Oriental Women Part 4

A people's religion will register its mark quickly upon its women. A most suggestive Semitic conception is found in the use of the figure of marriage to describe the relations.h.i.+p between a people and their G.o.d, or perhaps more accurately, between a land and its governing divinity. This entire conception finds its best ill.u.s.tration in the term _Baal_, which means husband, or lord. The G.o.d was conceived of as father and the land as mother of the people and of all the products of the soil.

The influence of the Baal cult upon Israelitish society, especially upon woman, cannot be understood without reference to the nature of that wors.h.i.+p. Picture before your mind's eye the rustic prophet Amos, with wandering staff in hand, impelled by a divine impulse, making his way northward, and carrying a divine message to the people. He reaches Bethel in the southern part of the kingdom of Israel--a city that from time immemorial had been a sanctuary. He is shocked at the terrible orgies practised about the altars there in the name of religion; at the unbridled pa.s.sion and lewdness in the name of the G.o.d and G.o.ddess of fertility, Baal and Ashtoreth; at the men and women revelling in shame, that the increase of the land might be celebrated and productiveness symbolized.

It is while looking upon such a scene of b.e.s.t.i.a.lized wors.h.i.+p and debauched womanhood that Amos cries out in prophetic grief:

"The virgin of Israel is fallen, She shall no more rise.

She is forsaken upon her land There is none to raise her up."

The domestic life of the prophet Hosea furnishes perhaps the best ill.u.s.tration of the condition and dark possibilities of womanhood in Israel during this era of religious lapse and of consequent moral decay.

When religion sanctions prost.i.tution at the altar, profligacy is not unnatural. Hosea had married one Gomer, daughter of Diblaim. Soon she forgets her marriage vows and gives herself to a life of shame. Hosea, not then a prophet, more than once tried to reclaim the erring wife of his love; but she again falls into evil ways. His home is destroyed; and as he thinks of the meaning of this fatal blow to his domestic happiness, he can but see in it a divine call to go forth to correct a condition of society which could foster such vice and make such sorrows possible. The whole meaning of his ministry, as he starts out with his children as object lessons of his and the people's great humiliation, is but an enlarged reproduction of his own bitter experience.

That the G.o.d and his land were related as husband and wife, was a very familiar conception in Israel, as well as with the nations round about.

Even Isaiah proclaimed that the land of the Hebrew should be called Beulah, that is, "married," a land wedded to Jehovah, in pure and abiding love. But it remained for the wors.h.i.+p of Baal, which means both "lord" and "husband," to fasten upon Israel the basest practices between the s.e.xes, as a part of the wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.d to whom the land was married.

Hosea sees in his own poignant grief an epitome of Israel's relation of apostasy from Jehovah. She should have been a wife of purity, keeping her covenant vows with her Lord, but instead, she had gone away to consort with other G.o.ds and was playing the harlot against her first love. Repeated efforts had failed to reclaim her, and now she is given up to horrible vice as she sacrifices her virtue at the altar of Baal.

It is a fearful arraignment, hot with his own experiences and saturated with tears. The words of Hosea are themselves the best representation of society of the day, as we speak under the figure of his own bitter grief:

"Plead with your mother, plead, for she is not my wife and I am not her husband. Let her therefore put away her wh.o.r.edoms out of her sight and her adulteries from between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s." This is the earnest plea for a purified Israel and a redeemed womanhood.

The day is to come, says the prophet with the broken heart, when "she shall follow after her lovers but she shall not overtake them. Then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now." "For she did not know," says Hosea for Jehovah, "that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal." And looking forward to a day when the sensual wors.h.i.+p of Baal which so debauched womanhood, should be no longer known in Israel, the prophet, again as the mouthpiece of Jehovah, still carrying out the same figure of wedlock, says to Israel: "And I will betroth thee unto me forever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in loving kindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness; and thou shalt know Jehovah. And it shall come to pa.s.s in that day that I will hear, saith Jehovah, I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth; and the earth shall hear (with) the corn, and the wine, and the oil."

It was only after the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in B.

C. 586, and the consequent exile of the Hebrews, that this nature wors.h.i.+p which so endangered womanly virtue was exterminated.

