Growing up on the picket line — a fixture of my childhood with my church — I developed a set of skills most ten- or eleven-year-olds don’t need. For instance: I became really good at scanning traffic and passersby to spot the people sneakily preparing to throw food or random objects at us. This was pretty common, actually, and was sometimes caught on film — like the time my little cousin Elisha got hit in the head by a Big Gulp that someone threw out the window of their car as they sped down the street, tires squealing.
They apparently didn’t appreciate the picket sign he was holding, our most classic: “God Hates Fags.”
Which is all to say that I learned to duck. Fast.
I also developed epic hand strength, so that I could hold four signs at a time — two balanced carefully in each hand — “the butterfly,” as we called it. In our family, no one wanted to hold just one sign.
But my patience probably got even more of a workout than my hands — the patience to answer the same questions and retorts, again and again, for two decades, without completely losing my sanity. (Although admittedly, many of the people I was talking to were quite confident that I already had.)
One of the most common arguments that would be flung at me was:
“...but the Bible contradicts itself.”
And I always had an answer. I would say, “You’re taking things out of context. Any apparent contradiction in the Bible dissolves when you just have the right framework, the right theology, the right discernment.” Which — without any sense of hubris at all — my family and I were sure we had. Lucky us.
Sometimes I would quote one of my favorite examples — two verses that sit right next to each other in the book of Proverbs:
The first says: “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.”
And it’s followed immediately by the second: “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.”
Don’t answer a fool. But also, Answer a fool.
So which is it?
It always seemed clear to me that the answer was “both,” and wisdom meant knowing when to apply each verse.
The contradiction wasn’t a flaw, in other words. It was a test.
Another apparent contradiction in my family’s religion was our relationship to violence. On one hand, we were stridently against violence. We would not engage in it, ever, even if we were attacked. And we pretty frequently were — sometimes with projectiles. Sometimes with fists. Sometimes with people driving their cars at us. On one memorable occasion, someone tried to burn down our church — and came close to succeeding. We would try to protect ourselves when people came at us — like I said, I got very good at ducking and dodging — but we wouldn’t fight back.
And there were a lot of Bible passages to support that position, including this one we quoted often: “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh.”
Our battle was spiritual, not physical.
But on the other hand, we absolutely revered some of the most violent characters in the Bible. If you’ve ever seen Game of Thrones, for instance, you’ll recognize the genre: men who cut off the heads of the unholy, zealots who barely flinch as they brutalize their opponents with knives and spears. My family and I didn’t just accept the bloody scenes that these biblical figures carried out. We celebrated them.
And so for today, I want to revisit three of them. Three tales of gory, holy impalement.
*****
The three bloody stories that we are going to get into today all unfold in the early history of Israel, before there are kings or anything we might really recognize today as a “nation.” They take place several centuries after the story of Joseph, so roughly around 1200 B.C., near the end of the Bronze Age. At this point, the Israelites aren’t a unified country so much as a loose confederation of tribes, living in the highlands of what is today Israel and the surrounding region.
To understand these stories, it’s key to remember that at this time, and really for most of human history, war was not some distant event or a rare occurrence. Hand-to-hand battle to the death with blades and blunt objects may seem alien to most of us now. But at the time, violence and battle were not only more familiar, but also frequently understood to be something holy or cosmological. War was seen less as a dispute between states — which, again, didn’t really exist in the same way at the time — and more as a contest between gods, expressed through these warring tribes and armies.
Across the world, it was common for conquering armies to slaughter all the adult males living in the land that they overtook. Or to cut off their ears or genitals. It was common to enslave the vanquished people or to make a human sacrifice of their leaders.
That is the world of these stories.
And I should also say that I’m not interested in judging the people of the past by the morals and norms of today. I’m curious about the people in these stories and in understanding why our ancestors found it important to pass them down, generation after generation.
