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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  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.”

  And it was a custom in Israel, that the daughters of Israel went yearly to 1am-ent the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year.

  —JUDGES 11.39-40

  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.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A GODDESS OF ISRAEL

  The Forbidden Cult of Jephthah’s Daughter

  THE SINS OF THE FATHER THE SILENCE OF GOD

  “THIS GLORIOUS AND AWFUL NAME”

  LOOPHOLES “WOULD A DOG BE SACRIFICED TO ME?”

  WOMEN WHO BEWAIL THEIR VIRGINITY

  CHILDREN OF HARLOTRY

  A GODDESS OF ISRAEL A CROWN OF FLOWERS

  The 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

  So Jephthah, angry and estranged, reinvents himself as a kind of Bible-era gun-for-hire, a mercenary whose base of operations is a remote town on the border between Israel and Ammon. Somehow Jephthah sires a daughter, an only child, and the Bible suggests that the two of them live together in a tender but lonely bond—we are told nothing about the woman who gives birth to Jephthah’s only child. Like many adults who grew up in broken homes, Jephthah cherishes his own child above all else—and yet he puts her at risk when he is given an opportunity to redeem himself in battle. “[T]here is something excessive about him which disposes him to tragedy,” one scholar observes,7 and so we are not really surprised when he utters the rash vow that will ultimately deprive him of his precious daughter.

  The Bible does not tell us the name of Jephthah’s daughter—a fact that takes on special significance in a book whose authors regard names and naming as something sacred. One ancient storyteller dubbed her “Seila,” a name that I have chosen to use in retelling her story here, but the stinging irony—and the deepest mystery—of Jephthah and his daughter is that her tragic fate is only dimly remembered and her real name is entirely forgotten. And yet, as we shall see, the Bible preserves some intriguing clues about what Jephthah’s daughter and her companions were really doing when they took to the hills of ancient Canaan to “bewail [her] virginity,” and these clues suggest that she may have been a young woman quite unlike the willing martyr that the Bible makes her out to be.

  THE SINS OF THE FATHER

  The Bible itself and many of its pious readers over the centuries place the blame for the death of Jephthah’s daughter on Jephthah alone, and they regard his vow to sacrifice “whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me” (Judg. 11:31) as impulsive, shortsighted, even vain and downright stupid—but essentially innocent. Possessed by the spirit of God, distracted by the prospect of the crucial battle to come, charged up with adrenaline and perhaps a certain blood lust, Jephthah does not pause to reason out the ways in which his vow might go wrong. How he could have overlooked the possibility that his daughter would be the first one to greet him on his return from battle is hard to understand in hindsight, but the apologists have tried their best to explain it away. One ingenious argument for Jephthah’s innocence, if not his gift for abstract reasoning, points out that a typical Bible-era house was built around a courtyard where livestock was kept,8 and holds that Jephthah is not an utter fool when he anticipates that a stray chicken or a curious goat would be the first one to encounter him on his victorious homecoming.

  But Jephthah’s vow can be understood in more troubling ways. The Bible tells us plainly enough that the women of Israel traditionally celebrate a victory on the battlefield “with timbrels and with dances,” the very phrase that appears in the story of Jephthah. Miriam leads such a celebration after the defeat of Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea (Exod. 16:30), and King Saul is greeted in the same manner when he returns from battle with the Philistines after David’s famous sword-and-slingshot duel with Goliath: “[T]he women came out of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet king Saul, with timbrels, with joy, and with three-stringed instruments” (1 Sam 18:6). As a combat veteran who lives alone with his beloved daughter, Jephthah might have expected and even hoped for such a greeting.

