Praise Her Works: Conversations with Biblical Women

15 Michal

o 114 Chapter 5 Michal JUDITH KATES :.¢rÇ¥t±h%b¦e^z±oßg IÄ<àc¤·àýC V÷¡kàgáC ohº¤ r¡g¦WáC gº¥sIb “Her husband is prominent in the gates, as he sits among the elders of the land” (Prov. 31:23). jukac v,hnv in vkgc susk vkhmva kfhn uz 'vkgc ohrgac gsub rcsv gsub ;uxcku /tuv vkuj rnt,u u,hnvk ,hcv ,t urnahu kuta rnut tuv vn /heb osn lkhmvk hsf uk vrnt 'hc ,rea vhct vk rnt /vebu wv jhanc ush jka hn hf Her husband is prominent in the gates, this is Michal, who saved her husband, David, from death when Saul sent [messengers] who kept watch on the house in order to kill him, but she said, “He is sick” (1 Sam. 19:14). In the end, when the matter became known, her father said to her, “you deceived me.” She said to him, “[It was] to save you from [shedding] innocent blood.” What did he say [then]? “No one can lay hands on the Lord’s anointed with impunity” (1 Sam. 26:9). —Midrash ha-Gadol Michal’s story emerges in fragments interspersed in the tales of kings and warriors in 1 and 2 Samuel. She comes onto the biblical stage as we begin to perceive the rivalry between Saul and David. Saul, Israel’s first king, has continued to reign, although rejected by God. In contrast, David, the beautiful, charismatic young man anointed by the prophet Samuel as Saul’s successor, has begun to achieve great military success in Saul’s army. As in a fairy tale, Saul offers David the hand of his daughter Merab as a reward for fighting “the battles of the Lord” (1 Sam. 18:17), although his real goal is to see his rival slain in battle. In the midst of their tense vying 115 Chapter 15 Michal for position, with David claiming to feel unworthy and Saul arbitrarily marrying Merab to another man, we suddenly hear with startling clarity that Saul’s other daughter, Michal, “… had fallen in love with David” (1 Sam. 18:20). Saul resolves to use her as a snare for David by offering her in marriage for the bride-price of 100 Philistine foreskins , intending to bring about David’s death. Instead, David is wildly successful in battle, counting out 200 Philistine foreskins, and Saul gives him his daughter Michal, “who loves him” (1 Sam. 18:28), in marriage. Michal plays her most active role when, sometime later, in the episode referred to in our midrash, Saul makes a direct plan to assassinate David in his house. Michal, here identified as “David’s wife” (1 Sam. 19:11), not only warns him, but saves his life, letting him down from the window (just as Rachav saves Joshua’s spies in Jericho). She deceives the waiting assassins with a household idol (teraphim) that she puts under the bedcovers, topping it off with “a net of goat’s hair” (1 Sam. 19:13). This reminds us of her foremothers , Rachel and Rebekah. Rachel deceived her father, Laban, with teraphim, and Rebekah used hairy goatskins to disguise Jacob. In the first words we hear directly from her, Michal asserts that David is sick in bed. Then she defends herself against her father ’s accusation of disloyalty by claiming that David had threatened to kill her if she did not help him. This justification seems to work with her enraged, suspicious father. Meanwhile, she has enabled David to escape into the world of action and possibility. During the long narrative of Saul’s decline and ultimate defeat at the hands of the Philistines, and David’s rise to military victory and kingship over all of Israel, we hear about Michal in two brief moments. Each time, the narrator presents her as the instrument of political power struggles. While David is roaming the country as leader of a growing band of irregulars, “Saul had given his daughter Michal, David’s wife, to Palti son of Laish from Gallim” (1 Sam. 25:43). David clearly understands the message behind this strange treatment of his wife, because his 116 Praise Her Works first condition for making a treaty of reconciliation with Abner, Saul’s defeated general, is that “… you bring Michal daughter of Saul when you come before me” (2 Sam. 3:13). When he achieves the return of “… my wife Michal, for whom I paid the bride-price of one hundred Philistine foreskins” (2 Sam. 3:14), we hear quite poignantly about the sorrow of theobscurehusband,PaltisonofLaish,butnothingofMichal’sthoughts or feelings. In our last view of Michal, she is standing apart from the joyous popular celebration as “David and all the House of Israel brought up the Ark of the Lord [to Jerusalem]” (2 Sam. 6:15). This is the culmination of David’s military, political, and religious success. Michal, once more called “daughter of Saul,” watches from a window again as David dances ecstatically. The text states, “she despised him in her heart” (2 Sam. 6:16). The story that began with a flash of insight into her heart (she “loved” David) now ends with an equally brief notice of what seems to be complete reversal of her feeling. If Michal could speak and act at all, she could do so only within the confines of the inner chambers. At last she “came out “(2 Sam. 6:20) to denounce David for his revealing self-exposure as he dances with high and low. David’s bitter retort turns the sexual innuendo of her speech into a taunt of her isolation and a gloat over her father’s defeat. It represents the only direct exchange of words between them and her final silencing . The story ends bleakly with: “And to Michal the daughter of Saul there was no child to the day of her death” (2 Sam. 6:23).1 Commentary Midrash ha-Gadol connects Michal’s story to the verse in “Eishet Chayil” that most fully focuses not on the woman, but on her husband. It is the verse in which the eishet chayil is praised as the instrument of her husband’s renown. This is a perceptive response to the way Michal emerges from the biblical text. Whenever she is mentioned, she is called either “daughter of Saul” or “wife of David.” She