Category: Prison Conditions

One of the major assumptions of modern penologists is that prison, as an artifact of modernity, came to replace other forms of punishment: executions, maiming, etc. Overall, I think there are three main approaches that support this idea:

The legalistic approach

Some punishment scholars—primarily those who study incarceration from a formal, doctrinal perspective—rightly point out that the legal definition of prison differed greatly in antiquity and in modernity. The modern conceptualization of criminal punishment adheres to the Enlightenment-Era logics regarding the rule of law: laws forbidding undesirable behavior must be preemptively enacted, universal in their verbiage, fairly and impartially applied by an independent judicial entity, and prescribe the minimal amount of set punishment that satisfies retributive and/or utilitarian goals. Descriptions of incarceration in antiquity (and, in particular, in the bible) rarely, if ever, conform to this model: determination of guilt is not a necessary precursor to incarceration, and when it occurs, it does not necessarily reflect what modern doctrinalists would regard as a fair, impartial judicial trial. Sentences, if meted at all, are not necessarily determinate in length. The entry and exit points of ancient confinement facilities are not always well defined and, as we will see, often reflect erratic, casuistic decisionmaking by monarchs in the throes of whims and dreams.

If the argument dismissing incarceration in antiquity relies on legalistic comparisons, it is seriously undermined by the fact that the study of incarceration in modernity has long ago transcended such formal categories. For decades, scholars have been studying the function of legal institutions on the ground, unlimited by the rational or articulated goals of said institutions. The entire field of law and society is concerned with the gaps between “law in the books” and “law in action,” often identifying the ways in which the actual operations of institutions deviate from their legal definitions. More specifically, current scholarship about the modern carceral state applies to an entire body of institutions, facilities, and practices, of a dazzling variety of shapes and sizes, and encompassing multiple goals and functions. Adopting a limiting, legalistic project of studying incarceration would miss out on a wealth of scholarship about pretrial detention, immigration detention, bail, electronic monitoring, parole conditions, and postrelease supervision, as well as on illuminating comparisons between correctional facilities and other forms of extractive confinement, such as cattle towns and private sector surveillance.

In other words, save for when stating the obvious—that confinement systems looked different and served different purposes thousands of years ago—clinging to formalism is not particularly instructive when studying the incarceration experience.

The arc-of-enlightenment approach

By contrast to the legalistic approach, some sociological pioneers have examined penal changes over the longue durée, attributing the emergence of incarceration as the most salient form of punishment to large-scale social transformation. In his classic text The Division of Labor in Society, Emile Durkheim analyzes the shift from simple societies, in which collectivity is a function of sameness and conformity, to complex ones, based on diversification and socio-economic exchange. This shift manifests in numerous ways, one of which is the emblematic penal regime. In a later essay, titled The Two Laws of Penal Evolution, Durkheim observed that punishment would change as societies became more complex: laws designed to address transgressions through repression would shift toward restitution, and corporal punishment would shift toward incarceration. Durkheim, then, tied incarceration to social complexity, which he identified with modernity.

Setting aside the many critiques of Durkheim’s identification of “simple” and “complex” societies, which exceed the framework of this book, it is notable that prison symbolized, for him, a progressive step. Other sociologists were even more explicit in identifying prison with progress. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias advances the idea of a gradual reduction in interpersonal violence as a political and cultural shift. Post-medieval times, Elias argues, saw a top-down trickling of new standards regarding violence, sexual behavior, bodily functions, table manners, etc., from courtier society to lower societal strata, reflecting sublimation and self-restraint.  The formation of this more rarified etiquette paralleled the emergence of the modern state. As monarchs amassed and consolidated power, Elias argues, they assumed a monopoly over legitimate physical violence, centralizing the infliction of punishment and eliminating violent forms of dispute resolution between individuals.

Elias’ observations are echoed in the work of other people who documented long-term trends in crime and punishment. V.A.C. Gattrell notes a decline in bloodthirstiness and delight at spectacles of public savagery in Early Modern England. Robert Nye documents the increasing regulations and limitations on, and eventually decline in and disappearance of, dueling as the modern state assumed a monopoly on punishment. And Pieter Spierenburg notes the gradual disappearance of more savage forms of punishment and the turn toward confinement. In The Spectacle of Suffering, Spierenburg painstakingly documents the gradual disappearance of public executions and the emergence of penal restraint. Importantly, these scholars, especially Spierenburg, shy away from praising these trends as an unqualified good, describing them in neutral language.

The neutrality seems appropriate, given a considerable flaw in Durkheim’s take on the evolution of punishment: the transition from repression to restitution is a premise that careful historical observation does not bear out, and even if plausible, it would not necessarily dovetail with a transition from corporal punishment to incarceration. As Leon Sheleff has observed, social complexity often generates repressive forms of punishment, and as Martin Killias’ careful study of dozens of historical and modern societies shows, a rise in incarceration often occurs alongside repressive efforts.

Moreover, the extent to which these works, which focus on the emergence of the Early Modern European state, can offer useful insights about punishment in antiquity, is very limited. Durkheim and Elias were inspired by dramatic social transformations that occurred in their time and place—the long industrialization process—and likely did not give much thought to their application to a completely different setting. If the emergence of centralized state power represses savagery and interpersonal violence, one might wonder what these big-picture sociologists and historians would make of ancient empires, including those reflecting great levels of sophistication and social complexity, such as ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome. It is hard to responsibly draw comparisons between these empires and the emergence of the European modern state, and even harder to speak of penological parallels, but there are indications that Fourth century Athenians, for example, believed that institutionally channeling anger through formal punishment was beneficial.