  That is why more than one contemporary Bible critic insists that Jephthah knows exactly what he is doing when he makes his vow. Mindful of Miriam’s example, they suggest, Jephthah thoroughly expects to be greeted by his daughter, “who in the patriarchal society would have been more expendable than a man.”9 Perhaps Jephthah, who has already bartered his soldierly services for high office, is perfectly willing to offer up his daughter as a way of inducing the Almighty to grant him victory in the battle that will determine if he will live in glory in Gilead or die in shame in Mizpah. “[A] bribe under the table” is how one scholar describes Jephthah’s words on the eve of battle. “The vow is not imp
ulsive; it is shrewd and calculating.”10 And so, when he appears to blame his daughter for falling victim to his vow—“Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou art become my troubler” (Judg. 11:35)—the guilt-ridden Jephthah may be desperately trying to comfort himself by shifting some measure of guilt to his wholly innocent child.

  Still, even if we are willing to blame Jephthah for making the deadly vow, whether on impulse or by calculation, an awkward question remains: Why does God allow Jephthah to carry out his bloody vow? What is God doing while Jephthah’s daughter and her companions bewail her virginity during the remarkable stay of execution granted by her father? Where is God when she is being led to the altar and burned as an offering?

  THE SILENCE OF GOD

  At least one ancient source insisted that God is horrified at the sight of Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter. “He rose and slaughtered her before the Holy One, blessed be He,” goes a rabbinical version of the story of Jephthah in which God is depicted as mouthing the words found in the writings of the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 19:5). “The Holy Spirit cried out: ‘They have put their children to fire … which I never commanded, never decreed, and which never came out of My mind.’ ”11

  For some Bible readers, then, Jephthah’s vow is “an act of unfaithful’ ness, an attempt to manipulate YHWH, who has already freely bestowed upon Jephthah the gift of the spirit.”12 But God cannot be acquitted quite so easily as the author of Jephthah’s vow—or at least an accomplice of Jephthah in both the making and the fulfillment of the vow. After all, the Bible tells us that “the spirit of God” comes over Jephthah before he utters the vow that will eventually result in the death of his daughter. “One could more plausibly argue,” insists contemporary Bible scholar J. Cheryl Exum, “that Jephthah made his vow under the influence of YHWH.”13

  Indeed, the Bible tells us that “the spirit of God” is not always benign. Saul, who is chosen by God to be the very first king of Israel, is cast into despair and even madness when the Almighty abruptly withdraws his favor and replaces it with affliction. “Now the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul,” the Bible tells us, “and an evil spirit from the Lord terrified him” (1 Sam. 16:14). At first the soothing sounds of a harp played by a young shepherd named David are enough to drive off the evil spirit (1 Sam. 16:23)—ironically., it is David whom God has chosen to replace Saul on the throne—but the “evil spirit from the Lord” is relentless:

  And it came to pass on the morrow, that an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul, and he raved in the midst of the house; and David played with his hand, as he did day by day; and Saul had his spear in his hand. And Saul cast the spear; for he said: “I will smite David even to the wall” (1 Sam. 18:10–11).

  So it is tempting to regard the “spirit of God” that possesses Jephthah as something dark and distorting. However, even if the spirit of God plays no role at all in the making of Jephthah’s vow, the Almighty does nothing to prevent Jephthah from carrying it out—God remains pointedly aloof.

  As the Bible reveals, sometimes the Almighty expresses his will, however indistinctly and indirectly, by simply clamming up. When Saul confronts the armies of the Philistines, for example, he desperately seeks advice and assurance from the Almighty—and the sure sign of God’s disfavor is silence. “And when Saul inquired of the Lord,” the Bible reports, “the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim,* nor by prophets” (1 Sam. 28:6). So, too, does God fall uncharacteristically silent in the face of Jephthah’s vow and the long preparations for the sacrifice of his daughter, all of which affords the Lord plenty of time to consider whether or not to commute her death sentence. “The source of the tragic in the story of Jephthah is not divine enmity,” observes one Bible critic, “but divine silence.”14

  One theologically correct understanding of God’s silence in the story of Jephthah’s daughter is that the Almighty disapproves of Jephthah’s vow and punishes him by allowing his daughter to die on the altar, an explanation that is supposed to acquit God of any culpability in her death but does not offer much comfort to Jephthah’s daughter. A less devout but somehow more convincing interpretation of God’s silence is offered by the Israeli author Amos Oz, who imagines Jephthah begging in vain for a sign that God wants him to disregard his vow and spare his daughter. “I have not withheld my only daughter from you,” Jephthah is made to plead to the Almighty in Oz’s short story Upon This Evil Earth. “Grant me a sign, for surely you are tempting your servant.”15