When I learned about these characters, they were essentially my family’s version of superheroes. They were something like “holy X-Men” to us, and that isn’t exactly the sort of lesson that I want to pass on to my little ones.
So I wonder: What sort of wisdom — if any — is here for me now?
*****
Act 1: The Javelin of Phinehas
Our first man of action is Phinehas. He appears in the Bible just as the Israelites are on the brink of entering the land that they’ve been promised for generations. They have survived centuries of slavery in Egypt, decades in the wilderness, and they’ve defeated powerful kings.
But right in this moment, things start to unravel — because, as the Bible says, “the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab.” Essentially, some of the men of Israel are sleeping with foreign women. And it turns out that it’s not just the sexual “whoredom” that’s a problem. It’s the fact that it quickly becomes spiritual whoredom: These Israelites begin to worship the gods of the foreign women. They eat the sacrifices made to these other gods and bow down before them.
Maybe I should pause for a minute and describe how funny it is for me to look back and imagine the faces of my siblings and me — seven of us under the age of twelve — solemnly nodding as we listened to our mother explain words like “whoredom,” in both the metaphorical and physical senses, in great detail.
In any case, as a direct result of all this whoredom, God is furious. He tells Moses that some of the leaders should be hung up before the Lord, to turn his jealous rage away from Israel. God also sends a plague throughout the camp to punish them. The story doesn’t tell us what plague exactly, but it’s safe to assume it’s nothing good. We only know that it’s lethal and that thousands of people are dying.
It’s a terrible scene and the people of Israel are weeping at their tragic, chaotic, bloody situation.
And in the middle of the chaos, in walks a couple. A man of Israel brings in one of these foreign women, and as it says: “in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of all the congregation of the children of Israel, who were weeping” — in full view of everyone, “defiantly” is how my mother always put it when my family would read this story — the couple walks into a tent to have sex.
And this is the moment that Phinehas takes charge. He gets no introduction before this. He just suddenly appears. He sees this couple waltz into that tent, and: He rises up from among the congregation, and takes a javelin in his hand; And he goes after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrusts both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly.
These lines are often interpreted in their most intimate, most shocking way: The couple is “in the act of fornication,” as my mother put it — and just as the man penetrates the woman, the javelin skewers them both in one unbroken stroke. A single devastating thrust.
Like I said, very Game of Thrones — nudity and all.
And it’s at this point, after 24,000 Israelites have died, that the violence of Phinehas brings the plague to an end.
Because God is pleased with Phinehas.
God tells Moses that Phinehas has turned away God’s jealousy and divine wrath. And for this courageous act of violence, God blesses Phinehas and his descendants with “a covenant of peace” and “an everlasting priesthood”: “because he was zealous for his God, and made an atonement for the children of Israel.”
As if this sinful couple were a blood sacrifice, appeasing the wrath of this jealous God.
The era of this “whoredom” was over, all thanks to one sharp javelin and a man bold enough to use it.
*****
Act 2: The Double-Edged Dagger of Ehud
Some decades after Phinehas and his javelin, the Bible says that the children of Israel have again done evil in the sight of the Lord. No details this time, but to punish them, God causes the king of Moab — a man named Eglon — to conquer them.
For eighteen years, Eglon rules over the children of Israel, until God raises them up a deliverer: a champion who will free them from their oppression. This time, that hero is a man named Ehud. And just as with Phinehas before him, Ehud suddenly just appears here, when action is needed. The only details we know about him are that he is of the tribe of Benjamin — which, maybe I should point out, is named after someone we’ve already met, Joseph’s little brother — and an important detail: that Ehud is left-handed.
So, Ehud journeys to Moab. Ostensibly, his purpose is to bring a gift from Israel to King Eglon, who, the text notes bluntly, is “a very fat man.” The way he’s described, you get the sense of someone who’s not just overly large — which is a sign of someone being very rich — but also overconfident and complacent.
