Judith’s City of ‘Bethulia’
Part Two (iv): Shechem and its Oak Tree
by
Damien F. Mackey
“Covenantal
promises first given to Abram at Shechem, first acknowledged then fully
committed to by Jacob at Shechem, guarded by Simeon and Levi at Shechem,
possibly symbolized by Joseph's bones at Shechem, were twice
ratified in Joshua's time, in modified form, by Israel at Shechem, where
the emphasis was placed on 'fullness of faithfulness'. Shechem was also where
Joshua placed the massive, covenantal 'law stones' as God had commanded”.
In this series I finally got around to accepting
Shechem (rather than the far less significant Mithilia, or Mesilieh) as the
strategically important city of “Bethulia”, the home of the Simeonite heroine,
Judith, whose womanly intervention would lead to the rout of Sennacherib’s
185,000 strong Assyrian army.
In the following article, “The oak tree of
Shechem”, the vital covenantal importance of this ancient site is discussed
with relation to the famous oak tree there:
SEE,
PEOPLE ARE COMING down from the center of the land, and another company is
coming from the Diviners' Terebinth Tree.
Judges 9:37
Judges 9:37
….
The couple from Ur
Though two
thousand years had passed since Adam and Eve had tended the Garden of Eden, and
untold millions had been born and died, barely a handful had ever known the
true God. With Abram and Sarah, the time had come for God to set in motion a
process that would forever change that situation, relatively speaking, creating
a people fit to be called His own. God initiated this momentous new phase with
a disarmingly unrevealing act. He gave order to Abram and Sarah to get up and go,
promising them great things if they obeyed:
Now
the Lord. said to Abram: "Get out of your
country, from your family and from your father's house, to a land that I will
show you" (Gen. 12:1).
God gave command
to this faithful couple to depart from their secure, comfortable, cozy
existence to venture into what was possibly the great unknown. ….
Shechem and the oak tree
Abram
passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the terebinth [oak]
tree of Moreh (Gen. 12:6).
Abram and Sarah
set off on the long journey without dithering or dickering. Their route
probably took them through Damascus, along the shore of the Sea of Galilee
where, two thousand years later, the One to come would teach the crowds, and
then on to Shechem, a very important centre in the second millennium BC. There
the first stage of their journey came to an end at the great tree of Moreh.
Shechem and its
tree were destined to play a vital role in God's dealings with Abram and his
descendants. The story of Shechem, its oak, and of incident after incident
played out in their shadow exposes the vital organs of God-man covenant
relationships to view, showing clearly the key to covenantal success.
Shechem and its
tree were destined to play a vital role in God's dealings with Abram and his
descendants.
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Sadly, failure
more than success makes the lesson.
Let's now tell the
fascinating tale of Shechem and its oak. Shechem, the first city in the
Promised Land to be mentioned in the Bible, is located approximately 45
kilometers directly north of Jerusalem. Scholars agree the tree was almost
certainly an oak. As if to send up a flare alerting us to its special
significance, there, by the tree, three 'firsts' occurred:
- In the past, God had only spoken to Abram (12:1); here by the oak tree He appeared to him — the first of three recorded appearances in his life. (See also 17:1 and 18:1.) Describing this event, Hamilton (1990, p. 377) says, "Here the mode of revelation shifts to a theophany, Yahweh appeared to Abram. The shift is not incidental." Such an appearance reinforces the assurance that a divine intervention of great significance has occurred.
- The first declaration made in the Promised Land of history's most amazing promises occurred here. In fact, the announcement of these promises was the very purpose of God's appearance to Abram;
- The first of seven altars built by the patriarchs was erected here. The urgent way the text reads gives the impression that barely had God disappeared than Abram built an altar to worship Him.
The oak tree, as
we will see, is special; definitely not your average, every day agglomeration
of trunk, branches and tracery covered with green leafy bits. For the time
being let us simply note its importance, as revealed by the meaning of 'Moreh'
which, translated, means teacher. The most reputable conservative
commentary available today on Genesis says that it "suggests a place where
divine oracles could be obtained" (Wenham 1987, p. 279). That
explanation certainly fits the facts.
Were this episode
the only "oak of Shechem" one, we'd quit right now. But let's
continue; as the record unfolds over time, Shechem became the venue for more
than its share of happenings had chance alone set the rules. Shechem next pops
into the record at the return of Abram's grandson, Jacob, after many years in
Mesopotamia as Laban's some-time dupe.