The body-to-soul approach

A more sinister take on the emergence of the prison in modernity is Michel Foucault’s influential Discipline and Punish. Foucault observes the emergence of “great confinements” in hospitals, military barracks, schools, and prisons, as a new form of governmentality. At the outset of the book, Foucault contrasts a scene of royally prescribed torture for a regicide, culminating in drawing and quartering the condemned, with a monotonous daily schedule for inmates at a juvenile facility. The shift from the former to the latter, Foucault argues, reflects a turn from centralized, dramatic displays of governing power focused on the body of the condemned to something much more pervasive: a vague but widespread web of institutions designed to produce changes in the soul through surveillance and supervision. As his central metaphor for the carceral, Foucault relies on Jeremy Bentham’s famous prison design: the panopticon. Housed in cells organized in a circle, facing a central tower, inmates have no way of knowing whether they are being watched, and thus begin to control and modify their own behavior to comply with the institutional standards, internalizing them.

Plenty of works about the emergence of the modern prison have adopted Foucault’s observations, finding evidence that control and fear increasingly shape behavior in societies with mass incarceration, identifying carceral features in many settings and areas of life beyond physical prisons, and focusing on the growing classification of people according to risk. There is also evidence that certain punishments, such as the death penalty, are increasingly regulated, medicalized, and removed from the public eye. But importantly, just like Durkheim and Elias, Foucault focuses on the transition from a European court society to the modern state, and the applicability of his framework for understanding antiquity is limited. 

When Foucault identifies incarceration with modernity, he is describing a very particular form of incarceration: one that is highly regulated and operates on a massive scale, according to the government and administration principles of Weberian formal rationality. The basic premise of Foucault’s analysis does not discount the possibility that ancient societies might have had a very different sort of prison, one that exhibits some common features with the “gloomy festival of punishment” era.

Another challenge to Foucault’s observations, as well as those of the other two approaches, has to do with the classification of incarceration as categorically distinguishable from other forms of punishment, often referred to as corporal punishment. And I have to say, the more I think about the history of punishment over the longue durée, the more I realize that the boundary between incarceration and corporal punishment is false. Not only, as I’ve said many times before, is prison itself corporal punishment, but it often comes hand in hand with corporal mortifications of various kinds. People on death row, for example, are incarcerated. People put to hard labor are incarcerated. People awaiting deportation are incarcerated. People awaiting public humiliation are incarcerated.

In other words, incarceration and other forms of punishment do not have the sort of see-saw correlation that simplistic accounts of penology would have us believe. One does not necessarily rise when the other one falls. What throws us off is that the scale of incarceration in modernity is so immense that it dwarfs the other accompanying things. But that doesn’t mean that incarceration wasn’t always there.

Samson Captured by the Philistines

Today’s example of this is Samson, whom, as I’ve just realized, I haven’t yet discussed in the context of the book. The story of Samson’s capture, incarceration, and suicide, is told in Judges 16. If the Joseph/Daniel/Esther trio can be classified as exilic fantasy/folktale and Jeremiah as political thriller, Samson is definitely in the action/adventure category, and while we have plenty of evidence for the existence of the Philistines (though their ethnicity is debated, see here, here, and here), the Samson stories are superhero fiction. By contrast to other judges, characterized by their wisdom, righteousness, and/or military strategic acumen, Samson is, first and foremost, a man of astounding physical force. David Grossman’s terrific reimagining of the Samson story casts him as a man of contradictions: his blessing is his curse, he is a terrifying antagonist of the Philistines but is fatally attracted to Philistine women, and his desire for vulnerability and openness is his undoing.

What leads to Samson’s incarceration is his disclosure to Delilah that his physical prowess stems from his long hair. Once he falls asleep, she cuts his tresses, and begins to torture him. Interpreters differ in how they understand this torture: some believe she called someone else to cut Samson’s hair, and some believe that she started taunting him physically to test whether, indeed, his power has dissipated. Then she calls out that the Philistines are upon him, and they charge, and immediately inflict horrific torture: they gauge out Samson’s eyes. They then take him to Gaza, place him in “beit ha-asurim” (literally: the house of prisoners), where he is put to work at the grinding mill. Rabbi Steinzaltz explains that the grinder works in a circle, so Samson did not need his eyesight to engage in this labor: it was well fitted for his new disability. Radak posits that prisoners had to earn their keep and therefore ground the mill.

But Radak offers an additional, and more sinister, take on Samson’s forced labor: he sees “grinding” as a euphemism for sexual slavery. According to Radak, Samson, not to put too fine a point on it, was put to stud, to impregnate Philistine women (one wonders why: did they still believe that he possessed some special supernatural powers and was therefore a valuable progenitor?) Generally, this reading dovetails with what I saw in some medieval readings of Esther: really unsavory sexual undertones and a fleshing out of the power differential stuff, which suggests that these commentators might have read the Biblical material through the lens of medieval punitive savagery. Which is not to say, of course, that sexual slavery was not within the realm of the imaginable in antiquity (we have plenty of examples). What is interesting about the Samson story is the emasculation of Samson but the preservation of his manliness for the utility of his captors (I’ve read a couple of queer readings of the Samson story that make a lot out of this stuff.)

