The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (37 page)

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!”
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—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.”
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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.”
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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:

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”
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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.”
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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.

I
n 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.

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.

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.

“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!”

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.

“Master,” pleaded the servant, “let’s spend the night here among the Jebusites.”