During the long, synchronous reign of Uzziah, King of Judah, and of Jeroboam II., King of Israel, in the eighth century before the Christian era, prosperity both at home and abroad had given the people of both kingdoms great wealth. The Syrians had for a long series of years been a breakwater against the growing power of a.s.syria. In the meantime, there was unsurpa.s.sed opportunity for internal development, commercial expansion, and the acc.u.mulation of wealth. Riches had led to luxury, and commerce had made the people more hospitable to foreign ideals, both social and religious.

It was in the reign of Uzziah's successor, Jotham, that a new and eloquent voice was lifted up on behalf of reform, calling the people back to the ideals of the fathers and of the prophets. This new force in Jerusalem was the young Isaiah, whose striking vision in the year King Uzziah died caused him to give up a profane life for the prophet's office; and upon none of the Hebrew prophets do the condition and character of woman seem to have made so deep an impress. Among the very earliest of his public utterances, so far as they have been preserved to us, is that severe arraignment of the women of Jerusalem for their wanton haughtiness, their wasteful extravagance, their love of show, their self-indulgence and vice. Thus in detail does the prophet draw for us the moving picture of female pride: "Moreover, the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing (or tripping delicately) as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: therefore, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments (anklets) about their feet, and their cauls (net works), and their round tires like the moon (crescents), the chains (or ear pendants), and the bracelets, and the m.u.f.flers, the bonnets (head tires), and the ornaments of the legs (ankle chains), and the headbands, and the tablets (or smelling boxes), and the earrings, the rings, and the nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel (festal robes), and the mantles, and the wimples (probably, shawls), and the crisping pins, the gla.s.ses (hand mirrors), and the fine linen, and the hoods (or turbans), and the vails. And it shall come to pa.s.s that instead of sweet smell (of Oriental spices) there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle, a rent; and instead of well set hair, baldness; and instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty. Thy husbands shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate, shall sit upon the ground."

In this period, the women as they went along scented the air with the perfume from the boxes that hung at their girdles; they lolled idly and luxuriantly upon ivory beds and silken cus.h.i.+ons sprinkled with perfume, and they gossiped to the sound of music.

In predicting the great disaster and slaughter that were to come upon the people through the a.s.syrian invasion, made successful by the effeminacy of the people, the prophet discloses not only the dire extremity to which the people were to be reduced, but reveals the feminine ideal among the Hebrews, already alluded to in this volume, namely, that which makes motherhood the aim of every Hebrew woman and the absence of it a calamity. In that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, "We will eat our own bread and wear our own apparel; only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach." Widowhood and celibacy were equally sources of deepest grief among the women of Israel, and both were to be among the results of the luxury and vice of the land.

Woman, as well as man, in this era of decay, had fallen into the habit of the most cruel covetousness, and, when occasion offered, the rich and powerful women oppressed the poor. The herdsman-prophet Amos, coming from his home in the rural districts of Judah, was shocked at the corruption into which even the women of Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, had fallen, and so, with a rustic boldness that would not mince matters of such grave concern, he compared the women to the fat cattle of the land of Bashan, saying to the wives and mothers of the corrupt and luxury-loving city: "Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring and let us drink!"

In the age of decline, it is a noteworthy fact that not a woman appears to have lifted up prophetic voice against the moral and religious decay.

Prophets there were, but apparently no prophetesses, except those whom Jeremiah rebukes with scathing earnestness,--women who prophesied according to their own feelings and desires rather than in harmony with the eternal principles as applied to the then present conditions.

Indeed, in the entire period of decline which preceded the fall of Samaria in B.C. 722 and of Jerusalem in B.C. 586, no prophetess appears in the record, except that Isaiah speaks of his wife as the prophetess.

This involves an entire change in the meaning of the word.

But there were patriotic women, just as there were patriotic men, during the days of decline. There was no greater suffering than that of women when they saw the Babylonian soldiery laying Jerusalem in ashes.

