Have you ever noticed how many stories there are in the Bible about women cutting off men's heads? Like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, biblical women often seem to cry 'Off with their heads!' There's Salome with the head of John the Baptist served to her on a plate. There's Delilah who cuts off Samson's beautiful and strength-giving head of hair. There's Jael driving a tent-peg through Sisera's temple and there's Judith striking the head off Holophernes. Heads are important in the Bible. If the Church is a body, Christ is the head. But in the Bible women are good at cutting off heads. Does this mean something?
Of course, Freud thought it was all evidence of the castration complex. The head stands for the phallus and the stories are about the male fear that women are really out to strike at their masculinity. The head of the Medusa kills a man just by looking. Men are afraid. So these stories in the Bible are part of a whole tradition of stories that express and create this complex. They belong to the tradition of the 'femme fatale', of the woman who is fatal to man. So Karen Horney writes,
'Men have never tired of fashioning expressions for the violent force by which man feels himself drawn to the woman, and side by side with his longing, the dread that through her he might die and be undone.'
The femme fatale is irresistible, fascinating, frightening, but ultimately deadly. And though Tom Jones might ask 'Why, why, why Delilah?' the answer of the tradition is that this is how women are: enticing and lovely, but treacherous. And so, almost inevitably, male dread and fear are transferred and stories are written in which the women objectify this dread. We have the Sirens, the Medusa's head and the lethal mermaids, we have films like 'Fatal Attraction' and 'Body Heat', and we have biblical women like Salome, Delilah and Judith. Male dominance, they say, is built on such frail pillars that it must create the femme fatale to embody its suppressed but terrible fears. Samson may be able to kill a lion with his bare hands or even bring down the Temple of Dagon, but even he can also be enslaved and brought down by the fatal attractions of a woman. Men beware, these stories say, a woman may be beautiful but she will kill you!
But there might be more to these stories yet than an objectified castration complex. The lost heads might signal another fear. For the head represents many things, not only the phallus, but also knowledge, wisdom and power, the distinctions of reason and argument. Is it these too at which woman may strike? Is it these too that male power is afraid to lose? And what does God say to man and woman, to all the earth and heavens, from these stories of fear and loss?
First a look at the story of Judith. It is a story that lies in the shadowy region between history and fiction and one that wears its symbolic power brave and bold. King Nebuchadnezzar sent a general called Holophernes with 132,000 men to straighten out all the people who hadn't yet quite got the hang of who was boss around the Near East. The Jews were high on his hit list and Holophernes laid siege to one of their cities, a place you won't find on the map now - called Bethulia. The people in the town gave up hope of finding any way out of their predicament. They concluded that God must be behind it all - 'God has sold us into their power' they said - and so that was it. But there was a comely widow called Judith who thought this was bad theology and decided, since no-one else seemed to be doing very much, to take matters into her own hands. She prayed, then slipped into her slinkiest dress, put on all her jewellery from anklets to earrings, and, as the Bible puts it, 'made herself very attractive, to catch the eye of any man who saw her'. She made a hamper worthy of Fortnum's and set out for the camp of Holophernes. She got to see the General by persuading his henchmen that she had a cunning plan about the best way to defeat the Jews. And suddenly there she was in Holophernes' chamber where he was resting on his bed under a purple mosquito-net woven with gold and emeralds. After a speech to flatter any male ego, Judith told him that he was sure of victory because God would always let the Jews be defeated if they sinned and, as it happened, they were sinning right now, eating non-kosher food because that was all they had left. Holophernes liked the message and he liked the messenger even more. She stayed around the camp for a few days and played hard to get, but eventually he persuaded her to join him in his tent for an intimate supper. But he drank too much, passed out and Judith cut off his head with his own sword. She wrapped the head in the purple mosquito net, put it in the picnic basket, and took it back to Bethulia where she had it displayed on the battlements. When the Assyrians saw it they fled in terror and the Bethulians cheered Judith to the skies. Judith led the community with a feminist anthem written specially for the occasion.
'The Lord Almighty has thwarted them by a woman's hand
It was no young man that brought their champion low;
no Titan struck him down,
no tall giant set upon him;
but Judith, Merari's daughter,
disarmed him by her beauty.'
