Free The Good Lie by Robin Brande Page B

enemy overran them and enslaved them, the
Israelites cried out to their God for help, and over and over again he sent
them a savior in the form of a mighty warrior-judge.
    Samson was a judge.  So was
Gideon.  And Deborah, the only female warrior the Bible talks about.  It’s her
story I like the best.
    Deborah commands one of her
soldiers, Barak, to take ten thousand men and go kick the enemy’s ass.  Barak
answers, “Only if you go with me.”
    There are two ways of looking at
this:  either Barak is afraid, and wants the mighty Deborah by his side, or he
doesn’t trust her judgment, and wants to see if she’ll put her own life on the
line.  Whichever it is, Deborah sticks it right back to him:
    “I will go with you,” she says, “but
because you asked this of me, the honor will not be yours today, but a woman’s.” 
You assume she’s referring to herself, but she isn’t.
    Barak and Deborah slaughter the
enemy, and only one man escapes—the evil enemy commander Sisera.  He flees to
the tent of Jael, the wife of a friend of his.
    The Bible doesn’t say why she does
it—a lot of times the Bible leaves it up to you to decide why people do what
they do.  For whatever reason, Jael speaks honey to Sisera and tells him he can
hide in her tent.  Then she serves him some warm milk and tucks him in for a
nap.
    And while Sisera is sleeping Jael
takes a tent peg and hammers it into his skull.
    The whole next chapter in Judges is
devoted to the Song of Deborah, where Deborah dances around and sings the
praises of Jael— she crushed his head, she shattered his temple, she spilled
his brains, fa la la .  And how’s this for insensitive?  At the end of the
song Deborah gloats about how Sisera’s mother would have been sitting at her
window all day watching for her son, wondering why his chariot is so late in
coming.  Her handmaidens comfort her:  your son must still be dividing the
spoils.  Maybe he’s still raping the women—he’s a very busy man.  He’ll come
home from work soon enough, old mother, don’t worry your poor gray head.
    And this is what I think:  how
sweet that must have felt to Jael.  Hard at first to bring herself to make that
first blow, driving the tent peg past his skin and skull, but once she began
she couldn’t stop or Sisera would wake up and kill her.  And when he was dead
she must have looked down at him and smiled and praised herself for a job well
done.
    I had thoughts like that myself.  I
thought about cutting off his penis while he slept.  Taking the largest knife I
could find and stabbing my father first in the heart and then through his groin
over and over again without looking at it.  Would I go to prison?  Would they
call that self-defense?
    I thought about how I would feel
afterward:  scared?  Sad?  Triumphant?  How do you feel when you’ve dipped your
hands in blood for a cause you know is righteous?  How do you feel when you’ve
violated every impulse you’ve ever had, and committed some act of terrible
violence?  Is there ever a way to feel good about that?  Maybe.  Maybe.
    I knew I was in the right.  The
Bible is clear about men lying with men.  There is no excuse, no exception for
it, no “just this one time.”
    Incest?  Well, that gets a pass
during times of stress.  Lot’s daughters could sleep with their father.  Adam
and Eve’s children and Noah’s must have had to make do with each other, knowing
they were doing God’s will in repopulating the earth.  I suppose a man who
pored over the Bible like my father did, searching for every single passage on
adultery and fornication, might have run across the stories of incest and might
have created a rational argument in his favor, but on no account is there any
relief in any verse of any chapter saying a father may lie with his son.  You
get stoned to death for something like that.  Good.
    It was Sunday.  My father and Mikey
were in church—what a joke that was.  How could my father