Judaism's forgotten warrior queen
...And why we should stop neglecting so much else in Jewish tradition
The Lord will give Hephzibah, the mother of Menahem b. Ammiel, a staff for these acts of salvation. A great star will shine before her. All the stars will swerve from their paths. Hephzibah, the mother of Menahem b. Ammiel, will go forth and kill two kings, both with hearts set on doing evil (see Dan 11:27). The names of the two kings are Nof, king of Yemen, who will wave his hand (Isa. 11:15) at Jerusalem, and the name of the second, is Iszinan, king of Antioch.
(Sefer Zerubbabel, trans. Martha Himmelfarb)
Sefer Zerubbabel is a prophetic, pseudepigraphic work that exerted tremendous influence on Judaism until at least a few centuries ago. No less a figure than Eleazer of Worms referred to it as a baraita (which is a complicated but significant designation). Sefer Zerubbabel holds the distinction of being the first work to give much detail on the narrative of Mashiach ben Yossef, the first messiah figure. In accordance with more well-known works, Sefer Zerubbabel’s Mashiach ben Yossef will fight a war, die, and be resurrected by Mashiach ben David - the much more famous messiah whose utopian dynasty will last forever in the Messianic Age.
To my point, Sefer Zerubbabel also contains our tradition’s only warrior woman: Hephzibah, mother of Menahem b. Ammiel, the final messiah.
We have other women in the tradition who lead in battle (Deborah) and who seduce and kill evil opponents (Yael and Judith). But other than Hephzibah, we don’t have another warrior woman who goes into battle and engages the enemy firsthand.
And what a thrilling image the story graces us with! Hephzibah has a personal star and the other stars make way for her as she heads into the thick of war.
She’s a confusing character in some ways. For instance, her name comes up briefly in the book of Kings as the mother of a character named Menahem, but otherwise the Hephzibahs of Tanakh and Sefer Zerubbabel don’t seem connected. Her name is also a future name of Israel, per Isaiah.
But confusion over Hephzibah’s origins and the pseudepigraphic nature of Sefer Zerubbabel don’t fully explain why Hephzibah has been forgotten by the tradition (and by Jewish education). Zohar remains a widely-known work despite being centuries younger than Sefer Zerubbabel and just as pseudepigraphic. Oh yeah, Zohar also references Hephzibah and Sefer Zerubabbel’s story:
Hephzibah, wife of Nathan son of David, who is the mother of the Messiah, Menahem son of Ami’el … will come forth and announce the good news, and she is in the category of herald of joy to Zion.
(Zohar 3:173b, trans. Daniel C. Matt)
Perhaps the damning aspect of Sefer Zerubbabel is its focus on Mashiach, which doesn’t align with Reform Jewish soteriology. In my context - Reform Judaism - that might be enough to make the book at least not useful. But the biblical Prophets refer to Mashiach constantly.
However, for Orthodox Jewry, a more damning aspect of Sefer Zerubbabel is likely its association with Sabbateanism, particularly Nathan of Gaza’s new version of it.
This issue shouldn’t have much impact on how heterodox Jewish hashkafot should respond to Sefer Zerubbabel, but it probably has. (I use hashkafah loosely for convenience’s sake.) Even as prominent progressive Jewish leaders such as R” Jericho Vincent and R” Jill Hammer have begun evenhandedly reassessing Sabbateanism and Frankism, we’ve tended to take orthodox stances on the movements as implicitly dogmatic.
My point here isn’t to get into Sabbatean debates, although if you (hypothetical reader) check out R” Vincent’s piece on the matter, you’ll get a heavy dose of the new perspectives out there from greater authorities than myself.
My broad point is that we’re forgetting a lot of the feminist potential of Judaism. Progressive Judaism’s nearly sole focus on Chumash, as I’ll refer to the Five Books of Moses for clarity’s sake, prevents us from learning and teaching about some of the most interesting stories - and women - in our tradition.
As a potentially necessary bit of throat-clearing: I’m not a rabbi. I do Jewish educational stuff, but I’m not a veteran in the endeavour. So, if a hypothetical reader has rebuttals or qualms, drop a comment.