But along with the gift, Ehud carries something hidden: a double-edged dagger that he’s made, about a foot and a half in length, and concealed behind his thigh. His right thigh — the last place the royal guards would expect a left-handed man to carry a weapon.
And as he stands before the king, after he has presented the gift, Ehud says, “I have a secret errand unto thee, O king.”
And Eglon responds, “Keep silence.” The king sends all of his people out of the room. It apparently doesn’t even occur to him that he may be in danger. And there, now alone with the king, Ehud declares, “I have a message from God unto thee.”
And as he says it, Ehud reaches with his left hand, draws the dagger from his right thigh, and drives it into Eglon’s belly.
The text lingers here. Ehud thrusts the blade in so deeply that every inch of the handle follows after it — and the fat closes over the iron, swallowing it whole. Ehud cannot pull it back out, so the weapon disappears into the fat belly of the arrogant king.
And then there’s this line that I’m guessing has startled readers for millennia: “And the dirt came out,” it says.
As children, my siblings and I would laugh at that phrase. The most common interpretation is that Eglon emptied his bowels when the blade went in. The great king, who had oppressed Israel for eighteen years, dies not in the glory of battle, but in a private chamber, in total humiliation. His own filth marking the end of his reign.
With the evil king now slaughtered, Ehud locks the parlor doors behind him to keep the king’s servants from discovering what he’s done, and he escapes by way of the porch.
By the time the servants force their way into the parlor and discover their king dead on the floor, Ehud is already rallying the Israelites. He leads them in driving back their enemies, killing about 10,000 men — “all men of valor,” it says, “all lusty.”
“And there escaped not a man.”
And for 80 years, on the back of this bloody deed, Israel is given the gift of peace.
*****
Act 3: Jael and the Tent Stake
Years after Ehud and his double-edged dagger, we’re back in the same cycle.
The children of Israel once again “do evil in the sight of the Lord.” And this time, it’s the king of Canaan who prevails over them. But the real terror of the story isn’t the king. It’s the leader of the army — the captain of the host: a man named Sisera.
For twenty years, Sisera oppresses the children of Israel. And one thing that makes him powerful is that he commands an army with these nine hundred chariots of iron — sort of the ancient equivalent of tanks, basically — which give him technological superiority and overwhelming force against his enemies.
And once again, God raises up a champion. But this time, the oppressor’s humiliation will take a different form because it will come at the hands of a woman. Two women, actually.
The first woman, Deborah, is a prophetess. But her most important role in this story is that she’s also a judge. Her story, and Ehud’s before her, appear in the Book of Judges, which chronicles this volatile stretch of Israel’s early history. During this time, the twelve tribes are not ruled by kings but by a series of judges: leaders whom God raises up when the nation has fallen into oppression. Judges are not monarchs, but they serve some similar functions: they are part military commander, part political authority, part arbiter of disputes.
But as a judge, Deborah is unusual, because she is the only judge who’s a woman. One day, she summons a military commander named Barak, and she tells him what God wants him to do: Gather ten thousand men, and God will draw the hated commander Sisera to you, to the river Kishon. And there, she says, you will defeat him.
But Barak hesitates. It’s not an outright refusal, but it seems to reveal fear of Sisera and his iron chariots. Or maybe it’s just lack of confidence. If you’ll go with me, he tells Deborah, then I will go. But if you won’t go with me, I will not.
Deborah is not afraid. She agrees, but she also offers this prophecy: “The journey that thou takest shall not be for thine honour; for the Lord shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.”
So off they journey. Deborah, Barak, and ten thousand men.
And when Sisera hears that Barak and his men have gone to the river Kishon, just as predicted, he gathers all nine hundred of his chariots and all the men with him, and they make that journey, too.
And on the banks of the river, war breaks out.
But the battle quickly turns against Sisera. His lines break, and his advantage slips. The text doesn’t explain how it happens, only that it does. Some commentators say that in that land by the river, those iron chariots become useless in the mud. However it unfolds, the effect is the same: The war machine falls apart, and Sisera’s army collapses.
