. It became the custom, which still exists among Jews to-day, to break a glass bottle at Hymen’s altar to indicate that the former life is no more, and that the bride has entered upon a new estate. Among the Hebrews the married woman was better protected in her rights than among most people of ancient times. While her property was usually under control of her husband, yet the dowry came to be considered her own, whether it be money, property, or jewels. A husband could not compel his wife to remove from the land of her fathers; and in many ways her individual rights were protected. Woman’s inferior position in Greece was one element in the decline of that remarkable country; the defilement of the womanhood of Rome hastened the downfall of that city’s power; but the protection given to Hebrew wifehood and widowhood became an element of great strength in the life of Israel.
The Greek attitude toward woman could probably be reflected in the old saying: “A woman who is never spoken of is praised most.” In the period of Rome’s decay women became immodestly conspicuous in the social and public functions of the day. As opposed to both these conditions the Hebrew, the wise man in the Proverbs, calls her a virtuous woman whom her husband can praise in the very gates.
Edersheim calls attention to a suggestive custom which sprung up from the slight difference of sound in the words for “find” in two passages of Scripture concerning women, both of which occur in the wisdom writings. The first of these reads: “Whoso findeth a wife, findeth a good thing.” (Proverbs 18: 22.) The other, “I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets.” Hence arose the habit of saying to a newly married man, “Maza or Moze?” “Have you found a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bitter’?”
The tendency in Israel continued to restrict marriage to one’s own tribe. The law of inheritance gave force to this custom. Those very near of kin were thus regarded as most eligible for wedlock. Jacob married two of his first cousins. A similar situation is seen in the marriage of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebecca. Each husband, under specially trying circumstances, had claimed that his wife was his “sister,” and so she was,—for in the patriarchal form of society all who belonged to the same family or clan were brother and sister,—but not in the strict sense which the word was intended to convey. While brothers and sisters of the whole blood might not marry, yet it would not have been regarded as altogether out of place for half-brothers and sisters to marry, especially if they had a different mother.
The story of Amnon and Tamar not only throws light upon this point, but illustrates how brother and sister by the same father as well as the same mother stood in a greatly different relation, the one to the other, in the matter of brotherly protection from that of half-brother and half-sister.
Amnon, son of David, fell desperately in love with his half-sister, David’s daughter, Tamar. By a cunningly devised plot Amnon succeeded in bringing the beautiful damsel into his chamber. When Absalom, Tamar’s brother and half-brother to Amnon, heard that his sister had thus been dealt with, he felt himself under obligation to defend her honor, by slaying his half-brother, which he did at a feast given during the season of sheep shearing, when the king’s sons were all making merry.
The remark of Frances Power Cobbe is as true in Israel as elsewhere. “A man may build a castle or a palace, but poor creature! be he as wise as Solomon or as rich as Croesus, he cannot turn it into a home. No masculine mortal can do that. It is a woman, and only a woman,—a woman all by herself if she must, or prefers, without any man to help her,—who can turn a house into a home.” It was the Hebrew wife and mother who largely gave to the homes of the Israelites their peculiar quality. But it may be said it was seldom her necessity or her preference to set up a home without the presence of some son of Israel.
The birth of children was always considered an occasion for rejoicing. Hebrew women were, as a rule, active and strong, and natural in their mode of life. There are but two cases in all the Hebrew Scriptures of death at the time of childbirth. One is that of Rachel, who, when upon a fatiguing journey with her husband and family, gave birth to Benjamin and died; the other is the wife of Phineas, who, when she heard the sad news of the victory of the Philistines over Israel, the capture of the Ark of Jehovah, of her father Eli’s and her husband’s death in the battle, gave birth to a child whom the nurse called Ichabod, for said she: “The glory is departed from Israel.” In the naming of her children the Hebrew mother thus often revealed a poetic imagination that is of a high order. In this the Hebrew language was helpful, for, as one has remarked of it: “Every word is a picture.”
