It wasn’t lactose intolerance.
AM Psalm 75, 76 • PM Psalm 23, 27
Judges 5:19-31 • Acts 2:22-36 • Matt. 28:11-20
Sisera, a Canaanite general, had just been decisively defeated by the Israelites. He was fleeing the battlefield and escaped into a tent, in which Yael, an Israeli housewife, was alone. Sisera begged Yael for some water, Yael instead gave him warm milk from a skin made from a calf’s stomach. (Btw, this typically turns milk into cottage cheese within a fairly short time).
Sisera suddenly got sleepy, and when he was conked out, Yael took a tent peg, and hammered it through his head. What was the most important issue for later all-male Biblical exegetes? How was Sisera so easily overcome? [The following are published proposals.]
Warm milk made him sleepy.
Warm milk made him sleepy, and he dreamt of the gorgeous Yael, and had—something the old Boy Scout Manual warned against—“a nocturnal emission,” which so weakened him, Yael got the drop on him.
Sisera had sex with a compliant Yael seven times, was exhausted, and died blissfully happy, except maybe for the splitting headache.
I vote for the most astounding “Hypothesis 4.” Yael just got the job done without the need for any “mansplaining” of how to go about it.
Written by Tony Stankus
Tony Stankus, MLS, FSLA, now 71, Distinguished Professor and Health Sciences Librarian at the U of A, gets to add another acronym to his name this August: SLA HOF, Special Libraries Association Hall of Fame. Like God’s grace, it’s unmerited, but even greater than this is that I am so grateful that I have good people with whom I can share this: the priests and people of St. Paul’s.