Mackey’s comment:
Judith would later recall the trials endured by Abraham and by Jacob under
Laban’s trickery as if the Bethulians’ present trials under hard Assyrian siege
were almost inconsequential by comparison (Judith 6:26-27):
‘Recall how [God] dealt
with Abraham, and how he tested Isaac, and all that happened to Jacob in Syrian
Mesopotamia while he was tending the flocks of Laban, his mother’s brother. He has not tested us
with fire, as he did them, to try their hearts, nor is he taking vengeance on
us. But the Lord chastises those who are close to him in order to admonish them’.
Jacob returns from abroad
Jacob, the
original composer of "If I Were a Rich Man", forever in his parlor
counting out his money, had fled from home to escape death by his brother,
Esau, after deceiving his own father Isaac and thereby swindling his brother
out of a special powerful blessing. That was on top of an earlier episode in
which Jacob had taken advantage of Esau's hunger to snatch his birthright from
him. Forty years later, at about the age of ninety, Jacob returned.
His journey home
from Mesopotamia was filled with dread over how his brother Esau would receive
him. Jacob's relief when Esau embraced him warmly upon meeting again was
palpable. After catching up on old times, they parted company again, and that's
where Shechem comes into the story:
Then
Jacob came safely to the city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, when
he came from Padan Aram; and he pitched his tent before the city. And he bought
the parcel of land, where he had pitched his tent, from the children of Hamor,
Shechem's father, for one hundred pieces of money. Then he erected an altar
there and called it El Elohe Israel (Gen. 33:18-20).
Though some argue
almost persuasively (e.g. Wenham 1994, p. 300) that Shechem here is the
name of the crown prince of the area rather than the name of the city to which
Jacob came, we believe the evidence shows otherwise. (Wenham is wrong when he
says that "nowhere else in the OT is it [salem] used in this way
as an adverb qualifying a verb". It is indeed used that way in
1 Samuel 16:4. Also, a study of Joshua 24:32 shows that the land Jacob
bought was by Shechem.) But even if their contention is correct, the
alternative town that is spoken of (Salem, translated in NKJV as
'safely') was located only three miles from Shechem anyway, and would have come
under the city of Shechem's regional control.
Mackey’s comment: For
the importance of Salem, see Part One (ii) of this series.
Nobody can explain
why Jacob chose to settle in Shechem upon his return after a house-building
detour in Succoth. Shechem did not lie on the major route from Mesopotamia into
the Promised Land, yet it was strategically placed from a trading point of
view. Perhaps his reason to settle there was entirely based on mercenary
considerations.
What can we deduce
from this account with its many salient features? One feature — the purchase of
real estate — is most intriguing. Was doing so an act of honoring God by
securing the spot where Abram built his altar, or was it an act of
disobedience, going contrary to God's will that they live their lives as
disenfranchised strangers in the land of promise, as possibly indicated in
Genesis 28:4? But let's focus on those items closer to certainties.
To begin with, one
cannot help but note Jacob's unhesitating resolve to build an altar in the same
place, probably within eyeshot, of grandfather Abram's altar.
But even more
eye-opening is the unheralded, untrumpeted act of naming the place el Elohe
Israel. For the first time, Jacob actually calls the God of creation the God
of Israel.
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For the first time, Jacob
actually calls the God of creation the God
of Israel.
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And guess who
Israel was. Himself! He was saying that God was now his God. Don't let
the significance of this fact be lost on you. Note what Wenham says,
In calling the altar "El, the
God of Israel," Jacob acknowledges that the creator God who had changed
his name at the Yabbok to Israel was now his God. He had vowed at Bethel that
if the Lord brought him back to his father's house in peace, "the Lord
will be my God" (1994, p. 301).
Pillar promises
To getter a better
grip on what's going on, we really need to fill in some detail about the Bethel
deal Wenham refers to here. While fleeing Canaan with his brother Esau in hot
pursuit, Jacob had a dream at Bethel in which he saw angels ascending and
descending upon a ladder whose top reached up into heaven. Then God Himself
appeared at the ladder's apex, and made a number of glowing promises laden with
assurances of blessings unrivalled, blessings that would make the biggest prize
in lottery's history blanch visibly (28:13-15). Jacob, showing no hint of
remorse over his chicanery, responded with unfeigned self-concern laced with a
dash of skeptical reserve:
Then
Jacob made a vow, saying, "If God will be with me, and keep me in this way
that I am going, and give me bread to eat and clothing to put on, so that I
come back to my father's house in peace, then the Lord
shall be my God. And this stone which I have set as a pillar shall be God's
house, and of all that You give me I will surely give a tenth to You (Gen.