The bright eyes and graceful form of the gazelle suggested the name for a daughter of Tabitha, of which Dorcas is the Greek. Zipporah was a little bird; Deborah, the busy bee; Esther, a star; Tamar, a palm tree; Zillah, a shadow; Sarah, the princess; Keturah, fragrance; Hadassah, the myrtle. Thus, some resemblance or poetic association suggested to the mother, either at the birth of the child, or because of some fact or incident of later experience, the name the little one was to bear. Often there is a tragedy or a mother’s sorrowful life history crystallized in a name. When Rachel, Jacob’s favored wife, brought forth her second son amidst the suffering which was to take away her life, the woman standing by tried to comfort her in the fact that another son had been born to bless her. The mother, with her last faint breath, replied: “Call his name Benoni (son of my sorrow).” But the father, unwilling thus to perpetuate his wife’s anguish, called him Benjamin (son of my right hand). When Naomi, the widow, bereft of her husband and sons, returns to her native Bethlehem after many years of absence and of sorrow, the women came out to meet her, saying: “Is this Naomi?” She answered them: “Call me not Naomi (pleasant or winsome), call me Mara (bitter), for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.” So, among the Hebrews, names not only were given to both men and women at birth, but were frequently changed at some critical moment or because of some extraordinary experience in their life. Ordinarily, however, the favorite method of naming sons connected the boy in some way with his God; as when Hannah named her baby boy Samuel (God hath heard), and the name of Jacob (the supplanter), was changed to Israel (the prince of God). The girls seldom if ever bore names ending in el (God), ajah (Jehovah), but were called by some name of poetic association or natal experience. In no respect do the Hebrew mothers deserve greater praise than for their share in the upbringing of children. While the Jewish law placed the responsibility for the training of the Hebrew youth upon the father, a very large share of the responsibility fell upon the mother. With the Hebrew child, as with the children of all nations, it is impossible to say exactly where its education begins. The famous dictum: “If you would bring up a child in the way it should go, you must begin with its great-grandmother,” finds special force among the Israelites. The women held an honored place in the education of the Jewish youth. Before the child could walk or could lisp a syllable, while still in its mother’s arms, it would see her, as she passed from one room to another in the house, stop and touch the mesusah on the doorpost, and then kiss the finger that had thus come in contact with the sacred words of the law encased there. The little one would easily learn to put out its own tiny finger and touch the aperture of the sacred box on the doorpost, and then press it to the baby lips.
Here was the first lesson in the law of its fathers. Very early the mother took her babe to the temple, and offered a sacrifice for it. Especially was the birth of the firstborn significant, for the firstborn son belonged to Jehovah, just as the firstborn of the herd and the flock and the first-fruits of the ground. These must be sacrificed on the altar of the Lord. But, happily for the mother heart, the firstborn son might be redeemed by the sacrifice of a lamb, or, if the mother were poor, by a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons. So the young mother brought her boy to the altar, made her offering, and took her babe back to her bosom.
From the time of offering onward, the mother greatly aided in shaping the life of the young Israelite. In this training the sacred Scriptures played an important part. The rabbis, however, never regarded women as becoming masters of the intricacies of the law. It was a saying among them that “Women are of a light mind.” This was doubtless an appropriate remark, for it is certainly true that much of the rabbinic lore is heavy, almost beyond expression. There were not a few women, though, who were well versed in the Scriptures and also in rabbinical teaching. The synagogues were open to the women, where they occupied seats partitioned from those of the men. The attendance of women upon the great feasts, where much could be learned of custom, tradition, and teaching, also gave them opportunity to be instructed in the religion of their fathers. The Christian apostle Paul congratulated his young friend Timothy, that from a babe he had known the Hebrew Scriptures, which he had learned from his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois. These are typical mothers of the higher order; and while probably only the richer homes owned a copy of the entire Bible, most families possessed at least one or more scrolls containing parts of the sacred writings.
The strength of motherly devotion was nowhere stronger than among the mothers of Israel. The spirit of Rizpah was the spirit of most of them. For when seven of her sons, the sons of Saul, had been slain and their bodies exposed, in the revolution which brought David to the throne, Rizpah took a piece of sackcloth, and, spreading it upon a rock near by, guarded the bodies of her offspring from the beginning of barley harvest till the early rains: that neither birds might molest them by day nor beasts of the field by night.
