Having men for dinner: deadly banquets and biblical women.

Abstract

This essay looks at several biblical women who use the power of food and drink, the banquet with its implications of seduction, to kill men or to determine whom the dining men kill. I will be asking in particular how the symbolism of food and drink interacts with gender, sexuality, and killing in the tradition. Jael (Judges 4:17-22) and Judith use drink along with the promise of sex, as though one conveys the other, to reassure, sedate, and deceive the men they need to kill. Herodias (Mark 6:14-30) and Esther (Esther 4-7) have equally deadly aim and also use food and more importantly drink to meet that aim, but in their cases, the drunken man is not the man who dies, but the one who kills. Thus the stories of Jaei and Judith advocate a more direct subversion of the female role as nurturer--the nurturing turns to killing;, the nurturing role was in fact all along a disguise for a female warrior. The stories of Esther and Herodias, on the other hand, propose more complicated and less subverted use of the nurturing role. While Jael and Judith take up masculine weapons to kill, Esther and Heredias manipulate men themselves as weapons, working within their traditional gender role.

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Female characters in the biblical text rarely kill. But the few women killers in the Bible kill with fascinating frequency in the context of, and/or by means of a meal. In this article, I will look at four biblical women who use the power of food and drink, the banquet with its implications of pleasure and seduction, to kill men or to determine whom the dining men kill. I will be asking in particular how the symbolism of food and drink interacts with gender, sexuality, and killing in the tradition.

Beginning with Jael's womanly, tently killing of Sisera in Judges 4-5, I will move to Judith's story of drink along with the promise of sex, to accomplish her superheroic killing (Judith), and then to Esther (Esther 4-7) and Herodias (Mark 6:14-30), women who have equally deadly aim but use food and more importantly drink not to kill, but to manipulate the drinking man to kill. It would seem at the start that the stories of Jael and Judith advocate a more direct subversion of the female role as nurturer--the nurturing turns to killing; the nurturing role was in fact all along a disguise for a female warrior. The stories of Esther and Herodias, on the other hand, propose a more complicated and less subverted use of the nurturing role--they become respectively positive and negative examples of the manipulative power of women's sex, the power to instigate killing, but a power that cannot itself enter the man's world of killing and war. Jael, and more tellingly, Judith become in a sense male at the moment of the killing, as we will see. Esther and Herodias, however, do not even for an instant become men. Rather than using men's weapons, these women manipulating the banquet context from their social position as women, ultimately use men as weapons (for a more complete version of this article's argument, see my book by the same title, forthcoming from Pilgrim Press in 2006).

Life, Death, and Food

Like other species, human beings derive life from death--food is where we see that transformation. Whether or not human beings must in fact kill to live, sacrificial culture appears to assume this as a universal truth, often seeing even vegetable harvest as a kind of killing. Sacrifice assumes that we kill, at least plant life, to eat; thus we kill to live. It is fitting then, that food should be prominent in narratives about killing, particularly those about righteous killing. Our texts require some justification for killing, no doubt more so when the killer is a woman. A useful and ancient justification is that this person must die in order for others to live; again this is the logic of sacrifice. When is killing a good thing? When its proceeds sustain the life of the community. Thus food embodies killings primary justification and appears to lend it natural support.

I will be looking at both food and wine in these stories, and while the logic of meat as killing that sustains life does not require much argument, wine as a vegetable product may seem immune to these observations. But a very rudimentary word study shows that wine appears most often in the Hebrew Bible in references to sacrifice. Occasionally, it even takes on violent connotations and associations with blood. So Judah, according to the blessing in Genesis 49, will wash his garments in "the blood of grapes" (v 11). Similarly, Isaiah 63 describes the Lord treading the wine press alone, as though squashing human life rather than grapes: "I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath (v 3); their juice spattered on my garments and stained all my robes;" and Jeremiah warns of the "wine of wrath" (25:15). More often, beth in the context of sacrifice and of gifts intended to pacify, wine is mentioned in lists that include oil and grain, as the produce of human labor, and, in its connections with agriculture, as a marker of human culture.

Ironically for these stories, there is a sort of anthropological truism that the sharing of a meal constitutes a community. Those who eat together become one--physically, as their physical substance will be reconstituted by the one meal they share, and socially, through the shared experience of eating and drinking. The extent to which and the manner in which meals in these stories are shared, point to those bonds that genuinely exist between the characters and those bonds that are part of the ruse.