Hugging their babes to their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, some were hewn in pieces, while others suffered shameful indignities and were led away among the captives, to sojourn in a strange land. The prophets had foreseen the coming anguish of the women; and when Jeremiah foretold the restoration of Israel to her land, he proclaimed that the eyes of Rachel, which had wept for her children "because they were not," should at length be dried, and her mourning turned into rejoicing. Thus the picture drawn in that elegiac poem--the greatest of all Hebrew threnodies, known as the Lamentations of Jeremiah--when he saw the sacred city in ruins, was reversed:

"How doth the city sit solitary That was full of people!

How is she become as a widow!

She that was great among the nations, And princess among the provinces, How is she become tributary!

"She weepeth sore in the night And her tears are on her cheeks: Among all her lovers She hath none to comfort: All her friends have dealt treacherously with her, They have become her enemies."

This was but the enlargement and national application of the distress experienced by the women of Israel during the siege and final overthrow of the city in which all Jewish hopes centred.

Of the Hebrew women during the period of the exile, we know comparatively little. And yet no woman of later Biblical Judaism made so deep an impression upon the Jewish mind as did Esther. By her beauty and the wise cunning of her uncle, she became the wife of King Ahasuerus, the famous Persian who attempted to measure arms with the Greeks--an effort which turned out so disastrously for the gigantic but undisciplined Persian army. The story of Vashti's deposal, because she refused to lend herself to the immodest proposal of the king, befuddled by the wine of banqueting and revelry; of the subsequent selection of Esther as queen; of her entreaty for her people, against whom a deep-laid and cruel plot was soon to be executed,--is a familiar narrative.

That a Jewish woman should have been elevated to such a position in the Persian palace seems so improbable that some have been inclined to doubt the accuracy of the story which the Book of Esther records, especially since profane history tells of but one wife of Ahasuerus, Amestris. But the argument from silence is always precarious. Vashti and Esther may easily have been extra-legal wives of the king, even though Amestris were his only legally recognized wife. The well-known custom of Oriental monarchies makes such a view highly probable. At all events, there stands the well-known feast of Purim, the "festival of the Lots," as a monument in Jewish religious life of the substantial accuracy of the events recorded in the Book of Esther.

The power of Esther's life and of her service to her people in exile may be in a measure estimated by the fact that no book in all the Bible was so much copied, or was so generally in possession of the Jewish families as that of Esther. Indeed, it was a.s.serted by Maimonides and believed by many that when at the coming of Messiah all the rest of the Old Testament should pa.s.s away, there would still remain the five books of the law and the Book of Esther. Written as it was, upon separate scrolls, it was in thousands of Jewish houses. Even at the present day rolls containing Esther are the prized possession of Jewish families; and these are sometimes even now pa.s.sed down from parents to their children upon the wedding day. On the day of Purim, the book is read in public as a part of the service, that the way in which Esther became the savior of her people may never be forgotten. The power of Esther's story over the Jewish mind has seemed the more remarkable, since it is the single book in the Hebrew Canon which does not contain the name of G.o.d.

But on the other hand, there is no Hebrew writing that is so intense in its national spirit; none which breathes and burns so deeply with the characteristic genius of "the peculiar people."

There was perhaps no time in the history of the Hebrews when social life received a more severe shock than during the days of the reforms inst.i.tuted by Nehemiah about the middle of the fifth century before Christ. When the Jews returned from their exile in Babylonia many of them married women of gentile blood and religion, daughters of those who had peopled the land of Palestine during the exile. Children of Jews were being born and taught heathen language and heathen wors.h.i.+p by their mothers. Nehemiah, under appointment as governor, when he saw that Jews had married "wives of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab," commanded that all foreign women be immediately divorced, and that only Jewish women should be taken for wives. Great was the temporary suffering involved, to be sure, but the aim in view, namely that of keeping the people henceforth free from idolatry seemed to justify even so drastic a measure. A grandson of the high priest, himself in priestly line, had married Nicaso, daughter of Sanballat, the Horonite, the very crafty and troublesome ruler of Samaria. When Nehemiah demanded of him that he give up his wife he refused. The governor accordingly expelled him from Jerusalem, chasing him out of his presence, as the Biblical narrative informs us. Josephus says that when the people demanded that he give up his alien wife or his priestly office,--as the law flatly forbade priests from having foreign wives,--he decided first in favor of his office. But when Sanballat, his father-in-law, heard of it, he told him not to move hastily, but if he would keep Nicaso his wife, he, Sanballat, would build him a temple of his own, so that he might be not only a priest, but high priest, and Nicaso's husband at the same time.

