Honey and Holy Men
Feb 5th, 2021 | By Timothy Han SM ‘22+1
Pictured: honey comb dripping with honey.
In 1909, Ezra Pound published “The Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” a retelling of the Christ story in epic tone. In Pound’s proto-fascist reading, Christ becomes not a sheep led to the slaughter, but a warrior-martyr in the tradition of William Wallace, Joan of Arc, or John Brown. The Christ figure is all-powerful, “a master of men.” Pound’s Christ is not the chief priest whom the Book of Hebrews described, but rather akin to the warlords of Israel’s ancient mytho-history. He is not Melchizedek offering (or receiving) prayer over Abraham, but rather Abraham himself, still bloody from the warpath. In his poem’s last couplet, Pound makes the warrior-martyr analogy explicit by using the image of the honeycomb to link Christ to Samson, Jonathan, and John the Baptist:
“I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb
Sin’ they nailed him to the tree.”[1]
Ezra Pound’s politics were thoroughly repugnant and un-Christian, but it is worth examining the connection he drew between the three aforementioned Hebraic figures. Why do the Biblical writers use an image so tame as the honeycomb, symbolic for the sweetness of God’s law, to link together a violent, warrior tradition in Biblical literature?[2] And what is John the Baptist doing next to Samson and Jonathan?
Samson was one of the great judges of Israel, a warrior who stood up for the oppressed Hebrews against their foreign oppressors. Unique among all the chieftains named in Judges, Samson commanded no warbands, but fought alone. Raging crazily like a lion in the hills, Samson prowled the rugged, Judean countryside. The author(s) of Judges make(s) Samson’s leonine metaphor explicit in an early episode.
Journeying to meet his bride for the first time, Samson briefly leaves the company of his parents and encounters a lion in a vineyard. In a fit of bestial passion, Samson tears apart the lion with his bare hands, and leaves the carcass to rot. A few days later, while traveling to meet his bride again, and bring her home with him, Samson walks past the same carcass. He notices a swarm of bees have used the rotting husk as a shelter to create a beehive. Scooping honey out of the corpse with his hands, Samson returns to his parents and offers some to them, but never tells them how he got the honey.
The previous chapter, Judges 13, describes the painstaking care Samson’s parents took to keep him holy and pure throughout his childhood. Consecrating their heaven-sent child according to the Nazarene rite, Samson’s parents made sure he never drank wine, ate unclean food, or cut his hair. After that prefatory chapter, Judges 14 reads like another fall of man: teenage rebellion, youthful indiscretion, and temptation culminate in a tragic and horrifying saga.
The premise itself of Judges 14 is an act of lust: Samson, desirous of a Philistine woman, disobeys Hebrew tradition and his parents’ advice, deciding instead to intermarry with a foreign people. On the journey to meet the Philistine woman, Samson runs off. Escaping the watchful eyes of his parents, he flees into a vineyard, presumably to find a winepress and drink. Maybe it had long been his habit to drink whenever he could slip away from his parents. Maybe he was just curious what wine tasted like. The next scene––Samson tearing apart a lion with his bare hands––suggests that he is already inebriated. And finally, after the whole encounter, Samson decides not to ritually purify himself after killing a beast, but immediately goes, bloody and drunk, to meet his betrothed for the first time.
Samson’s parents resolutely do not react to this entire ordeal. Somehow, his parents cannot smell the blood on Samson or his clothes. They cannot smell the alcohol on his breath. They ask no questions about where he has been; apparently, it is quite natural for their strictly-raised son to run off for hours at a time without saying anything. The mum resignation of Samson’s parents suggests that he has always been a rebellious child.
Nevertheless, it is on the subsequent journey to bring Samson’s betrothed home that the Nazirite monk commits his greatest sin.[3] On the way back, Samson runs into that same vineyard––again, without his parents, again, to drink. After becoming intoxicated, Samson finds his lion’s carcass, and scrapes out honey from the corpse to eat. This accomplished, Samson goes one step further by giving that sullied honey to his parents to eat. Not only does he know it is against Hebraic divine law to interact with a corpse, every sensible human knows that it is against natural law to scoop out honey from an unburied, decomposing body, and eat it. But in addition to sinning himself, Samson also induces his unsuspecting parents to sin. At least in the Garden of Eden, Adam understood the circumstances of the situation and knowingly made his choice to eat the forbidden fruit. Samson’s parents, by contrast, have no idea that they are eating forbidden food.