Jael: A Woman and Her Tent

Jael's story is graphic, stark, and brief, albeit repeated. She invites the enemy in, leaving her tent and her proper place to bring him in, as though hospitably, offering him shelter, both literally and in the sense of security, shelter from the storm. Her leaving the tent to invite a man in seems to transgress her assigned role as married woman, limited to the private sphere circumscribed by the tent, but in a way that extends the role itself--her hospitality, it seems, the succor of her tent, overleaps its bounds. She runs out to offer him the shelter of her tent, and he accepts that shelter at face value. When she answers his request for water by giving him milk (4:19)--or in the poem, curds (5:25)--her hospitality once again seems to have gone beyond the expected. The detail of Sisera's request for water and Jael's provision of milk appears in both the narrative and poetic versions of the story, gaining significance through the repetition. As other readers have noted, in the narrative it appears to be the milk that signals Sisera to push Jael's protection further, telling her to stand guard for him at the tent's door. She and the tent--for she is the tent--will keep him safe, as safe as the fetus in the womb. He climbs into her womb, drinks her milk and, in the narrative, falls asleep, a fetus or infant, or lover.

Critics dispute whether the imagery leans more toward motherhood or seduction here. In the narrative, Sisera's sleep is sound--are we to attribute this only to the soporific effects of the milk, or is he sexually sedated? Moreover, we discover that he is asleep only after the tent peg has already gone through his skull--he's certainly asleep now!--and the sense that we have missed something also invites readers to assume that what we missed was sex. The scene itself invites a sexual interpretation; as Danna Fewell notes, "at least in biblical literature, a man seldom enters a woman's tent for purposes other than sexual intercourse. The woman's tent is symbolic of the woman's body" (Fewell: 393).

Furthermore, Jael not only leaves her tent to approach Sisera, perhaps a culturally suspect move in itself, but phrases her invitation to him in terms that can be read as scandalous: "Come in, my lord, come in to me!" The verb sur, often translated "turn aside, turn away," or even "deviate, stray," together with its repeated sibilance (Assis: 84), emphasizes the secretive nature of Sisera's entry into the tent--he is turning aside, away from the beaten path where he will be sought, into this shelter. In particular, the unusual and unnecessary addition of the phrase, "to me," raises the question in readers' minds whether the shelter and hiding place is Jael's tent or Jael herself, or whether the story in fact distinguishes the two (Assis: 83).

But there is no particular reason to choose between the sexual and the maternal connotations of this scene--it is not, after all, as though sex and motherhood had no connection whatsoever. The tent is symbolic of the woman's body, but as we have already seen, not only as lover. Jael is not explicitly either Sisera's lover or his mother, and so she is flee to be implicitly both. Certainly Sisera's position described in the song, failing between Jaers legs in death, has connotations both of sex and of birth (perhaps abortion in this case, 5:27). Precisely the milk with which she provides him, though obviously carrying maternal and nurturing connotations, also invokes the sex act that brings on motherhood and its milk. In the human world, those who might drink a mother's milk are not only her infants but also her lovers.

So Jael and her tent, her womb, appear as mother and lover to Sisera, right up until the moment she drives the tent peg through his skull. Until this point, a first time reader might believe that Jaers aim is to aid and abet Israel's enemy, her husband's ally. The text says that Jael goes to him softly, secretly (4:21; on the connotations of the Hebrew word, see Niditch: 45). The phrase could sum up the entire narrative up to this point. She has indeed gone to him softly, as an ally and a woman--perhaps a sexually inviting woman--as a lover, a hiding place, a nurturer, as a womb and a tent. She goes to him softly to kill him with the tools of her tent--security, nourishment, mallet, and peg. In the narrative, she nails his head to the ground, to the land (ba eretz 4:21), as the tent is nailed to the ground, for security, stability.

And for this mysteriously motivated act, Jael is celebrated in Judges 5 as "most blessed of women in tents" (5:24)--apparently meaning most blessed of women, period. For women are in tents, the tents that are their homes, the tents that are their clothes, the tents that as clothes or homes are supposed to protect them from the eyes and aims of random men. Women are in tents and women are tents. Women's job in the biblical world is to shelter, nurture, hide, protect--to claim place for the organized processes of life against the demands of the chaos outside. Jael brings Sisera into her world, a woman's world that men would visit only briefly and occasionally--and nails him to the ground there; he will know what it is to be a tent.

