The Book of Judges and the Violence of Heresiology

The book of Judges has preoccupied the scholarly imagination within the history of feminist/womanist biblical interpretation and is often labeled a text of terror.^{Footnote 5} To summarize briefly, the book is comprised of a series of narratives that trace a cycle of rebellion, suffering, and deliverance. Its main characters are flawed, violent, and even at times sadistic. And it is in Judges that we find stories of both female triumph and extreme horror. For example, in Judg 4–5, Deborah surpassed patriarchal expectations and led as commander and judge, which secured the Israelites’ victory over their enemies. And within Deborah’s narrative, we also find the story of Jael, who boldly drove a stake through the head of her enemy and won praise among the tribes of Israel even as an outsider. But Judges also preserves the haunting stories of Jephthah’s daughter’s unwarranted death (Judg 11), the brutal ends of Samson’s many consorts (Judg 13–16), and the dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine (Judg 19). It is undeniably a book that showcases the worst impulses of humanity and a glorification of gender-based violence.

And while the book of Judges was frequently noted as troubling for ancient commentators, it nevertheless became a site of fantastical exploration for Christian authors in late antiquity.^{Footnote 6} Many of these authors were equally enthralled and horrified by the mistaken vow and subsequent sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter. Augustine of Hippo, for example, spent a great deal of time in his Questions on Judges both describing Jephthah’s error, comparing it to the sacrifice of Isaac, and reminding his audience that this story was an exception that proved the rule: child sacrifice is wrong.^{Footnote 7} Ambrose of Milan, Augustine’s mentor, on the other hand, in On the Duties of the Clergy, read the story allegorically to help settle some of the more unsavory details.^{Footnote 8} It is a reminder, he states, of the willing sacrifice that all are called to make as followers of Christ. It is Athanasius of Alexandria’s invocation of the infamous dismemberment of the unnamed woman found in Judg 19, however, that stands out, not simply for its gruesome narrative but also for the ways in which the story became embedded within Athanasius’s larger theological project.

The story of the nameless woman preserved in Judg 19 holds a long history in the late ancient context.^{Footnote 9} The spectacle of Judges, along with other gruesome stories of deaths of women, was one way in which heresiologists framed their rhetorical arguments.^{Footnote 10} As both Averil Cameron and Karen King have noted, the logic of heresiological literature is frequently exclusionary and often violent.^{Footnote 11} As we will see, Athanasius capitalizes on this story to claim that a war against the Christian church is underway.^{Footnote 12} Thus the story of the rape and dismemberment of the unnamed woman in Judg 19 gave life to his heresiology.

The growing interest during the 1990s in the concept of orthodoxy and its twin, heresy, in the history of Christianity, culminated in two overlapping schools of thought. In 1996 the Journal of Early Christian Studies published a collection of essays on heresy in late antiquity.^{Footnote 13} Then, in 1998, a group of scholars gathered at the École française de Rome and afterward published a collection of essays that includes the Middle Ages and modernity.^{Footnote 14} Both collections stress the theoretical shift in the field of Christian history focusing on the discourse, both ancient and contemporary, of orthodoxy and heresy. Subsequently, scholars such as Karen King, Rebecca Lyman, Susanna Elm, Virginia Burrus, and Todd Berzon have expanded how scholars of late antiquity engage the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy, not as a social phenomenon but as an exercise in rhetorical control as well as discursive political and theological war of words.^{Footnote 15} In this rhetorical exercise, to call forth an orthodox self, you must also have a heretical other by which to define and call the self into existence. To state it another way, these categories are mutually dependent and do not exist outside of one another.

The most classic examples of heresiological texts that scholars have explored have been treatises that contain catalogs, which systematically list named heretics and describe their heretical beliefs, such as Irenaeus of Lyon’s Against Heresies, Hippolytus of Rome’s Refutation of All Heresies, and Epiphanius of Salamis’s Refutation of All Heresies.^{Footnote 16} But this was just one way that heresiological literature surfaced in late antiquity. The field of heresiological studies has also turned to other literary genres to identify a larger discursive politics at play. So-called histories of heretics, for example, were a popular genre alongside highly stylized letters addressed to, and in opposition of, doctrinal enemies. Richard Flower has explored how letters composed to imperial figures quickly became a popular register to deploy Christian invective in order to identify and condemn heretical emperors in a new age of Christian imperial politics.^{Footnote 17} I have also argued that the invocation of classical tropes of displacement and exile took on a new powerful way to construct the orthodox self and locate heretics.^{Footnote 18}

As these scholars demonstrate, heresiological discourse crossed a host of different literary genres and rhetorical techniques. What I term here as heresiology, then, was a set of literary practices deployed by competing Christians to defend their version of orthodoxy much like those described before but that were reliant on the exploitation of the real and imagined experiences of gender violence. As we will see, Athanasius’s heresiological project began as a carefully constructed narrative built out of the violence of Judg 19 and showcases how gender violence and heresiology merge.