Home life among the Hebrews of Palestine to-day is marked by much that characterized that life ten or even twenty centuries ago; therefore a few facts concerning the home life in the Jerusalem of to-day will teach us much concerning that of the past. Probably nine-tenths of the native homes of Jerusalem are unpretentious, unattractive, uncomfortable, and show signs of poverty. The people have learned the fine art of economy in house room. Father, mother, and the multitude of little ones with which the Jewish home is usually blessed do not find it difficult to be tucked snugly away in two or three rooms. These give ample space for cooking, dining, sleeping, and performing the necessary labor of domestic life; besides furnishing opportunity for the hospitality for which the East is still justly noted. Call any time you will, on any business bent, and your hostess, if there be no servant, will, before you are permitted to mention the matter of your call, bring to you a glass of wine or perhaps a cup of coffee to refresh you. This, too, though the family be poor and it be deprivation for even this repast to be served to the guest. And though you know of the sacrifice the hostess makes, you must not refuse, lest you offend and wound the spirit of hospitality at its very heart.
The brunt of the work of the house falls, of course, upon the wife and mother. And it is doubtful if the place of the woman of the Palestine of to-day, even among the Jewish families, is as high as in the days of Israel’s independence and power. While great respect is shown the father as head of the family, the mother is often scarcely more than the servant of her children. The sons especially do not give her the respect that was once her unquestioned due. The girl is from her birth looked upon and treated as inferior to her brothers. Patiently, all women of the Orient seem to bear this inferiority—a sort of penalty they must pay because Heaven made them women and not men. The young girl’s matrimonial prospects are never in her own hands. She tamely submits to arrangements made for her, and, without test or questioning, assumes that her husband is her superior in all things.
Education among the girls of modern Palestine has been almost hopelessly neglected—except as teachers from England and America have been able to supply the deficiency or overcome the indifference. There is little wonder that home life is unattractive and the housekeeping miserable with so little possibility for the women to catch even a glimpse of the higher things that elevate and refine. Sometimes the Jewish girl is a wife as early as ten or twelve, and frequently at the age of fourteen. Thus home life is often rendered unhappy and divorce frequent. Physical, mental, and moral anguish follow in the wake of many of these early marriages. The young Jewish maiden’s life is cheerless before her wedlock, as she is shut out from the joys of social gatherings; and, after marriage, cheerlessness gives way to impenetrable gloom. To say that there are no happy marriages would be wide of the mark. But divorces are sadly common among the Jews of Palestine to-day; the husband having almost unlimited power to break, under very slight provocation, the bond that binds him to his wife. The rabbi must of course confirm the dissolution of the bond, and thirty piasters is the price. The effect of this custom upon modern Jewish womanhood in the venerated land of Rebekah and Rachel is most unhappy.
Home life in ancient Israel was singularly sweet, pure, and industrious. The family was both the social and the religious unit. Idleness was considered a curse; and every child was taught to train his hands as well as to cultivate his heart.
The occupations of women were numerous and varied. Everywhere in the East needlework was and is highly prized. Mothers set their children at it at a very early age and great skill is often attained. The poorer women frequently earn with their own fingers the amount of their marriage portion; and in the hours of seclusion wives of the harem have always found embroidery and other forms of rich needlework a common pastime for the empty hours.
While working in skins, clay, and in metals was reserved for the men, the Hebrew women were very largely the producers of the food and the wearing apparel. They assisted in the cultivation of the fields, were the millers, grinding with their primitive stone mortar and pestle, the bakers, the weavers and spinners, making use of the hand spindle which may be seen in Syria and in Egypt to-day, though in the latter country the men shared with the women the skill in this handicraft. Among the Hebrews, as with the Greeks, Clotho is a woman.
We find the virtuous woman, as ideally drawn in the Book of Proverbs, to be one who finds good wool and flax and works willingly with her hands; distaff and spindle fly at her finger’s bidding, so that her whole household sits doubly clothed in scarlet, and even fine linen is wrought in her house, and rich girdles go out to the merchantmen. She makes the field and vineyard turn out profitably and imports her food from afar. Whether as shepherdess, gleaner, or the maker of food stuffs or textiles, the Hebrew woman may justly hold a place of respect among her sex.
Among the amusements in which women specially engaged, those of music and dancing should be given first place. These often had a religious or semi-religious character. Women did not usually sit down, or rather recline, at banquets with the opposite sex. Their songs and dances were generally among themselves; dancing with the opposite sex was unknown. Instrumental music frequently accompanied their singing, a sort of tambourine or hand drum being a favorite instrument. Women played an important part also in mourning customs. Professional female mourners were hired to go up and down the highways, wailing piteously as part of the funeral rites. The prophet Nahum in predicting the overthrow of Nineveh uses a figure suggested by frequent observation of mourning: “Her maids shall lead her, as with the voice of doves, tabering upon their breasts.”