28:20-22)".
Jacob's vow that
God would be his God if He brought him back safely from
Mesopotamia needs to be seen in context. First, when God spoke to him from the
top rung, He had promised to be with Jacob wherever he went, implying that He,
God, would stand ever-watchful over Jacob and his family. On top of that, God
had many years earlier made his grandfather Abram the following staggering
promise:
Also
I give to you and your descendants after you the land in which you are a
stranger, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession; and I
will be their God (Gen. 17:8).
We are not drawing
a long bow here to suggest that Jacob, a 'descendant' of Abram, and thus one of
those of whom God was declaring He would be his God, was simply not going to
meekly, willy-nilly let God be his God. (Oh, how short-sighted!) He
was not going to naively believe God's magnanimous, munificent, magnificent
claims. In essence, he was putting God to the test, declaring that if God really
wanted to be his deity, then He had better come up with some good reason
for it, He had better come up with the goods; Jacob specifically reiterated
God's implied promise of a peaceful (safe) return to Canaan.
At the same time,
Jacob obligated himself to certain good deeds in return — to build a 'house'
out of the pillar he had erected at the same spot, and to commence
regular tithing on all his earnings.
Jacob, procrastinator extraordinaire
God fulfilled all
his ladder promises, even though only in germ form compared with their
long-term outworking, including bringing Jacob and his family safely back to
Canaan. Jacob was stuck. Unless he was mad enough to tempt God, he knew he had
to fulfill his side of the deal and return to Bethel to build a
state-of-the-art altar, implied by his vow to build a 'house' there, and to
start tithing. ….
But Jacob was
Jacob. Instead of going on to Bethel to fulfill his obligations, he dragged
his feet at Shechem.
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Perhaps, in
building a ruder altar there, and accepting God as his own personal God, he
thought he had divested himself of any further obligation. Though the inner
workings of Jacob's mind can not be known with any certainty, subsequent events
prove that his Shechem dithering and lingering did not impress God at all ….
Calamity at Shechem
The next episode
must surely go down in history's log book of treachery as a classic. Jacob's
daughter, Dinah, went gallivanting around the district with the result that
someone ended up with her in the kitchen where things got a little out of hand.
His name happened to be Shechem, crown prince of the district. When they heard
about it, Dinah's brothers were so incensed they hatched a diabolical plot.
Feigning friendship, they offered Shechem Dinah's hand in marriage on one
condition — that every male in town be circumcised. Shechem agreed. On the
third day after the mass operation, when all the patients were in the direst of
discomfort, Dinah's two brothers Simeon and Levi strapped on their keenly-honed
swords, entered town, and pierced every grown male through virtually without
resistance.
Jacob was
flabbergasted, angry, and smitten with terror, expecting reprisals from all
quarters. God took advantage of his vulnerability under such duress, ordering
him to go to Bethel and fulfill his vows:
Then
God said to Jacob, "Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there; and make an
altar there to God, who appeared to you when you fled from the face of Esau
your brother" (Gen. 35:1).
He went, and did
it. But the Shechem story is nowhere near ended. Let us continue.
If trees could talk
….
So
Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, "Put away the
foreign gods that are among you, and purify yourselves, and change your garments;
then let us arise and go up to Bethel, that I may make there an altar to the
God who answered me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I
have gone." So they gave to Jacob all the foreign gods that they had, and
the rings that were in their ears; and Jacob hid them under the oak which was
near Shechem (Gen. 35:2-4).
One strongly feels
that this oak tree was not just any old tree, the use of the definite article
suggesting such a conclusion. What other inference does the inspired text want
us to draw than that it was the same one under which Abram built his altar,
probably where Jacob had also erected his own? So at the very spot where Abram
had demonstrated his conviction that God would one day faithfully fulfill His
covenant promises, where Jacob himself first called God his God at the
dedication of his altar, Jacob buried all remnants of pagan influence among
them.