This style of heresiological reasoning reemphasizes Averil Cameron’s claim that violence remains inextricably linked to the orthodox project. To push her logic further, I argue that too often orthodoxy was—and remains—reliant on the logic of gender violence that continues to inform how gender is constructed. Athanasius’s invocation of Judg 19 was not intended to console or even recover the specific names or stories of those who suffered or would suffer these or similar wrongs. The experience of violence was instead used to make a point.

Dismembered and Remembered

We find the Judg 19 story preserved in Athanasius’s Encyclical Letter composed during his second flight from Alexandria and circulated widely beyond the Alexandrian region.^{Footnote 19} In this letter, and while he was tucked safely away in Rome in the summer of 339, Athanasius described for his audience a series of dramatic events that initiated his flight to Rome.^{Footnote 20} To frame his narrative of displacement and suffering, Athanasius describes a coordinated attack on the Alexandrian community and rereads the events alongside the shocking story of Judg 19.

As a brief reminder, Judg 19 preserves the story of a Levite man traveling with his wife through the Benjaminite territory of Gibeah.^{Footnote 21} They stop for the evening and take up shelter with another member of the tribe of Israel, who is also described as a stranger among the Benjaminites but who takes pity on the visitors. His hospitality, however, is immediately challenged. When the male inhabitants of the town learn of the Levite’s presence, they storm the house and demand the host hand over the Levite to satisfy their sexual whims. As a compromise, two women are offered instead: the unnamed partner of the Levite and an unnamed virgin daughter of the host (who we never hear from or more about in the story). The hostile men then torture and gang rape the unnamed woman all night long and only release her at dawn. She falls at the threshold of the house where the Levite discovers her the next morning. The Levite then unceremoniously tosses the brutalized woman on his donkey, and he returns to his homeland. Once home, he cuts the woman’s body into pieces and sends each part out to all the tribes of Israel to call the Benjaminites to account for their crimes.

This story of sexual violence and torture is quite shocking. It is therefore disturbing how the narrative became wrapped into Athanasius’s renarration of his experience of persecution in Alexandria. In this Encyclical Letter, we find that the Judges’ narrative was deployed to contextualize a history of terror grounded in biblical precedent. In Athanasius’s version of the story, much of the details of the Judges narrative were glossed over. Athanasius even states that he is not interested in the sordid details, but he begins with this saga of violence to usher in his own story of horror. His story, he exclaims, is far worse:

In other words, Athanasius uses the story of Judg 19 to prepare his listeners for the atrocities that he and his companions face. By comparison, he argues, the Levite’s suffering—and here, he intentionally draws us back to the suffering of the Levite and not the nameless woman—was but one small offense.

Why then does Athanasius invoke this passage at all? I argue its use was not just a passing biblical comparison. The topic of in-group fighting (the Benjaminites are one among the twelve tribes of Israel) and excessive violence (particularly the dismemberment of the woman’s body) successfully frames Athanasius’s description of his own experience of intra-Christian violence and displacement in Alexandria. Moreover, his use of the language of pollution and corruption to describe what happened to the unnamed woman highlighted for Athanasius the ongoing danger heretics posed to the church. The symbolic, and literal, rape of the church would not be lost on his audience.

To unpack this invocation further: Athanasius’s flight to Rome was intentionally grafted into the story of the Levite and his partner in two key ways. First, it is in this text that Athanasius gives life to his heresiological discourse, starting with the death and dismemberment of a woman. And second, it is in this letter that the details of the attack on the Alexandrian church would serve as a template for how Athanasius’s logic of gender violence would be used in subsequent polemical treatises.

In her work Sex Lives of the Saints, Virginia Burrus argues that women must die in order for a man to get a Life (or vita).^{Footnote 22} In her assessment of hagiographical literature, Burrus states:

Here Burrus explicitly identifies hagiographical narratives (which we will return to later), but I argue that her observation extends to a variety of literary genres, including heresiological literature. Athanasius first calls attention to and then exploits the unnamed woman’s experience to piece together his heresiological corpus. His was not a lament for the woman. In other words, the unnamed woman does not get a Life in return for her suffering. Instead, Athanasius explicitly stated that it was not his intent to renarrate the details of the Judges narrative but to make another point. The unnamed woman is but a dismembered and remembered object, who was owned, used, tortured, and divided among men. Her death gave life to a man.