has no substance as a character apart from her connection to the two rivals, in whose struggle 117 Chapter 15 Michal for power she is a crucial weapon. In her moment of greatest activity, to which the midrash alludes, she moves from her position as daughter to triumphant wife. Ironically, that triumph entails abandonment by her husband and return to manipulation by her father. To the end of her life, she is pulled between two definitions of male connection. Reading both the story and the midrash in this way, we might see Michal as the embodiment of women’s self-effacement by both biblical and Rabbinic text. However, a more nuanced reading of the story of this “fragmented woman,” in the phrase of scholar Cheryl Exum,2 opens more possibilities for both strength and tragedy. Michal begins her textual life with vigor, individuality, and even independence. She is the only woman in the Bible who, we are told, “loves” a man. We are used to hearing about men’s passionate attachments, such as Isaac for Rebekah and Jacob for Rachel. But among women characters, Michal alone is accorded such a movement of feeling and loyalty to a potential marriage partner. She loves the person who challenges her family’s position in a conventional sense, but who represents the surprising, even subversive, choice of the God of Israel. Despite her father’s efforts to use her and her feelings against David, she becomes the agent of David’s liberation through her intellectual, psychological, and verbal prowess. In the episode mentioned by our midrash, Michal transforms the limitations of women’s restriction to inner domestic space into ingenious tools for David’s salvation. The window high up in the wall that encloses her becomes a metaphorical birth canal through which she pushes her endangered young husband. She then exploits the stuff of women’s world: blankets, fabrics, even the teraphim to buy the time necessary for his escape. The text implicitly compares her ingenuity, or trickery, to her foremother Rachel. Michal, as a member of the tribe of Benjamin through her father, is a direct descendant of Benjamin’s mother, Rachel. Rachel also deceived her father, Laban, in connection with teraphim, while aligning herself with Jacob, her husband , to thwart Laban’s potentially lethal anger. Michal enters the company of biblical heroines Rachav, Rachel, Rebekah, and Tamar, 118 Praise Her Works who all use the weapons of the powerless in the service of life and covenantal continuity for the people of Israel. What could be criticized as trickery or deception appears frequently in the Bible as the only effective means for subordinated people to achieve goals essential to Jewish history. Michal also displays the linguistic dexterity of the foremothers . To Saul’s angry challenge (couched in a vocabulary that specifically recalls trickery in the Jacob and Rachel story), she responds with an explanation that fits perfectly into his paranoid expectations of David. She knows that he will not be surprised at her claim that David threatened her. She uses that knowledge to protect herself. Moreover, she relies on his assumptions about her passivity and availability as a pawn to blind him to the daring reality of her activity. Our midrash revises this tense scenario. It offers a more harmonious version of their exchange, in which Michal ingeniously manages to present her loyalty to her father’s “enemy” as a form of kibud av (honoring the father). In saving David, she has really saved her father from the worst crime a true king can commit. She is cast in the same light as the midrashic understanding of Rachel’s deceptive act. That has been explained as a desire to separate her father from his idolatrous practices (Bereshit Rabbah 74:5). Within the scope of the midrash, Michal shields herself from a painful conflict of loyalties, protects her father’s reputation , and launches her husband onto the path of renown. This is what makes her a praiseworthy eishet chayil. Yet Michal’s story cannot be entirely recast in the mode of insider activism. She eventually becomes the pawn and symbol of the power struggle between David and Saul. We are left to wonder what happened to the feelings and perspective on life of this daring young woman. She ends up pushed from one marriage to another according to the outcome of war and political maneuvering. She may have chosen to love David. But the brutal calculation with which David demands her return when he is consolidating his power over the House of Saul could not be further removed from personal choice or inner feeling. The window through which we see her at the end of her story 119 Chapter 15 Michal has now become not the ingenious tool of her independent strategy, but the sign of her separation from David and his triumph. Her final speech in the biblical text conceals as much as it reveals . Is she angry that David cavalierly left her at the mercy of her increasingly insane father? Has her love turned to jealous rage as she is forced to live with the knowledge of the six other women David has now married for political benefit, each of whom has given birth to a son? After all the time that has passed, does she now think of herself as the sole remaining representative of a royal dignity that David ignores? Is stubborn resistance to the total adulation of David all that remains of her courageous individualism? If we understand her sarcastic denunciation as protest against any or all of these understandings of her fate, we might feel sympathy, even admiration, for her struggle against the constriction of her life. But this remains a futile protest. David triumphs over her in language as he does in action. She may once have dreamed of sharing in the wider realm of kingship as David’s partner, but such goals, whether personal, national , or spiritual, have been obliterated. As feminist Bible scholar Ilana Pardes comments, “A female character who tries to fulfill her ambitious dreams, to protest against time’s tyranny, runs her head against a wall.”3 The biblical text both silences Michal and undermines her significance when it reduces her identity to “daughter of Saul” and records an absence: “So to her dying day [she] had no children” (2 Sam. 6:23). Michal Speaks I have a completely different story to tell. Yes, I loved David. But not because I was the fairy-tale princess, languishing in the palace of my ogre father, the mad king. And not because I was waiting to be rescued by that oh, so handsome, so strong young soldier, the idol of all those singing women. No, I wanted to play my part in the national drama, the transformation of our people into a great kingdom, ruled by God’s beloved .