Hungry Like the Wolf

Long before Jewish comic book creator Stan Lee bestowed upon Bruce Banner the ability to transform into the rampaging Hulk, an ancient Israelite possessed similarly uncontrollable superhuman abilities. At least, that’s what some biblical commentators suggested centuries ago.

As the Book of Genesis nears completion, the patriarch Jacob gathers his sons, bestowing on them blessings for the future. Some of Jacob’s invocations are straightforward. Judah, having emerged as a leader of the family, is told “your brothers will praise you. Your hand will be on the neck of your enemies.” Asher? His “food will be rich. He will provide delicacies fit for a king.” Joseph, that sanctuary-in-Egypt-providing son, is gifted with resources that will be “greater than the blessings of the oldest mountains and the riches of the ancient hills.”

Then Jacob gets to Joseph’s younger brother Benjamin. Jacob declares that Benjamin, his youngest son, “is a ravenous wolf. In the morning he devours his prey. In the evening he divides the plunder.”

To Rabbi Ephraim ben Shimshon, one of the Tosafists, those renowned medieval commentators on the Talmud, this seemed to reveal Benjamin’s supernatural abilities. But like the easily triggered Banner’s abilities, they were hard to keep in check. As Rabbi Ephraim wrote: “Benjamin was a ‘predatory wolf,’ sometimes preying upon people. When it was time for him to change into a wolf, as it says, ‘Benjamin is a predatory wolf,’ as long as he was with his father, he could rely upon a physician, and in that merit he did not change into a wolf.” The ravenous inclinations, in other words, could be reined in—sometimes.

In case one was wondering as to the plausibility of such powers, Rabbi Ephraim shared the science of his day: “There is a type of wolf that is called loup-garou (werewolf), which is a person that changes into a wolf,” he wrote. In case one was to encounter such a creature, mind you, “the solution for [dealing with] this wolf is that when it enters a house, and a person is frightened by it, he should take a firebrand and thrust it around, and he will not be harmed.”

Tragically, Rabbi Ephraim added, it is likely Benjamin’s uncontrollable violent inclination is what killed his mother, Rachel, as he emerged from her womb. After all, as the Bible tells us in describing Benjamin’s birth, “as her soul left her, for she was dying, and she called his name ‘the son of my affliction.’” (Genesis 35:18)

And where did the ability to turn into such a fearsome creature originate? Well, suggested the great 13th-century German scholar Eleazar of Worms, “those people who change into wolves were created as such from the Six Days of Creation, and do not return to their earlier state until they have eaten the blood of a man or woman.”

As the contemporary scholar David Shyovitz has pointed out, this presumption of Benjamin’s powers was not just of scientific interest in medieval times. It was also theologically crucial in Jewish-Christian arguments. After all, two physical transformations lay at the core of medieval Christian theology: the Incarnation, in which God is presumed to have become man in the form of Jesus, and the Eucharist, in which food becomes God.

Thus, the 12th-century Giraldus Cambrensis, a Welsh-born Christian thinker, argued, “It cannot be disputed, but must be believed with the most assured faith, that the divine nature assumed human nature for the salvation of the world; while in the present case, by no less a miracle, we find that at God’s bidding, to exhibit his power and righteous judgment, human nature assumed that of a wolf.”

In other words, just as humans can turn into wolves, Jesus can transform his physical form into a divine one. Werewolves, Christians like Giraldus argued, supported their religion’s main spiritual claims.

One can imagine then, that belief in Benjamin’s lycanthropic talents offered Jews not a source of fear but of faith. We, too, these Jews reassured themselves, have in our tradition, someone who is both human and more-than. Not Jesus, though. Instead—“beware of Benjamin,” you can imagine them warning their crusading Christian neighbors—if you continue to attack us, we, like him, will bite back.