But why this story from Judges? There are many other women who die ignominious deaths in the book of Judges, as briefly highlighted before. Any one of Samson’s love interests, for instance, could work. Or, if Athanasius wanted to highlight the violent treatment of virgins, he might have considered Jephthah’s lamentable daughter. And yet, Athanasius zeroes in on the unnamed woman for several explicit reasons. He states:

To be clear, it is now the exiled men who stand in for the pieces of the broken woman—which is a change from his earlier reasoning, where the story of violence would prepare his readers for the shock of his experience. In this second invocation of the story, the living men carry with them the stories of horror, which the mute dismembered woman could not. She dies so they might live (this is a theme we will see again).

He goes on to explain two explicit accounts that detail just what those insults and injustices were. Athanasius first refers to Gregory of Cappadocia’s initial invasion of the city and his impious attack on the “Great Alexandrian Church” during the season of Lent.^{Footnote 24} In this first account, the church and its baptistery were set on fire and then plundered by heathens and Jews.^{Footnote 25} Known Arians then ravaged the sanctuary and tortured the faithful. Virgins were stripped and raped, presbyters and laymen were flayed alive, and many others were handed over to the authorities to be cast into prison to prolong their suffering.

Then, in a much shorter and less detailed account, Athanasius states that Gregory turned his attention to a second church where the bishop had been hiding. Upon learning of Gregory’s plans to repeat the same assault, Athanasius fled to safety. Those left behind were thrown into prison, and the church succumbed to the desires of the Arians. These two descriptions parallel the unnamed woman’s story in graphic detail. Like the Judges passage, the rape of the church’s virgins and the torture of its members is excessive and violent. The perpetrators were described as ravenous and inflamed by their madness and rage. And like the Judges narrative, the story did not end there.

A key detail that Athanasius retains in both his version of the Judges narrative and its connection to the atrocities committed against the Alexandrian church is the dismemberment. As Susan Jeffords has noted in her gender analysis of narrative theory:

As Jeffords highlights, it is the dismemberment that is most useful for narrative progression. She, or they, are then reassembled to become something different and change to meet the needs of the narrative. It is clear that the dismembered body is central to Athanasius’s self-fashioning in this and later polemical texts. As he cuts through the narrative, he points to his own excessively violent reality. He argues that it is a persecution that surpasses any that has come before. Athanasius laments:

What is so shocking to Athanasius was that, like the Benjaminites, the rapacious enemies considered themselves a part of the community. And like the Benjaminites, the Arians allowed their madness and insatiable desire for violence to distinguish them from the other members who claim the same faith. Their perversion proves what a threat they pose to the Christian church and to her bishop.

And here, Athanasius invokes a familiar method of biblical exegesis. The biblical pericope serves as a predictive narrative to interpret his contemporary moment. The link between the Judges narrative and the violence taken against the Christian Alexandrian community, with Athanasius at the center of the narrative, is meant to emphasize the excessive bloodlust he presents in his record of the coordinated attacks against his city. We are encouraged to compare the city to the ravaged woman’s body and Athanasius to the Levite.

The bishop draws for his readers a connection between male property and the polluting lust of those enemies of the church. Athanasius, like the Judges narrator, removes the humanity of the raped victim(s) to make a point. The body transforms into an object or piece of property that was ravaged by the excessive violence of men.

Athanasius then takes this story a step further, however, and reassembles the ravaged body as his own. Ultimately, what stands out is Athanasius’s adoption and co-opting of the suffering of the sexually violated women in both the biblical text and his account of the attacks on the Alexandrian community. The brutalized woman, like the vulnerable citizens of Alexandria, may have suffered a terrible fate, but the suffering of the man who recorded these stories was, according to Athanasius, far worse. It is here that Athanasius deploys the biblical narrative to frame the start to his heresiological argument: the true victim is not the dismembered woman but the bishop in flight.

As others have noted, Athanasius built his career and identity as a persecuted defender of the faith.^{Footnote 27} To reinforce this identity, he created a larger-than-life enemy, that is, those infamous Ariomaniacs.^{Footnote 28} These straw men, not unlike the Benjaminites, helped to bolster his identity as a persecuted figure—but, as he began to intimate in this letter, he must become more than a victim. As his heresiological logic progresses in later texts, the body must be dismembered once again to be reassembled into the victorious champion of Nicene orthodoxy. Nevertheless, this logic was reliant on this narrative of gendered violence.