This appealed to Mana.s.seh's judgment, and he chose the plan of his father-in-law. Thus was built the temple on Mount Gerizim, which became thereafter the centre of Samaritan life and wors.h.i.+p. It was concerning Mount Gerizim that the Samaritan woman at the well spoke when she said to Jesus: "Our fathers wors.h.i.+pped in this mountain; and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to wors.h.i.+p."

The suffering of the women during the grievous persecution of the Jews under Antiochus Epiphanes, "the ill.u.s.trious"--nicknamed Epimanes, "the madman"--was frightful in the extreme. Some men, but fewer women, yielded to the pressure of the effort to destroy the Jewish religion by forcing the Greek pantheon, Greek games and theatre, and the Greek culture upon the Jews. The struggle into which the people were plunged brought the self-sacrifice of the women into prominence. A typical case of suffering is given in the Second Book of Maccabees. King Antiochus had laid hold of a mother and seven sons, and commanded that they violate their law by eating swine's flesh. The eldest was first put to the test. He refused to obey. The king commanded that the tongue of him who spoke thus defiantly should be cut out, his limbs mutilated, and his living body roasted in hot pans, and that his mother and her younger sons should witness the awful sight. One after another the sons were cruelly dealt with and slain. Each one was given opportunity to save his life by eating the forbidden flesh, but each refused. At length the youngest only remained. The king appealed to the mother, standing by, to advise her boy to obey and save his life. But the st.u.r.dy Jewish mother turned to this son and strengthened him in his determination to die rather than prove faithless to the religion of his fathers by obeying the merciless tyrant. He too was then murdered, even more cruelly than the rest. And at length, the mother herself lost her life upon the same altar of faithfulness, rather than transgress the law. Of such st.u.r.dy stuff were the Jewish mothers of this awful period made. There is little wonder that the sons of such women succeeded in winning their independence and in setting up again a Jewish state, which had been suppressed for more than four centuries.

A look into this period would be incomplete without reference to one of the apochryphal or deutero-canonical books of the Old Testament, highly prized by the Jews as containing a picture of pious home life among the Jews in the captivity. A devout Jew, as the story goes, with his wife Anna and his son Tobias were among those whom Shalmaneser, King of a.s.syria, had taken captive from the land of Israel and placed in the city of Nineveh when Samaria fell about B. C. 722. Loyal to his religion, Tobit, even in exile, refused to eat the bread of the Gentiles; but by dint of hard work and fidelity he at length became purveyor to the king.

By the revolving wheel of fortune, Tobit is at length reduced to poverty. Here Anna his wife, with devoted womanly faithfulness, comes to the rescue with her skilful fingers, weaving and spinning for a livelihood; for her husband was now both poor and blind. One day Anna, wearied and provoked, reproaches her husband for his blindness--such calamities were esteemed a divine curse in Israel, whereupon Tobit prayed that he might die. On the self-same day, a young Jewess, Sara, daughter of Raguel, a captive in Ecbatana of Media, was offering up a similar prayer that the end of her life might come. For her father's maid had charged her with killing her seven husbands, who had died one after another, each on the very first night of the wedding feast, though the strange deaths had been the work of Asmodeus, the evil spirit, who was not willing that the maiden should wed. Now these two widely separated and unrelated prayers were to be brought together into one romantic story by the help of an angel, who becomes a guide to the son of Tobit, young Tobias, who is about to start out in life in quest of a fortune. The angel guides him to Ecbatana, bids him make the eighth to offer marriage to Sara, whose seven husbands had perished on the nuptial night. Though Tobias had never seen the young woman before, he was to her the next of living kin and so should be (according to the Mosaic law) the one to offer his hand to the youthful, much-married widow.

Would the young Tobias prove strong enough bravely to face the record of the seven deaths? The angel here comes to the rescue, and calls Tobias's attention to the heart and liver of a great fish which had been caught in the Euphrates as the two had journeyed together from Nineveh to Ecbatana. These, burned with perfumes in the bridal chamber, drove the evil spirit Asmodeus away, and the marriage festivities went on merrily.

