The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (32 page)

But Seila refused to share the moment of glory with even these intimate friends, and she sensed that her father would want it precisely that way. “Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood,” her father always said, “it’s the two of us against the world.” So Seila shushed her friends, urged them out of the house and down the road before they could spoil the sublime encounter between Jephthah and Seila, the conquering hero and his beloved daughter, his one and only child. From her friends she took a pair of timbrels, each one gaily decorated with long ribbons of many colors. But it would be Seila alone who danced out of the house and welcomed Jephthah in his moment of greatest glory.

The sun was nearly gone, and the sky had taken on shades of fire and quicksilver, when Seila heard the sound of a horse clip-clopping up to the gate. She crept to the window, peered out, and saw her father slowly and wearily dismount. Even in the half-light she could see that he had been injured, and he moved with an awkward gait. Still, she saw what she imagined to be an aura of golden light around his head, and he seemed longer and leaner than when he had left so many weeks ago.

With a squeal of delight, Seila seized a timbrel in each hand, butted open the door of the house with one hip, and skittered into the courtyard. Then she stopped, straightened up, raised one timbrel high above
her head and held the other at arm’s length along her leg. Slowly, solemnly, but with a tautness that bespoke her passion, Seila set up a rhythm of clanging timbrels, intoned a sinuous melody in a high ululating voice, and danced slowly and solemnly across the courtyard toward the gate where her father now stood.

Seila performed the same dance that she and the other young women had danced so many times before in a circle around the great oak, but now she felt as if she were floating three inches off the ground. At last, as she reached the place where her precious father stood, she suddenly bowed low, rattling the timbrels all the while, and finally lifted her eyes to behold him at his moment of triumph.

She gasped. Jephthah was staring at her with an expression of unspeakable sadness and horror.

“My daughter—” he croaked, and then all at once he threw himself down in the dust of the roadway. With one clenched fist he began to beat his breast, and with the other he pulled at his tunic as if to rend his clothing from top to bottom. “My one and only child!”

Seila rushed to his side and threw herself to the ground next to him. “Father!” she cried. “What is wrong?”

“Alas, my daughter!” he said, gasping and wheezing. “You have brought me low!”

Seila felt suddenly breathless. She had the thought that somehow her father had learned of the goings-on beneath the ancient oak where she gathered with her companions every seventh day. Had someone spied out Seila and her companions and reported back to the elders? Was her father brought low by what his own daughter had done in that secret cleft in the hills?

“What troubles you so?” Seila pleaded, weeping openly and hanging on his neck. “Tell me, Father.”

Jephthah drew away from Seila and wrapped his arms around his own shoulders as if to comfort himself.

“I have opened my mouth,” Jephthah said, “and I cannot go back.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, still weeping, still fearful of what words her father had spoken—and to whom.

Jephthah looked at his beloved daughter, his one and only child, but he found that he had no more words to speak.

Long afterward, the townsfolk of Mizpah still spoke of the death of Seila by her father’s hand. They described the crude altar he erected in the courtyard of his house, and how he escorted the compliant and uncomplaining young woman from the house, how he laid her—ever so gently—on the rough stones of the altar, how he dispatched her quickly and mercifully with a sure stroke of his dagger, the same one he had used in battle so many times before to slay a wounded but still-dangerous enemy. And they praised Seila as a heroic woman whose fidelity to the Almighty and loyalty to Israel allowed her to see the necessity and even the sanctity of her death.

“My father, you have opened your mouth and made a vow to the
Lord, so do to me what you have vowed to do,” Seila was said to have reassured her father in a clear and certain voice in the moments before her death, “because the Lord has taken vengeance against your enemies, just as you asked, and delivered the children of Ammon into your hands.”

Of course, none of the pious gossips actually saw the sacrifice of Seila with their own eyes or heard her final words to her father, and the unlikely little congregation that witnessed her death—the comrades who fought alongside Jephthah in battle and the young women who danced with Seila around the ancient oak—never spoke of it to anyone except themselves, soldier to soldier and maiden to maiden. But the townsfolk found it comforting to tell themselves that Seila did not cry out, did not plead for her life, did not struggle against the blade in her father’s hand, did not groan in misery as her blood spilled over the stones of the altar and the flames turned her beautiful young body into charred meat. “Do to me what you have vowed to do” were Seila’s words to Jephthah, at least according to the story that was repeated, generation after generation, by the children of Israel.

A whispered rumor held that Seila begged her father for a single favor before he carried out his vow to the Lord: “Let one thing be done for me, and one thing only,” she is said to have asked. “Let me alone for two months that I may leave our house and go to the mountains and bewail my virginity, I and my companions.” Said the trusting Jephthah: “Go.”

The rumormongers insisted that Seila did not run away and hide from her father, as one might have expected. But before she returned to lay her neck upon the altar, Seila and the young women who were her companions sought out some hidden place, worshipped strange gods in strange ways—and, some say, when they bewailed Seila’s virginity, did so in a manner that would have merited burning even if Jephthah had not made his remarkable vow on the eve of battle with the Ammonites.

When two months had passed, Seila reappeared at the door of her father’s house in Mizpah. Then and there, her life ended, all according to Jephthah’s solemn vow to the Almighty. Eventually, the men and women who knew Seila by name followed her to the grave, and her name was forgotten. But her father’s remarkable vow, and the way that he fulfilled the vow, were still recalled among the children of Israel. Indeed, it was a tradition among the daughters of Israel to go to the mountains each year and spend four days in remembrance of the daughter of Jephthah, recalling her life and lamenting her death in a manner that befitted the daughter of a chieftain.

The Forbidden Cult of Jephthah’s Daughter

T
he oddest assortment of rogues, outlaws, and lowlifes in all of the Bible are found in the Book of Judges: seducers and harlots, assassins and mercenaries, rapists and torturers. Yet we also find heroes and heroines, martyrs and saviors, and among them is a beguiling young woman whose strange life—and even stranger death—are preserved in a few intriguing lines of text. The Bible asks us to regard Jephthah’s daughter as an accidental but willing victim of human sacrifice, and yet we might wonder whether Jephthah’s daughter and her companions did something so shocking to the biblical authors that they dressed up her death in the trappings of sacrifice but dared not speak her name at all.

The Book of Judges is a history of the troubled era that followed the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, a period of crisis and chaos in which “there was no king in Israel, and every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 21:25). But “[c]haos affords opportunity to certain men and women of low birth and mean circumstances,”
¹
as one scholar points out, and so it is that a dispossessed and despised soldier of fortune named Jephthah finds a way to reclaim his legacy and restore himself to a position of privilege and power. Or so he thinks.

Jephthah is the bastard son of a wealthy man—or at least he is treated like one by his half brothers. The Bible plainly tells us that his mother was a common whore, a
zonah
, although some fussier commentators argue that we ought to regard her as the divorced wife of Jephthah’s father,
²
and the rabbis rather delicately describe her as “a woman of another tribe.”
³
Whore or not, Jephthah’s mother was “his father’s ‘other woman,’”
⁴
and his half brothers find that reason enough to reject Jephthah’s claim to a share of their father’s legacy. The law codes in the Bible (and elsewhere in the ancient Near East) do not justify the disinheritance of Jephthah: a son was entitled to inherit from his father whether his mother was a wife, a concubine, or a harlot.
⁵
To Jephthah, then, the galling rejection by his brothers—and the ratification of their deed by the elders of Gilead—is not merely an injustice or a violation of law, but “an act of violence.”
⁶