In the biblical book of Judges, there is a story wherein a Canaanite general fleeing the battlefield asks a woman for shelter, but she murders him in his sleep and turns him over to his enemies.
My question is: assuming there is truth to the story, was this not an egregious violation of hospitality towards a guest, especially as her people were ostensibly at peace with his? If so, why was the act condoned?
Simple—they weren’t at peace. Sisera’s people attacked Jael’s people. Targeted assassination of enemy commander in a war zone? No problem. If he’d wanted better hospitality, he oughtn’t have attacked her people.
Your logic reminds me of the classic definition of chutspah — Dude murders his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court 'cause he’s an orphan.
In my experience, the sacred hospitality of judges typically involves copious Scotch.
And yet Rahab was spared because she was hospitable to the enemy spies.
That’s not to say that’s a contradiction. But it does make sense why people would have problems with this passage. It is one of the more particularly brutal stories in the Bible.
It’s praised as someone of seemingly lower power getting one over on the bad guy. This narrative is common in Jewish myth (Biblical or not). They love an underdog story.
Rahab was spared by the side doing the spying because she was hospitable to the spies. It’s a different situation.
It is quite understandable (and I am sure Sisera was well aware!) that he could expect no mercy nor quarter from the Israelites. The problematic passage is
[QUOTE=Wikisource KJV Judges 4:17]
Howbeit Sisera fled away on his feet to the tent of Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite: for there was peace between Jabin the king of Hazor and the house of Heber the Kenite.
[/QUOTE]
In other words, he expected hospitality from Heber’s clan precisely because they were, at least formally, at peace.
One can infer that the whole thing was a targeted assassination orchestrated by Deborah the judge-prophet, but would it have been considered OK, according to the norms of the time, for Jael to violate neutrality like that? Or perhaps Deborah reasonably assumed that it was war and nobody was likely to do anything about it? I would have thought that hospitality was historically a serious thing and that Heber’s people would not be too happy about the violation of their honour, but their dislike of the Canaanites may have been enough to let the whole thing slide.
My understanding is that Sisera should have looked for Heber and not his wife, he should not have taken refuge in Jael’s tent thereby making her a target to his Israelite pursuers and that he violated the hospitality norms first by asking for a drink and then commanding her to lie on his behalf and say that no man was in her tent. Whether this sufficiently releases her from the bonds of hospitality, I can’t say, but given how the bible speaks of her actions, clearly they don’t find fault with her decision.
I’ve got to say, I completely misinterpreted this phrase the first time I read it. That would have been a huge violation of hospitality, and more than sufficient justification for Jael to kill him.
It’s a good question.
In Judges, the actors were bound by a sacred code of hospitality.
This code would normally preclude murdering a guest. So why isn’t she condemned for doing so?
The answer appears to be that the Caanaite general violated the code of hospitality in the first place, and so she is not bound by it.
Here’s a PDF of an article examining in great detail this question:
http://jeremiahcommunity.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Matthews-Hospitality-in-Judges-4.pdf
To summarize: it is improper (under the patriarchal code in place at the time) for a male guest to approach the tent of a woman to ask for hospitality.
One can see why this would be so - there are lots of reasons. First, it dishonors the patriarch, who is the head of the household - you are supposed to ask him. Second, in a lawless era, it is highly intimidating to approach a woman’s tent and ask for hospitality - the implied threat of robbery, rape or worse always exists.
Next, the Caananite demanded that she stand at the door of her tent and lie to anyone approaching that he was there. This is also a violation of the code. Again, the implied threat - if you don’t lie, I’ll harm you - is obvious.
The important aspect of this story is that in a patriarchal era, men and women were not on the same footing, and while it may seem to us that receiving a male guest is nothing unusual, at the time it would have been clear to the reader that a Caananite general could not reasonably be a “guest” for a woman alone - particularly when he’s ordering her about.
Like in one of those hostage scenes in the movies, when the cops are at the door and the hostage cracks it open and persuades them that everything is fine and the fugitive bad guy isn’t there, while he’s the home invader holding a knife at her back the whole time… She got herself out of a hostage situation. Good for her.
Interesting paper. But I am struck by one thing that surprised me. He asserts that the Sodomites were acting within the rules of hospitality when they attacked the angels. But the Bible at later points flat out says the problem was their violation of the rules of hospitality.
I’ve always assumed that they should have offered the angels hospitality, but they didn’t, but then Lot (the foreigner) did. Hence that was showing that he was good but everyone else in Sodom was not.
To use the logic of the paper, it would be showing a violation of hospitality to aid the reader in accepting Sodom’s final fate.
She really put a peg in “Stockholm Syndrome”. 
Judges 19 presents the charming story of a guy and his girlfriend and servant who decide to spend the night in Gibeah (ironically chosen instead of a neighbouring non-Israeli town which he did not feel comfortable entering).
They are eventually taken in by a resident foreigner, and the paper indeed refers to this as an “improper invitation”, the host not being a citizen. This occurs, however, only after no one else was willing to invite them, which is itself a gross violation of the rules of hospitality according to the paper and common sense. Matthews writes that both the Sodomites and the Gibeatites were technically within their “legal” (what law?) rights to attempt to harm the strangers as a result of the improper invitation, but does not really address the overriding obligation of the townsfolk to accommodate travellers in the first place.
What follows is instructive. The Benjaminites apparently do not have a problem with what befell the strangers staying in their town, but the rest of the tribes clearly do.
Matthews makes a good point that in the biblical narratives the custom of hospitality “seldom… follows proper protocol”. Especially in Judges, events and their consequences are laid out for the reader to ponder. The only law is what is “right in [one’s] eyes”, which is why I was genuinely curious what the tribes’ reasoning would have been in the various cases.
I think what he is saying is that the Sodomites had a legitimate beef with Lot for offering hospitality within their city without their consent, as he wasn’t a citizen.
That doesn’t contradict the point you are making - that the Sodomites ought to have offered hospitality, and were displaying their evil nature by attacking the angels: they were only technically within their rights to do whatever they wanted to the strangers, as they had not offered any protection and were not bound by Lot’s offer of protection.
However, people who go around attacking strangers who have done them no harm, rather than offering them hospitality, are bad people - regardless of whether they were within their rights or not.
This is distinct from the issue of Jael. If the Sodomites had a beef, it was with Lot, not the angels. Jael had a legitimate and stronger beef with Sisera - she was a woman put under some heavily implied threat by the fugitive general. The “hospitality” in his case was improper from the start.
These sections of the Bible are fascinating in an anthropological sense exactly because they show how laws gradually grew out of myth and custom.
There is a good reason why things rarely go well in these stories - things going well doesn’t make for memorable stories. For a story to pass into myth, it has to be interesting, and conflict is interesting.
There is also this factor: the stories often had a polemical purpose that has long been forgotten. Some tribe behaving badly in a story may reflect a dispute at the time the story was redacted …
IIRC the problem with Lot is that the crowd wanted the angels to come out for a good time meet and greet… “Bring them out unto us, that we may know them.” They even passed on Lot’s virgin daughters, preferring to get to know the angels instead.
This did not seem to be a question of who was entitled to offer hospitality and shelter…
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Yes, exactly the same language is used in Judges. A bit of the old ultra-violence.
The scale of the subsequent genocide is utterly mythic, even in today’s terms. One is amazed comparing it to the total population of Israel in 1200 BC.