The life of Tobias had been saved. He takes his newly wedded wife back to his father's house in joy and triumph, cures his father's blindness by the same magic charm which had saved his own life in the bridal chamber, and peace and wealth and long life follow in rich profusion.

This story is chiefly of interest to us as it shows the continuation, even into the period of exile, of the Levirate marriage custom. While the story of the marriage of Sara, daughter of Raguel, is a Jewish romance, the literature of the inter-biblical period is not without its tragedies, in which woman plays an important role. Among these is the well-known story of Judith and Holofernes.

Many Jewish women have pa.s.sed into literature and art. Rebekah at the wellside, Miriam watching by the reeds or singing the paean of victory with timbrel, Ruth gleaning in the field of Boaz, Delilah the voluptuous, and Athaliah the monster, have exerted their influence both upon the makers of art and writers of drama, but probably no Hebrew woman before the birth of Jesus has made a deeper impress upon the imagination of men than Judith, the beautiful woman and patriot of Bethulia. A woman once saved the city of Rome from overthrow. Several times in the history of Israel was it given to a woman to be the deliverer of the people. The names of Deborah, Esther, and Judith have come down the centuries as those of women who risked their lives for the salvation of their people from the enemy, and succeeded because of their tact and prowess.

The story of Judith and Holofernes is told in the apocryphal Book of Judith. The a.s.syrians are at war with Israel, whose cities are being besieged and wasted in the merciless onslaught. Holofernes, the a.s.syrian general, at length lays siege to Bethulia in his onward march to the holy city of Jerusalem. The people are reduced to straits most direful and bitter. Women and little ones perish in the streets, and the people cry out to their leaders to sue a.s.shur for peace. The rulers, thus urged, promise within five days to yield to their besiegers. It is then that Judith, wealthy and pious, a widow of the city, comes forward to strengthen the fainting heart of the governors and to bid them trust G.o.d and stand firm. She promises, in the meantime, that she herself will aid them. Praying earnestly that G.o.d will help her in her purpose, she lays aside the habiliments of widowhood, and, arraying herself in garments of gladness, goes forth with her maids to the camp of Holofernes. Charmed with her beauty and grace, the a.s.syrian gives a feast, to which the bewitching Judith is invited. Holofernes makes merry, and, drinking to drowsiness, lies down in his tent to sleep. Others depart in the night, leaving him and the Jewess alone. Seeing her opportunity, Judith seizes the scimiter that hung on the pillar of Holofernes's bed, and, laying hold upon the hair of the sleeping man's head, severed it from his body, and made her way in the darkness back to the city. In the early morning a sally was made from the city gates, and the a.s.syrians, finding their captain headless, were thrown into utter confusion and completely routed. Thus did Judith become the deliverer of Israel. The women of the city ran together to see her who had been their savior, made a great dance for her, sang her praises, and bestowed their benedictions, placing garlands of olive upon her brow.

Portia's shrewd dealing with Shylock, the Jewish money lender, called forth the frequent applause of the onlookers: "A Daniel come to judgment, yea, a Daniel!" It is in the _History of Susanna_, an apocryphal addition to the canonical Book of Daniel, in which the great prophet is presented in the role of arbiter. He appears in a cause against a woman, Susanna, a Jewish lady of great beauty, the wife of a wealthy and distinguished Hebrew whose home was in Babylon. Susanna excited the amours of two judges, elders of the people, who were frequently at her husband's home; but she spurned all their advances, till, angered and resentful, they united in a plot to destroy her, and accused her of unfaithfulness to Joachim, her husband. The penalty for adultery was death, and the people crowded to the trial; for if there was conviction, stoning would follow. The two elders, standing, with their hands upon the innocent woman's head, tell the story agreed upon, how they saw the wife of Joachim in the very shameful act of which they accused her; and the a.s.sembly, believing the testimony of the two elders and judges of the people, condemned Susanna to death. At this juncture, the young man Daniel appears upon the scene, much as Portia in the trial of Antonio, and, by adroitly cross-questioning the two witnesses separately, involved them in contradictions, revealing the cowardly plot against the virtuous woman and convicting them of false witnessing. And since the law of Moses prescribed the same penalty for those who bore false testimony as that which would have come to the accused, the elders were put to death, and Susanna was given honor before all the people.