Now there would
have been untold thousands, if not millions of oak trees in Canaan where they
could have buried their household idols. But no.
|
Now there would have been
untold thousands, if not millions of oak trees in Canaan where they could
have buried their household idols.
|
It had to be the
same oak as that under which Abram built his altar. At the same oak tree in
Shechem where Jacob first aspired to faithfulness by a mere show of it, now he
sincerely repented and turned wholeheartedly to God.
Dem bones, dem bones
In an
easily-overlooked verse, Joseph commanded his great-great-grandsons that they
ensure his wish to have his bones returned to the Promised Land be permanently
perpetuated until the day of Israel's departure from Egypt, as prophesied,
should come:
Then
Joseph took an oath from the children of Israel, saying, "God will surely
visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here" (Gen. 50:25).
Only one reason
can be seen as lying behind Joseph's wish — the covenant promises of God that
Israel would inherit the Promised Land. Joseph wished to lie in death among his
own descendants. He obviously believed in God's faithfulness to those promises
without reservation.
Where were his
bones eventually stowed when his descendants finally inherited the Promised
Land?
The
bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel had brought up out of Egypt, they
buried at Shechem, in the plot of ground which Jacob had bought from the sons
of Hamor the father of Shechem (Josh. 24:32).
One could take the
stance that the only reason his bones found their final resting place in
Shechem was that it lay in the territory Joseph's descendants occupied. Maybe.
However, lots of other cities and towns lay in their territory. Why Shechem?
One could, of course, ascribe the location to the normal human tendency to
hallow places where important events had occurred, such as Shechem. Indeed,
quite possible. But as we will see, the deed also fits into a matrix of
deeds-events having a vital common denominator.
Dem stones, dem stones
Hundreds of years
later, Joseph's descendants departed Egypt carrying his bones, in readiness to
fulfill the promises God had made to the patriarchs. For forty years they
wandered in the Sinai Peninsula. En route, Moses commanded them what they must
do when finally they entered the Promised Land. The account is given in
chapters 27 and 28 of Deuteronomy. The vital points are contained in 27:2-13:
And
it shall be, on the day when you cross over the Jordan to the land which the Lord your God is giving you, that you shall set up for
yourselves large stones. You shall write on them all the words of this law.
Therefore it shall be, when you have crossed over the Jordan, that on Mount
Ebal you shall set up these stones. and you shall whitewash them with lime. And
there you shall build an altar to the Lord your
God, an altar of stones. Take heed and listen, O Israel: this day you have
become the people of the Lord your God. Therefore
you shall obey the voice of the Lord your God,
and observe His commandments and His statutes which I command you today."
And Moses commanded the people on the same day, saying, "These shall stand
on Mount Gerizim to bless the people, when you have crossed over the Jordan.
and these shall stand on Mount Ebal to curse.
The law of God lay
at the heart of the Sinaitic covenant inasmuch as it outlined in detail the
terms of the covenant the people had to observe. As becomes clear in both
Deuteronomy and later in the book of Joshua where the fulfillment is spoken of
(8:30-35), between Ebal and Gerizim the people ratified the covenant made with
God at Sinai. An altar of huge stones with the law of God inscribed on them was
erected on Ebal, Shechem's sentinel mount, as a token of that covenantal
commitment.
Now. Guess where
Mounts Ebal and Gerizim are located. They are the hills in whose valley Shechem
lay! The vibrating, thundering chorus of millions of voices shouting 'Amen' in
unison to the terms of the covenant, from hill to hill, echoed powerfully in
the streets of Shechem below; nothing like it has ever been seen (better,
heard) again in all history.
The vibrating,
thundering chorus of millions of voices shouting 'Amen' in unison to the
terms of the covenant, from hill to hill, echoed powerfully in the streets of
Shechem below
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Covenant ratified — yet again
At the end of his
life, Joshua called for Israel to assemble again — at Shechem. The solemnity of
the occasion cannot be expressed better than by its simple yet inspired
biblical description:
Then Joshua gathered all the
tribes of Israel to Shechem and called for the elders of Israel, for their
heads, for their judges, and for their officers; and they presented themselves
before God (Josh. 24:1).
