The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (34 page)

According to Judges, any man who tries to cross the Jordan River is challenged by the soldiers of Jephthah’s army to say the Hebrew word
shibboleth
, which happens to mean either “ear of corn” or “flood.”
²⁰
Thanks to a quirk in the dialect spoken by the Ephraimites, they are unable to pronounce the “sh” sound in
shibboleth
, and so they answer the challenge by pronouncing the password as “sibboleth,” thus betraying themselves as Ephraimites. Any man who cannot pronounce the word correctly is seized and slain, and the Bible reports that forty-two
thousand Ephraimites die at the hands of Jephthah’s soldiers, all because they mispronounced a single word.”
*

The sages ask us to believe that Jephthah’s daughter is not merely resigned to her fate but positively eager to repose herself on the altar and expose her neck to her father’s blade. According to the rabbinical writings, she is delighted at the opportunity to give her life in exchange for the victory of Israel against the pagan invaders. Indeed, her only anxiety is that she will not be acceptable as a sacrificial offering and that her father’s vow would be in vain. Once reassured by God himself that her sacrifice will suffice, Jephthah’s daughter turro around and comforts her father!

“Why dost thou grieve for my death, since the people was delivered?” she is depicted as saying in one rabbinical tale. “Dost thou not remember what happened in the days of our forefathers, when the fore-father offered his son as a burnt offering, and the son did not refuse but consented gladly …?”
²¹

The burnt offering to which Jephthah’s daughter refers, of course, is the sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham. Indeed, the Hebrew word used by the biblical author to describe Jephthah’s daughter as his “only” (or “beloved”) child is the same one that God uses to describe Isaac when calling on Abraham to offer him as a sacrifice.
²²
But the allusion to Abraham and Isaac is darkly ironic on the lips of Jephthah’s doomed daughter: God stays Abraham’s hand at the last moment and provides a ram to be sacrificed in place of his son, but no such deus ex machina appears in the story of Jephthah and his daughter. What’s more, Abraham had several wives and an abundance of children (Gen. 25:1–5), but Jephthah’s wife is dead or gone, and his daughter is his one and only child.
²³
So the story of Jephthah and his daughter is “a grim
inversion of the Abraham-Isaac narrative,”
²⁴
a bargain with God that makes Jephthah a chieftain over Israel but reduces him to an even greater loneliness and despair than he must have felt on the day he was driven out of his father’s house.

Other sages were more troubled by God’s inexplicable willingness to let Jephthah’s daughter die in defiance of biblical law that ought to have spared her. To be sure, a vow was sacred, but a vow could be annulled if it violated some other commandment. Some rabbis insisted that the whole sorry affair could have been—and should have been—taken to a rabbinical court, a
bet din
, where the judges would be empowered to literally “interpret it out of existence.”
²⁵
Indeed, the rabbis imagined a spirited but learned disputation between Jephthah and his daughter over the finer points of the biblical law—and the law is on her side.

According to a tale told by the rabbis, the daughter points out to Jephthah that a sacrifice must be selected “from the herd or from the flock,” and not from one’s own family (Lev. 1:2). She argues that Jephthah is entitled to make a cash payment equivalent to the value of the sacrificial victim in place of the sacrifice (Lev. 27:2–8). She invokes the patriarch Jacob, who “vowed a vow” to give a tenth of all of his possessions to the Almighty but whose vow does not extend to the sacrifice of his own children (Gen. 28:22), and she conjures up Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, who “vowed a vow” to give her son to the Lord but meant only that he would be dedicated to service and not sacrificed (1 Sam. 1:11). The rabbis who put these arguments in the mouth of Jephthah’s daughter were convinced that Jephthah’s vow need not have been fulfilled at all.

