The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible

by Jonathan Kirsch

  Jephthah’s father had been a rich and powerful lord with a grand house in the district of Gilead. But Jephthah never knew his mother. He saw her only once from a distance as the great man’s entourage passed through the poorer streets of Gilead one fresh morning. Jephthah’s father pointed out the gaunt woman with greasy hair and a gaudily painted face who stood lazily at a crossroads, calling out now and then to passersby. Jephthah was too far away to make out her features or the words that she spoke. But his father’s voice was clear enough: “That pitiful wretch is your mother,” said Jephthah’s father. “So count yourself lucky that you ended up in my house and not hers.”

  Now Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valour, and he was the son of a harlot; and Gilead begot Jephthah.

  —JUDGES 11.1

  But Seila knew that her father did not count himself lucky at all. His father had a wife, a plump and proper woman from a highborn family, who had given him an assortment of sleek young sons. As Jephthah grew older, his father was content to let his stepmother take charge of him along with the rest of the children—and she saw no good reason to keep Jephthah around the house when the very sight of him disgusted her. She contrived to move him to a room in one of the out’ buildings where the stable hands and the house servants bedded down; she made sure that he was otherwise occupied when guests arrived for a banquet; she dressed him in plain clothes even as she ordered up richly embroidered garb for her own sons; she found tasks that took him away from the estate at mealtimes. If Jephthah’s father noticed how his wife had banished his firstborn son, he said nothing; if he cared one way or the other, he gave no sign of it.

  By the time he was sixteen, Jephthah had learned to content himself with the companionship of the stable boys, who taught him skills that would turn out to be useful and even profitable for a young man who grew up poor in a rich man’s household. Once Jephthah learned to ride a horse, to fashion a weapon out of iron, to wield his weapon in a fight, he no longer cast yearnful glances at his father, no longer spoke sweetly to his stepmother in the vain hope that she would regard him as a son rather than a bastard. Then, one day, he rode into the courtyard of the great house and saw his half brothers sitting on low stools, their clothing rent and ashes on their head. Jephthah wondered for a moment who had died, and when he realized that it was his father, he was unmoved.

  And Gilead’s wife bore him sons; and when his wife’s sons grew up, they drove out Jephthah, and said unto him: “Thou shalt not inherit our father’s house; for thou art the son of another woman.”

  —JUDGES 11.2

  Still, Jephthah understood all too well what his father’s death would mean for him. When the thirty days of mourning had passed, Jephthah boldly presented himself at the door of the house and demanded his share of the rich estate his father had left behind. Jephthah was turned away like a whining beggar by his arrogant half brothers, who taunted Jephthah with the fact that his mother was not their father’s wife. “You will inherit nothing of our father’s estate,” one of them declared, “because you are the son of that other woman.”

  Afire with anger and indignation, Jephthah took his complaint to the elders of Gilead, who finally agreed to consider the rival claims of the rich man’s sons. One day, Jephthah, his half brothers, and the gray-bearded elders of Gilead gathered in the house of the dead man, and Jephthah poured his bile into words of great passion. The elders stroked their beards and nodded their heads and even smiled now and then at Jephthah’s plea for justice—the other woman’s son had a surprising gift for the well-chosen and well-spoken word—and then, as if Jephthah had not spoken at all, the elders of Gilead pronounced judgment wholly in favor of his half brothers and briskly ordered him not to bother them again. Then they rose, bestowed one final patronizing smile on Jephthah, and rushed out of the house as if afraid that the eloquent young man might let his dagger speak for him.

  Indeed, one or two of Jephthah’s comrades, who were precisely the rough sort that one might imagine to be the friends of a bastard who had been thrown out of his own home, urged Jephthah to pay another visit to his father’s house by night. “Slit one of their throats,” they said, “and even the fatheads who have taken away your father’s legacy will understand your message!” Jephthah briefly considered the proposition but decided that an outlaw was even worse off than a disinherited son. So Jephthah and a few of his cohorts fled from Gilead and made their way to a town on the frontier between Israel and Ammon, a place where a man whose wits were as sharp as his sword might make a living as a soldier of fortune when there were rich men to serve—or a bandit when there were rich men to rob.

  Then Jephthah fled from his brethren, and dwelt in the land of Tob; and there were gathered vain fellows to Jephthah, and they went out with him.

  —JUDGES 11.3

  Exactly who Jephthah’s mother had been—and why she was not his father’s wife—was a puzzle to young Seila, one that her father never bothered to explain. Only when Seila was older, after she had been befriended by the young women of Mizpah who became her constant companions during Jephthah’s long absences, did she learn the word that described Jephthah’s mother, a word that her father never once uttered within her hearing.

  “Your grandmother,” one of the girls explained, “was a harlot.”

  So it was that Jephthah came to Mizpah in the land of Tob, and so it was that Seila was born in the little house on the outskirts of town. “My one and only child,” Jephthah would say as hot tears welled up in his eyes, “flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood!”

