So I am trying to write this series about some Zack Snyder movies. I hope to eventually get to some kind of treatment about the recent Rebel Moon films. I’ve been going over a number of the tropes in the films as I think about them. One of them that has struck out at me is Zack’s choice of linking blue fire swords to the villains and giving red fire swords to the heroes. This is the opposite choice from George Lucas in the Star Wars films, where he gave the good guys blue light sabres and red ones to the bad guys.
It’s an election year in the United States, and those interested in doing their civic duty to vote responsibly will be thinking about Democrats and Republicans, the party of the guys with blue ties versus the party with the guys with red ties.
In short, I’ve had red and blue on the brain lately.
I’ve also been thinking about a personal hero of mine, Carl Jung, and about Joseph Campbell, an expert of the symbolism of myth who himself was influenced by Carl Jung. Joseph Campbell is a personal hero of Zack Snyder, whose artwork I am thinking about.
One of the things about Joseph Campbell that I have been critical of is his advocation of what the tantric yogis of Hinduism call “the left hand path.” Campbell described this path as eschewing the rules and conventionality of the standard “right hand path” for a dangerous and individualistic road to follow.
I’ve really been wanting to wrap my head around this whole red vs. blue, left vs. right phenomenon that seems to be written into humanity’s consciousness somehow. Kabbalah also has a left and a right, that is, the right hand column of the Tree of Life (wisdom, love, victory) as well as a left hand column (understanding, valor, majesty). I’ve been wanting to discover where all these ideas meet, and in order to do so, I’ve been searching the Bible for clues.
I’ve been tempted to apply a reductionist thought process to the ideas in my mind to the effect of declaring the right hand path good and the left hand path bad. However, I found in the Bible a story about a left-handed good guy. Ehud the Judge. I want to talk about this guy. It might be unpleasant to some of you, but I want to go ahead and show you the whole story of Ehud from beginning to end. I think I’ll be able to show you some things in it that you might not see on your own.
Judges 3:15-30
Then the Israelites cried out to the LORD, and the LORD raised up a champion for them: the Benjaminite Ehud son of Gera, a left-handed man. It happened that the Israelites sent tribute to King Eglon of Moab through him. So Ehud made for himself a two-edged dagger, a gomed in length, which he girded on his right side under his cloak. He presented the tribute to King Eglon of Moab. Now Eglon was a very stout man. When [Ehud] had finished presenting the tribute, he dismissed the people who had conveyed the tribute. But he himself returned from Pesilim, near Gilgal, and said, “Your Majesty, I have a secret message for you.” [Eglon] thereupon commanded, “Silence!” So all those in attendance left his presence; and when Ehud approached him, he was sitting alone in his cool upper chamber. Ehud said, “I have a message for you from God”; whereupon he rose from his seat. Reaching with his left hand, Ehud drew the dagger from his right side and drove it into [Eglon’s] belly. The fat closed over the blade and the hilt went in after the blade—for he did not pull the dagger out of his belly—and the filth came out. Stepping out into the vestibule, Ehud shut the doors of the upper chamber on him and locked them. After he left, the courtiers returned. When they saw that the doors of the upper chamber were locked, they thought, “He must be relieving himself in the cool chamber.” They waited a long time; and when he did not open the doors of the chamber, they took the key and opened them—and there their master was lying dead on the floor! But Ehud had made good his escape while they delayed; he had passed Pesilim and escaped to Seirah. When he got there, he had the ram’s horn sounded through the hill country of Ephraim, and all the Israelites descended with him from the hill country; and he took the lead. “Follow me closely,” he said, “for the LORD has delivered your enemies, the Moabites, into your hands.” They followed him down and seized the fords of the Jordan against the Moabites; they let no one cross. On that occasion they slew about 10,000 Moabites; they were all robust and brave men, yet not one of them escaped. On that day, Moab submitted to Israel; and the land was tranquil for eighty years.
Sorry, I know that had to hurt. Reading a whole half of a chapter of the Bible. I want this text available here, though, because if you look into some things, you’ll see a richer picture emerge than what you saw on the first reading.
First, we will start with the name of this hero. In Hebrew, the term Benjamin means “son of the right.” So above, “Ehud the Benjaminite” means “Ehud, the son of the right, a left-handed man.”
