Comedy in the Book of Judges

Judges. As in one of the Books of the Bible, yes. I enjoy reading the Bible sometimes for the story content. And some really nice existential poetry in Ecclesiastes. Plus, not for nothing, Gospels are nice. Calming.

Anyhoo. There are three exceedingly funny stories in Judges. I always love reading this Book.

One is actually one of my favourite stories in the Bible. It involves a man named Micah. Micah was just this one random dude from the Ephraim tribe. One day, this random Levite (of the priestly clan, if you know your Israel tribes) knocked on his door. And Micah was like: you want to be my priest? And the Levite said: ya, sure. So Micah made some carved idols and paid the Levite to be his priest. 

Come this one day and some Danites came to this town and met Micah’s priest who told them a good fortune. So they said: you want to come with us with your cast idol, serve an entire clan instead of just one man? And the Levite, this Benedict Arnold of a priest, said: ya, sure. So he left with them.

Later Micah caught up with them and was like: Hey, you took my god and my priest, what is up with that?! And the Danites, very blood-thirsty and just a gang of 600 bullies, were just like: Don’t make us hurt you. So they just took Micah’s god and his priest and set up a new town.

I don’t know the point of this story. It’s just really funny to me.

The second funny story is a little racist. And again, it involves Ephramites. Apparently Ephramites can’t pronounce Sh. So the Gileadites would ask them, “Say Shibboleth”. And if the person says Sibboleth, they just killed them. It was highly interesting to me in college when I was obsessing over linguistics.

I just find it funny it has mention in this very solemn Book. 

The third one is just a random throw-away line. Judges 3:17 reads: He presented the tribute to Eglon king of Moab, who was a very fat man. 

Just like that. It’s like the neighbourhood aunties and unclejis just looking at you and going: you are fat. Or a very honest kid who you ask to describe someone and they just go: the fat one. I mean this dude, who was a king, was ruling over Israel at some point, because they were evil and God was punishing them. Which is basically the entire recurring theme of the Book. And all that the Book has to say about his was that he was “a very fat man”. 

You have to wonder just how fat he was. And thankfully, the Bible provides that answer in the next next para. Somewhat. Ehud, a Benjamite man, whose only other description is that he was “a left-handed man”, plunged his one and half foot long sword into Eglon’s belly. And the Bible just says: “the fat closed in over it”. Always with the fat when it comes to Eglon. 

Very gory, very macabre. But also, so random it’s funny.

Now, go and read your Judges.

Flench Flies

I was reading Judges 12:5&6 and I snorted loudly over my Kindle. The Gileadites were being jerks to the Ephramites. To test if they were Ephramites, they made people say “Shibboleth” and because the Ephramites could not pronounce it right and said “Sibboleth” instead, they would know and they’d kill them. They killed 42,000 Ephramites this way.

42. I don’t care that Douglas Adams just sat on his desk, stared into the garden and thought, “42 will do… end of story”. 42 appears too many times in life to not care. In the Bible too. If I’m not wrong, usually associated with deaths. I should reflect more on this.

Moving on. Shibboleth. Sibboleth. These little pronunciation fault-lines appear when one is speaking a language one is not fluent in or perhaps not used to it. There are just some sounds that you don’t get right simply because the same sound doesn’t occur naturally in your language. Like Shibboleth and Sibboleth.

Or take for example, in Mizo language, there is no naturally sounding ‘J’. We have it in our alphabet because we use a modified, phonetic version of the Roman alphabet designed by Christian missionaries and I suppose we needed the J for a lot of names in the Bible that require a J. Like Jerusalem or Jordan or Joseph; kind of important names in Christianity. Even so, it clashes with the other sounds in Mizo. So these names are always pronounced with a ‘Z’ sound. Of course today, people take pains to get it right and use the actual J but it disturbs the flow of an otherwise lyrical language. Something’s gotta give, and all that.

But what the Shibboleth-Sibboleth story forced in my memory are all the jokes and even actual instances where Lusei-speaking Mizo folk make Burmese-Mizo folk pronounce the word for chicken. Ar. I don’t speak Burmese but maybe there’s no distinction between R and L in the language; maybe like in Japanese where the letter for R and L is the same. So instead of saying “Ar”, they’d say “Al”. It is an endless source of perhaps un-witty and unimaginative running jokes in Mizo. Embarrassing if it happens to you IRL. Once, owing to a slip of tongue, I ordered "Flench Flies" at a McD's in Priya Mkt, Vasant Vihar. The boy who took my order clearly wanted to laugh and I just kept the straightest face I could muster till he accepted defeat and just processed my French Fries order. Mortifying. Anyhoo. I was amused to note the same instance in the Bible. Maybe we’re not all that different, people all over the world, even dispersed through time.

To make my point, take Plato, the famous philosopher. I was reading this article by Aakar Patel. He mentions that Plato’s name in Greek is actually Platon, meaning wide. But in English it is spelled through Latin which drops the N. India got the name from Muslims speaking Arabic which has no P in the language so they exchanged the P with an F, but kept the N at the end. There is however no natural sounding F in Arabic so the A is inserted before the F, easing the speaker into the word by separating F from L. Hence, Af-latoon. Plato. Aflatoon. What do you know?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, what’s in a sound? No?

Of course the next Christian who calls me Easter deserves one solid round of Octopus slaps. With a catfish attached to the end of each tentacle, thank you.

*Esther: titular character of the 17th book of the Bible.

**Easter: a day marked for celebration named after the Anglo-Saxon Goddess of Spring/Fertility Eostre, and does not appear in the Bible.