Lastly, I also want to note that I’m not criticising individual scholars and educators for not doing what I’m proposing. I’m discussing a general, historical trend in general, historical terms, and making general suggestions for a far more general shift than any one individual can enact. But again, comments will be open, for once, and I’m happy to make corrections.
Seven Prophetesses, minus five
I think subtracting five from seven makes two, but I’m no mathematician. We have seven prophetesses in our tradition: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Hulda, and Esther. Two of those are in Chumash: Sarah and Miriam. Both are fairly major characters. But they’re two out of seven.
Esther, of course, has the Megillah to herself, as well as the holiday of Purim, on which we read her scroll. She’s not in Chumash, but she’s widely known and taught in the heterodox Jewish tradition.
But Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, and Hulda? We rarely discuss them now. I grew up reading about them, because my upbringing emphasised all of Tanakh. So it’s been something of a surprise to find out how obscure they’ve become in many Jewish contexts.
There are numerous interesting women characters in Chumash, between the Matriarchs, Dinah, Serach, Miriam, and more. But just as the bulk of Tanakh is Nakh, the bulk of biblical women are in Nakh - and that’s not mentioning pseudepigrapha, deuterocanon (like Judith and Sefer Zerubbabel’s Hephzibah), and midrashim.
Rejecting most of these works has removed most strong women characters from our memory. Not teaching kabbalah has also led to a forgetting of G-d’s feminine aspects, but that’s a bigger topic I’ll only briefly bring up later.
The simple fact is that most Jews base their knowledge of Judaism on what they encounter more or less involuntarily during their upbringing. They aren’t likely to seek out Nakh study or more niche Jewish history or orthodox subject matter, such as kabbalah.
Beyond its women characters, Nakh also contains the majority of the stories in our tradition that children find engaging. Christians often learn more about these stories growing up than we do! What child wouldn’t find David’s victory over Goliath interesting, or the stories of Samson and Deborah? What about the Medium at Endor? Or the rise and fall of Solomon and his Temple (let alone the midrashim on Solomon’s adventures with demons)? These stories are easy to present in an interesting way to children.
Certainly, Chumash has plenty of interesting stories, but many parashot don’t. A baseline education in Nakh (and deuterocanon and midrash) may well keep kids engaged when saying more about the early stories on Moses and Miriam start to produce diminishing returns.
The negelct of Nakh isn’t a situation in which the baby has been tossed with the bathwater, because none of us would say Nakh or Oral Torah is bathwater, even if some might say deuterocanon is. So the question is, why has Nakh gone by the wayside for our kids and even our adults?
The (specifically Orthodox and Ashkenazi) rejection of Nakh
I realise that I have a tendency to not explain terms because, as the saying goes, Google is your friend. In this case, though, I want to explain what Nakh is, for the sake of emphasis.
Tanakh, a common term for the Hebrew Bible, is an abbreviation for its three parts: Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim. Thus, you’ll sometimes see Tanakh transliterated as TaNaKh. Nevi’im contains the Prophets and Ketuvim contains the Writings, a grab bag category of books such as the Psalms and the Megillot, which include Esther. It’s hard to overstate how important these works are to our tradition. The rabbis cite all of Nakh liberally throughout Oral Torah; it’s hard to follow most of the rabbinic discourses without studying Nakh.
Halakha, Jewish Law, finds much basis in Nakh. As just one example, there has been significant and meaningful halakhic debate concerning suicide; much discussion of the matter centres 1 Samuel. This is a halakhic discussion with much real-world importance and deep emotional potential, and to follow it, a reader needs to know a major moment of Nakh.
Plus, we often wear a Star of David, but who was David? We often discuss the history of Jewry and Israel, and where do we see the ancient conquest of the Holy Land? We often discuss the Temples, but in which books are they discussed? In Nakh!
There’s no Judaism without Nakh, and nobody would deny this.
However, we don’t tend to care much about Nakh in the heterodox context, and often the orthodox context neglects it, too - and there’s a history behind this that I’ll mostly let someone else tell.
R” Eliyahu Krakowski has written an excellent, brief article on this topic, from which I’ll draw quotes and paraphrase. He opens by stating that “the neglect of Tanach study is not a recent phenomenon” among Ashkenazic Jewry. He cites various traditional explanations for why this neglect began and major arguments from rabbis who wanted us to return to studying all of Tanakh.