In any case, the Philistines hold a big party at their temple, and they bring in Samson to mock him in his weakness. Unbeknownst to them (and this is a truly genius literary device from the author of this tale, I think) Samson’s hair has begun to grow back while at the prison, and when he is brought to the temple, he asks the youth who minds him to place him between the columns of the temple. He begs for God to restore his power so that he can avenge one of his eyes, and calling out “Let me die with the Philistines!” he demolishes the temple, slaughtering more Philistines than he had killed in his life. This, by the way, is often a spectacular moment in operatic productions of Samson and Delilah.

The Samson story is instructive in several important ways. First, it offers an example of incarceration that goes hand in hand with torture, humiliation, and forced labor. Second, it offers some notions of what would have been imaginable to those reading and interpreting what was surely a work of complete fiction in terms of the scope of carceral torture. And third, this story–not unlike the Jeremiah incarceration story–does a terrific job capturing the deep rage and desire for revenge by someone treated so cruelly by his captors.

In the last few weeks I’ve been sharing snippets from my new book in progress, Behind Ancient Bars. Chapter 2 of the book will be devoted to the Hebrew Bible’s most illustrious prisoner, Joseph. You can find the full story in Genesis 39-41. Briefly, Joseph is thrown in prison following a false rape accusation by the wife of Potiphar, to whom Joseph had been sold as a servant. The biblical story offers us a rather rich account of Joseph’s carceral experience, including his responsible role in prison management while a prisoner himself and his interaction with two fellow inmates (the chief cupbearer and the chief baker). We also learn of his unsuccessful efforts to have the chief cupbearer curry favor for him with Pharaoh and of his eventual release, and auspicious rise, when his dream interpretation skills are needed.

Medieval midrashists found Joseph a fascinating subject, but tended to focus on his dreams, the salacious story with Potiphar’s wife, and Joseph’s later reconciliation with the brothers who sold him to the Ishmaelites. But one also finds quite a bit about his prison journey there, and the expanded stories tend to adhere to two important messages. The first is a concerted effort to frame the entire incarceration journey—in terms of time as in terms of content—as orchestrated by God for specific purposes, suggesting God’s interest not only in the people of Israel but also in geopolitical matters. I see examples of this in other biblical incarceration stories, but it is especially pronounced here. Second, and relatedly, there is an idea I’ve already discussed in the context of Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: the notion that Joseph undergoes a penological transformation within confinement that prepares him for his prophetic leadership after reentering Egyptian society.

I’ve recently come across Nicholas Reid’s excellent book Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia. In his analysis of primary sources, Reid urges us to use a wide lens when discussing prisons in antiquity, similar to what we now do in modern incarceration studies. He says this, with which I’m wholeheartedly in agreement:

When thinking of a history of prisons and imprisonment, one must look beyond the stated goals and stated functions of the prison to the actual practice. . . since prisons are multifunctional, the historical investigation into imprisonment should not revolve solely around the question of punishment. . . the adaptability of limiting corporal movement through imprisonment to meet numerous social goals and handle numerous social ‘problems’ has deep roots in history, even though direct connections and linear developments do not exist.

Even though Joseph was not sentenced to a prescribed period behind bars, and even though biblical punishment is usually retributive in nature, there is enough in the biblical descriptions and the midrashim to point to a message eerily similar to the one parroted in rehabilitation programs and parole hearings today: that incarceration is a “rock bottom” point in a prisoner’s journey that is an essential part of his or her coherent life story, that one goes down in order to go up, and that one develops important prosocial and other skills in confinement that set him or her up for a pivotal historical role postincarceration. In light of this, I decided to rewrite the Joseph story as a parole hearing transcript, relying heavily on the medieval midrashim. Here’s a short snippet:

PHARAOH: Okay, since we’ve moved to the inmate’s C-file, let’s see how he did in prison. From what I see from the record, you haven’t had many visitors in the twelve years you’ve been inside.

JOSEPH: No, Your Majesty. I believe only in the early days, when Zulycah still visited me.

AMHOST: I’m not sure I understand: The woman whom you claim falsely accused you of rape visited you in prison?

POTIPHAR: Your Priestly Eminence, since I oversee the prison, she can come and go as she pleases, and she even helps me with the logistics.

PHARAOH: And when she visited you, what did you talk about?

JOSEPH: She was trying to persuade me to give in to her. You know, “How ‎long wilt thou remain in this house? do but listen unto my voice, and I will release thee from ‎thy prison.” Like that. I had to keep saying: It is better for me to remain in this house, ‎than to listen unto thy words, and transgress against God.[1]

AMHOST: I guess we keep things nice and cushy for you in Thebes. Some people would easily mistake you for a prison administrator, rather than an actual prisoner, and think Potiphar just moved you to another job to put some distance between you and his wife.[2]

MERITAMUM: It’s not like that, Your Grace. The write-up about the visit documents that the inmate was repeatedly threatened by his accuser‎. She was overheard saying, “if thou wilt not do my wishes, I will put out thine eyes, and I will put ‎additional chains upon thy feet, and I will surrender thee into the hands of such as thou hast ‎not known, neither yesterday nor day before yesterday.”

HAT: Looks like it was even worse. I have the 128 write-up that she put in his file, and it says that, while they were setting the table at chow hall, cleaning the drinking glasses and all that, she would say to him: ‘In this matter, I mistreated [ashaktikha] you. As you live, I will mistreat you regarding other matters.’

