Christine Jeske
In times like these I look to Rizpah.
As our nation responds to the latest in the long line of black lives lost to systemic racism, this scarcely mentioned Bible character exemplifies a marginalized mourner who refuses to be silenced. When seven of her family members are killed over a generations-long conflict, she commits to months of public mourning to bring honor to the dead.
In the faces of the protesters who have risen up across the nation, I see the steely face of Rizpah. In today’s news-feed culture where our fingers so quickly swipe from one headline to the next, could we, like Rizpah, pay attention to any tragedy as long as an entire season?
This is the challenge of Rizpah: Instead of the usual few days of pitying conversation, will we hold this focus long enough to enact change?
Rizpah’s Mourning
Tucked away in the book of 2 Samuel, Rizpah’s story comes late in the rule of king David when the kingdom of Israel has grown to expect peace and prosperity (2 Sam 21:1–14). Then famine strikes, and tensions run high. David asks God what to do. God says there is bloodguilt to deal with—a history of collective societal hurt that David has ignored.
But David doesn’t ask God how to repair those historic sins. Instead David allows those involved to help choose the means of atonement, and they turn, as people have often done throughout history, to blaming the Other. David hands over seven descendants of his political rival Saul’s royal line to be publicly executed.
Among those killed are two children of a survivor named Rizpah.
Rizpah has no means to fight back against these political forces. She cannot hope to undo the history of violence that now has a stranglehold on her family. But she has one ability: the power to make people look. She does this by enacting a rite of public mourning that turns the meaning of these deaths from disgrace to honor. She leaves the bodies of the murdered on the mountainside in plain sight and places sackcloth on a rock to sleep there beside them. Then she refuses to leave.
The Bible records no words of Rizpah, only her actions. For an entire season, perhaps as long as six months, she sits. During that time she “did not allow the birds of the air to come on the bodies by day, or the wild animals by night” (v. 10). It’s impossible to know her precise motives, but by shooing away scavengers, she ensures that the bodies remain—intact, visible, and undeniable in all their terror—for public mourning.
Mourning Black Deaths
As protesters rose up across the nation at the death of George Floyd, the unarmed black man killed by the choking knee of a white Minnesota police officer, we watched the resolve of Rizpah playing out again. She is waiting in bright sunlight and through the darkness for justice. She demands that these lives mattered. Their deaths must be seen and their significance faced.
The Bible does not shy away from the messiness of sociopolitical and economic life. Despite all his psalm-writing and political victory as a man “after God’s own heart” (1 Sam 13:14), David had abused power before (2 Sam 11, 1 Chron 22:8), and these killings contradict Mosaic laws against killing innocents for their ancestor’s sins (Deut 24:16). David’s means of atonement for bloodguilt may have been as culturally accepted in his time as the police tactics of today. But the inadequacy of this violence points us to a coming Messiah, whose reign would be so different.
The artist Lauren Wright Pittman, describing her hauntingly beautiful painting of Rizpah (pictured above, click to expand), writes that “Rizpah’s public unraveling causes the unraveling of David’s distorted version of justice.” She also sees in Rizpah an example for the present. “When we see injustice may we, like Rizpah, climb the mountain of God and defend those who cannot defend themselves. When we see someone unraveling in inexplicable grief, may this sight unravel us from the ways we are entangled with injustice.”
Black politician Stacey Abrams told the New York Times during the first week after George Floyd’s death, “We have to start by saying, what you say and what you feel is real.”1 Once again at the death of George Floyd, as at the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and so many more, the body of another innocent testifies to wrongs that extend beyond these individual bodies. Today the results of systemic racism are plain to see. We have failed to make amends for the legacy of enslavement, segregation, stolen lands, denied mortgages, denied education, and denied dignity.
As a white person who was raised in the same racist lies, who benefited from the same racist systems and was ambivalent to the same violence, I too have had to learn to open my eyes to my complicity for the suffering of people like Rizpah. My people have taken the easy answer—turn our backs and let violence carry on, keeping silent the fact that it reinforces our own privilege. We let the marginalized carry the consequences of their own marginalization. The scars are already manifest. Let us look.
One critique we often hear of protests is that they propose no plain solution. Rizpah, too, waits without offering resolution. What can solve the pain of lives already taken? What can heal the tangle of a history so muddled with violence? Who can replace whole lineages destroyed?
Like Rizpah, black and brown theologians have for many years been asking what it means to hope when surrounded by the innocent bodies of the dead. How should we seek justice when lynchings don’t stop? Theologians James Cone, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Esau McCaulley, among others, refuse to offer easy hope in the face of this nation’s history of killing their people. Like Rizpah, they stand looking for God when too many bodies are already on the ground.
And in turning to God, they see Jesus, also lynched by suffocation at the hands of people representing the state. Jesus knew what it was to cry out to God, asking that the cup of suffering be taken away, and to receive no answer except to drink it to the dregs. But Jesus would demonstrate the resurrecting power of God, the same power that works among us today. Resurrection does not come easy, yet it comes.
Refusing to Look Away
Some time after Rizpah took her stance beside the dead, David came and took the bodies of the seven innocents and others in their family and buried them with dignity. “After that, God answered prayer in behalf of the land” (2 Sam 21:14). Rizpah’s accomplishment was that leaders and bystanders saw. Her actions opened space for solidarity, the respect of memorial, and the possibility of social change.
Already we see wheels of change turning as the death of George Floyd catalyzes more people to acknowledge the wrongs of systemic racism than perhaps ever in this nation’s history. But when the news cycle shifts to the next tragedy du jour, will we maintain the resolve it takes to deconstruct lies and dismantle systems? Do we have Rizpah’s resolve to lay our sackcloth on a rock and hold the public’s focus until justice is done?
Change will take more than a few days of social media posts and testing out the experience of a protest march. What if each of us spent months establishing habits of stewarding the power we hold in our workplaces, schools, civic groups, political circles, and churches to change the systems that keep on killing?
There is not one easy solution to systemic racism, but there is plenty to be done. A six-month commitment to stop looking away could include both learning and action. Racism is a complex subject that takes more than a news article to understand. We need to commit to reading books like The New Jim Crow, White Awake, or I’m Still Here, and watching films like 13th, Just Mercy, and Selma. We need to learn what’s happening in our own communities, and show up. We need to lead honest conversations about racism in every group we belong to, especially if we teach in classrooms or pulpits. We can volunteer in our schools, where the ravages of racism are undeniable. And we can give our time and money to the many organizations where trained professionals are already fighting for systemic change.
What if we stared in the face of this horror called racism and lamented, and then learned to shoulder the hard work of repentance? What if, like Rizpah, we refused to look away?
Christine Jeske is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Wheaton College and author of three books including forthcoming The Laziness Myth.
Image: Lauren Wright Pittman, Rizpah, © A Sanctified Art LLC
- Quoted in Astead W. Herndon, “Black Americans Have a Message for Democrats: Not Being Trump Is Not Enough,” New York Times, May 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/politics/black-americans-democrats-trump.html.[↩]