  God has already complied with countless such pleas and demands from his people ever since he first befriended Abraham. Only a few pages earlier in the Book of Judges, for example, the Almighty recruits an Israelite named Gideon to do battle on behalf of the Chosen People—“The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour,” says an angel who calls on Gideon as he sits under a terebinth—but the reluctant Gideon insists on a sign that it is really God who has called him to service. The angel offers a flashy display of “fire out of the rock,” but not until God himself appears is Gideon convinced. “Peace be unto thee; fear not,” says the Almighty to Gideon, “thou shalt not die” (Judg.6:11, 20, 23).

  But when it comes to the making and keeping of Jephthah’s vow, God falls wholly and ominously silent, and thus condemns Jephthah’s daughter to death. So the story of Jephthah reveals that silence is one of the mysterious ways in which God works, his wonders to perform. “Did the Lord desire her for himself?” muses Bible scholar Cynthia Baker,16 as if to suggest that the whole sordid enterprise is a device by which the Almighty satisfies his own appetite for the martyrdom of Jephthah’s daughter. Or is God testing Jephthah, just as he will later test Job, by granting him victory in battle and then waiting to see if the father is really willing to slay his only child in defiance of the words attributed to the Almighty by his own prophets?

  “THIS GLORIOUS AND AWFUL NAME”

  At the heart of the story of Jephthah and his daughter is the notion that he must do exactly what he has vowed to do. The biblical author never entertains the thought that Jephthah might renounce his words or that Jephthah’s daughter might refuse to comply with them. “I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back,” Jephthah declares, and his daughter does not argue the point: “[D]o unto me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth” (Judg. 11:35–36). So we are reminded of one of the more curious articles of faith among the Israelites: they regard words and even letters not only with reverence but with fear and awe.

  Of course, the Israelites are forced to rely on words alone to express the power as well as the glory of the Almighty. “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image,” goes the second of the Ten Commandments, “nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath” (Exod. 20:4). Thus, for example, the Israelites regarded the four Hebrew letters that spell the proper name of God—conventionally rendered in English as YHWH—to be so powerful (and therefore so dangerous) that no one but the high priest was permitted to speak “this glorious and awful name” (Deut. 28:58)—and even he was permitted to do so only on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, and only in the confines of the Temple at Jerusalem. By the second century B.C.E. even the high priest was forbidden to utter the Holy Name, and anyone who dared to defy the strict decree was doomed to an unspeakable fate, both here and in the “world to come.”17

  Indeed, the rabbinical writings preserve the cautionary tale of an otherwise exemplary rabbi and his family who were martyred by the Romans during the persecutions under the emperor Hadrian. The rabbi was “executed by burning, his wife slain, and his daughter placed in a brothel” by the Roman authorities, who intended to make an example out of the rabbi precisely because of his piety—but the sages offered a much different explanation. The rabbi suffered his fate, they insisted, because he dared to pronounce the Holy Name, even though he did so “not for profane purposes or for personal ends, but rather in a spirit of reverence, and in order to study and t
o understand the ways of God,” and his wife shared his fate “because she did not rebuke him for it.”18

  So, too, does the Bible regard the words of one who makes a vow to the Almighty as sacred. “When a man voweth a vow unto the Lord,” Moses decrees in the Bible, “he shall not break his word; he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth” (Num. 30:3) because “the Lord thy God will surely require it of thee” (Deut. 23:22–24).* For the ancient Israelites, then, God himself regarded a man’s word as his bond, and a vow was something more than a mere promise; rather, it amounted to “the creation of a reality even before its fulfillment in practice.”19 The biblical author expects his readers to understand and accept the fact that Jephthah’s rash words cannot be ignored or defied even though they amount to a death sentence by a father on his own child.