MERITARIUM: Oh, but he gave as good as he got. Basically played her at her own game. Like she said “ashaktikha,” so he would say to her: ‘[God] “Performs justice for the oppressed [laashukim].”’ (Psalms 146:7) [She would say:] ‘I will reduce your sustenance.’ He would say to her: ‘[God] “Provides food for the hungry.”’ (Psalms 146:7) [She would say:] ‘I will shackle you.’ He would say to her: ‘“The Lord frees the imprisoned.”’ (Psalms 146:7) [She would say:] ‘I will cause you to be bent over.’ He would say to her: ‘“The Lord straightens the bent.”’ (Psalms 146:8) [She would say:] ‘I will blind your eyes.’ He would say to her: ‘“The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.”’ (Psalms 146:8)[3]

PHARAOH: Dear Maat. How far did all of this go?

MERITARIUM: We’re not entirely sure, because there’s a lot of hearsay in prison intelligence. Rav Huna said in the name of Rabbi Aḥa, you know, that sort of thing. But rumor was that she placed an iron bar beneath his neck until he would direct his glance toward her and look at her. Nevertheless, he would not look at her. That is what is written: “They tortured his legs with chains; his body was placed in iron.” (Psalms 105:18)[4]

PHARAOH: Nice facility you run there, Potiphar.

POTIPHAR: I can’t possibly screen my own wife from the list of visitors, Your Majesty.

PHARAOH: Why would you let her do it? Did you think he was guilty?

POTIPHAR: Oh, no, I knew he was innocent. Even my kids knew.

PHARAOH: What?

POTIPHAR: We all knew. My kid kept saying, “stop beating on him, my mom is lying.”[5] Even on the way in, when I was booking him, I said to him, “Joseph, I know you didn’t do this, but I’m locking you up so I will not attach stigma to my children.”[6]

MERITAMUM: And even so, Your Majesty, when she visited him in prison, it didn’t seem to faze the Inmate. He was overheard replying, hold on, it’s hard to read the hieroglyphs, “‎Behold the God of all the earth, he is able to deliver me from all that thou wouldst do unto me. ‎For he giveth sight to the blind and he freeth the captives and he preserveth the strangers ‎that are in the land they never knew.” Eventually she gave up and stopped coming.  

PHARAOH: Do we have any laudatory chronos in the file?

MERITAMUM: Yes, Your Majesty. The inmate was charged, de facto, with the functioning of the entire administration.

PHARAOH: You entrusted. The entire prison administration. To a prisoner.

POTIPHAR: The whole thing. Eating, drinking, binding people, releasing them, torturing them, giving them a rest. He would call the whole thing and whatever he said, went.[7]

HAT: It says in this chrono, “the minister did not have to see anything he put in the inmate’s hand.” I’m not sure what this means.

POTIPHAR: It means I didn’t have to supervise him, because God helped him succeed in prison as well as on the outside. It’s a kal vahomer.

HAT: A what?

POTIPHAR: A kal vahomer. Argument a fortiori. They have to say he was successful in prison, because success on the outside would be self-evident.[8]

HAT: See, I read it differently. I read it that you didn’t see anything fishy or poorly performed.[9]

POTIPHAR: You know these prison write-ups. You can read them seventy different ways.

HAT: Mr. Jacobson, do you feel that you were treated fairly in prison?

JOSEPH: To be honest, I did end up feeling relieved. Back home, whenever we ate, my father would give me the choice portions, and I always had to look over my shoulder lest my brothers take revenge. And I confess that here in prison I could breathe a bit easier. But God likes to give me a challenge, so I figure he’ll sic a bear on me anytime soon.[10]

HAT: Not sure I understand what the bear’s got to do with any of this.

JOSEPH: It’s got to do with the grain.

AMHOST: What grain?

JOSEPH: You’ll see.

---

[1] Sefer HaYashar (midrash), Book of Genesis, Vayeshev 19

[2] McKay (2009).

[3] Bereshit Rabbah 87: 10.

[4] Bereshit Rabbah 87: 10.

[5] Sefer HaYashar (midrash), Book of Genesis, Vayeshev 18-19

[6] Bereshit Rabbah 87: 9.

[7] Midrash Sekhel Tov, Bereshit 39:22:2

[8] Bereshit Rabbah 87:10; Midrash Sekhel Tov, Genesis 39:23:3.

[9] Midrash Sekhel Tov, Bereshit 39:23:2

[10] Midrash Sekhel Tov, Bereshit 39:23:4

My new project Behind Ancient Bars looks at several prominent incarceration stories in the Hebrew Bible. One that is often missed is Esther’s stint at Ahasuerus’s harem. Because most of the story is a bedroom farce, and some of it a bloodthirsty schadenfreude fest, many commentators skip over Esther’s confinement before she is taken to the king, which you can find in Chapter 2. But this short vignette illuminates not only commentary about empire in general (and probably Persian empire in particular), but also about the multiple forms of vulnerability of women and the ways in which governmental systems are crafted to exploit these vulnerabilities. This paints the festive Esther story a much darker, more sinister hue.

Seeing the Esther story as an incarceration story to begin with requires doing what modern penologists do on the regular: expanding our definition of incarceration. I find it interesting that people who happily read Foucault and Goffman, seeing obvious parallels and symmetries among total institutions and across the carceral archipelago, suddenly adopt a hyper-legalistic approach to punishment in antiquity, forcefully arguing that there is no incarceration in the bible because it is not listed as a sanction for a criminal conviction in Deuteronomy or in Hammurabi’s law. If incarceration scholarship in modernity can look at pretrial detention, immigration detention, and even cattle towns–because those are carceral experiences–then incarceration scholarship in antiquity can and should encompass political detention and shady government programs for locking up and reeducating children. And indeed, some commentary on the Book of Esther moves away from the entertaining popular presentations of beauty pageants to identifying incarceration elements.