Further, we can look at the name Ehud on its own. Exactly what it means is uncertain, but in the Kabbalah, the left hand column consists of three concepts arranged in the order of the mother at the top to the daughter and the grandson below. The mother is Binah (a feminine word meaning “understanding”). The daughter is Gevurah (a feminine word meaning “valor” or “might” or “heroism”). The grandson, though, is Hod (a masculine word meaning “majesty”). This word Hod, the son of the left, so to speak, is based on the same root letters as the name Ehud. If you take the vowels out of the two words, you get the same consonants. While this may seem esoteric and mystical, something to be eschewed by the scientific and rational, Hebrew is a Semitic language that forms words based on adding specific patterns of vowels to specific clusters of consonants to form words of related meaning. In short, this connection of Ehud to Hod is actually a philological characteristic of Semitic languages. So to begin with, if we include references to the Kabbalist Tree of Life with our analysis, this left-handed son of the right is also a grandson of the left, and his name is connected to the concept of majesty, splendor, and glory.
The author may have had some idea of this in his mind when he introduced Ehud using this incredibly clever play on words, but he may have had a more practical reason for mentioning that Ehud was left-handed. The reference to Ehud as a left-handed man describes him as a warrior of the highest caliber. Particularly, he was likely to have been introduced as an expert archer. Let me explain.
The history of the firearm is a long and storied one extending back to the most ancient of times, but they entered the scene of mass usage in large armies during the later renaissance and early enlightenment periods. It may come as a surprise, but when firearms were introduced, they invariably possessed less range, less accuracy, and less stopping power than an arrow launched from a longbow made of English oak.
Why then were they adopted? From the earliest times until today, a rifleman can be trained to competency in a matter of days, but an absolutely effective archer took years to train. Ancient armies used to employ lesser-trained archers en masse, teaching them to simply fire their arrows into the sky and hope that they hit the enemy formation in the distance. Zack Snyder’s 300 and Zhang Yimou’s Hero contain incredible scenes with masses of descending arrows darkening the sky with their number. It doesn’t take much training to accomplish this, but you have to have a lot of archers.
On the contrary, the Lord of the Rings trilogy introduced Legolas, the elven archer capable of incredible feats with his arrows that he could fire at any target at any range under any circumstance with machine gun rapidity. The various Robin Hood movies also capture this essence of the super-skilled archer as a type of warrior superior to any swordsman. Kevin Kosner’s Robin Hood is my personal favorite. Even John Rambo preferred the silent lethality of a compound bow to a rifle.
With this in mind, let’s turn our attention to the defense of ancient near eastern cities. In the land of ancient Israel, cities were built on top of massive hills called “tels” and surrounded by thick walls. The hills the cities sat on were etched by paths that spiraled around the hill, going around the tel as a kind of ascending staircase from the bottom of the hill to the city gate at the top. If you were going to attack the city, you were going to have to march your army along that path, spiraling around that hill from the bottom to the top up to the city gate. All the while, that city’s archers would be standing on top of the wall firing arrows at your troops. There wasn’t enough space on the wall for thousands of archers, and those archers weren’t going to have the luxury of firing into the sky on top of distant enemies. They were going to have to shoot straight into the eyes of masses of hostile soldiers marching straight into their home, where their wives and children awaited anxiously about news of their husbands’ victory or failure.
Now if that spiral path to the gate wrapped counterclockwise around the tel, the archers wanting to get the best shots at the enemy while they were the furthest away would have to shoot left-handed.
In athletics we know the stories of those pitchers training day and night for years to learn the art of slipping that ball past that left-handed power hitter. In boxing there are the stories of the irresistible left uppercut that normal men just have such a hard time defending against. Right up out of your blind spot and through your brain.
While titling Ehud as a left-handed son of the right is a clever play on words, and one that contains references to mystical kabbalistic concepts, most scholars see the description as a reference to Ehud as an unstoppable warrior embodying the summa of training, dedication, and expertise.
Next we see that Ehud carried a double-edge dagger or sword. This is a weapon that kills with a sharp point or a slash from any side. It embodies a kind of a trinity of sorts, though not the poorly described equilateral triangle defined by the Christians at the Council of Nicaea, but rather an isosceles triangle with one point and two sides much like the unique God represented by the Word of God on the one hand and the Holy Spirit on the other. That is, God expressed through his Shekhinah. In terms of Kabbalah, we have the top sphere of Keter supplemented by the right and the left hand paths.