This is but one of the many examples in Hebrew history which reveal the unusually high moral character and purity of life that prevailed among the Hebrew women.

It is one of the noteworthy and distressing facts of late Jewish history that in the later teaching of the rabbis woman is placed upon a distinctly lower plane. Her inferiority to man is frequently emphasized.

And yet there was one factor which came into the life of Judaism, after the Babylonian exile, which gave to Jewish women an advantage which they had not previously enjoyed. It was the establishment of the synagogue.

The secondary place given to women in the temple wors.h.i.+p has already been referred to. The man, as head of the family, was representative of the family and responsible, therefore, for the performance of the ceremonies required of every Hebrew household. With the destruction of the temple and the dispersion of the Jews, the temple rites were rendered impossible. When the synagogue arose to fill the vacancy made by these conditions, women were given a place in attendance at the instruction given in these new centres of Jewish life. And while they were never strictly considered members of the congregation, yet, seated in a separate part of the room, they heard the Scriptures read and expounded; and it was not unknown for women even to read on the Sabbath as among the seven appointees for the day. The _Torah_, or law, however, was considered rather too sacred and important to be committed to their exposition.

Judging from a remark in the _Halacha_ it is just to infer that in the days when the Jews had become dispersed throughout the Roman world, there were two facts that had a very powerful influence upon Jewish women, one of them of Hebraic, the other of Greco-Roman origin. For the _Halacha_, in speaking of the women leaving their homes, said that there were two causes which took the women away from their domestic duties: one was the synagogue, the other, the baths,--not, indeed, an altogether uncomplimentary comment upon the women of the times, for it would seem they believed in the oft-coupled virtues of cleanliness and G.o.dliness.

From the days of John Hyrca.n.u.s, the influence of the Jewish rulers had been decidedly in favor of h.e.l.lenic culture. Thus the revolution brought about by the Maccabean revolt seemed about to be undone by the successors of the Maccabees. Jewish independence had been won in an effort to resist Antiochus Epiphanes and others in their attempts to destroy Judaism by making the Greek religion and customs prevalent throughout Palestine. Would the sons and successors of the st.u.r.dy Maccabeans give away the fruits of the hard-won victory? When to Alexandra was bequeathed the government by her husband, she decided to espouse the cause of the Pharisaic party, who hated the encroachments of foreign influence. But, alas, for the queen's inability to cope with a situation so strained! In her effort to appease the opposite party she put weapons into their hands, which were soon turned against her. As an old woman of seventy-three, she saw her two sons in bitter contest, at the head of opposing forces, each trying to rule over a tumultuous, faction-torn nation. She pa.s.sed away, deploring a condition which she was utterly unable to correct. It was not till Pompey brought his Roman legions to the gates of Jerusalem, and set up the Roman eagles in the holy city itself that intrigue and battling for the Jewish throne was brought to a close. Then Jewish independence was no more.

A great granddaughter of Alexandra was destined indirectly at least to play a prominent role in later Jewish history. This was Mariamne. Herod, afterward known as the Great, had hoped by marrying this descendant of both the contending Jewish parties, to unite the influence of the two branches of the Asmonean house. In this, however, Herod was disappointed, and he proceeded to accomplish by force what he had hoped to do by wiles. In the frightful war of extermination waged by Herod against the whole Asmonean line, which he feared might endanger the rulers.h.i.+p secured to him by the Roman power and his own political prowess, there figured a Jewish woman who, because of her sagacity, is not to be pa.s.sed over in silence. She was Alexandra, a granddaughter of the queen of the same name. When Herod attempted to place in the office of Jewish high priest a young man who would be simply a tool for him, Alexandra advocated the candidature of Aristobulus,--her son and a brother of Mariamne,--who by birthright was in line of official succession. Alexandra shrewdly wrote to Cleopatra that the wily woman of the Nile might use her influence with Antony to force Herod to terms.