Joshua recounted
God's faithfulness from the time of Abram's calling until He gave them the
Promised Land. He solemnly impressed on them the importance of keeping
faithfulness with God and his covenant. The following statement captures the
sum and substance of the gathering's purpose:
Now
therefore, fear the Lord, serve Him in
sincerity and in truth, and put away the gods which your fathers
served on the other side of the River and in Egypt. Serve the Lord! (24:14)
The phrase
"sincerity and truth" is translated "sincerity and
faithfulness" in the RSV. The real meaning of the phrase is best expressed
by NIV's "with all faithfulness". Joshua told them that they
must, in observing the covenant made with God, honor it with fullness of
faithfulness. The people responded, equally solemnly, that they would do so:
We
also will serve the Lord, for He is our God
(24:18).
God was their God
because He had promised to be the God of Abram's seed. They ratified the
covenant with shouted professions of faithfulness. Little did they realize that
the charge of faithfulness they accepted would later turn into a charge against
them. When all was over, Joshua,
…
took a large stone, and set it up there under the oak that was by the sanctuary
of the Lord (24:26).
Eight hundred
years had elapsed since Abram first built an altar under the Shechem oak tree.
Could this possibly be the same tree?
Eight hundred years had
elapsed since Abram first built an altar under the Shechem oak tree. Could
this possibly be the same tree?
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It's doubtful,
though oaks can live for many hundreds of years. But its proximity to the
"sanctuary of the Lord", which was
probably the altars built by Abram and Jacob, indicates it was now taken to be
the official substitute.
Can we not picture
Joshua pointing to the altars and the tree, can we not hear him rehearsing
their stories? Can we not imagine him pointing to the ground, declaring
"somewhere down there are the pagan gods your father Jacob buried; do the
same, bury your false gods, and serve the one true God only." The stone
was to witness to their promise to be true. On that day, under Abram's tree of
promise, Israel ratified her covenant with God, the covenant she had made at
Sinai about one hundred years earlier.
The charge against
About three
hundred years later, a staggering event occurred in Shechem, one which gave the
lie to the people's profession made at that city in Joshua's day that they and
their descendants would forever be faithful.
God was king
From the very
outset, God was king over Israel. The clearest exposition of this truth is
found in 1 Samuel 12:12:
And
when you saw that Nahash king of the Ammonites came against you, you said to
me, "No, but a king shall reign over us," when the Lord your God was your king.
This truth
received little in the way of enunciation in the Law simply because every
moment of Israel's history renders it obvious. He created her as a people. He
delivered them from annihilation in Egypt. Israel's covenant with God amounts
to nothing less than a suzerainty treaty that finds its meaning only when made
between a great king and subject peoples. His regal reign over Israel is
evident in such passages as Exodus 15:18, Numbers 23:21; 24:7, Deuteronomy
17:14 and 33:5. But Israel rejected God in the days of Samuel, the last of the
judges:
And
the Lord said to Samuel, "Heed the voice of
the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but
they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them" (1 Sam.
8:7).
Such treason would
ipso facto amount to rejection of the Sinaitic covenant whose central
stipulation entailed loyalty to God. Nevertheless, God in His mercy did not
call it quits right then. He endured hundreds of years of more active rejection
of His proprietary rights over Israel before He brought into play the covenant
sanctions of cursing as rehearsed at Shechem.
Significantly,
this official rejection of God's rule was preceded hundreds of years earlier by
an abortive popular uprising against God, and guess where its locus was — yes,
Shechem. This earlier act of treason set the scene for the later. The key
player was a man by the name of Abimelech, whose father was the well-known
judge Gideon, of fleece-and-dew fame.
The book of Judges
recounts how the people had approached Gideon, after God had used him to save
Israel from Midianite oppression, and pleaded with him to be their king. Note
his response, showing faithfulness to Israel's covenant with God:
Then
the men of Israel said to Gideon, "Rule over us, both you and your son,
and your grandson also; for you have delivered us from the hand of
Midian." But Gideon said to them, "I will not rule over you, nor
shall my son rule over you; the Lord shall rule
over you" (Judg. 8:22-23).
Treason
A greater contrast
between father and son has rarely been witnessed in history as that between
Gideon and Abimelech. Shortly after his father died, Abimelech went into
treachery mode. Like the consummate politician he was, he lobbied hard in his
town of Shechem (yes, that's right) to gain support. Feeling he had it, he
murdered all seventy of his own brothers, barring one who escaped, on one rock
in one day! Immediately,
…
all the men of Shechem gathered together, all of Beth Millo, and they went and
made Abimelech king beside the terebinth tree at the pillar that was in Shechem
(Judg. 9:6).
