CW: sexual violence against women
In Genesis 16, Abraham and Sarah sinned. I have always been taught that their sin was failing to trust that God would follow through on the promise of future children and taking matters into their own hands by getting Hagar to bear a child for them. Nobody’s perfect, am I right?
But when I look at this story again, it’s evident that the sin is most truly against Hagar. Abraham rapes her, an enslaved woman with no choice or control over her own body, and forces her to bear him the son he believes he has coming to him. It doesn’t matter if this was an accepted practice in the culture around him; rape isn’t something that becomes less or more wrong from one place and time to another. In a way, the two sins are related––if Abraham had trusted God, then he wouldn’t have sexually victimized a woman for his own gain. Ultimately, God doesn’t allow him to benefit from his sin, instead making him wait many more years for Isaac to arrive.
God’s promises to Abraham will not be carried out through rape and sexual slavery.
Every time Abraham raped Hagar, God saw. Every time Sarah mistreated Hagar out of jealousy, forcing her to do manual labor and beating her (and even, according to some rabbinical interpretations[1], causing her to miscarry her first child before eventually becoming pregnant with Ishmael), God saw that too. When Hagar fled into the wilderness out of desperation, God saw her and gave her water and hope for the future, a future that wouldn’t belong to Abraham’s family but to her own.
As Rachel Held Evans reminds us in a creative retelling of the story, “Just one person in all your sacred Scripture dared to name God, and it wasn’t a priest, prophet, warrior, or king. It was I, Hagar––foreigner, woman, slave.” It’s a good point––all of the other names we use for God from directly from God, but not this one: Hagar names God El Roi, The God Who Sees, for “I have seen the One who sees me.”[2]
The Bible’s Great MenTM
God also saw Tamar’s suffering, even when her own father didn’t.
Tamar was a princess, the daughter of King David, the legendary “man after God’s own heart.” One day, her half-brother Amnon begs her to come to him because he is sick and needs his sister to care for him. As soon as she arrives, the not-at-all-sick Amnon overpowers and rapes her. Then he throws her out of his room, overcome with loathing for her, casting her out to face the consequences of his treatment of her all alone––she will be considered “defiled” and will never marry or have a family of her own, forced to live under the same roof as her rapist, the future king, for the rest of her life.
In 2 Samuel 13 it says, “When King David heard of all these things, he became very angry, but he would not punish his son Amnon, because he loved him, for he was his firstborn.” Amnon is the crown prince. David is the only person in the kingdom with the power to hold Amnon accountable, and he won’t do it. Maybe he just wants to protect his beloved son, or maybe he thinks it would be hypocritical to punish Amnon for something David himself had done to Bathsheba. It doesn’t really matter.
It’s her brother Absalom who stands up for her. He’s the one who puts her under his protection and welcomes her into his home, and even names one of his own daughters after her. He is the only man in the story who treats her like a person. Eventually he kills their half-brother Amnon in revenge, and later leads an uprising against their father and takes his throne. A few years after this story he is defeated and then murdered.
In the end, we never hear about Tamar again, and the only witnesses to the injustice done to her are God and her dead brother Absalom.
I only ever learned about Absalom as a rebellious son who rejects God’s anointed king, one of the Bible’s Great MenTM. Absalom is supposed to be the bad guy. Maybe the people teaching me the Bible in Sunday school thought I was too young for the rest of the story, or maybe I just didn’t understand it. But reading it as an adult, I probably wouldn’t trust in the holiness and divine right to rule of a man who abuses his power to satisfy his own sexual urges and raised his sons to do the same, either, if I were Absalom.
Cedar Rapids-based journalist Lyz Lenz wrote about identifying with this story when she learned that one of her sisters had been abused by a family member:
“Like Absalom, I railed and screamed and demanded justice… Over and over, my family told me to forgive to find God. Finally, I was told that maybe nothing had happened. Maybe, my mother said, I needed to be quiet and stop trying to tear the family apart. So nothing was ever done and the statute of limitations was allowed to pass.
“I remember calling another sister on the phone during all of this. I was yelling at her. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is why I don’t want to hear from you. This is why no one will talk to you. I’m afraid you are going to do something. You, out of everyone, are the most angry.’
“This infuriated me even more. ‘Why is that?’ I asked. ‘Why am I the only one angry? Isn’t it right to be angry about this? Shouldn’t we all be angry?’”[3]
Shouldn’t we all be angry? But we aren’t. Too often we don’t even know, or at least we don’t want to know, because it’s more convenient to believe that our heroes would never. But the story of, well, most of human history is of suffering passing under the radar because it was inflicted by Great MenTM whom we prefer to think of as the good guys.
Closer to Home
One evening in 1944[4], Recy Taylor was walking home after a late church service in Abbeville, Alabama when a group of six men kidnapped and gang raped her at gunpoint. She went to the police, and even though all six men were positively identified and one confessed, none were ever arrested and a grand jury declined to indict any of them. In the months after the attack, Mrs. Taylor received death threats, her home was attacked, and her character was smeared by those who wanted to make it all seem like her fault.
The state of Alabama didn’t apologize until 2011, nearly seventy years late.
She was black, and they were white. That was all it took for these men to be able to prey upon Recy Taylor and get away with it. Concern for the safety of white women has long been a key excuse for white men who wanted to attack black men, but black women had no recourse when they were attacked by white men. White men have been the Great MenTM, the heroes of American history since it began, and like Amnon, the least likely to be held accountable for the violence they inflict on the powerless.