How much of this represents true carceral practices, or is a realistic portrayal of royal harems, is hotly debated. Summarizing the literature for and against a reading of Esther as fiction, Adele Berlin opines that the story, like the Daniel story, dates to the Hellenistic period, and reflects stereotypical Athenian perceptions of Persia: “luxury, hierarchy, bureaucracy, wine drinking, the postal system, imperial law, bowing down, eunuchs, impalement, a royal garden, and a sexually virtuous queen.” But at least some of this fed commentators who used it to glean more about imperial Persian governmentality.

The background to the Esther story is well known: during a royal feast with his courtiers, an inebriated king orders his queen, Vashti, to appear before the courtiers. She refuses, angering the king, and is either banished or executed, which results in a vacancy. The king’s servants propose that all good looking virgins in the kingdom be gathered at the “women’s house” in Shushan, the capital, under the supervision of Hege, the king’s eunuch, so that the king may pick whichever one pleases him to be his queen in lieu of Vashti.

Julia Schwartzmann points out that the details of Esther’s arrival in the harem can be disturbing to modern readers, because of Mordechai and Esther’s “ambiguous uncle/niece relationship, the way Mordechai hands over Esther to the king’s harem, and his manipulative handling of his silent and passive niece.” Not only modern readers: Two important medieval commentators, Abraham Ibn Ezra and Immanuel of Rome, propose that Mordechai planned, as a foster parent, to marry his beautiful charge, a-la Dickens character John Jarndyce (his charge in the book, you’ll remember, is also called Esther!) One can only imagine many young women and girls in similarly precarious situations who would end up swept into the harem–a rather hopeless prospect, as only one girl would be officially crowned queen, and as no girl, per Ibn Ezra, would be available for marriage or any life outside the harem after having bedded the king–with girls like Esther, without parents and with guardians who have agendas beyond their charges’ best interests, more vulnerable to apprehension and lockdown.

The pageant story will have us believe that the girls gathered at the capital out of their own free will, but some commentators see this more as a coercive executive action. Shelom Esther draws the readers’ attention to the large number of officers and bureaucrats involved in the concubine-gathering operation, which had to visit each house to prevent parents from hiding their daughters. Joseph Ibin Yahya adds that Mordechai hid Esther, and that she was taken against his will and against hers.

The administration of the harem, as we saw in the Daniel court stories, is given to eunuchs. The word “saris” (eunuch) might be used differently in different biblical contexts, and could be a reference to a high government official rather than to the sexuality of these personages, but what we know of various empires–especially the Persian empire–suggests that, at least in some contexts, the meanings converge. Last week, at our archaeology course, Brett Kaufman told us that it was common to entrust military commands in imperial armies to eunuchs because they would have no dynastic aspirations and thus would not attempt to usurp the throne. But it makes sense that confinement operations, where sexual exploitation is a serious risk, would be entrusted to sexually inactive supervisors, as 19th century commentator Malbim very explicitly explains.

Even if sexual abuse was not a risk, there were other ways to render the eunuchs’ charges pliable and docile. Much is made in chapter 2 of the issue of cosmetics (“tamrukim”). Some commentators, like Ibn Yahya, interpret these in a straightforward way as beauty-enhancing products, while others, like Immanuel of Rome, thought these could be medications, including first-aid supplies. What is interesting is that the sole purveyors of these items were the eunuchs, which Malbim shrewdly interprets as part and parcel of the king’s power play which, in turn, reflects the lessons learned from the Vashti episode:

He feared that [the girl he would choose] would not want to marry him, and [his advisors] said that after they examined those who came willingly and did not find an appropriate wife for him, then he will appoint officers and they will round up all the girls with a strong arm, (and they even shrewdly said that he should appoint new officers, so that it would be someone who has not been bribed to ignore the rich people’s girls), and against the fear based on his memory, and the concern that [the prospective bride] would do as Vashti did, they advised to gather the girls around Hege, and that they must not bring their own cosmetics from home, but rather only receive them from the eunuchs, and from this side will always be submissive toward the Eunuch and not uppity as Vashti was.

Malbim on Esther 2: 3: 2

When Julia Schwarzmann marvels at how captivating the Esther story is given its telenovela-like synopsis, I want to add: the power of the story is that both ancient and modern readers would recognize the patriarchal fear of subversive and disobedience, the injured pride, the opportunities for exploitation and exertion of power. But it also points to a source of power and ingenuity on the part of the incarcerated person. We’ve already seen how Daniel, when failing to negotiate his diet with chief Eunuch Ashpenaz, makes a deal with “the waiter” on the sly to receive his special vegan rations. Here, we see Esther realizing that the key to surviving in the harem is to charm Hege, who proceeds to favor her with food and luxury items.

Another aspect of the story that exudes verisimilitude is Mordechai’s concern for Esther’s welfare–whether because of the general situation or because, at his request, she hid her identity from harem management. He is told to come to the harem yard every day to inquire after her, and perhaps one advantage of charming the pants off Hege was the availability of daily reports of her wellbeing.