Did you catch
that? If you did, it probably caught your breath. At the very spot where, under
the very tree where (Hamilton, p. 377), next to the very pillar where, three
hundred years earlier, all Israel had sworn faithfulness to God and His
covenant, where one thousand years earlier God first made the covenantal
promises to Abram, where Jacob later buried the vestiges of his false gods, the
populace of Shechem declared that a mere, evil man, was now their king. God,
they proclaimed, was no longer even a puppet ruler.
The outcome was
utter disaster, perhaps even greater than that which had occurred in the same
city hundreds of years earlier when Simeon and Levi slaughtered the entire male
population.
The outcome was
utter disaster, perhaps even greater than that which had occurred in the same
city hundreds of years earlier when Simeon and Levi slaughtered the entire
male population.
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Read the entire
account for yourself in Judges 9:1-20. In short, the honeymoon between
Abimelech and the Shechemites was short-lived. God set animosity between them,
resulting in Abimelech's massacre of the entire population. One thousand people
perished in one incident when Abimelech set fire to the temple of Baal in which
they were cringing in fear. That one thousand people could fit inside testifies
to its considerable size.
Why did this
disaster occur? Listen carefully to what Jotham, Abimelech's lone surviving
brother, had to say to the citizens of Shechem days before the massacre:
Now
therefore, if you acted in good faith and honor when you made
Abimelech king, and if you have dealt well with Jerubbaal and his house, and
have done to him as his deeds deserved. if you then have acted in good
faith and honor with Jerubbaal and with his house this day, then
rejoice in Abimelech, and let him also rejoice in you (Judg. 9:16-19).
Twice in one short
diatribe Jotham tells the people to judge themselves, whether or not they have
acted in 'good faith and honor'. This phrase begs to be noted, for it is identical
to that which Joshua used by the oak at Shechem in charging the people to
serve God faithfully, a charge which the people accepted enthusiastically. Here,
in exactly the same spot, the people cast aside their ancestors' voluble
promises to serve God loyally and launched on a course of rebellion. These
facts must not pass unnoticed. They provide a key to the proper understanding
of biblical history, and of the meaning of covenants in particular.
Interpreting the story
What appears to be
the three-stranded tip of a golden thread waves beckoningly around right from
the beginning of the Shechem account. All three 'firsts' — a theophany, a
pronouncement and an altar — share one common denominator, God's promises to
Abram. One might wonder how Abram's building of an altar fits in with those
promises. As soon as one starts looking for meanings to actions, the art of
interpretation is called for. But Wenham doesn't blush at all in interpreting
Abram's act:
Abram built an altar to show that he
believed the promise of the land. In building it, he symbolically demonstrated
his conviction that one day it would belong to his descendants (1987,
p. 280).
Let us state right
here the conclusion come to after studying the various clues relating to
Shechem and its oak tree: Shechem serves as a mechanism for concentrating the
theme of covenantal faithfulness to a sharp focal resolution.
Topical
connections are so strong that we can be confident God intends us to see an
umbilical link between them all.
At Shechem God
began to unveil His special covenant with Abram and his descendants, and it was
there that Abram responded with believing commitment. … it appears to have
brought Jacob to genuine spiritual conversion and faithfulness to God,
demonstrated by burying his household idols in the very patch of Promised Land
soil where Abram first worshiped God.
One could ascribe
the act of Simeon and Levi in destroying Shechem as showing loyalty to the
covenant promises. For if the marriage had gone ahead, it would have been the
thin edge of the wedge. Israel was to preserve an unmixed blood line. Had
intermarriage occurred, the very fulfillment of the promises that Abram's seed
would inherit the land would be jeopardized. Thus, Simeon and Levi could well
have done the "right thing". Wenham says,
… the narrative hints at the
multidimensional aspects of conduct, at the mixed motives that make it
impossible either to condemn any of the actors absolutely or to exonerate them
entirely (p. 317).
Mackey’s comment: Judith
will, in her magnificent prayer to God at the time of the evening offering in
the Temple - and quite contrary to Jacob’s angry reaction to Simeon’s and Levi’s
violent deed at Shechem (Genesis 34:30) - express nothing but admiration for
what her ancestor Simeon (and Levi) had done, even using this as an incentive for
her own move upon a new pagan Shechem-like offender, the Assyrian commander-in-chief
“Holofernes” (Judith 9:1-10):
Judith
fell prostrate, put ashes upon her head, and uncovered the sackcloth she was
wearing. Just as the evening incense was being offered in the temple of God in
Jerusalem, Judith cried loudly to the Lord: ‘Lord, God of my father Simeon, into whose hand you put
a sword to take revenge upon the foreigners … who had
defiled a virgin by violating her, shaming her by uncovering her thighs, and dishonoring
her by polluting her womb. You said, ‘This shall not be done!’ Yet they did it.