And Judith had many suitors from then on, though they all got nervous around sharp knives, but she never married and lived to the very ripe old age of 105. And that's the story of Judith.
The writer of her story says a great deal about her beauty. She dazzled the Assyrians and she charmed Holophernes. From his point of view she was a femme fatale, the fascinating woman who brought death. From the point of view of the Jews she was a good woman, attractive yes, but also chaste. She didn't sleep with Holophernes and she never married afterwards, though she had plenty of offers. But Judith was more than either of these things. She was a wise woman who dared to challenge the prevailing theology of her day. She was outraged that the leaders of the people thought the siege was a sign of God's judgement and so not worth a fight. She may have wielded a sharp sword but she spoke with blunt words.
'Will you never understand? You are unable to plumb the depths of the human heart or grasp the way the mind works; how then can you fathom the Maker of mortal beings? How can you understand God's mind and understand his thought?'
Judith may have cut the head off Holophernes, but she also cut the ground from under the best thinkers of her own people. She challenged the theology that leaves it all to God and decided to take action herself. She said her prayers, but she also took her body into action. And she won a great victory for the people.
As this story has been interpreted and passed on over the years, Judith's intellectual challenge has been overlooked. Well, you have to admit that it doesn't make such good print as a story of seduction, drunkenness and blood. But it wasn't just Holophernes who lost his head. It was also the wise men of the people, whose stupid, complacent and empty thinking was overcome by the good sense of a wise woman. This story may not have made it into the mainstream curriculum for theology students, but it has provided some powerful images in paintings and plays, in operas and oratorios. And it has been through these things that the story has had its impact on our culture. John Ruskin spoke of the 'millions of vile pictures' of Judith that he found in Florence. He found many paintings he described as 'gruesome' in which Judith was not a brave and wise saviour of Israel, but a clandestine assassin, a femme fatale with unnatural strength and deceptive allure. The subject was often treated as little more than pornography, a fleshly and beautiful woman engaging in some S&M (well more S than M!), with Holophernes as her poor and unfortunate victim. The bedchamber becomes the chamber of horrors, exchanging the fascination of sex for the fascination of violence, betrayal and blood. In this art tradition, Judith is a cool and heartless man-killer. Germaine Greer protests that Judith and the maid who accompanied her are so often portrayed as,
'two female cut-throats, a prostitute and her maid slaughtering her client.'
The many painters of the story forget the real challenge of Judith to thought and turn her instead into a classic femme fatale. She has been effectively diminished in Western art and literature and made into another castrating female, yet another Gillian Bobbet. In the Merchant's Tale, Chaucer forgets to tell us why she slew Holophernes while he slept! In some paintings she glares out at the viewer with a menacing glare. And all those gruesome pictures tell us nothing of her heroism. As the art historian Mary Garrard has commented, Judith is portrayed as heroic and powerful, but her power is seen as threatening to men, rather than as a virtue they can imaginatively share. Judith has become the pre-eminent embodiment in Western art of the castration complex.
But I think there is another way to read the story. The story could be read as a symbolic expression of another fear that strikes at the heart (and the head) of a university like this one. There is a strong fear today that all the old certainties of the Enlightenment, all the old pillars of knowledge, reason and thought, are wobbling. 'Nothing is solid… everything melts into air'. The cry is that objectivity and rationality have been replaced by the flighty and fanciful imaginings of the postmodern world. No longer is reason king. No longer are there any great stories or theories, but only lots of little ones, many voices singing different tunes, but no harmony and no great conductor. No longer are we ruled by the head, but by the heart. We love Diana, not Descartes. We do not found our existence on thought, but on the feelings of the heart. If Holophernes' head stands for reason and thought, then we fear that some Judith threatens to strike it off and leave us only with the unruly realm of the body with its unpredictable feelings and fleshly life. And so this story symbolises deep fears among many and the beheading speaks not of salvation, but of death and postmodern decay.
This threat to the traditions of Enlightenment thought has often been experienced as coming from women, and so it is that Judith wields the sword. As Mieke Bal puts it, Judith
'…stands at the cutting edge of knowledge.'