The grand jury refused to see what was right in front of its face, the violent crime against Mrs. Taylor, but God saw. God saw her when she was alone and vulnerable, at the mercy of six white men on the prowl. God saw her in the months and years that followed as she fought for justice and never got it. God saw her when she stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep because of the nightmares[5], when she felt hopeless and depressed and numb, when she started every time a man entered her field of vision or someone tapped her on the shoulder from behind. God suffered in each of those moments with her.
Before Our Eyes
Recently, a military coup took place in Myanmar. The democratically elected civilian leadership has been arrested, including head of state Aung San Suu Kyi, a legendary political leader and human rights activist whose credentials and honors include the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. She also represented Myanmar at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, where she tried to convince the international community that she was not, in fact, presiding over the military’s ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state, Myanmar, including a systematic campaign of “rape, murder, and destruction.”
For most of history, war rape has been considered at worst an unfortunate byproduct of armed conflict, not part of the conflict itself. Jean-Paul Akayesu was the first person ever convicted for wartime rape in 1998 when, for the first time in legal history, “The Rwanda Tribunal handed down a conviction for rape as a crime against humanity, and they held further that the rapes, which had been condoned and encouraged by Akayesu, also constituted the crime of genocide.”[6] A handful of convictions followed in places like Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
But in Rakhine state, according to a 2017 UN report, an estimated 52% of Rohingya women were raped by military forces with complete impunity in a deliberate effort to terrorize the population and replace the next generation with Burmese babies instead of Rohingya ones. Thousands upon thousands of women were victimized as a matter of policy and then dismissed by military officials calling it “Fake Rape” and saying things like, “These women were claiming they were raped, but look at their appearances––do you think they are attractive enough to be raped?”[7] Those officials now run the country.
I can count on one hand the number of news stories or articles I’ve seen in the Western media about these war crimes happening in plain sight. We just don’t want to see it. But God continually bears witness to these horrors, the sorrow and pain of each and every Rohingya woman and child.
Why am I telling all these stories? Precisely because we don’t want to see them. But they are happening right before our eyes, and we do not get to look away.
“Some folk think Christians shouldn’t lament, that our every word should be praise,” writes the Rev. Wil Gafney. “And so some folk try. They go through the motions. Haven’t you seen folk who mouth the words of praise because they believe that’s what they must do no matter how they feel, and their praise doesn’t quite reach their eyes? Their eyes tell the story of their soul’s sorrow. But the church isn’t comfortable with lament.”[8]
It’s easier to look away because then we don’t have to witness the heartbreak, the suffering, the despair, the blood. We don’t want to sit and feel for ourselves, let alone anyone else. But God invites us into the song of lament that has been sung since creation was first broken, the tears that God has been weeping all along for what we humans do to one another, for Hagar, for Tamar, for Recy, for the nameless billions crushed under the feet of the Great MenTM of history. Lament is holy, and it is vital. Without it we turn our backs on the suffering Christ who lives in the least of these.
The Weeping Deity
In the fictional universe created by J.R.R. Tolkien for The Lord of the Rings, there is a Creator figure named Eru Illúvatar who delegates much of the job of ruling Middle Earth to a pantheon of angels, who enter creation and act as gods known as the Valar. In terms of fiction writing, it’s sort of a fun way to incorporate both Tolkien’s Catholic faith and his love of ancient mythology into his work. Most of the Valar have their mythological equivalents elsewhere: Manwë is a sky god, Ulmo is a sea god, Mandos judges the dead, Yavanna tends to growing things, Aulë the Smith builds and invents, et cetera.
But there is one who doesn’t quite fit, who doesn’t have a counterpart in any ancient pantheon that I could find. Her name is Nienna, and her job is to weep. She is “acquainted with grief, and mourns for every wound [the earth] has suffered… and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope.” She also “brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom.”[9]
Interestingly, her most famous protégé is none other than Gandalf, one of the wisest and most important characters in the trilogy.
Tolkien was a World War I veteran who lost many of his friends while fighting in the Battle of the Somme, one of the deadliest battles in human history (with more than a million casualties). Here certainly was someone acquainted with grief, who knew the terrible things humans are capable of doing to each other. Even if Gandalf weren’t reason enough to underscore Nienna’s importance to Tolkien, her distinctive role in representing the divine on earth brings to the fore the very facet of the character of God we’ve been discussing here: that God sees everyone who suffers, and weeps for them.
When I first read about Nienna as a child, it didn’t make sense to me that she would spend all her time weeping. After all, I wondered, if that’s all she does, won’t she eventually run out of things to mourn? But I don’t wonder that anymore. It’s a relief, really, because I do not have enough minutes in the day to truly mourn for every sorrow I witness, let alone the ones I don’t. But God does.
[1] Tamar Kadari, “Hagar: Midrash and Aggadah,” Jewish Women’s Archive.
[2] Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, p. 32.
[3] Lyz Lenz, “Swinging with Absalom,” The Toast.
[4] “Feb. 14, 1945: Grand Jury in Henry County, Alabama, Refuses to Indict White Attackers of Black Woman,” Equal Justice Initiative.
[5] “Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Symptoms and causes.” Mayo Clinic.
[6] Richard J. Goldstone Hon., Prosecuting Rape as a War Crime, 34 Case W. Res. J. Int’l L. 277 (2002)
[7] Christina Lamb, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women, p. 71-72.
[8] Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. “A New/Old Psalm of Lament.”
[9] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, p. 28.
Marginal Notes 
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