Samson
and Delilah
|
And it came to pass, when she pressed him
daily with her words, and urged him, that his soul was vexed unto death
|
Judges 16:1
|
The
Good Book has some
rather strange stories. The tale of Cain and Abel, the story of
Abraham, or the
account of Joshua's campaign into the promised land, when a confederacy
of
Hebrew tribes allegedly confronted the indigenous matriarchies of
Palestine. I
suspect that even Noah’s Ark is a symbol for the new patriarchal
covenant emerging
from a matrilineal past, a past which is defamed as an era of depravity
and
sin.
Since
times
immemorial women have scavenged the land. They learned to observe the
seasons
and to return to the same place for an other harvest. At some point
women
discovered that it pays to return a fraction of the yield to Mother
Earth. They
improved the technique of planting and learned to till the land. In the
longhouses the women were in charge of distribution and storage. A new
social
model emerged. It meant organized labor and supervision in ways
unthinkable for
the free wheeling trapper of our hunter and gatherer past. It also
meant a
guaranteed meal ticket. The Mother Goddess reigned supreme. The Mosuo
people in
the Yunnan and Sichuan Province of China and the Minangkabau in Sumatra
still
live under her spell. The women house together in the communal
compounds of the
clan and their husbands show up only for the occasional visit. If the
man
belongs to a different clan his people will be recompensed for the time
of his
absence. In between the visits the “wife” enjoys full sexual liberty
and there
is no fear of unwanted pregnancies. Children are welcome and grow up in
the
house that belongs to the clan of their mother.
The
rule of
the mothers follows unwritten codes of etiquette and tradition,
although coming
to agree what exactly
is the right way of doing things can be a taxing dispute between
elderly ladies
trying to remember. I’ve witnessed it on my Chinese wedding: when and
where
during the procession was the umbrella to come out? Or was this not
supposed to
be a lotus leaf? At what point was the bride permitted to put her feet
down and
touch the ground? It was a temperamental exchange.
Arable
land
is collectively owned and cannot be traded or passed on to an
individual title.
A man may own and pass on his chattels. To protect the matrilineal
tradition of
their tribe, the Minangkabau of the 21st century push their males into
the professions
of attorneys and business people. It serves them as a front towards the
hysterically patriarchal bias of Indonesia’s Islamic government. The
Minangkabau are modern people with mobile phones and a considerable
share in
Indonesia’s economy, but their emigrants everywhere in the world
continue to
hold on to their matrimonial traditions. The men seem not to begrudge
their
mistresses' economic dominance, there is a social tradeoff in what
could be
called the men’s executive privilege. But this was not always the case.
In the Book
of Judges, a promiscuous drifter
with no
family to return to and not a single square foot of real estate to his
name
pays the occasional visit to his wife from a foreign nation (Judges
15:1). In between he has many affairs. In other words Samson was
one of
the disgruntled have-nots who looked for opportunities to opt out from
the
matriarchal economy.
The
means
to do so was provided by keeping livestock in the freedom of the open
spaces.
The earliest patriarchs were shepherds roaming the land far away from
the
fields and orchards surrounding the ancestral seat. We can see now why
in
Genesis (Gen.4:4) the god with a bias for all
things patriarchal "had
respect unto Abel and to his offering"
but not for the matriarchal Cain.
These
free
roaming pastoralists learned to mount the horse instead of hitching it
to a
chariot. A life of freedom, but there was a snag. It was all good and
well for
males to live by themselves, but without women this way of life had no
future.
Some daring individuals decided to resist the tyranny of custom and
either
kidnap a woman by force, virtually holding her captive in their tents,
or
persuade her with gentler means to leave the tribe and follow her man
to the
liberty of the open pastures. The founding myth of Rome tells of an
ambush on
women from the Sabinian neighborhood. In the Bible the tribe of
Benjamin is
restored by allowing the survivors to snatch women from the other
tribes.
Abraham’s emigration from the city of Ur may in actual fact have been
an abduction
story. There is living evidence pointing to these ancient practices. In
the
wedding customs of the Balkans, China, and the Amazons, the groom still
snatches the bride in a mock abduction, even pretends to manhandle her.
The
institution of marriage was born, a new way of life, but to abduct and
confine the girl was only the beginning of all the trouble. Virginity
and
marital fidelity became commodities, traded for dowries and political
influence with the objective of producing a male heir holding it all
together.
Sarah’s
ordeal to become pregnant has been attributed to her alleged
barrenness. Was it really her, or had the only man supposed to visit
her gone limp? Since this story came down to us from a male dominated
tradition, we should not expect to be told the truth. Yet we do know
that in many African societies a traveler staying over night is offered
the host’s own wife. Perhaps we catch a glimpse of the real story in
the episode where Abraham introduces Sarah to King Abimelech as his
sister (Gen. 20:2). Also the visit of the stranger
who promised Abraham that his wife will have a son should be considered
under this aspect (Gen. 18:6-11). What was Sarah really
laughing about? Back home in the matriarchal Chaldea, she would have
had many visitors without being considered unfaithful, and Abraham
could never have known whose drop of spunk had sired Isaac (Gen.
