“And then there was Shamgar, who killed six hundred Philistines with oxgoad. He too, saved Israel.” – Judges 3:31

As a history major I’m interested in two things – how people are remembered after they die, and how I’m going to pay rent this month. Which is why I was drawn to this passage in the Bible while I was reading alone and covered in sexual frustration.

This short passage about Shamgar occurs in the first (of many) sections in the Bible where the Israelites just keep messing up. God says right, they go left. Gods says,

“When two men are fighting and the wife of one intervenes to save her husband from the blows of his opponent, if she stretches out her hand and seizes the latter by his private parts, you shall chop off her hand without pity.” – Deuteronomy: 25:11-12

And all the Israelites went, “Yeah, we knew that already God, shut the fuck up already.”

God says “Now don’t you guys sleep with your daughters,” and the Israelites make love to their daughters in a cave –and then claim they did not know what they were doing because it was too dark. Which, if you haven’t tried it yet, is a foolproof defense in court.

And in this period of Biblical wanderings there is a series of heroes who save Israel from darkness. There is Ehud who stabs pagan king Eglon, a man who is so overweight that “Ehud’s sword hilt also went in after the blade, and the fat closed around the blade.” Eglon then began to leak excrement and his servants waited outside, “Assuming that he [Eglon] was relieving himself, they waited ‘to the point of embarrassment’ before unlocking the door and finding their king dead.”

The lesson here , I think, is that you should always barge in on your friends in the bathroom, because they could have just been stabbed by a Bible-wielding assassin.

After Ehud’s heroics there is Jepthah, a true patriot. Jepthah kills 42,000 evil Ephraimites because they could not say the word ‘Shibboleth.’ Which has to be the most specific genocide in human history. Hitler with a severe case of OCD. Even Hitler is like, “man, Jepthah, chill out, its just the word ‘Shibboleth.’ It’s not like their controlling the banking system or anything.”

Only the all but forgotten Parsley Massacre of 1937, when 20,000 Haitians were killed because they could not pronounce the word ‘parsley,’ rivals Jepthah’s antics.

But, amid these classic, uplifting stories of bravery there is poor Shamgar. Poor, poor Shamgar. Shamgar has his own chapter in the Bible – but it is the shortest chapter of the bible, one of the LONGEST BOOKS EVER WRITTEN. The chapter is one sentence long and then Shamgar is never mentioned again in human history.

To put that in perspective, there are at least thirteen prostitutes mentioned more than Shamgar. There is a seven-horned, seven-eyed lamb that is mentioned more than Shamgar. Shamgar is mentioned less than a spirit in the shape of a pig, and King Chushan-rishathaim. And a minor, ancillary character named Jesus gets multiple mentions – history is so unfair.

And this is all Shamgar is remembered for –

“And then there was Shamgar, who killed six hundred Philistines with oxgoad. He too, saved Israel.” – Judges 3:31

I like to think that history has wrongly remembered Shamgar. That he really was a sensitive guy who liked long walks in the olive grove and used his acoustic guitar skills to get laid. A normal guy. He didn’t mind hand jobs all that much and he sold little wooden figurines in the marketplace.

But then God called him to save Israel and the rabbis took his foreskin and he took out his anger on six hundred hapless Philistines. A classic case of foreskin envy.

But all anyone remembers is that one LITTLE outburst he had. One tiny, measly, rampage. Think about how other great human’s lives could be ruined if they were remembered in one sentence – “Barack Obama inhaled when he smoked weed. He too, destroyed America.” – “Ben Affleck was the star of Gigli. He too married Jennifer Lopez.” – “Ron Jeremy had a massive penis.” Well, some people are actually best remembered in one sentence.

And there is even confusion on what the Bible means by an oxgoad, since it, like Shamgar, is a word that is NEVER used in the Bible again. No one even knows for sure what Shamgar killed these six hundred pagans with – but scholars think it was probably a cattle prod. Now that’s badass. All hail Shamgar!