By contrast to the later story of her tenure as queen, Esther of chapter 2 is described passively: she is beautiful, parentless, young, vulnerable, and puppeteered by her uncle/guardian as well as by the various government officials. But between the lines, one finds glimmers of transformation. Placed in a complicated logistical and social scenario, Esther figures out that personal charm and charisma are useful tools, and that performing modesty and restraint pays off. Both Ibn Ezra and Immanuel of Rome emphasize that her restraint, which earned her the favor of Hege, reflect her intelligence. Ibn Yahya opines that she had the good fortune to be taken to the king in the winter, when one enjoys intimacy and closeness more than in summer, thus improving the odds of being the king’s favorite, but what if Hege, who was in her corner, was the one in charge of the schedule and deliberately scheduled her sexual audition for an auspicious date? The emerging picture is one of strategic thinking, charming the key people responsible for her welfare, and performing royal virtue even prior to her selection (perhaps impressing Hege as “queen material”) which the story does not demonize or regard as duplicitous but rather as an understandable, even commendable, survival strategy.

This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that, regardless of the official goal of incarceration in biblical stories, there is evidence of personal transformation occurring behind bars. Martin Pritkin, who approaches biblical punishment from a more doctrinal perspective, finds evidence of rehabilitative motives amidst the retributive rationales, but I think these stories make a somewhat different point: there’s a difference between the espoused nature of a confinement program and the sociological and psychological features of the experience of going though said program. Second, and relatedly, personal transformations in incarceration stories are a means to an end. Notably, incarceration serves as a cauldron, a crucible, a vehicle, for developing leadership characteristics that predict the protagonist’s success at his or her post-incarceration life. Joseph, for example, is incarcerated as punishment for a wrongful accusation or to allow Potiphar and his household to save face; behind bars, however, he develops not only the administrative and logistics acumen that will later serve him well in Egyptian administration, but also a prosocial approach to dream interpretation and the skills of getting along with different kinds of people (skills he lacked as a youth). Daniel learns some wheeling and dealing and perhaps impresses Ashpenaz and “the waiter” with his initiative. Jeremiah, admittedly a “finished character” by the time of his incarceration, has an opportunity to flex against Zedekiah and to leverage his existing friendship with Ebed Melekh to obtain relief, as well as to forge an important alliance with Nebuchadnezzar that grants him relative freedom in exile. And Esther’s reputation for virtuousness and humility and capacity to marshal personal charm and good looks to make important friendships goes a long way toward earning the favor of the king, both at her audition and later, when her skills are needed at a time of national crisis. The dire straits of incarceration are an essential part of the formulaic, fatalistic narrative. Theologically, they support the idea that the divine jails these people to foster the development of the personal characteristics that will come in handy later. I don’t see this as being much different than the sort of logic I see and here at many a rehabilitation program in prisons–namely, the way people are encouraged to construct and tell a coherent personal narrative, in which the prison journey, the crucible of change, is an essential ingredient on the way up, and support for an “everything happens for a reason” notion of meaning-making.

There are two ways of looking at this–benign and cynical. The benign approach relies on Victor Frankl’s logotherapy to argue that people survive and thrive after suffering–even extreme suffering–by imbuing their experiences with meanings. Shadd Maruna’s Making Good offers many examples for the role that a personal narrative of hardship and redemption plays in desistance from reoffending. The more cynical approach, akin to the one I developed in Yesterday’s Monsters, is that rehabilitative programming becomes sort of a mediocre community play that has to follow a script that prison authorities and parole commissioners recognize and validate: follower-to-leader, toxic-thinking-to-empathy, anger-to-understanding, opacity-to-insight. These scripts have a quasi-theological flavor (in some cases, the programs that encourage them, such as Twelve Steps groups, actually have a religion component.) Whether or not the fatalism and meaning-making project is genuine or artificial, it is a well-recognized story, and so, these incarceration stories feel familiar and similar to each other because they evoke a recognizable, universally familiar trope.

This month I started working on what will eventually become my next book, tentatively titled Behind Ancient Bars. In this book I hope to illuminate the Biblical and Talmudic incarceration experience, and hopefully put to bed some misconceptions held by modern penologists and some held by historians of antiquity. Every penology textbook I’m familiar with speeds through punishment in antiquity, retrenching the common assumption that prison is a product of modernity and contrasting it to its predecessor, corporal punishment.

In an environment saturated with incarceration, it’s hard to see it as anything but modern, but once you start looking for it, you can’t unsee it: the Hebrew bible and the Talmud are filled with references to prisons and jails, and while nothing in antiquity would have come close to resembling our modern correctional apparatus, confinement was very much present in the sociopolitical arena. Moreover, what we’ve been educated to see as a rift is more of a continuum: not only does the variation in carceral experiences today echo the variation in antiquity, but the boundary between prison and corporal punishment is very, very blurry, if it even exists (working on FESTER was the starkest confirmation for me that prison IS corporal punishment.)

There’s not a shred of archaeological evidence of prisons and jails from empires thousands of years ago, and the texts we have are not trustworthy descriptions of confinement. Rather, they tell us something about what would have been within the realm of the imaginable for their authors, and in the process, have something to say about politics, personal transformation, and fatalism.