12:1ff). Maybe he didn’t know even now. Only a mother can know
for sure whether a child is hers.
Classical
literature and the Bible (Gen. 2:21 and 3:16!) testify for violent
upheavals,
some say, a "patriarchal revolution," at the end of the Bronze Age.
When the first murder was committed the Bible is laying the blame on
Cain. As we know, land in a
matriarchy
cannot be traded. So, the only remaining option for aggrandizement in a
matriarchal neighborhood was open warfare. Plutarch is telling us of
the
Spartans’ longstanding war against the Messenians. Unlike
the wars between the other Greek polities,
the
Spartans not only subdued the Messenians but made them subservient
helots,
soil-bound serfs, working the land they once had owned. The Spartan
male was
confined to the barracks, a life of incessant training in the arts of
war and
of sexual bonding among the comrades in arms. It was an elite with the
inevitable
"l'esprit de corps,"
encouraged and rewarded with first helpings from the spoils of war and
bonus
features in the mating game. Something similar is known from China.
During the
thirties, short before the Japanese invasion, archaeologists had
unearthed the
artifacts of the "Shang"-people from between the 15th and 10th
century BC. Archaeology
and the
curiously distorted historiography by Confucian authors of a much later
era
suggest a people who every summer opened the wooden gates to their
stockades
and ventured out on their chariots to harass the neighborhood and
conquer more
territory for their mistresses. In the Confucian scheme of things, the
Shang
were thought to be China's second dynasty; but the moral bigotry of the
Confucians also accuses the Shang to have lost the mandate of heaven
because of
their "sexual license, libertinism and moral depravity." There are similar stories about the last
Etruscan viceroys before ancient Rome became a republic, and we notice
the
parallels in Plutarch’s observations on Spartan society.
The
philosopher Aristotle didn’t mean it as a compliment when he called the
Spartan
state a “gynecocracy” – a
country run by
women. In his Life of Lycurg,
Plutarch (45 – 125 AD.), on
the
other hand, is full of admiration for the Spartans. Like everybody else
in
Greece, Plutarch saw only the front, the communal education of
children, the
toughness of the Spartan soldier, the retentive taboos. Yet even the
urban and
unprejudiced Plutarch was mildly shocked by the liberal conduct and
economic
dominion of Sparta's women; he says their "cupidity" and "infidelity" had become proverbial. Aristotle noted
that
this “license” of the Lacedaemonian women existed from the earliest
times, and
“when Lycurgus, as tradition says, wanted to bring the women
under
his laws, they resisted, and he gave up the attempt.” Apparently neither Plutarch, nor
Aristotle, nor the Confucian
historians in China had any idea what they were looking at. Or maybe
they
didn’t want to know.
Especially
the function of the “ephors” in Lycurg’s constitution remains an
enigma. The
five ephors had administrative powers even over the two royal houses.
They
could impose fines, even depose and imprison an unsuitable monarch. But
who
were the ephors?
Apparently
they came from humble backgrounds and operated on a slim income. It
made them a
soft target for bribes. They were elected magistrates, appointed for
just one
year and without the right of reelection. The ephors presided over the
council
of elders; they were in charge of the judiciary, taxation, the
calendar,
foreign policy, and military training. The ephors were also personally
responsible to keep the helots in their place; they could imprison or
execute
any of them at any time without trial or violating religious taboos. In
other
words, surrounded by a male dominated world, the Spartan ephors, not
unlike the
attorneys and businessmen of the Minangkabau, served as the political
executives of their mistresses. From Plutarch’s description we learn
that the
Spartan male for most of his life did live in dormitories and barracks.
There
was no such thing as a Spartan family. The women were promiscuous and a
man had
no franchise in the possession of real estate. Everywhere else in the
ancient
world the Patriarchs had taken the helm and were busy remodeling the
economy
and their sex-life. Only the Spartans, the Etruscans and the
Philistines
maintained their ancient way of life. Surrounded by matriarchies, the
Hebrews
reacted with fanaticism and the retentive and unusually harsh
enforcement of
taboos against nakedness and premarital sex (Exodus 20.26, 28.42; Levi 18.6-19).
But
the
transformation was incomplete. To this very day, it is your mother’s
bloodline
that makes you a Jew, not your father’s. Apparently the conflict in the
book of
Joshua, depicting it as an invasion, was in actual fact a social
uprising. The Amarna
Tablets are a collection of
diplomatic
correspondence found in the ancient capital of Pharaoh Akhenaton (1380 – 1362 BC.). They tell us of
pastoral
Canaanites up in arms against their rulers in the cities. The word
"Hebrew" originally may have meant "outcast." It seems the
Egyptians exploited these conflicts to control the region and strike
alliances
with some of the rebellious leaders. It was the beginning of the
Hebrew’s
monarchy.
© - 1/27/2009 - by michael sympson, 1,900
words, all
rights reserved