In contrast to the other three stories we will discuss, the trouble with Jael's story is that the food-as-killing assumption does not seem to hold. That is, goat's milk avoids the killing connotations of other foods. Milk does not emerge from killing, but rather from the act of producing life; not from the male realms of hunt or slaughter, but from the female world of birth and nurture. What Jael provides to Sisera does not appear to have death as its price. It appears to be rather the very essence of life--the spontaneous substance that all mammal mothers feed their newborn young, the thing that goats and people have most prominently in common. It is a tie to the "natural," the female, the world imagined without man's culture and its accompanying warfare, without the necessity of killing. A life-giving drink or even a food (curds) that does not necessitate killing, and thus offers no justification for the death it makes possible, the milk is in itself that much more deceptive. Those eating meat ought to remember killing; those drinking wine ought to know its violent origins and treacherous power, but those drinking milk? Those drinking milk are babies--sheltered from the deadly costs of human life.

The milk, the sexual and maternal imagery of the killing, the emphatic tent, all appear to outline the killing with symbols of life. The penetration of the tent's peg into Sisera's skull is thus terrifically shocking--who knew that the tent had a penis of its own? Jael's action is a kind of reverse rape, a brutal act of penetration that shockingly emerges from the very heart of her femaleness. There are other means of killing, after all. She might have drowned him in the milk, suffocated him with the blanket, or even poisoned him. The choice of the tent peg is a choice--certainly on the part of the storyteller, if not on the part of Jael herself. Even though Jael facilitates and accomplishes the killing through traditionally feminine means--mother's milk, sexuality, covering and protection--she reverts to an accepted warriors method when it comes to the act of killing itself. That is to say, Jael becomes a warrior in killing Sisera, and she is celebrated as such. Amidst its flurry of images evoking birth, sex, and generally the womb, the story strongly implies that killing itself remains male, even when women do it.

Judith: You Can Never Be Too Kosher 

Like Jael, Judith also, under normal circumstances, lives in a tent. Somewhat eccentrically she makes a point of living in a tent on the roof of a perfectly good house (Judith 8:5). This seems to be part of her ascetic widowhood, which includes refusing all suitors and a great deal of fasting. She fasts "all the days of her widowhood," except for religiously appointed days, including the Sabbath, the new moon, and feast days (8:6). For Judith, then, eating is always a religious act. Every time she eats, it is a kind of religious feast. She eats to keep the law, apparently, on occasions when food is more or less prescribed. The tent, the widowhood and later refusal of suitors, and the fasting set her apart from the general populace, as A. J. Levine notes (213-16). To fast generally is to take a step away from the society with whom one would normally eat. As noted above, eating together strengthens, or even creates, the bonds of the community; fasting alone delivers Judith conversely into solitude, where she is apparently quite comfortable. It is perhaps less of an effort for her than it would be for others, then, to keep strictly kosher while she is in Holofernes' camp. She is used to eating or not eating by her own religious clock and not by the customs that surround her. And after all, she hardly eats in any case. So we can believe her when she tells Holofernes, "As your soul lives, my lord, your servant will not use up the things I have with me before the Lord carries out by my hand what he has determined to do" (12:4).

Nevertheless food is part of her arsenal, along with the bath, clothes, and entire beautification process she goes through to show off her natural beauty. Despite the tight control on her own appetites (or the complete absence of those appetites), the problem Judith is here to solve is one of hunger and, most directly, thirst. The Babylonians have cut off access to all the streams going into the city of Bethulia, so that the people are all dying of thirst and presumably also hunger, as the lack of water kills off livestock and crops (7:20-22). Judith may not be hungry, but her people are. Thus Holofernes believes her when Judith lies to him that the people are on the brink of eating unclean animals, and that if they do this, God will allow them to be defeated (11:12-15). What the people are actually on the brink of, of course, is surrender to these invading Babylonian hordes. In a sense, then, what Judith says is true, for surely if Holofernes conquers their city, the survivors will be reduced to eating non-kosher food.

