The eunuch in the film 'Judith of Bethulia' (1914)

The historian Susan Stryker, in the 2020 documentary film "Disclosure" (see 8:30-10:00 in the Netflix version) discusses the 1914 film "Judith of Bethulia." She says it is "one of the films that is often credited with inventing what's called 'the dynamic montage'." In the film, Judith sneaks into General Holofernes' tent. He dismisses his eunuch, after which Judith decapitates Holofernes with a sword. Judith leaves. The eunuch reenters the tent, discovers the general's body, and picks up the murder weapon.

"There's a claim," Stryker says, "that this is one of the first films that we know of where a [director's] cut in the film is used to advance the story. And there's a kind of, like, trans, or, you know, gender nonbinary character who is kind of circulating around the cut in the narrative. It's almost like the figure of the 'cut trans body,' the eunuch who's been castrated or emasculated, who is a 'cut figure', presides over the invention of the cinematic cut."

Screenshots from 'Judith of Bethulia,' as reproduced within the "Disclosure" documentary

Robert Greenblatt: Eunuchs in 'Search the Scriptures'

Robert B. Greenblatt was a mid-twentieth-century endocrinologist who contributed to the development of oral contraceptives.

His book Search the Scriptures places a modern endocrinological interpretation on certain Biblical references. His first case examines the likelihood that Esau, who transferred his anticipated inheritance to his younger brother in exchange for lentils when he suddenly felt he was about to die of hunger, was probably hypoglycemic. This book has a chapter on eunuchs titled "And They Sang Like Cherubs." The epigraph is Matthew 19:12 and the leading questions are "Why emasculation? What is the role of the endocrine glands in the development of character and personality?

Apart from some advice about how sex glands operate (noting Brown-Sequard's folly), most of Greenblatt's comments are of a historical nature. He acknowledges that servants were castrated "in the Orient, in the Middle East, and later in Greece and in the Roman Empire" since ancient times (though not by the Hebrews, according to Josephus and likely in obedience to the law in Deut 23:1) and more recently "for Moslem harems," and he reveals that an Assyrian bas-relief produced in some century BCE "depicts a vizier and a eunuch, in which the contrast between a normal and a mutilated male is vividly portrayed." He contradicts himself about the general awareness in ancient times of the differing impact of pre-pubertal and post-pubertal castration: "Eunuchs castrated in boyhood are known," he says, "for their fidelity; those castrated later in life have been often suspect, correctly," (p. 54) yet he also says that pre-Christians did not know that "this form of mutilation, for the best results, must be performed before maturity in both man and beast." (p. 56) It is unclear how to reconcile those two statements.

He mentions Christian sects that encouraged castration: the Valesii in the 3rd century and the Skoptsi in the 18th century. He also mentions that Pope Leo XIII banned the castration of singers, then a popular practice in Italy, in 1878. He says that the KJV Bible contains 26 instances of the word "eunuch," but that readers should be aware that the term, "especially in Egypt, was even applied to non-castrated, but loyal, servants and administrators of the king."

He says that inmates of the Nazi concentration camps Belzen and Auschwitz were castrated by "x-ray irradiation," though he implies conflicting descriptions of whether this injury was "punitive" or experimental pseudoscience "to study the tissue changes induced by X-rays." (He was aware of two survivors of these Nazi experiments living in the U.S. who had consulted doctors about their hormone deprivation.)

This history notwithstanding, he says his main interest lies in the Biblical recognition in Matthew 19:12 that "some eunuchs...were so born from their mother's womb," something that he sees, as an endocrinologist, as a "diagnosis of congenital eunuchoidism or primary testicular failure." However, he does not explore this further. He does not give any examples of congenital eunuchs.

As a bonus, he quotes the description of the "beardless and goat-voiced Pardoner" from the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales in the Middle English.

Source

Robert B. Greenblatt. Search The Scriptures: A Physician Examines Medicine in the Bible. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1963.

Don't believe everything the sacred book says

Some people say that it is necessary to follow a sacred text so that one has a source of moral standards. A dialogue from Tom Perrotta's novel The Abstinence Teacher:

"Say what you want about the Bible, at least it takes a clear position on right and wrong."

