No ordinary woman

September 3, 1943, sixty-seven years ago today, my mother and father were married. 

Continuing this week’s theme of wells and marriage, and in my late parent's honor, here is an interesting water story from The Book of Joshua.

When the Hebrew tribes invaded Canaan sometime around the 14th century BCE, the city of Debir in the northern Negev proved a tough town to conquer.

As the commander in charge of the southern campaign, Caleb offered an incentive to whoever successfully captured the city - his daughter Acsah’s hand in marriage. Her cousin Othniel rose to the challenge and won both the battle and the bride.

Offering a daughter as the prize for military victory hints at the position of women in that society, but this story also shows us the resourcefulness of this woman. She is not just a trophy wife. She understands the realities of life.

For her dowry, Acsah asks her father for farmland. She knows that marriage alone is not enough, that a young family needs some real estate as well as love to live on.

While the men divide up the land, this woman is thinking about the practicalities of raising a family there. And she is not going to let the opportunity slip.

The Negev is not an easy place to farm.   Its name means ‘dry country’. The Negev is hilly, if not mountainous, poor in rain and with few sources of underground water. What rain it does receive drains to the east in narrow canyons and to the west along shallow wadis. Acsah knows that without water to irrigate your fields, land isn’t worth very much.

So after inspecting her dowry, Acsah adds an addendum. “Since you have given me land in the Negev, give me also springs of water.”

So Caleb’s endows his daughter with springs - not just one, but two - an upper and lower spring, a rare double source of available water.  A set of naturally occuring springs at different altitudes is a feature of the topography southeast of Hebron - and interestingly, excavations there in 1968-69 turned up lots of material from the time of the conquest.

Acsah's story is much more than historic trivia and a vignette of family life. Her request is about necessity, not greed. The point of this story in the Hebrew scriptures is that fair allocation of the land requires access to adequate water. Acsah’s demand to her father represents the plea of the powerless crying for justice from the king.

Justice is the life-blood of society as water is life for the land.

This story from Israel’s first occupation of the land illustrates one of the critical factors afflicting Israel and many other countries today – the scarcity of water resources.

I wonder . . . what would happen if government leaders everywhere were to commission the mothers and daughters of the land to resolve the scandalous disparities around access to water and to find equitable solutions that help family life to flourish?

Thanks, mom and dad, for all you did to raise a family - even when the land was dry.