The story is exceptionally concerned, in fact, with keeping kosher. When Holofernes invites her to join him for a meal, explicitly intending to have her for dessert, she manages to somehow give him the sense that she joins him in the feast while still eating and drinking nothing but her own food. The fact that she only appears to be eating and drinking in communion perfectly reflects her position and anticipates her chastity in the face of the general's lust. Despite having come into his camp, into his tent, she keeps her boundaries perfectly intact. Judith is nothing if not boundary-conscious. Jael may remain forever under shadow of suspicion that she slept with the enemy in order to subdue him, but no such suspicion can rest on Judith. She will not join with him in food or sex, she will not go to bed with the enemy (literally or figuratively), she will not become one with him in any way. Holoferues' conviction to the contrary reflects nothing more than his foolish and complete misjudgment of her. Judith's terrific care about what she puts in her mouth, (or in any bodily orifice) contrasts beautifully with the lascivious but unconscious general, passed out from having drunk more wine than ever before in his life (12:20).

During the meal they do not exactly share, Holofernes seems not to mind that Judith drinks her own wine. Rather, he extremely enjoys the meal and its promise of impending intimacy--and indulges in the wine of promise so much as to invalidate the promise itself. Both he and his servant urge Judith to drink, and she drinks, though without ill effects. We have already seen that Judith is immune to food and drink, among other things. Back in Bethulia, she fasts while the people starve, and bathes while they die of thirst (Levine: 212). Neither the scarcity of Bethulia nor the plenty of Holofernes' table appears to apply to her.

Judith's willingness to drink, though, apparently assures Holofernes that he will by agreement or by force have sex with her later. On that account, Holofernes himself drinks so much as to render him incapable of sex, rape, or anything else. More than any of the other men in these stories, Holofernes through drink puts himself completely at the mercy of the heroine. Judith is portrayed as saving Bethulia and Israel by her cleverness and beauty, but in fact the unconscious, helpless state in which Holofernes is killed is not exactly attributable to either. Or is it? He is so charmed by her, the text tells us, that he overdoes it (12:20). He enjoys the promise of her so thoroughly, that it goes to his head--literally. The idea that she will sleep with him is equated both with her beauty and with the wine; enjoying the wine is enjoying the sense of drinking the wine with her, as the opening interlude of the sex to come. Is this his stupidity, or the power of her beauty? She tells the elder's of the city later, "it was my face that tricked him to his destruction" (13:16). Like the sirens luring sailors to their death, Judith seems to be calling Holofernes to come to her by means of the wine, the very means of his destruction.

Having thus anesthetized him, Judith kills Holofernes with the sword "hanging over his bed"--penetrating or castrating him with the symbol of his own sexuality (13:6). Here more than in the Judges story, the killing is a masculine act. Judith seizes the very masculinity that had been looming in the background of the meal, the predatory sexual intentions of the enemy, to do it. Jael's weapon of choice was her own, as the tent and the bed that formed the backdrop were her own. But Judith turns Holofernes' own sex-as-weapon against him, almost as if he were killing himself. Indeed, it is in a sense Holofernes' own lust that kills him. While Jael does turn warrior at the moment of the killing, wielding her own weapons against her enemy, Judith is a half-step removed from the man's role. The fact that Judith uses her victim's sword says that she has no weapon of her own. She came with her woman's supplies--food, drink, and beauty--but had to rely for a deadly weapon on the man himself.

The killing accomplished, Judith then places into the sack that was reserved for kosher food the severed head, his removed life with all its sexual connotations. The head has now become kosher itself in that it has been slaughtered, cut, prepared in a manner fitting in the eyes of the Lord. The story's preoccupation with laws of kashrut is to some extent explained thus: Holofernes' death is not killing, but kosher slaughter, an act done according to divine law, in support of the life of the community, which must not go hungry.

The use of sex as a metaphor for battlefield slaughter, is, Susan Niditch notes, typical of the language of Greek epic. There the spear becomes a phallus, the penetration of the victim's flesh is represented as sexual penetration. In our stories, as Niditch also notes of Judges' 4-5, we have a similar "juxtaposition of slaughter and sex" (51). Yet here, of course, the slaughter does not so much evoke sex as it does take the place of sex. In both Jael's and Judith's stories this is the case--where sex is anticipated, killing occurs.

