Canter Bridge

Poetic justice is not the only pattern that the biblical literature discerns amid the apparent chaos of events. It is merely the most recurrent and arguably the most persistent voice arguing for a guiding hand behind history’s flow. Sometimes poetic justice is recognized and even articulated by the Bible’s least likely players.

Take Adoni-Bezek. The very definition of petty royalty, this early victim of Israel’s conquest of the land it was learning to call its own is remembered only because of his odd punishment and the colorful reflection it evoked.

When Judah attacked, the Lord gave the Canaanites and Perizzites into their hands and they struck down ten thousand men at Bezek.

So we are told early in the book of Judges. The language carefully underscores the claim that the land is YHWH’s gift to Israel, a framing of conquest that will occasion Israel’s blessing when recognized and her severest chastisement when amnesia trumps gratitude.

Adoni-Bezek would have been passed over un-named as just one of the chieftains that got thumped by Israel on its way to possession of the ‘promised land’, except for the detail that invading Judah cut off the man’s thumbs and big toes. In Hebrew, as in many languages, these two minor appendages are called by the same name. There may have been a symbolic element in their amputation, perhaps owing to the critical role played by the movable thumb in any human being’s ability to grasp and manipulate just about anything.

Adoni-Bezek comes to terms with his lost digits with remarkable equanimity.

‘Seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off have picked up scraps’—awkwardly, one supposes—’under my table. Now God has paid me back for what I did to them.’

One final summary closes this Canaanite king’s cameo.

Then they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died there.

That the narrative reports this king’s verbal resignation to events and does not refute it suggests that the book’s plot respects and even affirms his interpretation of events. Justice has rung poetic by joining Adoni-Bezek to the ranks of the vanquished thumbless. As he reports, ‘God’—or perhaps the gods as he might have meant it—has done the thing.

The Hexateuch is both taciturn and resolute about what cannot be known. Witness Deuteronomy 29.29. Yet one is instructed here and throughout the Bible’s pages to observe patterns and, with due caution, to trace the movements of heaven’s hand in them.

Chaos is not only YHWH’s first adversary and humanity’s greatest terror. It is also, one might conclude, unnecessary.