From Dismembered Victim to Reassembled Hero

It is clear in his later works that Athanasius continues to compare his suffering to other gendered suffering bodies, including Christian martyrs, but his position (and embodied persona) shifts from passive victim to active hero. While the stories of attacks are recycled, the role of the bishop shifts. In the following section of the text, Athanasius’s heresiological logic, which began in this Encyclical Letter explored above, shifts to help him identify his enemies. And while an explicit link to the Judg 19 narrative drops out, the story of ravage and sexual exploitation remains too compelling for Athanasius to let go.

In her more comprehensive analysis of Athanasius’s gendered embodied commitments, Burrus first sees Athanasius’s use of gendered language in his other Encyclical Letter of the Council of Egypt (which appears to have been written around the same time as the text explored above).^{Footnote 29} In this letter, Athanasius refutes charges brought against him at the council of Tyre, which had resulted in his first flight from Alexandria. To do so, he intentionally compares the veracity of Nicaea with the false council of Tyre. Unlike the outcome of Nicaea, where truth was birthed and gave life to the orthodox fathers, Tyre spawned the corruptive powers of heretics and brought about the miscarriage of imperial justice. To defend his status as inheritor of a Nicene legacy (and to dispel accusations of a seemingly cowardly flight), he disavows the activities at Tyre and constructs a distinctly masculine Nicene legacy.

The paternal terminology remained central to Athanasius’s re-imaging of Nicaea. The language of masculine triumph grew whenever his claim to the Alexandrian episcopate came under threat. Regarding his treatise On the Council of Nicaea (ca. mid-350s CE), Burrus draws attention to Athanasius’s frequent reference to those who attended Nicaea as “fathers,” placing himself firmly within that tradition. She states:

To contrast his vision of masculine transmission of truth and knowledge, the heretical lineage is transformed into a decidedly dangerous and effeminate one. For example, the charge of impiety plays a significant role in his creation of a counter-history in two works composed during his third flight from Alexandria.

In his History of the Arians (358 CE), he describes a heretical lineage that cut off all access to the generative power of the orthodox.^{Footnote 31} By associating the heretics with eunuchs, Athanasius contrasts the generativity of the fathers with the impotence of heretical branches and the futility of their efforts. Athanasius demonstrates this point in his description of a plot to persuade the bishop of Rome to accept an anti-Nicene position. Eusebius of Nicomedia sent an unnamed eunuch on his behalf (and, presumably, the emperor’s behalf as well) with both gifts and letters to seduce the bishop and turn him against Athanasius. ^{Footnote 32} If the bishop of Rome refused, then the eunuch was to threaten him and any other wayward bishop with violence (H. Ar., 37). There is no limit to the depraved tactics the heretics would undertake.

To accomplish their goal to malign Athanasius and corrupt the church, the court eunuchs were used to sow confusion and discord with womanly gossip and false information. The gendered allusions do not end there. Eunuchs, who were also frequently enslaved peoples, carried with them a stigma of sexual aggression and availability.^{Footnote 33} And so, their feminine wiles must not be trusted, especially in ecclesiastical matters. Athanasius insists that the unholy alliance between Ariomaniacs and eunuchs proved successful. Emperors and bishops continue to be fooled.^{Footnote 34} The problem, according to Athanasius, is that their deceptions remain difficult to expose—a point he laments at several points in this work. Athanasius, therefore, has to provide evidence to distinguish the orthodox heroes from the heretical enemy.

As Burrus has shown, pious obedience to the tradition of the fathers served as a litmus test for Athanasian orthodoxy.^{Footnote 35} It was a test that required vulnerable bodies to suffer, which is most clearly seen in his slightly earlier apologia Defense of His Flight (357 CE). Here Athanasius argues that the heretics proved their guilt by dishonoring the memory of the martyrs by mimicking the violence of imperial persecution.^{Footnote 36} Those who persecuted the Alexandrian church did so as if the imperial persecutions of the past were alive and well.^{Footnote 37} And here the events of the earlier attack narrated in his general Encyclical Letter are recycled, but now with a growing list of new characters to accuse.