Esther: Sleeping with the Enemy

Esther's story begins in the enemy camp, before her arrival. The story of the banquets that occasion Vashti's insubordination take place in and among the Persians; they are not stories of the Jews at all, until the king goes looking for a replacement wife. Esther's entry into the enemy camp is often misread as a privilege for her. She's selected as a beauty contestant, and of course she wins the grand prize of the king. But rabbinic tradition understands her being "taken" as "taken by force"--essentially, abducted. Mordecai's reaction to her entry into the palace is not joy or excitement, but concern. He paces daily outside of the women's quarters to find out whether or not she is alive and well, and what her chances are of staying that way (2:11).

Like Judith and Jael, Esther has gone out to the enemy, but unlike them Esther goes unwillingly, not for the purpose or with the intention of performing the righteous killing for her people that she will indeed engineer. She is less active in her own fate, then; in fact, markedly passive in these first few chapters. Mordecai has to order and finally provoke her to do something. In the book's only possible allusion to God, Mordecai goes back on his own advice to her that she assimilate, and, insisting that she act as a Jew, suggests that although she was taken by force into the center of power, she might nevertheless be there for a purpose; one larger than her own agency: "Who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" (4:14)

Interpretation has given Esther the benefit of God's spirit and power to concoct her plan and carry it out, but in the Hebrew, she has only her own wits, as Mordecai's help ends with his insistence that she act. Alone among these four biblical women, Esther receives motivating orders from a man. Ironically, though, from the moment she decides to do as Mordecai urges her, she acts entirely on her own.

Her actions are focused almost entirely on the provision of food and drink. When the king asks what she wants the first time, offering her up to half of his kingdom, she says that she wants to wine and dine the king and Haman (5:4). When he comes to the banquet and drunkenly repeats his promise to give her anything, she again asks to be allowed to entertain him and his advisor (5:6-8). Is she lying about what she really wants? Is this two-stage softening up process part of an elaborate and time-consuming plot? Or is she rather capable at this point only of wanting more contact with these men and their combined power of destruction, more influence over them to flow from her to them with the wine? Here Sisera's basic request for water and Jaers one skin of milk are replaced with a series of complex banquets, wine, requests, and vows. Jael's using the tool that came to hand is replaced with, well, with Esther's using the tool that came to hand; namely, the king.

The sexual act is notably absent--though rumors persist--from the account of Jael's sedation of Sisera, and Judith explicitly exults, "he committed no act of sin with me, to defile and shame me" (13:16; cf. White: 9). Despite the sex in the air, despite the sex in the food and drink, it is important that these women not sleep with the man they are cozying up to, because it is important that despite appearances, they are not indeed communing with, becoming one with the enemy. Appropriately, then, neither Jael nor Judith actually shares food or drink with the man. Esther, on the other hand, eats and drinks repeatedly with Ahasuerus and the evil Haman--and why not? After all, she is already sleeping with the king, at least occasionally.

In a sense the accusation of rape and Haman's approach to her bed follow up on Esther's already being compromised in marriage to a foreigner, albeit a foreign king (though in fact Esther, if anyone, is the foreigner; I am thinking of the term in the sense of Lawrence Wills' thoroughly useful text, JEW IN THE COURT OF THE FOREIGN KING). Somewhere in the unconscious of the story is perhaps the sense that since Esther sleeps with the Gentile king, why not with the Gentile king's Jew-hating advisor, why not with her cousin's would-be hangman, why not with the very author of her people's destruction? After all, she is already pleasing Haman with food and drink. After all, the author of the decree to destroy the Jews is not finally Haman at all, but the king himself, Esther's husband and lover.

While Jael provides for but does not share with Sisera, and Judith simply eats and drinks alongside Holofernes, Esther eats with the king and Haman not once but twice, at her own insistence. She does not keep kosher, and indeed the book of Esther is as unconcerned with keeping kosher as the book of Judith is concerned. The Targum's eagerness to assert that Esther manages to keep Sabbath and Jewish festivals, follow purity law concerning menstruation, and eat none of the Persians' food, underlines the absence of any such statements in the Hebrew (Grossfeld: 48). Indeed, the Targum's defense of Esther on this point only points out how impossible such strict maintenance of the law would be for someone in Esther's position. She is, after all, passing as a Persian (or at least a non-Jew) for most of the story. Rather, Esther's sharing two meals with the enemy--people before whom the previous queen refused to appear--underlines how involved she is with "them," the people who are endangering her own. Her identity as one of the "us" in the story is indeed as much a voluntary act for her as a condition of existence. In the meals themselves, Esther appears wholly identified with the Persian court, largely, as Timothy Beal notes, through the medium of wine (2).

