My name is Lilith. I am not supposed to
be this.
Once I was a demon. I nested in the
trunk of a tree in Inanna's garden, and gathered my young beneath my
shadow. I was the screech owl, the night bird, the wind that brings
spirits of disease.
Once I was a wife. My husband and I
were scratched from the same mound of dirt, and I climbed atop him
only to be told my place was beneath. Unable to find an arrangement
as equals, I left him and his garden and let his God make a lesser
person to be his lesser companion.
At some point I started murdering
children. By my very existence, I harass virile boys and bring about
nocturnal emissions. My stories are all of devouring newborns or
raping men in their sleep, but never both. I show one face at a time.
The moon rules the night and I shall
rule the moon. There are no men here to seduce or entrap, no children
to suck the life from. There aren't even women. Just pieces of women,
ideas of women. Fractured, shattered women who are discovering their
cracks and seams and going mad that they cannot change.
None of us can change who we are.
My name is Hagar. I am a slave.
I have always been a slave. Even when I
was a wife of Abraham, mother to his firstborn son, I was given to
him to make a child by Sarah, the first and favorite wife and my
mistress. Sarah hated me after throwing me into her marriage bed to
keep her husband from straying from it. As soon as I conceived, she
asked permission to punish me. The father of my unborn child granted
it. So I fled into the desert to escape her, but eventually came back
to deliver Ismael, son of Abraham.
The favorite wife is the great beauty,
of course. But she cannot have a child until the absolute last minute
of her story, when she is old and long past her days as Pharaoh-bait.
Only through the intervention of God, and according to some
unbelievable prophecy, will she pop out the son that will actually
inherit the blessings and legacy of his father.
But once that child is born, there is
no reason to suffer the slaveborn firstborn and his mother anymore.
It is blamed on my son, of course, making a child's joke about the
infant who would supplant him. Sarah demanded we be cast out and cut
off from Ismael's inheritance, and Abraham bent to the will of his
favorite, and now fertile, first wife. In other versions of the
story, it is a test of Abraham's faith in God to abandon mother and
son in the middle of the desert. The favorite wife does not survive
either, I hear, her value all used up in bringing about the favorite
son and getting rid of any other claimants to Abraham's blessing.
A great people are named after my son,
Ismael. My story is used to defend slavery, praise survival, and
celebrate motherhood.
I want to burn the whole motherfucker
to the ground, but there just isn't enough oxygen in the atmosphere
to get the job done.
My name is Rahab. It means broad.
I ran a brothel in the walls of
Jericho. That's how I met the Hebrew spies Joshua sent into my city.
The Hebrews sacked and massacred Sihon and Og, and despite the
strength of our walls, I feared Jericho would be next. Instead of
handing the spies over to the guards, I hid them and negotiated for
my family's survival. When the Hebrew army came and the walls fell,
my family was spared.
I am praised for living by my faith and
being justified in my works of delivering the entire population of
Jericho over to be murdered.
I don't know how to feel about that.
My name is Salome. It means peace.
My mother Herodias was the
granddaughter of Herod the Great and was a child when her father was
executed and she was married off to one of his other sons. After I
was born, she decided to divorce him and marry his brother Herod
Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee. This fouled up previously laid
marriage plans and started a war that Herod lost.
Divorce was rare and scandalous, and
royal scandal was as good as celebrity gossip got in Galilee. Even
John the Baptist, a man who didn't actually want to help bring about
a new kingdom but prophesied that someone was coming who would,
decried my mother to his flock. Herod Antipas had John arrested, for
either or both of those statements.
At his birthday feast, I entertained my
stepfather and all his generals by dancing for them. This pleased
Herod, and he made a big deal about promising to give me anything I
wanted. I'm not a politician, so I asked my mother what I should do.
She told me to ask for John the Baptist's head on a platter. Since I
loved my mother and trusted her instincts, I did.
Now it's my fault. Not my mother and
Herod Antipas for upsetting tradition and remarrying each other, not
The Baptist for talking shit in public about the tetrach's new wife,
not Aretas IV for taking back his daughter Phasaelis who was married
to Herod before he divorced her to marry my mother, and then invading
Herod's holdings in response. Despite the rich tapestry of history, I
have been cast as the cold-hearted, (but not calculating. I am
popularized as being stupid,) seductress who lures men to their doom.
I am uncomfortable in my skin. Dancing
is awful now.
I am Yael. My people are Kenites.
After twenty years of oppression by the
Canaanites, Deborah the Prophetess of Israel mounted a rebellion. She
sent Barak to lead his army to Mount Tabor, while she planned to draw
General Sisera to the River Kishon. Barak refused unless she
accompanied him. She consented to his revised plan, but declared the
glory of victory would belong to a woman because of it. As Deborah
prophesied, the armies met near the river and Sisera's nine-hundred
iron chariots were mired in the mud and his army slaughtered. Sisera
fled on foot, and while his remaining soldiers were hunted as far as
Harosheth of the Gentiles, he hid himself among the Kenites on the
plain of Zaanaim.
I took him into my tent and got him a
blanket, some milk, and a safe place to sleep. And then I hammered a
tent peg through his temples.
The Song of Deborah is one of the
oldest parts of the Bible. In it, I am extolled above all women for
murdering a man in his sleep. And I would do it again, because being
the right woman means betraying the right people.
Judith ripped me off. Apocryphal bitch.
I am Ruth.
Where you go I will go, and where you
stay I will stay. Your people shall be my people, and your God my
God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the
Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from
you.
Goddammit, Naomi! Where are you? I
won't leave you here.
I am Mary.
We are Mary.