(Don’tthinkIdidn’tknowthemeaningofDavid’sname—“friend 120 Praise Her Works of” or “loved one of God.”) When I saved David, I became God’s partner in creating our history. It was all very well for God to send Samuel to anoint him. That didn’t hide him from the knives of the assassins. God needs humans to carry out divine designs. I was brought up to know the destiny of royal daughters. My father expected to use me as he had my sister Merab. But younger daughters are sometimes indulged, even by stubborn patriarchs. So my father let me satisfy my appetite for learning. He never bothered to think about what I was learning. When my brother Jonathan’s tutors taught him Torah, I, too, studied Torah, along with statecraft. Just like Jonathan, I understood for myself that God’s choice had fallen on that unlikely shepherd from Bethlehem. But anyone who thinks about the stories of our ancestors knows that our God is the God of surprises. God can raise up the poor from the dust to set them with the great men of His people (Ps. 113). (Yes, I appreciated the love poetry David wrote for God; I didn’t need him to write poetry for me.) In a crisis, I could wrap myselfinthespiritualmantleofmymothersRachelandRebekah.Then I could invent schemes to rescue that chosen “younger son,” my husband , Israel’s true king. But I couldn’t rescue myself. If only David could have seen in me anything beyond Saul’s daughter. He never understood how much like Jonathan I could be for him—a friend and partner in his search to do God’s will. How ironic that only much later a few Rabbis, searching our texts for hints of the ways of God, saw fragments of whom I was. They preserved the memory of my spiritual life. I may have been silent in the palace, but I spoke with God. I bound myself with words of Torah, praying in tefillin. The sages of our people respected this and even recorded it in their Talmud (Eruvim 96a). The Rabbis who praised me because I insured my husband’s renown were shortsighted. Others knew which verse really belongs to me: “She is clothed with strength and splendor/ And she rejoices at the last day” (Prov. 31:25). “Clothed with strength” because I wore tefillin, which are strength (Berachot 6a) 121 Chapter 15 Michal and signify my personal path to God. Guided by this verse, they saw the need to read my story differently. Where it says that I had no child to the day I died, they understood that I gave birth—and rejoiced—on the day I died, just like my mother Rachel (Sanhedrin 21a). If you look between the lines of David’s glorious history and gather up the Rabbinic fragments, you can find my story of strength. A Message from Michal I hope my story helps you to see how careful you must be when reading women’s stories in the Bible. Do you understand the risks I took, acting as I did while living in my father’s palace? I drew strength from a tradition of women being as daring and inventive as could be, given the narrow confines in which we had to work. We have learned that it is possible to exercise power, to act effectively under severe constraints, even when our world considers us merely instruments of “more important” plans. But we have also learned the limitations of female power. While a life of service to important men can be a source of significance for a woman, it can also be the means of her self-effacement. You must question the assumptions you make about what is valuable in women’s lives. The biblical text may be ambiguous about whether or not I ever gave birth to a child, but it clearly equates childlessness and failure. Like me, you need not accept this. You can see in my life path the possibility of another kind of success. We can bring new life into the world not only as mothers, but also as spiritual teachers. For Further Thought What satisfactions or benefits does Michal receive from her love for David? How do you explain Michal’s outburst against David when she sees him dancing with the ark? 122 Praise Her Works Nehama Aschkenasy’s Woman at the Window: Biblical Tales of Oppression and Escape (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998) is an original, well-written book that uses the biblical image of the woman standing in the window looking out at the wider world as a focus for discussion. This image appears prominently in the Michal story, which the author analyzes using metaphors of inner and outer space. A Feminist Companion to Samuel and Kings, edited by Athalya Brenner (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), is a collection of essays by American, Israeli, and European scholars, all written from feminist perspectives, on the books of Samuel and Kings. It is part of a series called The Feminist Companion to the Bible. Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 2002) includes original interpretations of many women characters divided into the categories of victors, victims, virgins, and voices. It also provides reflections on the general treatment of gender differences in the Hebrew Bible. ...