In the book of Esther, Beal observes, "the place and time for drinking is also often the place and time for defining 'us' over against 'them,' and for consigning 'them' to oblivion" (2). We see here, perhaps, some of what the author of Judith draws upon, in that Esther's success, like Judith's, depends upon her ability both to please the man in charge and to get him drunk. In the book of Esther, as in Judith, pleasing him, sleeping with him, and getting him drunk are all closely tied, if not equated.

The fact that Esther is actually sharing the wine, so to speak, with the king points to another difference between her story on the one hand and Jael's and Judith's stories on the other. Esther's being legitimately and thoroughly in bed with the king, means she is a queen, or, in the context of her limited power in the story, more like the king's consort, and not a warrior. Her access to power, including the power to kill, is limited and precisely channeled. Furthermore, after killinging Sisera, Jael can run to the general of the Israelite army to show him her good deed; Judith can return triumphant to. Bethulia, with the enemy's head in her hand--but the enemy camp is Esther's home. She can rejoice with Mordecai and the Jews when Haman is executed and the Jews take up arms, but she will remain in her perhaps duplicitous role as the Gentile rulers hostess, lover, servant--a role that was a one-night stand for Jael and for Judith.

The story diverts responsibility for the impending slaughter of the Jews from the king onto Haman, despite the fact that the king is alter all, the king (Beal: 91). Rabbinic tradition actually goes further in this direction, making, for example, the edict against entering the court without permission an idea of Haman's. Whereas Jael and Judith had the relatively simpler task of placating and sedating the military leader whom they needed dead, Esther must deal simultaneously but separately with the power that can destroy her people and the hatred that wants to destroy her people, embodied in the king and Haman, respectively. Judith gets Holofernes drunk to the point of unconsciousness--with her beauty and his wine--in order to kill him. But Esther needs the king "merry with wine," not dead or asleep, but only and permanently in that intermediate condition of being captivated, even stunned, but not killed by her beauty. Judith lets Holofernes drink himself into oblivion, but Esther must pour her own wine, invite, charm, cajole, enchant, convince--how much easier, the author of Judith must have thought, to knock him out and cut off his head!

Just as Holofernes was using his weapons to destroy Bethulia, and Sisera his chariots to oppress Israel, so Haman is using the king to destroy the Jews. In each case, the woman must take up weapons herself--among them her sexuality and the expectation that she nourishes. As Judith uses Holofernes' own weapon, the sword hanging over his bed, against him, so Esther uses Haman's weapon, the king, against him. It is a much more subtle process, to instigate Haman's hanging, than simple killing would be. But Esther's task is to save her people while leaving her own position as queen intact, and she will accomplish that task, no matter how much wine it takes.

Herodias: Food and Death in the Kingdom of Wrong

The similarities of Herodias's story (in Mark 6) to Esther's are numerous--both take place at royal banquets notable for the length of their guest lists, both women profit from promises a pleased king repeatedly makes to a charming girl. Like the similarities between Jael's and Esther's stories on the one hand and Judith's on the other, the similarities between Herodias and Esther are no coincidence, but a case of intertextuality, even reliance of the later text upon the earlier. Herodias's story in Mark 6 depends for its tension and horror on stories like Esther's, in which the girl who charms the king is good, and her loyalties are to the Jewish people. By stark contrast the charming girl in Mark 6 is of unknown moral character and intention, and her loyalties are to a technically adulterous mother. While Esther through her own beauty and pleasing quahties manipulates Ahasuerus, Herodias must use her daughter's pleasing qualities to manipulate Herod.

Picking up on the split in Esther's story between the man with the power to kill and the man who must be killed, Mark's story divides the female killinger into two as well. Here the charming girl and the angry, plotting woman are two separate characters, the latter hidden and unfed, the former using the powers of her dance to gain not her own but her mother's desires, "on a platter." The girl adds the detail of the platter herself, perhaps because in the context of the banquet and her mother's absence, the request strikes her as motivated by hunger.