"See, Ruth told him. "This is what bugs me. The way you people talk, it's like you're the only ones who know how to distinguish right from wrong. Just because my moral system's different from yours, that doesn't mean I don't have one. And by the way, just because something's written down in a book that's a couple of thousand years old, that doesn't necessarily mean it's right."

"It does if it's the Word of God."

"The last I heard, the Bible wasn't written by God. It was written by human beings. And you gotta admit, some of it's a little nutty."

* * *

"I'm no scholar," he admitted. "I just feel like, you know, with all the moral relativism in the world, it's good to have some absolute standards."

Whose standards – that ought to be the question. Even if we need a single book as the source of our standards, how would we know which book to pick? "It's time to stop caring what desert nomads were spooked by five thousand years ago," Toby Johnson wrote.

Maybe we could choose based on popularity. A billion people or so couldn't be wrong, could they? Well, sure they could. The world has got about 7 billion people, and Christianity and Islam each have about a billion adherents; their holy books cannot both simultaneously be literally true in their propositional truth claims about theology and morality. Besides, the popularity of these religions has changed over time and will continue to change.

Ibn Warraq wrote, "To assess the truth of a doctrine by the number of people who believe it is also totally ridiculous. The number of people who believe in Scientology is increasing yearly. Is its truth also growing year by year?
"

If one happens to identify a book that one likes, one could, of course, also identify what seems to be true and false within that book. Biblical literalists derisively call this "picking and choosing," but it is the same kind of discernment that we use in all other areas of life. We don't assume that people, institutions, and books are correct (or wrong) all the time. We are even capable of recognizing authorities and experts while remembering that they might sometimes be wrong. Frank Schaeffer wrote that

"They [holy books] are also, inevitably, full of mistakes. The question is what to follow and what to ignore, in the same way one ignores a village idiot but knows the value of the village where both the idiot and the rest of us all live.

Every religious and every scientific/secular tradition has a 'village idiot' or two lurking in its scriptures..."

Jennifer Wright Knust said:

"The only way that the Bible can be regarded as straightforward and simple is if no one bothers to read it. As I had already gathered as a child, the Bible is not only contradictory but complex. Biblical books take sides, they disagree with one another, they intentionally change earlier teachings, and they make irreconcilable claims about human life and the nature of God. In some cases, they promote points of view that, from a modern perspective anyway, are patently immoral."

And, when interviewed by the Boston University Alumni magazine, she gave this opinion:

[Bostonia:] Do you think people will ever stop using the Bible for their own arguments?

[Knust:] That's my dream, that people will get the idea that there's the notion of context.

Sources

Tom Perrotta. The Abstinence Teacher. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007. p. 288.

Toby Johnson, reviewing Men, Homosexuality, and the Gods by Ronald E. Long, White Crane Journal, Issue #64, Spring 2005, p 37.

Ibn Warraq. Why I Am Not a Muslim. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995. p 22.

Frank Schaeffer. Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism). Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2009. p. 215.

Jennifer Wright Knust. Unprotected Texts. Kindle edition. Location 216.

"Biblical Sexuality: Author Jennifer Knust on what the Bible says about Homosexuality." By Kimberly Cornuelle. Bostonia: The Alumni Magazine of Boston University. Winter/Spring 2010. p. 19.

Imagining Esther's 'sister wife'

Roseanna M. White's novel Jewel of Persia retells the famous Biblical story celebrated as the basis of the Jewish holiday Purim. According to the Bible's Book of Esther, while the Jews lived under Ahasuerus (believed by most scholars to be the Persian King Xerxes who reigned in the fifth century BCE), the king exiled his wife Vashti for displeasing him, and he held a beauty contest to select a new queen. He chose Esther, who, unbeknownst to him, was Jewish. Subsequently, the king was persuaded by his advisor Haman to allow the extermination of all the Jews in Persia. When Esther learned of it, she informed the king that she and her cousin Mordecai, who had once saved the king's life by reporting an assassination plot, were Jewish and would be threatened by the edict. The king immediately hanged Haman and promoted Mordecai, and the edict against the Jews was canceled.