Sefardim did not reject Nakh, and R” Krakowski cites one particularly interesting explanation for this communal disparity:
…Yekutiel Blitz, the translator of the first Yiddish edition of Tanach, printed in Amsterdam in 1679, offers another theory for why the Ashkenazi educational system overlooks the study of Tanach: Among the Sephardim, teachers were paid by communal funds, but in Ashkenaz every father had to privately hire a teacher for his sons. The father “wants his son to know the entire Torah on one foot before reaching bar mitzvah,” to limit his educational expenses.
R” Krakowski points out that the vast majority of comments on the Ashkenazic neglect of Nakh have been negative, going back to the origins of this issue. He cites a number of raditional authorities, some of whom go so far as to say that not learning Nakh is a violation of halakha. The singular classic defence of neglecting Nakh comes from the Shach:
The Shach argues that the custom not to study Tanach follows the view of Rabbeinu Tam mentioned above, who maintains that since the Babylonian Talmud contains Tanach verses, one fulfills the obligation to study Tanach by studying the Talmud. However, the consensus rejects the Shach’s view—Rabbeinu Tam, most posekim explain, intended his ruling only for those who already know Tanach, but not for students who have never studied Tanach in the first place.
Regardless of interpretations of Rabbeinu Tam - on which the Shach is wrong anyway - it is impossible to grasp Nakh from Bavli.
I’ve heard friends who are in yeshiva say that’s it’s frustrating for them to not learn Nakh because of how much it’s cited in the rabbinic tradition. It’s hard to check an interpretation if one doesn’t know what’s being interpreted! Taking even a major rabbi’s interpretation for granted is hardly the norm in the Jewish tradition.
From the same personal sources, I’ve heard that women tend to learn more Nakh in Hasidic communities. Since I’m not going to do a deep dive into that right now or look into more official sources, I won’t say more on it here. It’s just interesting, to me.
A new challenge to Nakh study, per R” Krakowski, arose in the context of the Haskalah, the “enlightenment” that many Jews hold was a major moment in the secularisation of Judaism, for better or worse.
When we reach the period of the Haskalah, the Enlightenment, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a new justification is introduced for the lack of Tanach study: one who studies Tanach risks being swept into Haskalah. However, even these warnings include an appreciation of the need to know Tanach properly.
I’ll switch orientations here and not comment much on discussions of Haskalah from the orthodox critics’ views. Now I’ll start discussing the application of this discussion to the heterodox context.
There is no application of these arguments to the progressive Jewish context
Given the header of this section, have I wasted space above by going into debates over Tanakh education? Not at all.
My point in including a somewhat lengthy discussion of the history of the neglect of Nakh is to show that the rejection is contingent on time period (mediaevel to now), to culture (it’s specifically Ashkenazic), and to hashkafah (orthodox). The latter point is most significant for my purposes.
While, as R” Krakowski shows, almost all rabbis who have commented on the neglect of Nakh have detested it, he does cite two supporters of it. One is based on the study of Talmud - something rare in heterodox Jewish education. The other is based on a dislike of the Jewish Enlightenment, a movement that almost certainly led to the existence of non-Sabbatean progressive Judaism.
In the progressive, heterodox context, we aren’t generally studying Bavli and we aren’t against much of the impact of the Haskalah. The dissenting opinions based on Bavli and disliking the Haskalah aren’t relevant to us.
To get to my point: the much-despised, historically and culturally contingent neglect of Nakh, with only irrelevant arguments to support it, has no legs to stand on outside orthodoxy. It doesn’t really have legs to stand on in the orthodox context, either.
What we’re losing by losing our canon, and how to bring it back
By neglecting Nakh, we’re losing four or five of our Prophetesses. We’re losing the Medium of Endor, whose reputation is now shifting. We’re losing Ruth and Bathsheba. We’re losing a lot of our women and the Prophets’ female images of G-d. We lose Yael and we lose Proverbs 8.
By neglecting Talmud and midrash, we’re losing, among many things, Bruriah and an awareness of our past treatment of women. We shouldn’t forget the former because she’s a heroine, and we shouldn’t forget the latter because we’re still dealing with it. Losing Oral Torah means we’re losing much of our knowledge of Written Torah, such as Serach’s life; we’re losing our hopeful notion of the future of gender in the story of the diminishment of the moon; and too, too much else to list here.
