Ya'el: A Glimpse of Ancient Israel

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips
  leeanne@leeanne.com

Ya'el, by Tala Bar
  Published by Drollerie Press in electronic form (pdf) http://www.drolleriepress.com/

Ya'el, the eponymous protagonist of the novella bearing her name, inhabits the uncertain interface between girlhood and womanhood, fierce and proud, as young girls often are, and unwilling to give up any of her individuality and freedom to an arranged marriage. It will appeal both to young women and to those who appreciate the feminine side of divinity, a quality sadly lacking in many of the Abrahamic cults most familiar in the Western world.

As Ya'el discovers what it is about herself that refuses to bend to a husband's desire and mastery, she explores an Israel relatively unknown to most of us, the Israel of Jeroboam the Second, son of Joash, passed over fairly dismissively in the Bible, later commentators having somewhat mixed messages about his reign during the period between 785 and 745 of the Common Era.

Embarrassingly, despite his “sinful” tolerance of a certain laxness in narrow religiosity, he was among the most successful Kings of the Jewish people, his long reign being a sort of golden age — restoring the diminished northern part of the Davidic Kingdom to its former boundaries and greatly enhancing its prosperity and wealth — blithely ignoring the dour prophecies of not less than three prophets, Hosea, Joel, and Amos, who gleefully predicted the utter ruination of not only Israel, but the relatively pious inhabitants of Judah as well, in a sort of guilt by association, all on Jeroboam's tab.

Well, eventually he died, as even Kings must, and sure enough, the prophets were right, eventually. After his death, the Kingdom fell rapidly into plots, treachery, and decline, and within a few decades Israel had disappeared from the world stage except as a name, and perhaps an idea, along with all the other Kingdoms of the area, one by one, a prescient reality the prophets seemed mysteriously to have overlooked. Didn't want to spoil the surprise, one supposes, or perhaps it made a better story.

Jeroboam, son of Joash, had been excoriated by the three prophets as being entirely too cosmopolitan, tolerating “strange gods” and engaging in a lively commerce with the world, the very qualities which had seemingly made his realm successful, but the courts of David and Solomon seemed to have been very similar in their genial hospitality to foreign religious customs, if not perhaps with the same extravagance, since the Southern kingdom was a little off the beaten path.

Just over Israel’s southern border, the sometimes haphazardly devout Judah — what was left of the Davidic Kingdom after first David and then Solomon had squandered its wealth and alienated its people to the point of rebellion — was a rustic backwater, retaining more or less independence for some time after the fall of Israel because of the poverty of its inhabitants and so not all that attractive to potential conquerors whose armies sustained themselves on loot. Joash, the father of Jeroboam, himself had looted the Temple at Jerusalem of its treasures, the better to furnish the rival northern Temples in Dan and Bethel.

Where the Bible’s story is mainly from the viewpoint of the ‘down home’ cousins taking potshots at their decadent relations in the big city after a century had passed, Ya'el lives right in the heart of a cosmopolitan capital at one of the many crossroads of the ancient world, surrounded by the cultures and deities of many lands, all crowded together in a simmering stew of burgeoning life.

Ya'el is believable as a fourteen year-old girl, wise far beyond her years after serving as a sacred temple harlot in the service of Ashera, the most important of the many female avatars of the ancient Goddess, now reduced to a lesser status as sacred consort of a masculine God and called in the Biblical texts the Queen of Heaven, or Ashtoret — pointed by the Masorites to indicate that one should say “Boshet,” “Abomination,” whenever one saw her name, a tradition followed by most English translations since then, which might help to explain why so few have heard of her.

Indeed, this is a recurrent theme in many of Tala Bar’s stories, which are historical in the truest sense, reconciling the archeological and physical records of antiquity with the stories told about the past, so often bowdlerized and distorted to conform to a political or religious agenda. But as the Gershwin brothers so aptly observed in their “American folk opera,” Porgy and Bess, “the things that you’re liable, to read in the Bible, they ain’t necessarily so.”

Interestingly, these words were set to a jazz riff blending traditional Black music from the Deep South and the equally traditional melodies of the blessings chanted for the Haftarah in the synagogue, forming an obvious and profoundly Jewish commentary on the racist experience of American Blacks and the somewhat parallel experience of the Jews, a symmetry of which both groups had long been aware, at least in America.

So too, Ya'el might be seen as a commentary on the biblical version of history, teasing out the historical reality behind the propaganda, consistent with both the physical evidence and the hints remaining when the obvious redactions and alterations in the Bible writings are stripped away.

The unrelenting patriarchical monomania extolled throughout the biblical stories most familiar to us is here leavened with what might be called the real story, the women’s side of the masculine tall tales denied both by archeology and common sense, in which women have their own agenda, their own thoughts, and finally their own lives, in some cases utterly free and independent of the biblical model of female subservience.

The Biblical word we so often see in English as “Handmaid” — usually used by women to describe deprecate themselves in obeisance to their men, or to euphemize the sexual exploitation of women so often indulged in by the Holy Patriarchs — is after all a translation either of “shifchah” or “'amah,” both words meaning “female slave” in Hebrew. This obfuscatory tradition continues in the Christian writings, with the Greek words “doule” and “paidiske,” both literally “female slave,” usually being similarly transmogrified into “handmaid” or, in the somewhat earthier King James translation, “bondmaid.” But all this sounds a little too much like The Story of O to the modern ear, and so we lie (as translators) to our fellows and finally to ourselves (as readers).

The author lives in Israel, and a particular strength of the story is the vivid descriptions of actual places which with she is obviously familiar. One never has the feeling, as one so often does in historical stories, that the landscape was lifted from a travel brochure, or is so vague and amorphous that Solomon's Temple might just as well have been situated in New Jersey.

In Ya'el we see the complex, vibrant, diverse, alive Israel the prophets complained of, and the men and women who lived there, a broad spectrum of ambitions, religious traditions, points of view, and lives that winds up looking less like the single white light of infallible truth and more like a rainbow.

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