Neither Herodias nor John, whom she seeks to kill--neither the destroying enemy nor the virtuous Jew--is present to eat and drink at the banquet in Mark 6, and yet in the course of the banquet one brings on the other's death. Rather the banquet includes Herod himself and his numerous guests, presumably all men. Not a guest who will sit at the table, but a bit of entertainment for them, is the girl who is Herod's and/or Herodias's daughter (the textual evidence is divided on exactly whose daughter this is). How old is this girl? Four? Fourteen? How sexual is her dancing? Is she cute or is she a seducer or both? We are told only that her dancing pleased the king, though the lavish vows with which he proceeds to thank her have sounded to many like a sexually entranced (and drunk) man, rather than an indulgent and charmed (and drunk) father. If indeed this is to be understood as seduction--and again, as with Jael and Judith, the seduction is at best implied--then the story becomes frighteningly Freudian. Behind every sexy girl there stands a scheming (and unattractive? So she has been presented in opera and theater) woman, ready to use that sexuality as a road to the man's killing power. Women--seen or unseen, young or old--are dangerous to kings and prophets. Never get drunk in their presence.

Certainly, the mother's desire to kill is conveyed into the banquet by the dancing girl, who unites it with the father's power to kill by virtue of her own (childish?) power to please. The union of the power and the desire to kill then becomes the deed of killing itself. To accomplish the killing, Herod sends out of the court, to the prison where John is beheaded, so that the gruesome evidence of killing can return to the court's banquet table (delivered like a late-night pizza), to Herod, to the girl, and to her mother. John's severed head, and the guilty memory that haunts Herod thereafter, are the produce of this confluence of killingous desire, power, and pleasure.

Unlike the other three stories, of course, the killing here is not justified at all, but presented as the wrongful death of a righteous man. Jael's story does not concern itself with justifying the killing of Israel's enemy, and so does not include food that would reassure the reader that killing is necessary. Her story offers little justification because justification does not seem to be required. In the case of Herodias, on the other hand, no justification is offered because none will suffice. Ironically, the kill-to-eat motif absent in Judges 4-5 emerges here, obscenely, as John's head appearing at the banquet on a platter suggests that it constitutes dessert. Its very prominence at the table suggests brutality and cruelty rather than victory--or possibly even the bloody platter would not be in itself evil if only this were the right head, feeding the right people. Judith, after all, takes Holofernes's head in her food sack back to the elders of Bethulia, and its position on a stake strengthens and sustains them like the food they have been lacking. John's head may also sustain Herodias and/or the guests at Herod's party, but that is not good news. The entire tale of a woman getting the better of a man by seduction, by satiating him one way or another, is turned on its severed head in Mark 6. The reader who knows and loves Esther and Judith hates Herodias, the more so for her resemblance to them. Yet of course the final resemblance to Esther is that both stories at once blame and absolve the king himself for the condemnation of righteous Jews. Without the king, without the girl, without the wine and the food and the guests, Herodias, as the text explicitly says, wants to kill John, but cannot.

Feeding the Power to Kill

What emerges from an examination that groups these four stories around issues of food and killing is their common concern with power crossing gender lines. In each case the woman is confronting the society's power, which is vested and expressed in one or possibly two men. Through the use of her traditional areas of expertise--the provision of pleasure and nurture--she manages to wield that man's power, represented in these stories as almost exclusively the power to kill. In the case of Jael and Judith, the usurpation of power is direct and accomplished by taking power, and life, from the man; these are women who kill. To that extent they become momentary warriors, taking on in the act some culturally masculine qualities.

Here Jael stands apart even from Judith. Jael uses her own weapon, a weapon emerging from her own realm, even symbolically from her own body--as both the milk and the tent peg lead readers (as Sisera is led) to her womb. Her story remains the most challenging to traditional--even contemporary--gender roles, and my guess is that the unanswered questions Jael raises still trouble the stories of Esther, Judith, and Herodias. The latter three stories are more cautious, the women more manipulative, and their plots more complex. Judith kills Holofernes with his own weapon, but Esther and Herodias must wield the man's deadly power less directly. They do not themselves pick up sword or tent-peg and become momentary warriors, but rather rely entirely on the woman's assigned power to please and intoxicate. Esther and Herodias may be read as castrating, underhanded, and no friend to the opposite sex, but they are not even for one instant male.