The religious status of woman is one of the most significant facts in Israel’s history. Passing out of the patriarchal stage of life, when the father was high priest in his home, into a more complex existence, it is not surprising that woman’s place should become subordinated. Besides this, the Hebrew worshipped no goddesses, except in times of religious lapses. The women of Israel, however, are often found engaged in sacrifices, prayers, and active service to their God Jehovah.
While only the men were required to attend the annual feasts, the attendance of women in large numbers is often recorded. Their presence seems to be presupposed in the accounts of Hebrew worship; though for them the annual religious pilgrimages to Jerusalem were not obligatory.
In the temple worship they had a separate court, further removed from the inner precincts of the holy altar than the court of the men. And while they might join in the eating of some sacrificial meals, the sin offering was only to be partaken of by males. The official duties of the sanctuary were performed by men, but there were “serving women” who performed certain menial tasks about the sacred enclosure. When the temple ritual became elaborated, women were among the singers in the temple choirs, and they often aided in the music and by singing and dancing in times of great national rejoicing. And it is not without its suggestiveness that the Hebrews spoke of a divine revelation as Bath Kol, or “daughter voice.”
In the days when religious secretism became popular in Israel, and the people began to divide the exclusive adoration they had hitherto given to Jehovah and to worship other gods and even goddesses, women became prominent in idolatrous rites. Jezebel, who was a worshipper of the Phoenician goddess Ashtoreth, not only became the patron of the priests and puppets of the Baal cult, but endeavored to break down Jehovah worship by the destruction of his prophets. Maachah, the mother of King Asa of the southern kingdom of Judah, introduced the worship of the Assyrian goddess Astarte. Devotion to Ishtar, the chief goddess of Babylon became the fashion in Jerusalem in the days of Jeremiah the prophet, who tells of Hebrew women kneading dough and baking cakes in shape of the silvery moon in honor of the “queen of heaven,” Ishtar, the moon goddess; or perhaps, as some hold, this was the worship of the planet Venus, for similar offerings were made in Arabia to the goddess Al-Uzza, who was represented by the star Venus; and the Athenians too, we are told, offered cakes of the shape of the full moon in honor of Artemis.
During the period of the Babylonish captivity, before the final fall of Jerusalem, Ezekiel rebukes the women of Jerusalem for worshipping Tammuz, the Babylonian Adonis, who had been taken to the under world; for, says the prophet, “There sat the women weeping for Tammuz,” the departed husband of Ishtar.
There was never among the Israelites that reverence for women, akin to awe, which was manifested among the Teutonic tribes—a reverence which made women natural oracles. Doubtless in Israel, as everywhere, the instinctive, intuitive nature of women was discovered by the men of Israel as in other parts of the world. But women as oracles are isolated and exceptional. There were witches, who were under the ban. The highest spiritual influence and leadership in Israel was that of the prophet, for he was regarded as the mouthpiece of God, and, though of a far higher order, corresponded to the oracle among heathen peoples. Could a woman hold this place of dignity and power? The first person of this class mentioned in the literature of Israel is Miriam the prophetess. In the days of political confusion, before the time of the monarchy, Deborah the prophetess arose; and it was Huldah the prophetess who directed the reforms instituted by King Josiah, when the worship of Jehovah was purified, the temple repaired, and Mosaism restored to power. Just as there were false prophets in the days of religious decline, so there arose false prophetesses, like Noadiah, who attempted to thwart the reforms of Nehemiah and put his life in jeopardy. In the early days, the counterfeit of the prophetess, namely, the witch and sorceress, was not unknown in the land of Palestine. The law, however, was very stringent against such persons, though King Saul himself once went disguised to consult the Witch of Endor. Scripture says: “Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live.” These are the words which were thought to give sanction to the burning of witches in New England a century or more ago.