The seductive sweetness of honey is an apt analogy for the pride and ruin of Samson. A man too powerful to be bound by God’s law and too weak to resist the temptations of the flesh, Samson lived too much on the side of greatness. He was a freedom fighter for an unfounded nation, the liberator of an ungrateful tribe, surrounded by enemies, betrayed by those he loved. A man of sorrows, Samson sat impotently as his best man cuckolded him, then days later held the charred corpse of his first wife in the ruins of her home, burnt alive by her own people. Hunted like a beast, he was a renegade outside the law, beyond the law, bound by no law––divine or mortal. With the jawbone of a donkey, he made asses of Israel’s oppressors. In the wilderness of Judaea, Samson slaughtered Philistines like sheep.
Samson’s birth was not only a gift to his barren mother, but God’s answer to the prayers of oppressed Israel; Send us a savior, they prayed, and God sent Samson. But ultimately, the liberator was too free-spirited to obey even God’s law, and like an unwieldy blade, failed to accomplish his task. Samson died like he lived: a danger to all. Betrayed to the Philistines by his second lover, his captors put Samson up for show in their great temple of Dagon. Humiliated and scorned, the Hebrew warrior-martyr used his great strength to shake loose the very foundations of the building, and crushed all the scoffing Philistines under the weight of their temple.
If Samson was the antithesis of the law, a free spirit who lived to uproot the very foundations of a tyrannical empire, then Jonathan, Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Israel, was the embodiment of royal authority. Like Hector or Edward the Black Prince, Jonathan is one in a long tradition of warrior-princes who never ascended to the throne. Groomed as the heir-apparent from a young age, Jonathan demonstrated every princely virtue: martial prowess, restraint, humility, and love for his people.
At a time when Israel was so impoverished that only two swords or spears could be found in all the kingdom (one for King Saul and one for Jonathan), the prince led raiding bands against the Philistines. In one feat of martial glory, Jonathan routes an entire Philistine garrison by charging them, nearly by himself.[4] Hot on the chase like a lion who has spotted his scattering prey, Jonathan speeds after the fleeing Philistines, slaughtering one after another, and leaving a trail of dead bodies to mark his brutal ascent. Spurred on by divine favor, Saul follows his son’s charge, and an Israelite warband hunts down the scattered remnants of the Philistine army.
Late in the day, bloody from the pursuit, Jonathan comes across honey in the forest. Famished, Jonathan dips his staff in the honey, and takes strength from it. His horrified companions reveal that Jonathan’s father Saul had issued a royal decree earlier in the day that no Israelite should taste food until they had thoroughly destroyed the enemy. Rebuking his father’s foolishness, Jonathan remarks how hunger had prevented the Israelites from turning a small, tactical victory into a devastating rout.
But the next day, when King Saul inquires again of God what to do, the Lord refuses to answer. Stunned by this divine reproach, Saul swears that whoever had eaten the forbidden food must now surely die, even if it be his own son. Eventually, God judges Jonathan sinful, and picks him out of the entire country to blame. But Saul, reluctant to kill his child, allows the army to beg for Jonathan’s life and spares him, reneging on all his royal decrees and oaths.
The immediate lesson of 1 Kings 14, wherein this story unfolds, is the foolishness of monarchs. King Saul displays his stupidity and stubbornness in making rash proclamations, and his impotence and illegitimacy in refusing to carry out his threats. Nevertheless, somehow, God found that it was not Saul, but Jonathan who had sinned. When the bloody prince first tasted the honey, he had no idea he was disobeying his father: too far ahead in the pursuit, Jonathan had never heard Saul’s command. Even if Jonathan had no knowledge of the law, could he still have sinned?
God could have found Jonathan guilty either for eating the honey, or for disparaging his father, perhaps both. It is ultimately unclear whether God judges Jonathan guilty for the act of eating the honey, although the text strongly suggests so. However, it is clear that Jonathan did sin when he stated the obvious: his father was wrong. This story, written and promoted by court composers, argues that the king is always right, even when he is wrong. Saul, who made a stupid law, is not guilty. Jonathan, who unknowingly disobeyed a stupid law, is guilty.