Having begun by looking at the motifs of food and sex in these killings, 1 was struck by their presence also in a sort of reverse mode; that is, by the emphasis on fasting and chastity in some of the stories. Judith's story clearly turns on her chastity and fasting, but Esther also fasts before entering the king's court, provoked by Mordecai's fast and in her turn summoning all her servants and all the Jews to fast as well. Her fasting seems to be some sort of spiritual or mental preparation, as for battle (Though Randall Bailey has commented that Esther may just be trying to fit into her best dress, I believe he's kidding). Perhaps most interestingly, John the Baptist is known for his fasting and general asceticism, which forms a kind of contrasting background for Herod's drinking party.

There is, however, no mention of fasting in Judges 4 or 5. This absence itself points to another difference between Jael's story and the other three: Judith, Esther, and Herodias all defeat the powerful man in question by means of his self-indulgence. Jael's story is about Jael's righteous killing, not about Sisera being a drunken fool. The fasting of Judith and Esther contrasts these disciplined women with the pleasure-seekers they must manipulate, as John's fasting contrasts his doomed integrity with the capricious self-indulgence of the court. The stories become, then, in part a critique of the foreigners' decadent ways, and the vulnerable position of the Jewish people among them. Judith likely picks up on these tendencies in Esther's narrative, and takes them a great deal further, so that Judith (note her name, meaning "Jewess"--Levine: 210) becomes the embodiment of the people, chaste (which Esther is not, particularly), immune to the lures of pleasure, and, in the heroic tradition of Joseph, Daniel, and others, in charge despite her own vulnerability.

Herodias, of course, is not intended to be a model of Jewish virtue, and so does not fast. Rather, she seeks to kill the prophet who is a fasting model of Jewish virtue. Here the displacement of the asceticism from the clever female character to her male victim signifies how far the story has moved from an affirming tale of Jewish survival. Herod, technically a Jewish king, has become the drunken foreign lout; the one who has fasted ends up dead; the victorious woman is not an emblem of Jewish survival, but partner in an illegal marriage. In a sense, the story resolves the gender conflict created by Jael; i.e., How can a woman who seduces and kills be righteous? Judith and Esther must deal with this question, and do so with varying success. But for Herodias the question is erased; she is not righteous, but an adulteress and a killinger. What the others might seem to be, without the justifications of their narratives, Herodias actually is--a dangerous, killingons, and manipulative female, one who might have any man for dinner.

Works Cited

Assis, Elie. 2004. The Choice to Serve God and Assist His People." Biblica 85: 82-90.

Beal, Timothy K. 1999. Esther. Pp. 1-130 in BERIT OLAM: STUDIES IN HEBREW NARRATIVE AND POETRY, edited by. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.

Fewell, Danna, & David M. Gunn. 1988. Controlling Perspectives: Women, Men, and the Authority of Violence in Judges 4 & 5. JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION 58/3:389-411.

Grossfeld, Bernard, trans. and ed. 1991. THE TWO TARGUMS OF ESTHER. The Aramaic Bible, vol. 18. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.

Levine, A.J. 1995. Sacrifice and Salvation: Otherness and Domestication in Judith. Pp. 208-23 in A FEMINIST COMPANION TO ESTHER, JUDITH, AND SUSANNA, n. 7, edited by Athalya Brenner. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press.

Niditch, Susan. 1989. Eroticism and Death in the Tale of Jael. Pp. 43-57 in GENDER AND DIFFERENCE IN ANCIENT ISRAEL, edited by Peggy L. Day. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

White, Sidnie Ann. 1992. In the Steps of Jael and Deborah: Judith as Heroine. Pp. 5-16 in No ONE SPOKE ILL OF HER: ESSAYS ON JUDITH, edited by James C. VanderKam. Sodety of Biblical Literature: Early Judaism and Its Literature, n. 2. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.

Wills, Lawrence. 1990 JEW IN THE COURT OF THE FOREIGN KING. Harvard Dissertations in Religion, n. 26. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Nicole Wilkinson Duran, Ph.D. (Vanderbilt University) is currently teaching part-time at Rosemont College and Villanova University, while serving as parttime pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Clifton Heights, PA (e-mail: [e-mail]). She has published various articles on Hebrew Bible and New Testament topics and recently served on the editorial board of the Global Bible Commentary. She is the author of HAVING MEN FOR DINNER: DEADLY BANQUETS AND BIBLICAL WOMEN, to be published in the spring of 2006 by Pilgrim Press.