Herod was compelled to yield and appointed Aristobulus, but determined that Alexandra as well as the new high priest should be put out of the way. One day after both Herod and Aristobulus had been enjoying a banquet given by Alexandra, Herod successfully plotted the killing of the high priest in a fishpond attached to the house of feasting, Herod's minions holding him playfully under the water until he was drowned. But Alexandra was not so stupid as to fail to take in the situation. Through Cleopatra she again succeeded in forcing Herod upon the defensive. Being summoned to appear before Antony, Herod succeeded, however, in again ingratiating himself with the Roman, and he returned as strong as ever to Jerusalem.

But his return was not altogether happy; for on his departure, he had given command that should his interview with Antony be ill-fated, Mariamne, his Jewish wife, should be slain, that no other man might have her for wife. The secret leaked out, and came to Mariamne's ears. She violently resented the treatment of Herod and on his return reproached him for his cruelty; but the insanely jealous and wily Herod was not to be changed by reproaches. On his absence from home on the occasion when he went to meet Octavius, the new star which arose on Antony's downfall, Herod again commanded that both Mariamne and Alexandra be put to death should he not return alive. Mariamne on his return received him with cold resentment. With the help of Herod's mother and sister the estrangement became more and more bitter. The king's cupbearer was bribed by them to declare that Mariamne had attempted to poison her husband. The jury, as well as the evidence, being well-arranged before-hand, the unfortunate Mariamne was led away to execution in B.C.

29, to be followed next year by Alexandra, who had watched her opportunity and, taking advantage of an illness of Herod, had attempted to gain possession of Jerusalem and overthrow the reign of Herod. It was a bold stroke for a woman. It failed, and she was executed. With her death the line of Asmonean claimants to the throne was ended.

But the end of this chapter in which womanly hate and intrigue played so prominent a part was not yet. When Herod's sister, Salome, who had taken so large a part in the death of Mariamne, saw Herod's sons return from their studies in Rome, with the looks and royal bearing of their mother, Mariamne; when she perceived the people's joy at their likeness to the late Jewish queen who had been so cruelly murdered, her jealousy became most bitter, and she began to plot against them as she had against their mother. Herod for a time seemed unmoved and married one of them to Berenice, Salome's own daughter. This only intensified Salome's hate; and step after step of domestic hatred and unhappiness led at length to the order by Herod that the two sons of his Jewish wife, Alexander and Aristobulus, should be strangled at Sebaste, where years before their mother Mariamne had become his bride. No wonder Augustus Caesar could utter his famous pun in the Greek language which may be reproduced in the words: "I would rather be Herod's _swine_ than his _son_!"

This was the same Herod who issued an edict that rent the heart of many a mother "in Bethlehem and in all the coasts thereof," a command which sent Mary, the mother of the infant Jesus, into exile with her newborn Son, whose coming into the world was destined to open a new volume, as the narrative pa.s.ses from Hebrew to Christian womanhood.

Among the Semitic peoples it is not usual, certainly in strictly historic times, to find women holding the first place in the seat of government. Semiramis in the prehistoric period of a.s.syria is a noteworthy exception to the general custom; and queens sometimes ruled among the Arabians, and "the Queen of Sheba" in southern Arabia became famous. But the common Semitic conception that the king was son and special representative of the deity made it more difficult for women to hold the sceptre. Among the Hebrews there is no instance of a woman being legally recognized as queen. Deborah, before the days of the kingdom, "judged Israel" by virtue of her prophetic character and her ability as a woman of affairs, and Athaliah was enabled to usurp the throne through the murder and banishment of male heirs to the crown. In speaking of her reign it was said that she was the only woman who ever reigned over Israel. There is, however, one other woman who held the Jewish sceptre. After the b.l.o.o.d.y struggle led by the Maccabees, the Jews at length obtained their liberty from the yoke of the Seleucid kings.

Israel then enjoyed about a century of independence. During this period there arose one woman who for nine years ruled the nation. This was Alexandra, the widow of Alexander Janneus, whose unhappy reign came to an end by strong drink, B. C. 78. The conception of the government as a pure theocracy where the king reigned as representative of Jehovah himself rendered it impossible for women to be recognized as lawful sovereigns. The second Psalm, which seems to be a sort of coronation ode, written at the time of the incoming of a new king, expresses the relations.h.i.+p between Jehovah and the earthly ruler:

"The Lord said unto me, Thou art my Son, This day have I begotten thee."