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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  Still more pointed is the mystical tradition in Judaism that imagines the Shekinah, as queen and consort of God, engaging in sexual intercourse with the Almighty in joyous celebration of the Sabbath. The Kabbalists who espoused the idea of divine sexuality were careful to insist that the mating of God and the Shekinah was only a mystical and not a carnal encounter. But the same notion found a more literal expression in the Jewish tradition that a husband and wife ought to engage in “conjugal union” on the Sabbath, a day of rest, study, and prayer on which every act is sanctified, including the act of sexual intercourse.55

  Only the dimmest shadow of the Shekinah can be detected in contemporary Judaism, but at least one ritual contains an ember of the old passions that she once kindled in the hearts and souls of the people who venerated her over the millennia. At the beginning of the Friday evening prayer service in most synagogues, the congregation turns away from the ark where the Torah scrolls are kept and faces the door of the sanctuary while singing a hymn that was borrowed from the mystics who studied the Kabbalah. “Come O bride!” the congregation sings in greeting the unseen figure who is imagined to be the Sabbath Queen and the bride of the Almighty. Although few worshippers realize the origins or meanings of the ritual, it is one last echo of a tradition that may reach all the way back to Jephthah’s daughter.

  A CROWN OF FLOWERS

  Jephthah’s daughter, as she appears in the Biblical Antiquities of the ancient author known as Pseudo-Philo, embodies precisely the same qualities that are ascribed to the Shekinah: she is “loving, rejoicing, motherly, suffering, mourning, and … emotion-charged.” According to Pseudo-Philo, Seila and her companions seek out a place for their ritual observances that resembles the “high mountains” and “leafy trees” that are described as the sites of pagan worship by the biblical authors. Seila is made to address her words of lamentation to the beasts of the forest and the forest itself. So we might wonder if the “rewritten Bible” of Pseudo-Philo offers a clue to the mystery of where Jephthah and her companions go and what they do to “bewail [her] virginity.”

  Now Pseudo-Philo did not dare suggest that Seila is a goddess-worshipper, much less a goddess. Indeed, Seila is made to seem even more sanctimonious in Biblical Antiquities than she appears in the rabbinical literature or the Bible itself. According to Pseudo-Philo, Seila absolves her father of any guilt in her death. “May my words go forth in the heavens,” says Seila, “that a father did not subdue by force his daughter whom he has devoted to sacrifice.”56 Although she seems to understand that her father’s vow is legally flawed, Seila does not engage him in a debate over the fine points of the law, nor does she appeal to the rabbinical courts; rather, she encourages her father to do exactly what he has promised to do. “And now do not annul everything you have vowed,” she instructs him, “but carry it out.”

  Pseudo-Philo imagines that God himself, who holds himself aloof from Jephthah, hears and responds to Jephthah’s daughter as she laments her fate on a holy mountain by night. The Almighty declines to call off the sacrifice, but he praises the young woman who will be the burnt offering for her righteousness and sanctity. “Let her life be given,” God says. “[H]er death will be precious before me always, and she will go away and fall into the bosom of her mothers”57—a phrase that puts a distinctly feminist spin on the familiar biblical euphemism for death. In fact, the phrase is found nowhere else in the literature of that era,58 and the attitude of Pseudo-Philo toward women in general and Seila in particular prompts some scholars to wonder out loud whether the author of Biblical Antiquities was a woman.59

  Indeed, when Seila asks her father for a stay of execution so that she and her companions may “bewail [her] virginity,” Pseudo-Philo put words in her mouth that seem distinctly at odds with what we have come to expect from the sternly monotheistic (and seemingly masculine) authors of the Bible. For Seila and her companions, not unlike the pagans of the ancient world, the flora and fauna of the wilderness are not merely sacred but sentient, and she seeks out the very same hilltop groves where strange gods and goddesses are worshipped. “[Grant] … that I may go into the mountains and stay in the hills and walk among the rocks, I and my virgin companions,” she implores her father. “And the trees of the field will weep for me, and the beasts of the field will lament over me.” Once we reach the sacred mountaintop in the company of Seila and her friends, she addresses her first words to the landscape itself. “Hear, you mountains, my lamentations …,” she implores. “You trees, bow down your branches and weep over my youth.”60

  When Seila speaks her own eulogy in the company of her fellow mourners, however, she no longer thinks to address God, or her father, or even the wilderness and the wild animals around her. Rather, she addresses her absent and missing mother—“O Mother, in vain have you borne your only-begotten daughter!”61—and she alludes to the ritual adornments that have been prepared by the various women in her life in anticipation of her coming of age. “[T]he white robe that my mother has woven,” “the crown of flowers that my nurse plaited for me,” “the coverlet that she wove of hyacinth and purple.”62

  The highest calling for a woman in ancient Israel was marriage and childbearing, and Seila bewails the fact that she will be denied the rites and rituals that accompany them. “I have not retrieved my wedding garlands,” she cries. “I have not been clothed in splendor, according to my nobility. And I have not used the sweet-smelling ointment, and my soul has not rejoiced in the oil of anointing that has been prepared for me.”63 Seila’s lament reaches a climax of sorrow when she declares that all of the handiwork of the women who cherish her—and her own mortal remains—are condemned to Sheol, a Hebrew word that refers to the abode of the dead:

  Sheol has become my bridal chamber, though my people [dwell] on earth.

