Ear­li­er this week, Devan Sipher shared six things he learned writ­ing about wed­dings for The New York Times. He is a writer of the Vows wed­ding col­umn in The New York Times, the author of the nov­els The Scenic Route and The Wed­ding Beat, and has also writ­ten for oth­er pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing The For­ward and The Huff­in­g­ton Post. He will be blog­ging here all week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and MyJew­ish­Learn­ing.

I nev­er intend­ed to write novels.

I also nev­er intend­ed to write for The New York Times. When I was 17, I was accept­ed to med­ical school. And my par­ents are still try­ing to fig­ure out what went wrong.

After being a med­ical stu­dent, I was briefly a rab­bini­cal stu­dent. I have also been a pres­i­den­tial cam­paign coor­di­na­tor, an enter­tain­ment news show pro­duc­er, an infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy con­sul­tant, a com­put­er graph­ics artist, a book edi­tor, a book­keep­er, a play­wright, and an adver­tis­ing copy­writer along the way. In short, my career tra­jec­to­ry resem­bles the path of a drunk­en sailor — or per­haps a wan­der­ing Jew. 

So it’s appro­pri­ate that my sec­ond nov­el, The Scenic Route, is about peo­ple tak­ing the long way around. And I would argue that tak­ing the long way is a Jew­ish tra­di­tion. After all, we spent forty years in the desert.

Trav­el­ing is a key part of the bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, cen­tral to canon­i­cal sto­ries from Noah to Jon­ah to Joseph. How­ev­er, trav­el is also unpre­dictable, and the patri­archs (and matri­archs) often end up in des­ti­na­tions far from where they had intend­ed to be. (Joseph nev­er planned to go to Egypt, and Jon­ah was dragged to Nin­eveh kick­ing and screaming.) 

In The Scenic Route, life is what hap­pens on the way to where you’re going. And I believe one could argue that’s also a mes­sage of the bible, as sto­ry after sto­ry illus­trates peo­ple tack­ling unex­pect­ed chal­lenges and chang­ing the course of human his­to­ry in the process. 

Nowhere is this more true than in the momen­tous but lit­tle known vers­es about ​“the woman of Gibeah,” who wasn’t even from Gibeah, a town in ancient Israel inhab­it­ed by the tribe of Ben­jamin. The woman is the wife or con­cu­bine (the bible is unclear) of a Levite priest who is trav­el­ing from Beth­le­hem to a north­ern city. 

The Levite and the woman stop for the night in Gibeah and are offered food and shel­ter in the home of an elder­ly man. But the home is besieged by towns­men angered by the pres­ence of the for­eign­er in their midst, and demand he be hand­ed over to them. His host refus­es, but instead offers the woman.

The next morn­ing the Levite finds the rav­aged woman on the doorstep and (for rea­sons that must have made more sense in bib­li­cal times), he carves her into 12 pieces, send­ing one piece to each tribe — as evi­dence of the wrong done to him. 

The result is a war between the tribes, which ends with the near-dec­i­ma­tion of the tribe of Ben­jamin. And it is large­ly because of that dev­as­tat­ing civ­il war that the twelve tribes decide they need a king, which leads to the anoint­ment of the first king of Israel, King Saul, who, for the sake of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, was cho­sen from the tribe of Benjamin.

Every­thing that fol­lows: the king­dom of David and Solomon, the rise and fall of the two tem­ples, and all of Judeo-Chris­t­ian his­to­ry. It is all the after­math of a war, a rape, and a trav­el sto­ry that goes ter­ri­bly wrong.

Devan Sipher grad­u­at­ed from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, received an M.F.A. from New York Uni­ver­si­ty, and he is a for­mer junior can­tor of Tem­ple Israel. Read more about him and his work here.

Relat­ed Content:

• Essays: Wan­der­ing Jews
• Solomon: The Lure of Wis­dom by Steven Weitzman
• A King­dom of Priests: Ances­try and Mer­it in Ancient Judaism by Martha Himmelfarb