White's elaboration of this tale creates an additional character, a poor Jewish woman, Kasia, discovered by the king to be a great beauty. She follows the banished queen Vashti (called by her Persian name Amestris in this story) and precedes her friend Esther, who of course eventually also becomes the king's wife. Among all of King Xerxes' wives and concubines, Kasia is his great love – and he knows from the beginning that she is Jewish. She and two other concubines are chosen to accompany Xerxes on his military campaigns against Greece.

White's imaginative narrative remains faithful to the basic ideas in the Biblical version. Her afterword indicates that she also took many historical details from Herodotus' Histories. If Haman is a two-dimensional anti-Semite not given much psychological depth, it is compensated for by the focus placed on the romantic longings of women. White's website indicates that she and her husband run the Christian Review of Books and that she is active in her Baptist church. That said, the story about Jews in Persia feels composed from a distinctly modern, American, Christian perspective.

One could argue that this is really a story about prayer. The interpersonal conflict between Kasia and Xerxes tends to center on their religious disagreements. Xerxes would prefer that his wife conform to the Zoroastrian worship of Ahura Mazda, but Kasia is a devout Jew, praying several times a day and insisting that she will always identify with the people from whom she came.

The problem is that the author doesn't seem to grasp what observance of Jewish custom involves. Never once do any of the Jewish characters mention dietary laws or Sabbath observance, issues that would surely arise for them inside the Persian palace. Furthermore, the language of their prayer feels distinctly of the American evangelical style. As the author describes one of Mordecai's religious experiences: "...he put one foot onto his street and halted. His spirit weighed heavy within him, blurring his vision and stealing his breath. 'Jehovah?' he whispered." She then has him continue to ask: "'What is it, Lord?'" This sort of conversational prayer occurs many times throughout the book. The idea of having an intimate, "personal" relationship with God is culturally more Protestant Christian than Jewish. Traditionally, Jews do not even pronounce aloud the name of God spelled "YHVH" in Hebrew. Toward the end of the story, when Esther petitions for the lives of the Jews, the author writes, "The Spirit settled over her." This undefined "Spirit" sounds like a concept from the Christian trinity; it isn't clear what it would correspond to in Jewish theology.

So, it is a story about prayer, but written more for Christians than for Jews.

Another oddity is the obviously deliberate omission of any reference to physical sexual expression. This is a love story set in a harem. It's about a powerful man who owns multiple women, taking them from their families when they are little more than girls, using their bodies to produce male heirs, and competing with his male relatives for dominance over them. Yet the author describes nothing more than the occasional chaste kiss or angry pinch on the arm. If more needs to be implied, the narrative cuts off and resumes the next morning.

Presumably, this editorial decision is driven by the author's religious beliefs. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Love stories set in harems are inherently not G-rated and cannot be made so by modern American standards without abandoning much of the stories' cultural contexts. It would be one thing to minimize the amount of erotic and sexually violent scenes, but to completely eschew language for relevant body parts and reproductive functions is to drastically limit the story. The genteel reader can only infer so much. One cannot infer what isn't there to be inferred. Neither is the reader ever given a precise count of Xerxes' many wives and concubines, another detail that would have grounded the novel's sentiment in a harder reality.

Lastly, the treatment of eunuch characters is a little strange. The Book of Esther states that the king was served by seven named eunuchs; an additional eunuch later plots the king's demise. Accordingly, White writes, "Xerxes nodded at the eunuch nearest the door, who motioned his advisers into the room. The seven of them filed in, the men of soundest wisdom and highest birth below the princes. Most of them had advised his father before him." Kasia's servant Theron, like Kasia herself, is fictional, but others use the Biblical names assigned to these eunuchs.

The eunuchs, who are alternately referred to as "slaves," are always present. They are given relatively small orders that can be executed quickly: sending messages, fetching people, setting up thrones. None of the orders are ever of a managerial, organizational, or creative nature. Furthermore, the eunuchs are not given personal histories. The reader is never told what race they are, where they came from, why they were castrated, what they looked like, where they slept, who they loved, or who they worshipped. Frequently, such a slave appears as "a eunuch" without having any name designated at all, as if he is interchangeable with others like him, existing only to announce the presence of more important characters.

