Bat-Sheba (Women) / Bat-Sheba Woody Modern (Parfum)

Bat-Sheba Woody Modern (Parfum)

Judith Muller 1968

Israel, You Beautiful.
Israel, You Beautiful, You Strong, You Fierce,
You Wild, You Passionate, You Fragile.
Israel, You Wonder, You Child of the Desert.

Israel in the sixties, seventies, up to the mid-eighties.
Hot desert winds blow like a fleeting tenderness over the skin, pulsating, indestructible life force flows through every single breath of existence, every being.
Despite all the wars of this time, the fears, the never-ending suffering, always, incessantly and unstoppable this unbridled joy of life, the desire for a new day, the unique wit, the warm-hearted humanity in peaceful soulful mélange with melancholy, with the past, with sadness, grief and pain.
In every moment and everywhere, hope glimmers through, sometimes only in an almost imperceptibly delicate touch. As fleeting as a gentle eyelash flutter,
yet possessing the power of a desert storm.

A land like a child, it grows up, tries to find itself and its place;
so young, and yet so old, so experienced, so wise, so mature, so rich, so wounded and so vulnerable.
On the way to its future, a beautiful, fulfilling, hopeful future. Back then...
Back then... so much hope.... Hatikvah.... Back then.

Haifa, in the seventies, I sit in one of the myriad street cafés, from a distance wafts the scent of delicious falafel around my nose (no one outside the Middle East knew what falafel was back then), mixed with all the enchanting spices of the East in exotic pairing with the wonderfully sensual breeze of pomegranate trees and from the orange groves, drifting down from the lovely hills.
Countless young soldiers clad in olive-green uniforms with their machine guns slung over their shoulders - which looks so casual, nonchalant, but is a bitter, serious necessity - stroll through the streets past the many cafés.
Never have I felt as safe as here, rarely have I been as happy as here.
These beautiful men with their deep black hair, their striking, pronounced features and stunning virility and robustness throw me
flirtatious, desirous glances from their intoxicating glowing eyes into mine.
So many beautiful people here, men and women alike. In this fascinating number and on such limited territory, I had never encountered them anywhere before and never again to this day.
...And the older ones, whose faces tell more than any book in the world...
One sinks into their life stories with a melancholic veil before the eyes, without a word being spoken.

A gripping density of vibrations, atmosphere, passion, emotions, heat, danger and threat that can send less profound, weakly strung, rather superficial people fleeing,
at least strongly confuse them and all too often overwhelm them.
It is a lot that mercilessly intensifies the human soul here.
You have to love it, you have to be able to endure it, you have to want it.
To love enduring it, to experience it, to be allowed to experience it, - when you feel this way, then you live it.

THIS is the land of Bat Sheba.
The daughter of Sheva. The seventh daughter.
Bat Sheba, mother of Solomon and beloved wife of King David.

This woman belongs to the young state of the desert (of just 20, 30, 40 years).
The woman who is strong, fights, builds, with passion and dedication.
Never surrender.
The woman is with skin and hair, modern, fully self-aware in a very strangely (worthy of note!) different way than was lived at that time in the rest of the Western world, if at all.

Bat Sheba, the perfume, is created for this woman.
For the woman who lived, loved, and suffered exactly in this special land at that special time.
The future in clear view ahead and the overpowering past as backbone.
She confidently flirts back into the penetrating eyes of the men who are truly still men here.

The scent is one that cannot and should not be exported, that cannot be torn from its socio-geographical context.
That would not do it justice. It is akin to exile.
Bat Sheba needs the desert climate, the blazing heat for its complete unfolding, for the resurrection of its willful, expressive, enigmatic beauty.
Only, and only then, under all these conditions and circumstances, does it merge with its beloved, the woman who becomes this scent and the scent that becomes this woman.
They become one. An intense, inseparable unity.
Modern, biblical and archaic in perfect symbiosis.

This scent is the synonym for Israeli femininity, its reality, its personality of that time.
It is the spirit of the times, even a piece of Israel's cultural heritage.
The olfactory mirror of this young, wild, brave, rising, strong, delicate desert state.
It reflects everything that characterized, haunted, advanced, matured the country at that time,

It does not fit women in other parts of the world; - not to the type of career woman that emerged back then, or the blonde mother with husband and children in a Central European, secure home, and certainly not to American women, Scandinavian women, etc., nor to the emancipation of Western form.
This beautiful perfume belonged exactly where it was naturally widespread, -
in that time frame, in that country, with those people.
It was no longer produced from the moment (now all fates come together in perfection - from its creator, her life circumstances, etc.) when the country was about to change strongly in other directions, due to political and demographic changes and other factors.

Bat Sheba had its time. Perfectly its perfect time.
Full of brilliance, full of hope, full of spirit, full of survival power, full of strength and courage in all its delicate fragility.
The extraordinary and tenderness of the handcrafted bottle, where no specimen is alike, and which in its design is a reminiscence of vessels from biblical times that were discovered during excavations, bears
outwardly witness to this.
It contains the unusual elixir:
Mystically dark with a subtle, fresh hint of gentle cheerfulness.
The locally typical Sabra shines clearly in balanced harmony with its heaviness, which forms the defining base until the leisurely fading.

This is how Bat Sheba smells.
This is how Israel was.
An Israel that no longer exists today in this form and manner.
Israel today is a different country.
The child, in whose shining, expectant glowing eyes of yesteryear hope and enthusiasm flickered uncontrollably... -
the child has grown up...
...had to grow up far too quickly.

Almost like a mirage, the old images of those past days, bittersweet moments rise in me when I smell you today, Bat Sheba, and it fills my soul with overwhelming sadness and painful longing for what once was and was true and was wonderful -
....and is no longer.

But you will always be with me, one with me, Bat Sheva, You Beautiful.