  Jephthah raised Seila on his own, and they lived together in a rough-plastered house with a small courtyard where she kept a goat for milk and a few chickens for eggs. Now and then, a woman would appear at the doorway with a bundle of clothing and bedding, a sure sign that Jephthah was ready to pack up his weapons and make off with his cohorts to some distant battlefield. For weeks and sometimes even months, Seila found herself in the not-so-gentle care of a hired nursemaid until the happy day when her father appeared at the threshold with a bag of silver coins that would feed them until the next call to arms. Jephthah was an accomplished and courageous fighter, much in demand in those unsettled days in Canaan, and Seila was consigned so often to so many different women with so many unfamiliar names that she came to recall them as one woman with no name at all.

  As she grew up, Seila wondered to herself if one of those nameless women had been her mother. But Jephthah told his daughter nothing about the woman who had given birth to her, always turning away even her most pointed and insistent questions with the same phrase. “It’s the two of us against the world,” he would say. Seila understood that he intended to comfort her, but he succeeded only in provoking her curiosity. Eventually she stopped asking, but she did not stop wondering about her mother’s name, her origins, her whereabouts. Perhaps she had been a harlot, too. Perhaps she had fallen ill and died in childbirth. Perhaps she had run away with one of the battle-scarred old soldiers who could be seen up and down the streets of Mizpah. Yet, no matter how colorful or exotic the stories Seila told herself, her mother always remained nameless, faceless, voiceless, a ghost who haunted a young girl’s dreams.

  When Seila was old enough to care for herself while her father was away, she ventured beyond the little courtyard of their house, beyond the well in the town square, beyond even the gates on the outskirts of Mizpah. On one of her long walks into the countryside, she found a cleft in the dusty brown hills where a spring bubbled up and an old oak spread its branches. To that hidden place in the hills Seila returned again and again, at first alone and later in the company of one or two young women whom she counted as worthy of knowing her secrets.

  Sitting cross-legged beneath the tree, listening to the whispers that seemed to be coming from the highest bough as the wind stirred the leafy canopy, Seila imagined that one day she might look up and see her mother sitting high above her head in the crook of a swaying branch. She imagined the sound of a woman’s voice, and she w
ondered how her own name would sound on her mother’s lips.

  One day, when Seila was milking the goat in the courtyard, she heard a commotion in the distance, and she peered over the wall of the enclosure to see what was prompting the laughters and catcalls. Shading her eyes from the sun with one hand, she saw a parade of she-asses making their way slowly down the road in a little cloud of dust. Alongside the donkeys ran a few ragged children who whistled and hooted at the riders. At the head of the parade was a soldier on horseback, thoroughly ill at ease and watching the children with real apprehension. Two more soldiers bearing long spears rode at the rear. Between the mounted soldiers rode seven old men perched awkwardly on the she-asses, each man wearing plush robes of a kind not often seen in Mizpah.

  And it came to pass after a while, that the children of Ammon made war against Israel.

  —JUDGES 11:4

  To her amazement, the procession drew up directly in front of Jephthah’s house, and the old man on the first ass—a gangly fellow with a long, silvery, two-pointed beard—dismounted with an indelicacy that confirmed he was not accustomed to donkey-riding. Seila noticed that his robe had been dragged along in the dust, and the embroidered hem was blackened with dirt. At last, he stood up and addressed Seila without deigning to look at her.

  “Is this the house of Jephthah?” he demanded as he peered past Seila and studied the little house beyond the courtyard.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Ask the mighty man of valor if he will receive us,” the old man instructed. “Tell him the elders of Gilead have come to call on him.”

  Seila stared at the man for a long moment—she remembered the elders of Gilead and their evil decree—and then she hastened back into the house to summon her father, who was sleeping off a late night of drinking and singing. Jephthah appeared at the doorway, stretched his arms above his head, rubbed his eyes, coughed, and then spat into the dust. When he caught sight of the old man at the gate, he laughed out loud.

  “So what brings you all the way to Mizpah, old man?” Jephthah demanded. “Have you changed your mind about the inheritance you and my brothers have stolen from me?”

  The elder of Mizpah ignored Jephthah’s question and began to

  And the children of Israel again did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and served the Baalim, and the Ashtaroth … and the gods of Moab, and the gods of the children of Ammon …; and they forsook the Lord, and served Him not. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and He gave them over into the hand of the Philistines, and into the hand of the children of Ammon. And they oppressed and crushed the children of Israel…. speak in a booming voice, as if he were addressing a multitude instead of just one man. The children of Israel had sinned against the Almighty by worshipping the strange gods of the Canaanites, the old man said, and the Almighty was so angered by their evil ways that he had put it in the mind of the King of Ammon to send an army across the Jordan River to oppress and crush his Chosen People.

  —JUDGES 10.6-8

  And the children of Israel cried unto the Lord, saying: “We have sinned against Thee, in that we have forsaken our God, and have served the Baalim.”

  —JUDGES 10.10

  “And the children of Israel cried unto the Lord,” the old man continued, “saying: ‘We have sinned against Thee, we have forsaken our God, and we have served the Baalim.’”