They are rarely depicted as having feelings or opinions of their own – although there is the occasional clenched fist when they are forced to bite their tongues – and so they do not serve as confidants to the king or queens. When Darius plans to seduce Kasia, Theron warns, "Mistress, no," in a "muted" voice and then, because she does not heed his warning, he has to rush to her aid. Kasia laments Darius's reprehensible behavior, thinking to herself, "She had just lost the one friend she had left in her husband's house." What is the eunuch walking her home with his arm around her? Chopped liver? The only arguable demonstration of a eunuch's personal opinion occurs when the banished queen Amestris orders her head eunuch to choose a trusted servant to arrange for Xerxes' assassination. Corresponding to the Biblical, the author has Teresh argue: "Do you know how many of my brothers died in his pointless war, Bigthan? Four. All four dead, and me castrated to serve at his blasted door. My father's name will die now." After Mordecai overhears and reports this grumbling, the reader is told that Amestris' servant is no more; it is not even made explicit that there was an execution of a eunuch or two. It is important to realize that these words did not necessarily represent Teresh's actual opinion. He spoke only because he was ordered to do so by two levels of management.

In this story, eunuchs always obey, without exception. Thus Xerxes is able to order his servants not to follow him, "knowing they would obey whether they liked it or not". This creates problems for them, given that loyalties can conflict and that it is not possible to make everyone happy all the time. A particular eunuch believes he can defend a particular woman against "any other man" except the crown prince; even if the future king injures her, "it would have been death to the slave if he raised a hand to stop him." In other words, if two of a eunuch's superiors fight, the eunuch is damned if he intervenes and damned if he doesn't. When one's job is simply to follow orders, there are few points awarded for righteousness.

In short, there are limitations to this novel. It is nonetheless imaginative and well-meaning in its description of an interfaith marriage that changed the destiny of the Jews.

---

Esther Brownsmith writes:

"...literacy was likely an elite privilege in the ancient world—one that frequently excluded marginalized genders. But while concrete evidence for female or queer authorship of early Jewish texts is scant, these texts did reflect a different embodied and marginalized identity: Jewish identity. Whether they lived in diaspora or in a strip of Levantine land controlled by a string of foreign empires, Jews wrote from the margins of ancient Mediterranean and West Asian culture."

* * *

"...fan fiction can provide a crucial model and lens for reading biblical and parabiblical texts...in my upcoming monograph, Queen of the Alternate Universe: The Book of Esther as Fan Fiction, I focus on this process as it manifests in the book of Esther. ...the book of Esther reflect[s] on Mesopotamian deities— Ishtar/Esther and Marduk/Mordecai—through a diasporic Jewish lens. ...[it has a] fusion of mythic characters with a minoritized culture, using a familiar genre."

* * *

"Esther and Mordecai engage in an impassioned conversation, but they never actually see each other; every message is communicated back and forth by Hathach, a eunuch who serves Esther. Nevertheless, their communications are physically embodied; Esther sends Mordecai new clothing, and in response, Mordecai sends back a written copy of Haman’s decree. Esther counters by referring to her absence of physical contact with the king, and when Mordecai convinces her to act anyway, she instructs him and all the Jews of the city to fast for three days in preparation—once again a bodily action, whether or not there was implicit prayer accompanying it. In short, Mordecai and Esther are participating in this conversation from a fully embodied perspective, even as they speak to each other from entirely different spaces."

* * *

"the comparison with fan fiction gives us a possible motive for why the ancient Jewish author would choose to write a Jewish story whose central characters are borrowed from Mesopotamian culture. The authors that Kelley examines are engaged in emotioned literacy: the process of writing that stems from their emotional and bodily identity, including their deep love for the source material. But as fan fiction scholars have said from the beginning, love is not the only emotion that fuels fan fiction authorship. For instance, Henry Jenkins described the dueling emotions of “fascination” and “frustration,” noting that frustration is what often fuels authors to go in and write a new text, instead of simply rereading an old one. Those fan authors thus become “active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings.” (2013, 24) The corpus of Mesopotamian literature about Ishtar and Marduk was broad and pervasive; just as Israelite biblical texts reimagined Canaanite myths like the triumph over the chaotic sea, so did the author of Esther reimagine the Mesopotamian characters of their broader social sphere."

* * *

"...the book of Esther use[s] transformation through supplementation to rewrite the ubiquitous Mesopotamian characters of Ishtar and Marduk, shifting them into a context of Jewish identity."