By neglecting kabbalah, we’re losing most of what we know of Shekhinah and certainly of Binah. G-d’s feminine aspects are among the first pieces of wisdom to go when we forget kabbalah. We’re losing the background of Lekha Dodi and other everyday aspects of Jewish life and gender. We’re losing an accurate idea of the traditions around Lilith.
By neglecting folklore, we lose a lot of our stories of women, our diversity, and thus - ourselves. We’re losing knowledge of our mothers’ sometimes unwritten traditions, such as feldmesten.
By neglecting deuterocanon, we lose Judith, we lose the heroine of 4 Maccabees.
We aren’t just Ashkenazi, and our canon shouldn’t be shaped by notions of Judaism from which we have - for the most part - split. If we’re picking the good and leaving what doesn’t serve us, we need to keep what’s good. There’s no bathwater to ditch when it comes to Tanakh.
There are bigger difficulties here than just adding new readings to institutions’ curricula and classes. It takes time to read the even the basic volumes of the Jewish tradition, let alone the more obscure works I’ve mentioned. Kabbalah is hard for anyone and it’s easy to go astray when plumbing its depths. Talmud dedicates a lot of space to halakha, but there are plenty of sources for just the aggadot, too - including classic ones. Ein Yaakov, anyone?
It’s not just the responsibility of educators in Jewish institutions to bring back the bulk of Jewish literature. Changing what kids learn, read, and come to love depends primarily on how kids are raised by their families, by their communities, and so on. It’s a large shift to make, and I doubt I’ll create such a shift. But I can at least screech about it at the crossroads, or something.
Regardless of the educational setting in which we read it with kids and with each other, Nakh has far more stories that appeal to kids than does Chumash alone. Many stories in Nakh are like fairy tales but sacred.
And if someone wears a Star of David, I hope they’ll find the curiosity to read and talk about David.
What we’re losing by losing the pseudepigrapha
Now the staff that the Lord will give to Hephzibah, the mother of Menahem b. Ammiel, is made of almond wood, and it is hidden away in Rakkath (see Josh. 19:35), a city in Naphtali. This is the staff that the Lord gave to Adam, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and King David. It is the staff that blossomed and sprouted in the tent for Aaron (see Num. 17:23). Elijah b. Eleazar hid it Rakkath, which is Tiberias.
(Sefer Zerubbabel, trans. Himmelfarb)
As always, there’s some greater meaning behind a Jewish story. Not many people have written on Hephzibah. As Himmelfarb notes, even as often as Sefer Zerubbabel comes up in the tradition, Hephzibah pretty much vanishes. The major exception is her brief appearance in Zohar, quoted above. There’s not a lot of groundwork for interpreting her; she’s an enigma.
What I want to highlight - and there’s so much else I want to write about her - is that Hephzibah is a link of the distant past to the future. She’s the inheritrix of a legendary staff and she uses it to bring forth the glorious, messianic future.
She’s not the link of the past to the present. Serach is sometimes posed as such - as the long memory of the current Jewish people - but Hephzibah goes further. Her staff, given to her personally by G-d, hails back to Adam and she thrusts it forward into the time of Mashiach.
There’s some weird pseudepigrapha out there. Some of the hekhalot literature is bewildering even to someone versed in kabbalah. But in some cases, as with Sefer Zerubbabel, it pains me that we abandon characters like Hephzibah.
I was lucky, as a child, to read Tanakh often, both as a work to study and as a fun book of stories, mysteries, and basic guidance on how to live. I was lucky to be encouraged in this activity, and to discuss it around the dinner table as a family.
Proverbs 8 is my favourite part of Tanakh, and has been since from before I started developing longterm memories. I’ll end with part of it. Wisdom is speaking, and Robert Alter translates some of Her words thus:
The Lord created me at the outset of His way,
the very first of His works of old.
In remote eons I was shaped,
at the start of the first things of earth.
…
Happy the man who listens to me,
to wait at my doors day after day,
to watch the posts of my portals.
For who finds me has found life[.]
Edit, 9/6/25: slight edit because I allow comments on all my posts now, so “opening comments for once” is confusing now.