  “Yes, yes,” Jephthah said dryly. He had already heard about the advance guard of the Ammonites that had crossed the Jordan River to probe the defenses of Canaan. He had already heard of the sorry showing by the ragtag militia of Israelites when they encountered the professional soldiery of the Ammonite king. The old soldiers of Mizpah had laughed among themselves at the militiamen who had broken and run, the rich men who had packed themselves and their finery out of Gilead at the first word of the approaching army. Now the trembling lords and their soundly thrashed army were huddling together in their tents within sight of Mizpah.

  “I am sorry that the Ammonites have scared you out of your houses,” Jephthah continued, “but what does all this have to do with me?”

  The old man frowned briefly at Jephthah and then continued to shout out his grandiloquent words.

  “And the Lord said unto the children of Israel: ‘Did I not save you from the Egyptians and the Amalekites and the Philistines? Yet ye have forsaken Me and served other gods, and so I will save you no more! Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen—let them save you in the time of your distress!’”

  Seila studied the old man’s face, now contorted with anger, and she felt suddenly giddy. If the pious old graybeard who had cheated

  And the Lord said unto the children of Israel: “Did not I save you from the Egyptians, and from … the children of Ammon, and from the ‘Philistines? The … Amalekites … did oppress you; and ye cried unto Me, and I saved you out of their hand. Yet ye have forsaken Me, and served other gods; wherefore I will save you no more. Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen; let them save you in the time of your distress.”

  —JUDGES 10.11-14

  And the children of Israel said unto the Lord: “We, have sinned; do Thou unto us whatsoever seemeth good unto Thee; only deliver us, we pray Thee, this day.” And they put away the strange gods from among them, and served the Lord; and His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel.

  —JUDGES 10.15-16

  Jephthah of his legacy only knew what strange gods were worshipped in Mizpah and its environs, and in what strange ways!

  “So the children of Israel put away the strange gods from among them, and served the Lord, and His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel,” the old man went on. “And the people said to one another: ‘What man is he that will take up the fight against the children of Ammon? He shall be our chieftain and he shall rule over all of Gilead.’”

  Seila noticed a cruel smile play across her father’s lips. Now Jephthah understood why they had come to him, but he did not spare them the effort of saying it out loud. After a long moment of awkward silence, the elder of Gilead raised his hands toward heaven in a gesture of prayer and cried out to Jephthah.

  “Come and be the general of our army, so that we may fight the children of Ammon!”

  Jephthah fixed a stern gaze on the old man, who had suddenly fallen silent but who kept his hands in the air. The old man turned awkwardly and looked over his shoulder, as if to plead for assistance from the others, but they said nothing. At last, it was Jephthah who spoke.

  Then the children of Ammon were gathered together, and encamped in Gilead. And the children of Israel assembled themselves together, and encamped in Mizpah. And the people, the princes of Gilead, said one to another: “What man is he that will begin to fight against the children of Ammon? he shall be head over all the inhabitants of Gilead.”

  —JUDGES 10:17–18

  And it was so, that when the children of Ammon made war against Israel, the elders of Gilead went to fetch Jephthah out of the land of Tob. And they said unto Jephthah: “Come and be our chief, that we may fight with the children of Ammon.” And Jephthah said unto the elders of Gilead: “Did not ye hate me, and drive me out of my father’s house? and why are ye come unto me now when ye are in distress?”

  —JUDGES 11:5–7

  Now a second old man stepped forward from the rank of the elders who had watched the first one’s performance in obvious discomfort.

  “Yes, Jephthah, we are in desperate trouble—all of Israel is in trouble—and that is why we have come to you now,” the second one said with both candor and calculation. “We want you to come back to Gilead. We will make you a general, and you will lead our army into battle with the Ammonites. And if you prevail over them in battle, we will make you not only general of our army but chieftain over Gilead….”

  The old man paused so that Jephthah would not miss his meaning.

  “… chieftain over all of Gilead,” he repeated, “and every man who lives there.”

  Seila saw t
hat her father did not mistake the meaning of the man’s words. A generalship was one inducement, but she had often heard her father say to his comrades that generals who are fortunate enough to prevail in war are quickly forgotten in peace. But a chieftain would rule in war and peace, and he would wield his authority over civilians as well as soldiers. Among the cowering civilians of Gilead, of course, were Jephthah’s half brothers.

  “If you bring me back home to lead your army in battle against the Ammonites,” Jephthah said slowly, as if to make sure he would not be misunderstood, “and if the Lord delivers them to me, then—and only then—will I be your chieftain.”

  The elders clasped their hands, nodded, beamed. The one whose words had won over Jephthah stepped forward and seized his right hand.

  “The Lord shall be witness to the words we have spoken to each other,” the elder said solemnly. “Surely we will do exactly as you say.”

  And the elders of Gilead said unto Jephthah: “Therefore are we returned to thee now, that thou mayest go with us, and fight with the children of Ammon, and thou shalt be our head over all the inhabitants of Gilead.”

  —JUDGES 11:8

  And Jephthah said unto the elders of Gilead: “If ye bring me back home to fight with the children of Ammon, and the Lord deliver them before me, I will be your head.”