The story of Daniel and his three friends, Hananyah, Mishael, and Azaryah, is a case in point, and you can find it in Daniel ch. 1. The book opens with Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar’s victorious siege on Jerusalem, during which the Babylonians captured the implements of the temple into the land of Shinar, where they were deposited into the divine treasury. The king then ordered his high minister, Ashpenaz, to bring forth young Judahites of noble descent, teach them Babylonian literature and language, and feed them at the king’s expense, intending to incorporate them into the Babylonian administration. One of these children, Daniel, resolved not to defile himself (“lo itga’el”) with the Pat Bag and the wine, and after Ashpenaz expressed concern that his own life would be at risk if the children appeared poorly, appealed to the server/bursar to feed him and the other Judahites legumes and water. After a ten-day trial period, Daniel & Co. looked haler and healthier than the kids who fed on the path bag. The bursar continued to “carry” (remove? Keep for himself?) the king-allotted rations for the four and to serve them seeds instead. The kids are told to have done very well at the training, and when they came to the king, they were found to excel far beyond members of his senior administration.

Much of the exegetic chatter about this curious story focuses on Daniel’s refusal of the “path bag,” trying to establish precisely what was wrong with it. This is of deep interest to me, because I’ve been long interested in the awfulness of prison food, and Chad and I devoted much of the second chapter of FESTER to the horrific FUBAR of prison kitchens during COVID-19 (some of this story, complete with original emails, is here.) Of course, most religious commentators are not quite interested in that: rather, they spend their exegetical energy on explaining that Daniel et al. were trying to adhere to kashruth laws, the provenance of which is the ritual slaughter instruction in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, but which were far from developed in the early exilic period. Other commentators hypothesize that the four young Judahites were concerned about the possible use of the king’s meat and wine as libations to foreign gods. The dietary discussion among commentators then becomes a halakhic “hook” for backdating cleanliness and kashruth to the biblical text, thus creating linkages between the Torah prohibitions and the meticulous kashruth industrial complex of later periods. There’s a broader context to all this: revulsion at another nation’s food is often a proxy for differentiation, separation, setting oneself apart. As Daphne Barak-Erez explains in Outlawed Pigs, disgust of pig flesh has deep roots in Jewish tradition, and its implications persist to this day, and it could explain why this diet thing might have resonated as much as it has (it’s also worth considering, as I’m reminded by Rabbi Adam Chalom, that the Book of Daniel was likely composed during the Hellenistic period, when swine sacrifices and diet-based persecutions would explain the central role of diet in this story). As a secular humanistic Jew interested in penology, though, I find these particulars ancillary to the much more fundamental question about this curious story: what sort of facility, regime, or program, was this, exactly, and how does it relate to the overall Babylonian colonial project?

The exposition to the story places it in the context of the conquering of Jerusalem and seems to suggest an administrative response straight out of the playbook of colonial governance: identify potential leaders among the nobility of conquered population, remove them from potential leadership positions among their populace, bring them to the metropole, and coopt them into the colonial scheme through middle-management positions within the metropolitan government apparatus. Where this program lies along the continuum between benign and sinister, empowering and coercive, is fairly unclear. What we do know is this: Daniel, Hananya, Mishael, and Azarya are still children when the story takes place, and alongside them there are many other children subject to the same regime, most of which are not Judahites. The quartet (perhaps like all children in the program) is given Babylonian names (Belshatzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed Nego), a practice reminiscent of the “entry rituals” that Erving Goffman describes in Total Institutions. They are entrusted to the care of a high official (perhaps a minister, perhaps a eunuch), and their period of confinement, as explained above, includes an educational/vocational component: they are to learn Babylonian and the art of Babylonian governance, and when their three years of training conclude, they are expected to take a role in the Babylonian administration. They receive state-provided rations (“Path Bag HaMelech”) that are uniform for all residents of the facility. There is a special functionary who is responsible for the provision of foods, and he is identified as the “meltzar” (a word that will come to mean “waiter” or “server” in modern Hebrew.) It is also made clear that this is a high-stakes program: Ashpenaz himself—marked as a high administrator in Nebuchadnezzar’s court and clearly the chief administrator of this course or facility—is personally responsible for the welfare of his wards, to the point that his own head might roll should the king see that the children are upset, and that he feels comfortable enough with his wards to confide in them regarding this concern—a high official fostering amity with captive children who feel empowered enough to complain about their diets (and even to propose what might be the first Biblical experiment that has a valid control group!), presumably trying to get on their good side and eliciting their sympathy against the king. That the children’s welfare (not just their health, but their satisfaction) rates so highly with the king seems to speak well of his colonial enterprise, though the later stories in Daniel will do much to blemish his character. In any case, the fact that an entire story is devoted to the diet incident reminds me so much of what I know about the culinary aspect of CDCR administration, that I can only imagine the paper trail of the whole thing looking more or less like this:

***

From: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: Saga-Saltiyas@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Pat-Bag Supplies

Hey Saga how’s your night going.

Well as for here, it’s not going too good. I got four kids here starting to act out over the food and I don’t blame them. We’re now giving everyone the King’s Path-Bag and wine and four kids are asking for special vegetarian ratios. Right now we don’t have special meals for anyone. They say eating our food defiles them. Hope there is something we can do. I think it’s going to get really bad really fast around here if other kids start asking for vegetarian food. Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

***

From: Saga-Saltiyas@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

CC: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Re: Pat-Bag Supplies

Hey Pahas, that’s the correct meal. Everyone gets the same meal, no special problems because of “defilement.”

Sir Ashpenaz, anything we can do to improve upon this meal? The fellas aren’t enjoying it much and I worry.

