Night Work

Jon.”

Kate too got to her feet. “You make it sound so attractive, Hawkin.”

They sorted out dollar bills for the waitress, and went their separate ways.

When Kate got home she found the lights turned down and the house’s other residents asleep. She also found a package waiting for her on the table in the hall, an oversized mailing envelope containing something the shape and weight of a box of typing paper. Clipped to the end of the envelope was a note in Lee’s writing that said:

Roz came by with this tonight, said she had the impression that you wanted to see it so she printed you a copy.

Hope you’re not going to try to read it in bed.

—L.

It was a box of typing paper, or 487 sheets of it, anyway, unbound. On the first page was the title.

women’s rage and men’s dishonor: manifestations of the violent goddess in the hebrew bible

Chapter 18

KATE HAD NO INTENTION of settling in to read 487 pages of turgid doctoral prose, not after the day—the string of days—she’d had. She made herself a cup of decaf coffee that was mostly hot milk and sat at the kitchen table with the massive piece of work to glance through it, more so she could tell Roz she’d done so than from any great interest.

Two and a half hours later she suddenly realized that if she didn’t go to bed soon, she would not be going to bed at all. Once she had decided to skip over the lengthy footnotes with their detailed discussions of opposing points of view and debates of the subtle meanings of words and objects, the text moved right along. Indeed, instead of the usual dry technical language employed by every thesis Kate had ever seen, Roz wrote in straightforward, even lyrical English prose that drew the reader on, and in, as if this was a popular work designed to inspire a general audience. Why was she surprised, Kate asked herself; everything that damn woman set her hand to was compelling, why not her doctoral thesis?

Like most nominal Christians, and most enthusiastic believers as well, Kate had never given much thought to what came Before Christ. Oh sure, the Old Testament had been around before the New, which explained its complexity and seeming lack of unifying theme, but before the Old Testament there were what? Patriarchs and Canaanites and goatherds and things, wandering dimly through the desert.

In Roz’s hands the Bible came alive, revealing itself as a document of the human spirit with roots reaching far back into the history of humankind, before the stories were written down, back to an age when high-tech weaponry was made out of bronze, and even stone.

The name Baal appeared on page three, abruptly calling to mind Kate’s long-ago Sunday School classes taught by the tightly girdled Miss Steinlaker. The priests of Baal, it had been (and for an instant Kate was back in that drafty church classroom with Miss Steinlaker looming over her, smelling of chalk, perfume, menthol cigarettes, and the musk of unwashed clothing). The priests of Baal had lit something on fire, hadn’t they? Or perhaps had failed to do so. Kate blinked, and the classroom vanished, and Roz was explaining that Baal was a Canaanite storm god, a young warrior deity about whom hymns were written down on clay tablets, describing Baal as the Rider on the Clouds. Then a thousand years later the Israelites came out from Egypt and settled in the land, and soon they, too, were speaking of their God as a young warrior heaving thunderbolts across the sky, calling Him “Rider on the Clouds.”

It was not stealing, Roz explained firmly, and it should not be thought that the people Israel were trying to change their God’s nature or attach other gods to His coattails in a sort of religious corporate takeover bid. It had to do with framing a language of theology, using the images and descriptions of others to more richly describe the wonder of the one true God’s majesty and complexity.

If this was so, Roz then asked rhetorically, what of the images and language that described the unique actions and characteristics of the goddess figures so common in the ancient Near East, Anat and Asherah, Ishtar and Inanna? Were they simply condemned as idolatry, as the Prophets would have us believe? Or did their poetry and songs, their epithets and personalities, resonate so strongly in the minds of the people that, despite the goddesses’ inextricable connection with the forbidden fertility cults and their obvious antithesis to the masculine figure of Yahweh, God of Israel, some of their nature survived in Him, some of the goddesses’ stories became adopted and adapted by the people Israel?

This question came a bare twenty pages into the document, and amounted to Roz’s introduction, laying the groundwork for the thesis itself.

The thesis being that Yahweh did indeed come to incorporate certain characteristics of a group of Near Eastern goddess figures whom Roz classified as Warrior Virgins—virginity, as Roz had mentioned the night of Song but had been too distracted to explain, being for divine beings not indicative of physical innocence but rather a state of proud independence from males, of not being defined by their male consort.

As role models for women set on taking back the night, these goddesses were a fearsome bunch. Take the verses illustrating the goddess Anat:

Heads roll about like balls,

hands fly up like locusts,

like a swarm of grasshoppers, the warriors’ hands.

Anat ties the heads as a necklace,

she fastens the hands around her waist…

Her soul swells up with laughter,

her heart bursts with joy. Anat’s soul is joyous

as she wades to her knees in the blood of soldiers,

to her thighs in the gore of warriors.

No, thought Kate, Miss Steinlaker had never told her Sunday School class about this.

There was the goddess Inanna, who aside from being a goddess of fertility was also a fearsome warrior:

In the mountain stronghold that holds back homage,

the very vegetation is cursed, The city’s great gates,

O Inanna,

you have burnt to ash.

Its rivers run with blood,

the people cannot drink.

Then came the Indian goddess Kali, a close cousin to the virgin warriors of the Middle East, who lived in the cremation grounds, ate pieces of the bodies, and wore a necklace of human heads and a belt decorated with severed hands. She was followed by a description of the bloodthirsty Egyptian Hathor, appeased only by a great flood of red beer poured across the land like the blood she takes it to be. The Mesopotamian Ishtar called down a raging storm on humanity until they floated like dead fish on the sea, and the Greek Demeter condemned the earth to bare sterility to revenge the abduction and rape of her daughter.

Why do people think of goddesses as wide-hipped, large-breasted, loving bringers of fertility? Kate wondered uncomfortably. These women were terrifying.

Kate went to pour herself a glass of wine, looked at the rich red liquid in the glass, and dumped it down the sink, taking instead a shot of nice safe amber brandy from the cooking supplies. She continued reading, about revenge and wrath and the sheer joy of killing, and she winced when she came to Roz’s description of Kali:

She is young and beautiful, old and haggard, dark-skinned as a blow in the face of the pale, high-ranking Aryan castes, savage and loving and utterly enamored with bloodshed. Kali is created by the great goddess Durga for the express purpose of conquering a monster able to kill any man who comes up against him—but not, it turns out, any woman. Kali glories in death, decorates herself with pieces of her victims, and allows no man supremacy, not her enemies, not even her consort, who lies beneath her in intercourse. She is the advocate and protector of India’s poor, India’s acknowledgment that inside every woman lurks a force of immense power that, when loosed, exults in the destruction of men, that longs to trample even the most beloved of males underfoot, to wade in his blood and eat his carcass.

Sweet Jesus, Kate reflected, taking a large gulp of the brandy, what must Roz’s thesis supervisor be making