And it is true that as women have begun to participate in the adventure of knowledge they have discovered that knowledge is always gained from a particular place, from particular bodies and minds and particular places within society and culture. Nothing is known just as it is. Everything there is can only be known from where I stand. All women and all men 'know' from within their bodily life and not as disembodied heads. The head can know nothing on its own. No one can cut the head from the body without both dying in blood and terror. Unlike the Judith of the story, many have come to understand that head and heart belong together and that it is from both that knowledge proceeds. Knowledge cannot be objectified, cannot stand alone, unaffected by the body's life. Those disembodied heads outside the Sheldonian know nothing. Made of stone, with no bodily flesh, they are strangers to knowledge and their stares are vacant, their mouths silent… In other words, the head has always been connected to the body. Even those, like Descartes or Kant, who have claimed to speak from the purest and most disembodied reason, have always spoken from their bodies. So it is not true that heart and body are now threatening to cut off the head. It is not true that chaos strikes at order and rationality. But it is true that now we recognise that reason is always somebody's reason, that anyone's head also has a heart, that everyone thinks while they are sitting somewhere. So do not fear that women will say 'off with their heads', but listen to every woman and every man who tells you that the head is part of the body. The truly wise will not sever heads but reunite them with the warm and human experience of their bodily life. The search for a new kind of knowledge is not about severing and cutting, but about relating and linking, about connecting all knowledge with body and experience. Judith does not decapitate at all. Instead she thinks for herself, she claims her own body and her own more than common sense and she does not make war, but love.
There are many paintings of this amazing story of Judith and Holophernes. In some of them Judith stands holding the basket with the severed head within it. In one ghoulish painting Judith stands on the head of Holophernes. In some later paintings Judith is delicately feminine and Holophernes is hairy and gross - a kind of biblical 'beauty and the beast'. Sometimes she is the cold-blooded executioner, full of guile and deceit. Sometimes Holophernes is portrayed as a tragic hero, a man brought down by his own understandable vices. Sometimes Judith and her maid look like the characters the Bible portrays, guerrilla warriors, the weak defeating the strong when better men had given up hope. But there are some paintings where a different moment in the story is shown, where the head is not yet missing, but central to the picture. In our postmodern world, we need such pictures as these. We need to hold head and body together, not to fear their separation or their defeat, but to celebrate and enable their relating. We need to set aside our fear of those who seem to threaten knowledge and recognise that they have knowledge too. Knowledge comes from bodies as well as books. Knowledge is forged in experience as in thought. Knowledge belongs to women and to men, to foreigner as well as citizen, to child as well as adult, to the body as to the head. True knowledge will only be found as head and body are held together.
This truth is at the heart of the Christian gospel. The Fourth Gospel describes the rational principle that was at the beginning of all things, the Word. And the word was God. But the Gospel moment happens as the Word becomes flesh, as mind and body are one. Even the knowing of God was not all it could be until it became flesh. And we, who are creatures of flesh and blood, know God through our bodily life as well as through any spirit. God comes to us, not to release pure spirits from sinful bodies, not to set free pure thoughts from the prison house of flesh, but to raise us - as a new creation - body, soul and spirit, one united being.
So let us lay aside all fears of castrating women or of those who seem to threaten ancient ways of knowledge and learning. There are new ways, it is true, but they are ways that connect instead of separate. The feminist writer Helene Cixous has written words of comfort and delight:
'You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.'
I can imagine Judith and Holophernes laughing together over a cup of wine. They are talking into the night, not as lovers do, but as friends. Their bodies are close and they are leaning towards each other. But they are discussing politics and philosophy and she is telling him that the Bethulians have an interesting new angle on democracy. He had not known before that anyone could think so differently from the ways he learned at the Assyrian Academy. Perhaps she will persuade him that the heart sometimes has reasons of its own for disobeying the orders of a king. Perhaps he will keep his head after all. Perhaps she will be remembered for her wisdom and not only for her body. And perhaps one day people will tell the story of Judith and will believe that she is not deadly. She's beautiful and clever and she's laughing.
Rev Dr Susan Durber
Copyright © 1998 Revd Dr Susan Durber
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since 9.7.98