Next we see that Ehud did not simply attack all at once. First, he came with an entourage to pay tribute to the evil king Eglon, then the delegation went home via the town of Pesilim. At that point, Ehud returned to the evil king by himself. The paying of tribute was a kind of reconnaissance mission. He learned the layout of King Eglon’s palace and and who would be there to defend the king, and then he formed his plan of battle. So the story of Ehud contains a war with two advents.
The myths of the world are replete with stories of gods who do their best work the second time around. This is most notable in the stories of resurrected gods. In Egypt, Osiris was killed by Set, but became king of the afterlife after being resurrected by Isis. Dionysus of the Greeks was killed by Titans at Hera’s orders, but Zeus resurrected him. Among the Norse, Baldr, the god of light, was killed by Loki, but was prophecied to return at Ragnarok at the end of the world. In modern Judaism, the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, held by many in the Chabad organization to be the Messiah, came as a gentle but erudite and wise scholar, but is said to return with full messianic glory after undergoing the trial of death. And finally, the most famous of all, there is Jesus of Nazareth, who came as a poor carpenter performing miracles of healing, but who is also stated to return as a king of angels.
The best stories of divine activity are always two-act stories with a first act of love, light, wine, and words of wisdom followed by a second act of irresistible power. So on the one hand, we have Ehud’s reconnaissance mission contributing to his presentation as an elite warrior, not only the master of bow and blade, but also of tactics and planning. But this two-act scenario places Ehud in the vein of the greatest of heroes, first coming bearing gifts, but then delivering incontestable victory.
Now for this next bit, we really have to look at the text and think about what is going on and do some interpreting. So according to the text, Ehud is back with the evil king, and he is by himself. How did he get there by himself? He was a warrior from a subjugated delegation. Did he just come back and tell everyone, “hey, sorry, I forgot my wallet”? He tells the king he has a message from God, and the king says “silence!” And everyone around the king leaves. When this warrior from a subjugated nation tells the king that he has a message from God, the king says “silence!” And everyone protecting the king leaves! This makes no sense whatsoever on its face. So let’s think about how something like this could happen. The king was in his upper chamber, says “silence!” And everybody leaves. It seems like the king’s protectors don’t know Ehud is there. So how about this for a scenario:
Ehud sneaks back into the king’s bathroom. The king goes into the toilet by himself, sees Ehud there armed and armored telling him he has a message. The king tells Ehud to shut up, but says nothing more, fearing what is about to come. The king’s guards outside think the king wants to drop a deuce in peace without their chatter, not wanting them to invade his privacy, so they all head out to give the king some alone time. At that point, Ehud delivers King Eglon to his death.
We don’t know the details, but Ehud’s use of stealth seems to create a kind of confusion that gives him some time alone with the king on the commode. If something like that happened, we have to ask how Ehud got back in and reached that private inner chamber. Now these ancient cities actually had primitive forms of plumbing where excrement would fall through a hole and downward through the city wall and outside the city. It may just be that Ehud crawled up that drainpipe into the king’s private bathroom, met the king and forced an exchange where the king sent his protectors away, killed the king, locked the doors so that nobody would find out what happened until long after he was gone, and slid back down through that sewage pipe out of the city unnoticed.
This is my interpretation about how Ehud single-handedly slew King Eglon. I did not make it up. I first heard it while a student in Germany. Now if this is accurate, we have a picture of Ehud crawling up a pipe full of King Eglon’s feces in order to stab him in his fat gut to the point where the dagger and his arm were covered in Eglon’s feces, and then he slid down that pipe full of Eglon’s feces again to victory.
The whole story is one of Ehud killing Eglon via a carefully orchestrated plan, executed in absolute dedication, and of being covered in Eglon’s crap. Again, we have the perspective of Ehud as an undeterred force of absolute dedication, but further, we have another presentation of Ehud as participating in the common pattern of victory through a crucible of misery, as Baldr, Osiris, Dionysus, the Rebbe, and Jesus.
Ehud the left-handed man even bears some resemblance to Tyr of Norse mythology, whose right hand was severed by the Fenris Wolf. Among the Norse, Tyr, the god of justice, is a left-handed man.
From here, though, knowing the story of Ehud, whose name means “majesty,” the grandson of the Tree of Life’s left-hand path, a discussion of that tree and the relationship of the spheres on the left to the spheres of the right should ensue. But I am trying to keep these posts as simple as possible, so I’ll have to talk about that at some later point, or you can figure that part out on your own.