In writing of the women in the days of the kings, one naturally turns to the days of David, the first who brought Israel to a state of political stability. The familiar saying, “The great men are not always wise,” is well illustrated in the matrimonial experiences of King David. Many times was he married. Four of the wives of David are worthy of note. The first may be called his wife of youthful romance, Michal, Saul’s daughter; the next, Abigail, the wife of manhood’s admiration; the third, Bathsheba, the wife of lustful passion; the fourth, Maachah, the wife of old age’s sorrow, for she bore unto him Absalom, the rebel. It was a giddy and dangerous height to which David the youth had suddenly arisen when the people were giving him, because of his prowess in slaying Goliath of Gath, greater honor than the king. Even the young Princess Michal could not disguise her admiration for the new and youthful hero. But he must slay one hundred Philistines if he is to possess Michal, says Saul, thinking David would lose his life in the attempt. But the young man slew two hundred, and claimed his bride. While her father was plotting the life of his young rival, Michal was plotting more skilfully to save it; for, overhearing her father give orders that her husband and lover should be slain, she let him down from the window, substituting for her absent lord an image resting in her bed, beneath the covering, in such wise as to support her statement to the messengers, who came to take him before Saul, that David was sick. Michal, having to make choice between her father and her husband, chose the latter; and though she was long separated from him while David warred with Saul, when at last David reigned he sent and recovered her, his first love, and Michal became his wife again.
But there were women of affairs in Israel, as well as women of sentiment and devotion. The story of Abigail, wife of Nabal, and how she became espoused to David, is a pleasing chapter of woman’s power to excite the admiration of a manly heart by combining the grace and the tact of the womanly character with worldly wisdom and courage. It is one of the finest illustrations recorded of woman’s independence in the land of the Hebrews. The story of Bathsheba’s marriage to David is well known. Falling in love with Bathsheba’s beautiful form, the king plotted the life of her husband, put him in the front rank in the battle, and, when he fell, took her to his own house as wife. And while Maachah became the mother of a son who was to be a very thorn in the heart of his father, the wickedness which brought about the marriage to Bathsheba became the cause of the bitterest expression of penitential anguish in all the range of literature. For an ancient tradition, embodied in the introduction to the fifty-first Psalm, affirms that that poem of heart-stinging grief was written when Nathan the prophet had shown King David the heinous blackness of his sin toward Uriah the Hittite.
Diplomatic marriages were not uncommon in the ancient commonwealth of Israel. They were not provided for in the law of Moses. Indeed, they were distinctly prohibited both by the genius of that law and by its positive enactments. And yet, no less influential a name than that of Solomon might have been quoted as giving sanction to this method of assuring national peace.
Even modern governments might be cited—not only of the East, but of the countries of Europe—as pernicious examples of the very ancient custom of cementing political friendship by the interchange of daughters. The Tel El Marna tablets present a number of illustrations of diplomatic correspondence between Oriental kings concerning daughters who had been given as wives to brother monarchs as a seal of friendship. Now this well-nigh universal custom of diplomatic marriages, though discouraged by the law of the Hebrews, spoken against by their prophets, and forbidden by the very genius of their religion, was not uncommon in the land of Israel. Saul, the first king, can scarcely be said to have welded the tribes into a stable and recognized nationality. David, his successor, was a warrior, who depended for his successes more upon military prowess than upon the skill of diplomacy. The third King of Israel fell heir to a nation made by the master hand of his father. The Hebrews were now recognized by contemporary peoples as a great nation, and, being respected for their power, peace reigned in Palestine. Solomon, a man of peaceful temperament, resolved to sway the sceptre and enhance his influence by the arts of diplomacy rather than by the instruments of war. Among these arts was that of knowing how to be wisely and numerously wed. He it was who introduced the harem, in the modern meaning of the word, into Palestine.
The living wives—in number seven hundred—that are said to have been possessed by King Solomon shows that the prayer made by the people when first they sought a king “like all the nations” had been answered. Here was the beginning, as some of the prophets thought, of Israel’s subsequent disaster and final undoing as a kingdom. To them Jehovah was the one unifying cause, the great power that was to preserve their national integrity, their very existence as a people. To admit foreign wives into the palace, bringing with them their gods, and becoming perchance the mothers of their future kings was to defile the religion of the realm at its heart, to undermine the worship of Jehovah in the house of him who should be its main defender. In the life and reign of King Solomon we have the strange contradiction which is not infrequently discovered between theoretical wisdom and practical folly, between private life and public conduct. No man of ancient days appears to have understood woman better than Solomon, nor said more wise things concerning them. His dealing with the rival claimants of a certain baby, his wisdom in answering the hard questions of the Queen of Sheba have made his name famous. And yet it was his lack of practical wisdom in arranging his own household that sowed the seed of discord and dissolution which were later to cause great distress and at last disruption.