— “I Wrote My Way Out”: Embodied Appropriation, Fan Fiction, and the Book of Esther
Esther Brownsmith, University of Dayton
BOOKS & CULTURE VOLUME 19, NUMBER 1-2, 2023 1

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Sept. 1, 2012.

Image: A Purim spiel (a staged pageant of the story of Esther) photographed circa 1869 by Julia Margaret Cameron. © No known copyright restrictions. Belongs to the UK`s National Media Museum. Flickr.

How many Americans believe the Bible is the 'Word of God'?

Over the years, Gallup has asked Americans if they believed the Bible was the "actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word." In 1977, 38 percent of Americans identified themselves as Biblical literalists – rejecting the poll's other options that the Bible is "the inspired word of God" or "an ancient book of fables" – but by 2011 this response had declined to 30 percent. The decline was not perfectly linear. The number of Biblical literalists increased to about 40 percent in the early 1980s and declined to a low of 27 percent in 2001 before rising slightly again.

Gallup found that Biblical literalists were more likely to claim that they were Protestant Christians, attended church weekly, were political conservatives and/or Republicans, had only a high school education or less, and had low incomes. Additionally, Rasmussen found in 2005 that they are slightly more likely to be female and over 40.  (Among atheists and agnostics, by contrast, men clearly outnumber women two-to-one, according to the Pew Religious Landscape Study in 2008.)

When Americans are asked in a general way if they will affirm the truth of the Bible, the majority do so. Rasmussen found in 2005 that 63 percent of Americans agreed that "the Bible" – without having been asked to limit their response to specific stories within the Bible – was "literally true." This figure is twice as high as Gallup's.

Of course, it is possible to believe that some, and not all, statements in the Bible are true. When people are given options to declare belief in specific parts of the Bible, it generates a more nuanced picture of belief. ABC News Primetime poll in 2004 found that over 60 percent of Americans were literalists about certain Biblical events such as the creation of the world, Noah's ark, and Moses parting the Red Sea.  Those who described themselves as "evangelical Protestants" were more likely than other Protestants to have these literalist beliefs. A CBS news poll later that year found similar results, with 55 percent claiming to believe in the creation of the world as described in the Bible. Yet another poll found that 40 percent believed that God created humans "pretty much in their present form" several thousand years ago (Gallup, 2010).

William Saletan argued for Slate that, while Gallup has found in a dozen polls between 1982-2014 that at least 40 percent of Americans claim to believe that God created the Earth less than 10,000 years ago, a new 2014 study by the BioLogos Foundation found that, when people are pressed to be more specific about their beliefs and allowed to express uncertainty, only 15 percent of Americans maintained such a position.

Americans' beliefs differ so widely by geography such that it is hard to generalize about what Americans believe. In the U.S. states of Alabama and Arkansas, 75 percent believe the Bible is literally true, while in Vermont and Massachusetts it is only 22 percent (Rasmussen, 2006).

While 92 percent say they believe in God, only 71 percent say they are "absolutely certain" of God's existence. A quarter of Americans believe God is an "impersonal force." (Pew, 2008)

Polls have returned an assortment of more dramatic, specific beliefs. Over three-quarters of Americans believe in angels. (Scripps Howard / Ohio University, 2001) From 1975 to 1995, 140 children died of curable diseases in the United States after their parents refused medical treatment for religious reasons.  A Pew survey in 2006 found that a third of black Protestants and a third of white evangelicals believe that the "Second Coming" (the return of Jesus to Earth) will occur during their lifetimes.

And although nearly a quarter of Americans don't expect to have a religious funeral (American Religious Identification Survey, 2008), nearly half of Americans said they would disapprove of their child marrying an atheist (University of Minnesota Study, 2008) and 60 percent think the nation benefits when politicians make public expressions of faith (Newsweek, 2002).

Update: In 2020, a third of self-identified evangelicals in the United States agreed with a statement that Jesus was a good teacher, but not God. (The study from Ligonier Ministries was conducted by LifeWay Research.) In addition, two-thirds agreed that Jesus "is the first and greatest being created by God." Both of these positions are inconsistent with "evangelical teaching and most historic Christian doctrine," according to Relevant Magazine.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on July 30, 2011.