In the apologia, George of Cappadocia, another rival to the Alexandrian patriarchate (like Gregory) used imperial troops as well as other known heretics to attack the Alexandrian community: “George, that abandoned person … stirred up against them the commander Sebastian, a Manichee; who straight away with a multitude of soldiers with arms, drawn swords, bows, and spears, proceeded to attack the people, though it was the Lord’s day” (Athanasius, Fug. 6.21).^{Footnote 38} Here we see multiple causes for alarm. The Arians collude with imperial officials and attack the defenseless with the aid of a Manichaean. To further stress this heinous behavior, and conflate the tactics between the two invading bishops, Athanasius recounts the atrocious treatment of a group of dedicated virgins, saying: “Having lighted a pile, he placed certain virgins near the fire, and endeavored to force them to say that they were of the Arian faith: and when he saw that they were getting the mastery, and cared not for the fire, he immediately stripped them naked, and beat them in the face in such a manner, that for some time they could hardly be recognized” (Athanasius, Fug. 6.24).^{Footnote 39} Once again, the Alexandrian community was the target of excessive violence.

When Athanasius’s enemies were unable to capture the orthodox bishop in flight, they predictably tortured the innocent, whose faith was tested. The test was not about loyalty to Christ, however. Their loyalty was to their bishop. By subjecting their bodies to the abuses of the outsider George and the Arian heresy, they proved their allegiance to Athanasius. Here Athanasius makes a subtle but significant move in his use of the martyr’s authority. These burning bodies, like the unnamed woman in the Judg 19 pericope, were ravaged in place of the fleeing bishop. Athanasius stresses that the martyrs’ bodies, once the paradigm of Christian authenticity, were not the true victims, however. Their bodies were only capable of saying so much.

To further emphasize the distinction between the brutalized victims and the father who survives, Athanasius invokes biblical exemplars to reconstruct a tradition of fleeing men:

The implication here is that these masculine men escaped the excessive violence of their manic enemies (Jezebel is a particularly striking biblical type here). They survived so that other men might emulate their flight. The Alexandrian martyrs stand as testaments to justify the actions of the fleeing bishop, whose exile was the direct result of his defense of the Nicene cause.^{Footnote 41} Athanasius’s orthodoxy is tied to the stories of their tortured bodies, but those beaten or cruelly treated were passive victims or simply collateral for a much greater cause. Ultimately, he concludes, the patriarchs of the faith were not called to suffer the same fate as the martyrs.^{Footnote 42} In fact, the actions of the saintly fathers serve as the superior model of Christian piety. And here the resonances with the Encyclical Letter described above are particularly striking. In a bold statement, Athanasius writes:

The masculine virtue of fortitude is cultivated under the pains of ongoing persecution and, according to Athanasius, this active suffering is much greater than that of the Alexandrian martyrs. As a bishop in exile, Athanasius’s virile suffering body must be tied to all those saintly fathers who fled before him. It is a paternal generativity that relies on a set of discursive strategies and rhetorical performances that continue to blur gender roles and create queer crossings as before but not in ways we might have expected.^{Footnote 44} Athanasius’s flights into exile served as a type of masculine performance used to forge a distinctly orthodox patrilineal legacy.

Athanasius invokes paternal generativity to place himself among a male lineage of holy men who fled during times of persecution, men such as Abraham, Moses, David, and, most importantly, Christ. These saintly men fortified their manly courage through trials of persecution while in exile, and their authority is strengthened by the proper use of that time and space. Athanasius continues:

These fathers did not suffer silently, nor did they waste their time in exile. They openly proclaimed the gospel, speaking not just with their bodies, as the dead martyrs do, but with their lively tongues. The saintly fathers were preserved so that their testimony might affirm the message of right belief.^{Footnote 45}

Athanasius stresses that the Arians disinherited themselves from this past of persecution. They were worthy of blame because they conspired and colluded with the empire: “For the Arians were mixed with the soldiers in order to exasperate them against me” (Athanasius, Fug. 24). The Arians not only mimicked the past of imperial persecution but also took a leading role as the new persecutors of the faith as they cast holy men out of their episcopal territories and attacked the faithful.

The orthodox subject displays an image of the appropriate relationship between Father and Son. Conversely, the heretic mocks this heavenly relationship by acting impiously [ἄσεβείᾳ] (Athanasius, Fug. 2.9). It is clear that Athanasius emphasizes a particular form of filial piety to defend this vision of orthodoxy. That piety, however, is reliant on the torture and death of others. Thus, the resonances of the gender violence first found in his Encyclical Letter continue to ground his heresiological project in these later polemical works. And once again it is Athanasius’s suffering that is described as the test of truth. When it comes to Nicaea’s legacy, Athanasius continues to carve up and scatter the stories of suffering to bring his story of truth to life.