Therefore you handed
over their rulers to slaughter; and you handed over to bloodshed the bed in
which they lay deceived, the same bed that had felt the shame of their own
deceiving. You struck down the slaves together with their masters, and the
masters upon their thrones. …
Their wives you handed over to plunder, and their daughters to captivity, and
all the spoils you divided among your favored children, who burned with zeal
for you and in their abhorrence of the defilement of their blood called on you
for help. O God, my God, hear me also, a widow. It is you who were the
author of those events and of what preceded and followed them. The present and
the future you have also planned. …. Whatever you
devise comes into being. The things you decide come forward and say, ‘Here we are!’ All your ways
are in readiness, and your judgment is made with foreknowledge. …. Here are the Assyrians,
a vast force, priding themselves on horse and chariot, boasting of the power of
their infantry, trusting in shield and spear, bow and sling. …. They
do not know that you are the Lord who crushes wars …. Lord is your name. Shatter their strength in
your might, and crush their force in your wrath. …. For they have resolved to profane
your sanctuary, to defile the tent where your glorious name resides, and to
break off the horns of your altar with the sword. See their pride, and send
forth your fury upon their heads. Give me, a widow, a strong hand to execute my
plan. By the deceit of
my lips, strike down slave together with ruler, and ruler together with
attendant. Crush their arrogance by the hand of a female’.
Covenantal
promises first given to Abram at Shechem, first acknowledged then fully
committed to by Jacob at Shechem, guarded by Simeon and Levi at Shechem,
possibly symbolized by Joseph's bones at Shechem, were twice ratified
in Joshua's time, in modified form, by Israel at Shechem, where the emphasis
was placed on 'fullness of faithfulness'. Shechem was also where Joshua placed
the massive, covenantal 'law stones' as God had commanded.
Hundreds of years
later, the citizens of Shechem discarded every vestige of loyalty to the
covenant and embarked on a course of treachery, rejecting God as king in
preference for a wicked blob of Abimelech flesh.
Hundreds of years later, the
citizens of Shechem discarded every vestige of loyalty to the covenant and
embarked on a course of treachery
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Jotham's discourse
included a reference to 'fullness of faithfulness' that his listeners would
almost certainly have taken as alluding to Joshua's warning. Adding insult to
injury but strength to the thesis, Shechem was one of only six cities of refuge
and of numerous Levite cities (see Joshua 21:1-3, 21), cities inhabited by that
tribe set aside for special service to God. Such a city should have stood a
bastion of squeaky-clean holiness to the bitter end; instead, the depth of its
traitorousness is indelibly stamped on history's record in the stark shape of
its large temple of Baal. Horror of horrors, the city had become a centre of
Canaanite worship.
Further, after the
death of King Solomon, the epochal split of the one kingdom of Israel into two
separate kingdoms occurred when the people turned, admittedly under
provocation, against the legitimate Davidic successor and followed the upstart
usurper Jeroboam (see 1 Kings 12:1-19). The event occurred at Shechem,
which also became Jeroboam's first capital.
All these facts
underscore as plainly as can be imagined the very essence of covenantal
relationships. Though the form of the covenants God made with Israel may have
imitated standard ancient practice, the Bible's repeated Shechem incidents
highlight the heart and core of healthy relationships between God and man —
mutually-observed faithfulness — as well as its opposite, perfidious
unfaithfulness.
The Shechem type
teaches what it is that keeps a covenant robust and healthy; the glue that
holds two parties together in covenantal bliss consists of the vital attribute
of faithfulness. Without faithfulness
on the part of both parties, covenants are ultimately doomed.
This marvellous
history of Shechem typically lacks a wonderful later chapter, which is the apocalyptical
Judith incident.
The tale of Judith,
a heroine virtually forgotten to Israel in
terms of her historicity, has resonated down through the centuries in ancient
pagan tales of vague reminiscence, and has even been projected into pseudo AD ‘history’.
See e.g. my article:
Ancient tales inspired by Judith of Bethulia
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