  And may all the blend of oil that you have prepared for me be poured out,

  and the white robe that my mother has woven, the moth will eat it.

  And the crown of flowers that my nurse plaited for me for the festival, may it wither up,

  and the coverlet that she wove of hyacinth and purple in my nobility, may the worm devour it.

  And may my virgin companions tell of me in sorrow and weep for me through the days.64

  The story of Seila as imagined by Pseudo-Philo probably dates back to the first century C.E., an era when the sacred texts of the Bible had already been cleaned up and canonized, and so we cannot really know whether Biblical Antiquities preserves some thread of a forbidden tradition that the priestly censors left out of the Bible. Even the scholars who are willing to speculate that Jephthah’s daughter and her companions belonged to a “sex cult” dare not suggest that they were goddess-worshippers. Indeed, the sheer enthusiasm that Seila displays for her fate prompts some exegetes to see her as “a paradigm for later Jewish and Christian martyrology”65 or even a Christ figure in her own right. “The only other biblical character who is sacrificed by a patriarch for the good of his people,” one Bible critic points out, “is Jesus.”66

  Still, it is tempting to imagine another way to tell the story of Jephthah’s daughter. Perhaps she was offered up by her father on the altar of some deity other than Yahweh, one of those many forbidden gods and goddesses who so troubled the biblical authors precisely because they hungered for the charred flesh of children. Or perhaps Seila herself and her companions were the ones who defied the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other God before Me.” If so, we can begin to imagine that her death was not the result of a rash vow to Yahweh, but rather of a death sentence pronounced on an apostate in the name of Yahweh. Either one of these imagined endings might have prompted the biblical authors to turn Jephthah’s daughter from a goddess-worshipper into a pious martyr. And either one is reason enough to explain why they dared not write her name into the pages of the Bible.

  * “Urim” and “Thummim” are profoundly mysterious objects of unknown description that were somehow used by the high priest of the ancient Israelites to communi
cate with God. The Bible simply does not reveal what the Urim and Thummim were or how they were used, although scholars speculate that they were inscribed with holy words and used for divination by drawing of lots (Exod. 28:15–20, Lev. 8:8).

  * According to the Bible, the vow of an unmarried woman who still lives in her father’s household is binding only if her father witnesses the vow and does not exercise his right to veto it. The husband performs the same role in the case of a married woman who makes a vow. “But the vow of a widow, or of her that is divorced … shall stand against her” (Num. 30:3–10).

  * The tactic adopted by Jephthah, as it turns out, is clever but not uncommon. “I am told that in World War II,” reports Bible scholar Robert G. Boling in his commentary on the Book of Judges in the Anchor Bible series, “the Dutch underground was able to screen out German spies by making them pronounce the Dutch city name Scheveningen, which only the Dutch can do properly.”

  * The Bible tells us that Rachel hides the stolen teraphim in a camel-saddle and then dissuades her father from searching the saddle by sitting on it and telling him that she is menstruating. “Let not my lord be angry that I cannot rise up before thee,” she says, “for the manner of women is upon me” (Gen. 31:35).

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE TRAVELER AND HIS CONCUBINE

  “Behold, here is my daughter a virgin, and his concubine; I will bring them out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you….”

  —JUDGES 19.24

  In the days when no king ruled in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes, a man from the tribe of Levi found himself at odds with the young woman from Bethlehem who was his concubine.

  Who knows how such ugliness starts between a man and a woman? They exchanged bitter words, but the Levite went too far when he shouted “Harlot!” in her face. Not an unusual story, of course; who could have predicted how badly it would turn out in the end? Perhaps if there had been a king in Israel, the whole sordid affair might have ended when it was still just an ugly incident and not yet a bloody civil war.

  The woman slammed the door of the Levite’s house in the hill-country of Ephraim and headed back to her father’s house in the land of Judah. At first, the Levite was sure that she would see her own foolishness and turn back; he waited patiently for the sound of her footfall at the gate. Then, as days turned into a week, he began to fret—what fate had befallen her on the lawless roads between here and Bethlehem? At last, word reached him that she was back in the household of her father, and when the weeks turned into months—-four months, to be exact—he realized that she was not coming back, at least not on her own.

  What stung the Levite’s pride most of all was the fact that his concubine apparently did not miss him as much as he missed her. After a few more sleepless and fretful nights alone in his bed, the man worked up enough righteous indignation of his own to send him out the door and down the road after her. He took along two asses, one for him to ride and the other to fetch her back home, and a manservant just in case of trouble on the road. Even though one donkey was riderless on the way down to Bethlehem, the servant walked along behind him—but, then, he was accustomed to walking. To the Levite’s relief, no danger befell them as they made their way down from the hill-country.