Then, Sisera does something unthinkable for a commander of his stature: He abandons his chariot to try to save his own life. When he sees the might of his chariots failing and his men slaughtered by Barak and his men, it says that “Sisera lighted down off his chariot, and fled away on his feet.”
And with their leader gone, all the men in Sisera’s army are put to the sword by Barak and his men, every single one of them cut down — “and there was not a man left,” it says.
Only Sisera manages to escape, but now he’s alone and on the run. And that’s when he meets the second heroine in our story: Jael. She is the wife of a man whose house is at peace with Sisera’s king. So he flees to her tent because he has reason to believe that he’s safe here with her. You get the sense that he’s arriving here, breathless and defeated, ready to collapse — and Jael runs out to meet him:
“Turn in, my lord, turn in to me,” she says. “Fear not.” She invites him to come and lie down in her tent, and covers him with a blanket.
He then says, “Give me, I pray thee, a little water to drink; for I am thirsty.”
But “she opened a bottle of milk,” instead — something soothing, something to make him sleepy — “and gave him drink, and covered him” again.
He asks her to stand in the door of the tent and keep watch for him. He says, If any man comes and enquires of you, and asks, ‘Is there any man here?’...you tell them, “No.”
I always loved this image: The great captain of nine hundred chariots and thousands of men, now hiding under a blanket in a woman’s tent, asking her to guard the door while he rests.
But little does he know that, as he drifts off, he’s going to sleep for the last time.
Because Jael goes and grabs a huge nail — one of the stakes that holds her tent in place — and then she takes a hammer and comes back into the tent.
And she goes softly to him, where he’s lying on the earth.
And, it says, she smites the nail into his temples. With her hammer she strikes the nail so hard that she fastens his head to the ground. This mighty warrior who slaughtered countless men is nailed to the dirt floor of a tent. This oppressor who thundered across hills and valleys — silenced by a woman.
There’s no drama in the text here, no fanfare: “So he died,” it says.
We’re not told exactly why Jael does what she does. Near the beginning of the story, the Bible notes that her husband’s family has a distant connection to Israel, so maybe that’s part of it. Maybe she simply chooses to support the winning side, to avoid retaliation when the Israelites arrive in pursuit of Sisera.
But whatever the reason, she’s ready when Barak arrives. She runs out to meet him, just like she met Sisera, and she says to him: Come, and I will show you the man whom you seek.
And when Barak comes into her tent, behold. There he is. The terror of Israel, lying still. The nail through his temples.
*****
This whole story with Jael takes place in a single chapter. But the one following it recounts how this will be remembered among the children of Israel — a victory song, the song of Deborah.
One of my dad’s favorite lines from the Bible is here: “They fought from heaven,” it says, “the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” As if his defeat had been inevitable. As if the very movement of the stars and the planets and all the heavens had acted against him.
As the song continues, it becomes this poetic tribute to the violence and quiet cunning of this woman: “Blessed above women shall Jael…be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent.”
“She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen's hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head.”
“At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down…where he bowed, there he fell down dead.”
And then, there’s something that breaks through all the carnage and bloodshed: Deborah imagines — or maybe prophesies — what Sisera’s mother must be going through. She says, “The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice, ‘Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the wheels of his chariots?’”
But Deborah is not brokenhearted about the grief of a bereaved mother, no. Instead, she imagines Sisera’s mother waiting for her son, foolishly dreaming that he is victorious, seizing the spoils of war — the treasures and the women, “to every man a damsel or two” — not yet knowing that her son lies dead, his head nailed to the earth.
So not just Sisera but his mother, too, becomes an object of scorn — her grief, mocked.
Deborah concludes her song with an undeniably badass, if cold, line: “So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord…”
Yes. Let ‘em all die. They are evil — and we, the holy, rejoice to spill their blood.
That, at least, is how I hear it.