“The vow is ridiculous and retroactively void,” one ancient rabbi opines, “for a human being is not meant for ritual sacrifice.”
²⁶

The sages imagined that Jephthah’s daughter, unable to convince her father to disregard his vow, begs for a stay of execution so that she can bring an appeal to a rabbinical court, where her learned arguments might find a more sympathetic audience. “Perhaps one of [the judges] will find a loophole out of your words,” she is made to say to her stubborn father. Jephthah consents, and his daughter spends the last two months of her young life going from rabbi to rabbi, rather than “bewailing her virginity with her companions” as the Bible itself tells us. But the rabbinical tale ends in the precisely same bloody way as the
biblical text: “They did not find a loophole,” and Jephthah’s daughter goes meekly to her death as a burnt offering.
²⁷

The most glaring flaw in Jephthah’s vow is, of course, the possibility that a human being might be the first to greet him and thus end up on the sacrificial altar. As we have already seen, the prophets stoutly insist that God does not require or even permit human sacrifice of any kind. (See chapter nine.) What’s more, the handbook of ritual sacrifice that we find in the Book of Exodus “loftily ignore[s]” the sacrifice of a female of
any
species, human or animal.
²⁸
Yet the story of Jephthah and his daughter, perhaps more plainly than any other passage in the Bible, reveals that the biblical authors were neither surprised nor shocked by the notion that God would countenance the sacrifice of a child by her own father.

According to one ancient source, God is not especially concerned that Jephthah’s daughter might be the first one to emerge from his house and greet him on his return from battle. According to an anonymous author of the first century C.E. known only as Pseudo-Philo, whose
Biblical Antiquities
is a kind of “rewritten Bible” in which familiar stories are fleshed out and dressed up, God is angered by Jephthah’s vow as soon as he hears it—but
not
because Jephthah put his own daughter’s life at risk by coming up with such an impulsive and foolish proposition. Rather, God is insulted and aggrieved precisely because a creature less worthy of sacrifice than a young woman might end up on the altar as a burnt offering. Jephthah’s virginal daughter is perfectly acceptable to God as a victim of sacrifice, according to Pseudo-Philo, but what if something else beats her to the door?

“And God was very angry and said ‘Behold, Jephthah has vowed that he would offer to me whatever meets him first on the way.’” God is made to complain: “If a dog should meet Jephthah first, would a dog be sacrificed to me?”
²⁹

To punish Jephthah for putting God at risk of suffering the indignity of a canine offering, God decrees a terrible fate for Jephthah’s blameless daughter, whom Pseudo-Philo calls Seila: “Now shall the vow of Jephthah be visited on his first-born, his own offspring.”
³⁰
To make
sure that his will is done, God beclouds the minds of the judges who hear Seila’s otherwise compelling appeal, and so none of them is moved by her lawyering to spare her life. “I have closed the mouths of the sages of my people in this generation,” God confesses, abruptly adopting Jephthah’s vow as his own, “that
my
vow be fulfilled.”
³¹
To distract his readers from what appears to be God’s cold-blooded indifference to Seila herself, Pseudo-Philo puts a few tender words in the mouth of the Almighty. “I know her to be wiser than her father, and all the wise men,” God says, “and now her soul shall be accepted at her request, and her death shall be very precious before my face all the time.”
³²

Pseudo-Philo goes to the trouble of naming Jephthah’s daughter, and he follows the example of the Bible by selecting a name that reflects her destiny: “Seila” means “she who is demanded,” as if to confirm that God himself demanded her life. Her father’s name, too, seems to comment on his grotesque role in the death of his own child: “Jephthah” is an abbreviated form of the Hebrew phrase “God opens [the womb],”
³³
which recalls God’s claim on the “firstlings” of the Israelites. “Sanctify unto Me all the first-born,” says God to his Chosen People after liberating them from slavery in Egypt, “whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast, it is Mine” (Exod. 13:2). For Seila, sanctification means sacrifice, and we are reminded once again in the story of Jephthah that God prefers flesh and blood on the altar of sacrifice.