  And it came to pass in those days, when there was no king in Israel, that there was a certain Levite sojourning on the farther side of the hill-country of Ephraim, who took to him a concubine out of Beth-lehem in Judah. And his concubine played the harlot against him, and went away from him unto her father’s house to Beth-lehem in Judah, and was there the space of four months.

  —JUDGES 19:1–2

  And her husband arose, and went after her, to speak kindly unto her, to bring her back, having his servant with him, and a couple of asses; and she brought him into her father’s house; and when the father of the damsel saw him, he rejoiced to meet him.

  —JUDGES 19.3

  As the Levite traveler and his servant approached Bethlehem, the man wondered about the reception he would receive when he appeared at his father-in-law’s door. He knew full well what a sharp tongue was hidden inside the lovely mouth of his concubine, and he began to worry that she had poisoned her father’s mind against him with her version of what had gone so wrong between husband and wife. What if she told her father that he had accused her of playing the harlot against him? What if her father, outraged and indignant, set upon him and drove him off with blows?

  But the Levite need not have fretted. His father-in-law seemed very glad indeed to see him—and even gladder when he saw the second ass that was intended to carry his daughter back to the place where she belonged now that she was all grown up and married off.

  And his father-in-law, the damsel’s father, retained him; and he abode with him three days; so they did eat and drink, and lodged there.

  —JUDGES 19:4

  And it came to pass on the fourth day, that they arose early in the morning, and he rose up to depart; and the damsel’s father said unto his son-in-law: “Stay thy heart with a morsel of bread, and afterward ye shall go your way.” So they sat down, and did eat and drink, both of them together; and the damsel’s father said unto the man: “Be content, I pray thee, and tarry all night, and let thy heart be merry.”

  —JUDGES 19:5–6

  The man lingered at his father-in-law’s house for three full days, and he was treated to rich meals, an abundance of good wine, and much music and dancing. But the young woman refused to show herself. Instead she sulked in a back room of her father’s house, and the Levite found himself growing angry again. Why had he bothered to come in the first place? he asked himself. Let the wretched woman stay with her father! And so he announced that he would return to his own home in the morning, whether or not she wanted to come along, and he ordered his servant to prepare the donkeys for the journey. The next day, he rose at dawn, but the woman was still nowhere to be seen.

  “Have a morsel of bread with me before you go,” her father urged him. “You cannot travel such a distance on an empty stomach!”

  So the Levite traveler delayed his departure and sat down at the table for what turned out to be yet another sumptuous meal that lasted until the sun was high overhead. His father-in-law poured cup after cup of wine, and insisted on one last dance by the slave-girl with the fetching smile who had entertained them over the last three days.

  And the man rose up to depart; but his father-in-law urged him, and he lodged there again.

  —JUDGES 19:7

  And he arose early in the morning on the fifth day to depart; and the damsel’s father said: “Stay thy hearty I pray thee, and tarry yet until the day declineth” and they did eat, both of them. And when the man rose up to depart, he, and his concubine, and his servant, his father-in-law, the damsel’s father, said unto him: “Behold, now the day draweth toward evening; tarry, I pray you, all night; behold the day groweth to an end; lodge here, that thy heart may be merry; and tomorrow get you early on your way, that thou may est go home.” But the man would not tarry that night, but he rose up and departed.

  —JUDGES 19 8-10

  “Too late to start on your journey now,” his father-in-law said. “Why not spend the night and enjoy yourself? Then you can get off to a fresh start tomorrow.”

  So he lingered one more night, and rose early on the fifth day, but again the woman did not show herself. Again, his father-in-law pleaded with him to dine before hitting the road—and again he tarried.

  Then, quite to his surprise—and his father-in-law’s obvious relief—the woman appeared in the doorway of the house, dressed in a long cloak and bearing a bundle on her head, all ready for the journey back home. His father-in-law abruptly ceased his entreaties and instead seized the bundle from his daughter’s head, making himself useful by lashing the baggage to one of the donkeys.

  “On your way, then, the two of you,” prattled the father-in-law, not bothering to offer his son-in-law another night of hospitality,
“and Godspeed!”

  [He] came over against Jebus—the same is Jerusalem; and there were with him a couple of asses saddled; his concubine also was with him. When they were by Jebus—the day was far spent—the servant said unto his master: “Come, I pray thee, and let us turn aside into this city of the Jebusites, and lodge in it.” And his master said unto him: “We will not turn aside into the city of a foreigner, that is not of the children of Israel; but we will pass over to Gibeah.” And he said unto his servant: “Come and let us draw near to one of these places; and we will lodge in Gibeah, or in Ramah.”

  —JUDGES 19:10–13

  The sky was already gray when they left Bethlehem, and the clouds only grew more threatening as they made their way along the road. By the time they reached the outskirts of Jerusalem, the weather was wild and stormy, and the servant looked longingly at the little clusters of houses on the hills around them. Of course,’ the place was not yet called Jerusalem—the Israelites had not managed to drive out the Jebusites from their impregnable hilltop settlement, and the place still belonged to them. But the servants misery was greater than his fear of strangers, and he pulled at his master’s sleeve.