Thank you

***

From: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: Beltis@MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Veg Meals

Beltis, can you find out if we can order legumes cost-effective for four inmates for a few days? The king’ll have my head if he sees they’re unhappy. –Ashpenaz

***

From: Beltis@MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Veg Meals

Minister Ashpenaz, my cousin Babasu works for Balasi Beans. They have a ten-day special for a bean and seed combo I can order per person. Pls confirm.

***

From: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: Beltis@MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Veg Meals

Conf’d. Pls liaise directly with Pahas-Bel on next steps.

***

From: Balasi@BalasiBeans.com

To: Beltis@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

CC: Babasu@BalasiBeans.com

Subject: Order Confirmation

Order no. 1:14

Balasi Beans – Quality Legumes for a Great Price

Order Confirmation

Hi Beltis,

Thank you for your purchase!

We will send you another email once your order ships.

Many Thanks,

Balasi Beans

Bean and Seed Combo: Ten-day special  x 4

***

From: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

To: HealthServices@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

CC: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Beans

Dear Dr. Shala,

1. Inmate no. 49596 Muhibu is suffering from uncleanliness and inflammation. He is due for his alcohol, honey, and myrrh preparation. Can you grind it here for him?
2. Kids no. 30303, 23041, 30453, and 30340, Shadrach, Mischach, Abed-Nego, and Belshatzar, have been approved a diet of bean and seed combo. If effective in maintaining participants’ health, Minister of Eunuchs says we might reorder for the whole prison. Can you check how they are doing after ten days?

***

From: HealthServices@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

To: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

CC: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Beans

Just did initial assessment on the four kids you specified and a few kids receiving the usual rations. Will report back in ten days. –Dr. Shala

***

From: HealthServices@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

To: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

CC: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Beans Follow-Up

Pahas-Bel: I just stopped by the prison to take vitals and metrics from the four seed-eating kids and the control group. The seed-eating children seem to be doing better than the control group. If the king is so inclined, I would recommend ordering from Balasi Beans for the entire facility, but I won’t push it. In any case, there is no medical reason to prevent the children from eating seeds and beans.

***

From: CorrectionalCounseling@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Participants no. 30303, 23041, 30453, and 30340

Dear Sir Ashpenaz,

In anticipation for the appearance of Participants no. 30303, 23041, 30453, and 30340 (Shadrach, Meschach, Abed-Nego, and Belshatzar) before His Majesty the King, we have conducted exit interviews. The children wish to thank you for accommodating their dietary requests and to especially commend Pahas-Bel for his cooperation.

***

From: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

CC: HealthServices@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl; CorrectionalCounseling@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Path-Bag Discrepancy

Hi Pahas,

I’m looking at the books in preparation for the exit interview of the Judahite kids with His Royal Majesty and have to account for the Path-Bag rations they did not consume. I see three years’ worth of legume orders from Babasu, but I don’t see that the overall amount of path bag was reduced accordingly. What did you do with the meat and wine? Pls advise.

***

As some of you may know, the diet story is only the first of six court stories that found their way into the first half of the Book of Daniel. One of the more famous ones involves Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed Nego thrown into a furnace and emerging hale and healthy, which inspired this awesome gospel song:

Another famous one involves Daniel, whose fortunes rise and fall quite dramatically in the first half of the book, being thrown into a lion’s den, inspiring works like this:

That the diet story was important enough to be a precursor to these dramatic tales tells me two things. First, that the confinement regime in Chapter 1 is being seen as part and parcel of the overall political/administrative arsenal at Nebuchadnezzar’s disposal: classic corporal punishments, like the furnace and the lions, do not exist to the exclusion of confinement, but rather alongside it. One wonders whether the spectacularly corporal punishments of Daniel & Co. are unique to them, in the sense of singling them out of the other young people, while the confinement regime was everyone’s baseline in the program, or was everyone in the program at risk of ending up “down in the hole” with the lions if they fell out of favor.

Relatedly, that all these royal reactions are being deployed is designed to paint a story of fractured, erratic, capricious governmentality. Not unlike the Pharaoh we meet in Joseph’s incarceration story (which will also be extensively told in the new book), Nebuchadnezzar runs the sort of administration where the fates of his underlings–especially his foreign subjects–widely swing up and down. This either reflects the erratic nature of these monarchies, or adds to the fairy tale aspect of the story by exaggerating the mobility and changing fortunes of the protagonists. It’s also notable that, like in the Joseph story, there’s very little in the way of institutional memory: if the confinement form ch1 incurred stigma, it hasn’t impacted Daniel’s fate later. This wild reversal of fortune continues throughout the stories: after a meteoric rise in the Babylonian administration, Daniel’s prospects seem to have changed for the worse in chapter 4, only to dramatically rise again when he interprets the king’s dream (this and other aspects of the story are why some commentators think that the Daniel and Joseph stories are versions of the same tale, and thus date Joseph’s prison story to the exilic period as well). There’s also a lot of elasticity in the use and misuse of power. We see exalted people afraid their heads will roll if some foreign kid complains to the king. And on the other hand, it looks like Daniel & Co., who are kids–and foreign kids, at that–feel comfortable not only complaining about a diet that does not work for them (quite rudely, too! Imagine telling an Emperor that his royal banquet fare defiles you!), but also proposing an experiment to gauge the health benefits of the diet they demand. They also seem to possess real savvy about who to deal with, and how, in a total institution: when negotiations with the higher-up authority hit a hurdle, they make a deal with the bursar on the sly. Not only that, but they are taken seriously enough that, even when the experiment succeeds, they are served legumes and water until their time is up.