What exactly are Jephthah and her companions
doing
during those two months at large in the mountains of Canaan? The Bible tells us nothing more than what we read in Judges: Jephthah’s daughter “bewails her virginity” with her companions, and they commemorate her every year thereafter (Judg. 11:39–40), but no such ritual is mentioned anywhere else in the Bible.
³⁴
Still, even the spare and oblique words of the biblical text are enough to provoke the imagination, and somewhere beneath the imperfectly sanitized tale told by the priests and scribes we can make out dimly something strange and tantalizing, a forbidden tradition that somehow escaped the censor’s pen.

At least one excitable exegete speculates that Jephthah’s daughter
and her companions were acolytes of a “sex cult” in which “Israelite women were dedicated to the deity (presumably Baal) by an act of ritual defloration.”
³⁵
Another proposes that they belonged to a pagan fertility cult “based on the ancient and primitive custom of annually bewailing the dead or ousted spirit of fertility during the dry or winter season.”
³⁶
No less an authority than Northrop Frye allows that Jephthah’s daughter herself became “the center of a local female cult, doubtless originally on the principle … that virgin goddesses, like Artemis, are often the protectors of childbirth.”
³⁷
A great many scholarly readers of the Bible discern in Jephthah’s daughter the features of other figures from Greek myth: Persephone, who is abducted by the king of the underworld to become his wife but is permitted to return to the surface of the earth to visit her mother, the goddess Ceres, at seasonal intervals; or Iphigenia, a virgin who is selected for sacrifice to Diana but is spared so that she can spend her life in service to the goddess. But all of them agree that some faint trace of a forbidden and forgotten ritual is preserved in the biblical account of Jephthah’s daughter.

“It may well be that there was a local pagan cult of a Persephone-like goddess whose origins had been forgotten, and the story of Jephthah’s daughter was invented to account for the existence of the cult (as well as to justify its existence),”
³⁸
speculates one contemporary Bible critic. Another scholar entertains an even more startling scenario: Judges may be “the literature of a feminist intelligentsia” in ancient Israel, a collection of stories that “gave them the courage to live marginally, in a fashion resembling witches in New England.”
³⁹

The Bible offers at least one intriguing clue to the mystery of what Jephthah’s daughter and her companions are actually doing when they take to the hills to “[bewail] her virginity,” although the real meaning of the biblical text is concealed and distorted by a common mistranslation of a single crucial word. The word—
betulum
—that is usually translated in English as “virginity” does not refer to virginity at all but rather to “the stage of a young woman’s life when she is capable of having children,” perhaps signaled by the onset of puberty and a young woman’s menarche or first menstruation. In other words, Jephthah’s daughter is
not
bemoaning the fact that she will die without engaging in sexual intercourse with a man; rather, she is sorrowing over the fact that she “will be cut off from her people before she has become a mother in Israel, before she has progeny, her posterity.”
⁴⁰

Perhaps the rituals performed by Jephthah’s daughter and her companions on a remote hilltop can be regarded as nothing more startling than a rite of passage and a celebration of puberty that was generally observed by the women of ancient Israel. Only because Jephthah’s daughter is forced to celebrate her coming of age under the threat of death does the observance described in the Bible seem so ominous. Only because Jephthah’s daughter goes to her death does the same observance later become a yearly ritual of remembrance. That is why some Bible critics reject any suggestion that Jephthah’s daughter was the priestess of a pagan “sex cult” and urge us to regard the rites and rituals of Seila and her companions as something wholesome and essentially secular—“a countermovement of resolution and repair [that] serves to ameliorate her tragedy,” as one contemporary Bible critic puts it.
⁴¹

But there is another way to understand and appreciate the secret observances of Jephthah’s daughter and her companions in their wilderness sanctuary. We do not need to dress her up in the alluring costume of a sex cultist, but neither do we have to strip away the rich trappings that are suggested even by the spare lines of text in the Bible. Rather we can begin to see Jephthah’s daughter as someone who recognizes, responds to, and satisfies a deep and undeniable longing among the people of ancient Israel that is left unfulfilled by a male deity.