But for the purposes of Ezra Pound’s analogy, the comparison between Samson, a warrior-monk who sinfully ate honey at the spot of his martial triumph, and Jonathan, a warrior-prince who sinfully ate honey in the midst of his victory, is obvious. Like Samson, Jonathan would ultimately die fighting in the Philistines. In the tragic battle of Mt. Gilboa, the Philistines killed Crown Prince Jonathan, two of his brothers, and King Saul, shattering the Israelite monarchy and plunging the disunited tribes of Israel into civil war for a decade.
Finally, one arrives at the outlier: John the Baptist. The great herald of Christ, John appears in every gospel text, but perhaps features most prominently in the opening chapters of Mark. The first to write a gospel book, Mark begins the New Testament by introducing us to a primitive desert prophet, alone in the wilds of Judaea. This holy man named John eats honey and wild locusts, clothes himself with camel’s hair, and baptizes his followers in the waters of the Jordan.
Even if he was not a warrior like Samson or Jonathan, John the Baptist demonstrates a number of similar leonine qualities. Mark’s decision to open his New Testament with “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” imitates the mighty roar of a lion. In fact, when Jerome sought to assign each gospel writer a symbolic cognate from the four living creatures of Ezekiel 1, he assigned the lion to Mark. By comparing John, Christ’s herald, to a lion, Mark also makes the argument that Jesus is the heir to the throne of Jerusalem. The kings of Judah had adopted the Lion of Judah as their royal mascot: what better argument for Christ than to depict his herald as a lion in the wilderness of Judah?
But unlike Samson, John the Baptist is a holy man untainted by temptation. Unlike Jonathan, John has rejected society. A Levite by lineage, John is no prince, but a desert seer and holy man. In many ways, John closely resembles Adam in the Garden of Eden: alone, constantly in communion with the divine, and subsisting only on that which God has naturally provided for him. John even dresses like his primordial ancestor. Just as God made clothes out of animal skins for Adam and Eve, John makes clothes out of animal hair and skin.
Mark explicitly depicts John like Adam in order to make the point that his book is a new Genesis for the human race. When one opens up the gospel of Mark, one opens up a story about the beginning of the Christian world. John heralded the fulfillment of the old order, and the revelation of the new.
Here was a holy man who, instead of liberating his people from a foreign occupier through his terrible, swift sword, liberated his people from the oppression of sin through the sword of truth. John preached about the coming of the Messiah that his disciples might know the truth, and that the truth might set them free. Here was a monk set apart from all others, who, instead of falling into material temptation like Samson or Jonathan, faithfully lived by the Lord’s righteous creed. John defended his flock not against the slings and arrows of Philistine armies, but the scoffing contempt of Pharisee scribes. John used his leonine ruggedness not to win political power like Samson the Judge or Prince Jonathan, but in order to humbly surrender his disciples to Christ.
Most importantly, just as honey functions as a plot device to reveal the sinfulness of Samson and Jonathan, in Mark, honey demonstrates the faithfulness of John the Baptist: a holy man who actually obeyed God, even unto death. A drunk, bestial Samson disobeyed divine and natural law by eating honey and––foreshadowing his own temptation––tempted his parents into unknowingly eating forbidden food. Jonathan, prideful after a great victory, ate honey in violation of his father’s law and, when confronted with his sin, chose not to repent but to rebuke God’s anointed king. But John the Baptist, instead of succumbing to temptation or vanity, meekly went into the wilderness to obey God’s calling. In Mark, the poverty of John’s diet––honey and locusts––emphasizes the severity of the Baptist’s obedience. At the outset of a book of new beginnings, Mark juxtaposes John against the honey-eating, holy men who came before him, and uses the Baptist to herald the new glories of the Christian gospel.
Honey works as a plot device to reveal the all-too-human glories and sins of three Biblical holy men, revealing the intemperate indulgence of Samson, the rebellious pride of Jonathan, and the meek submission of John. And finally, in the new Genesis found in Mark, Scripture transforms honey from the reward of self-aggrandizing victors, to the sweetness found in obedience to Christ’s Law.
Notes
[1] Ballad of the Goodly Fere, Ezra Pound, New Directions Publishing, 1909, https://poets.org/poem/ballad-goodly-fere.
[2] “How sweet are your words to my taste, / sweeter than honey to my mouth!” - Psalm 119:103.
[3] The word monk is both anachronistic and an exaggeration, but the connotation of someone uniquely and distinctly set apart for a holy lifestyle appropriately describes the Nazirites.
[4] Jonathan’s armorbearer joined him in the assault.
[5] Mark 1:3.