*****
As I mentioned, these characters — Phinehas, Ehud, Jael — and others like them in the Bible were heroes to me growing up. For a long time, my digital passwords were actually a version of “Phinehas” (though I’ve changed them, so don’t try anything).
I even have a cousin named “Jael,” who was one of my best and closest friends all my life until I left Westboro. I wrote her a poem not long before I lost her for good — Into the Hand of a Woman, I called it, quoting the verse. In the poem, I lyrically praise my cousin’s namesake with the tent stake and her calculated brutality. In my family, this was a very normal thing to do.
And since I left, it’s been tempting sometimes to think, “Well, maybe we were just a bunch of oddballs” — which, in many ways, we absolutely were. It’s also tempting to think that these 3,000-year-old stories and their bloodthirsty protagonists are merely wild, depraved relics of an ancient civilization that we’ve all left behind.
But I’m not sure that’s right.
And I say that partly because when I look around at many of the stories that are popular today, I see versions of the same thing. Only now, instead of a battlefield with chariots, it’s psychological thrillers and crime dramas — where a serial killer or a terrorist or an abusive husband gets what’s coming to them. Maybe they’re not stabbed through the gut, but they’re thrown from a plane or off the top of a building. Maybe they’re shot in the chest as the hero delivers some clever line, delivering justice with an ironic twist that makes audiences cheer.
The evil one is utterly vanquished. The good guys win again.
I also mentioned earlier that these characters in the Bible were like superheroes to us. But just look at a movie like Avengers: Endgame. It was one of the most popular films of all time, the culmination of more than a dozen movies all leading to this big finale. And that climax? It was a bruised and battered hero, right at the moment you think he’ll be defeated, outfoxing the cruel, arrogant villain, and then turning him into dust.
Many of our most popular stories today are not departures from this ancient tradition we find in the Bible. They’re products of it, or at least products of the same human nature we find in it. The specifics change — a left-handed man of mystery assassinating a corrupt king in his palace versus Iron Man: a billionaire genius in a robot suit, battling an intergalactic super alien — but it seems like the satisfaction it delivers is the same.
There is something deep in us that wants the story where the righteous blade finds its mark. Where the oppressor is humiliated. Where the cruel, fat king's bowels empty on the floor.
We don't just tolerate these stories. We are drawn to them.
Maybe they give us a villain we can all agree on. And in agreeing, we briefly overcome our differences.
Or maybe they let us feel, for the length of a movie, that the moral universe has weight and direction. That sometimes, evil is punished. That sometimes, the small and the cunning can bring down the mighty and powerful. That justice is possible. I don’t think there’s anything uniquely ancient about that impulse. If anything, these stories endure because they tap into something people still recognize immediately.
But there’s also something messier and darker running through stories like these in the Bible. I was not taught these stories as legend or metaphor or cathartic entertainment. I was taught that they were history. That they were factual accounts of the works of God. That it was, in fact, God’s hand guiding Jael’s hammer as she drove that nail through Sisera’s temples. That it was the will of God, that He had called for these assassinations and blood sacrifices.
And that idea worries me now in a way it didn’t when I was a child.
To me, the danger doesn’t seem to be that “human beings are drawn to stories where evil is punished.” It’s the belief that we can identify that evil with absolute confidence — and that God or destiny or morality itself has demanded that we destroy them.
Throughout history, some of the worst violence we have inflicted on one another has come wrapped in moral certainty: not just “I hate you,” but “I am called to destroy you.”
And lately, the temptation to think in those terms feels less theoretical, especially in politics. Political opponents are increasingly cast not merely as wrong but as monstrous. An existential threat. Evil.
So what happens when someone, somewhere, starts to believe they can identify the evil kings and commanders of the world with certainty? What happens when that person becomes convinced that they have been called to rid the world of villains? A healthcare CEO, maybe. Or a governor. Or a president.
In a time of rising political violence, I think that’s a problem worth grappling with.