Mila's Tale Read online

  And then, facing directly into his reflection in the television camera, he repeated his vow in heavily accented but intelligible English: that if God would but give him this town, he would allow his men to punish it by killing the first creature that came out of its gates in morning light—and then the slaughter would stop. He would kill no more.

  The baby girl was born with the new sun, her color bad and her cry weak, but determined. She was gathered to her mother’s chest, where her grey newborn eyes studied the bright new world. Mila slumped onto a chair, blood on her blouse, tears in her eyes, aware that she had never been happier in her life, and most likely never would be. Mother lived, daughter breathed, and the night was over.

  Shockingly, the clinic door slammed back, revealing a man in the motley of combat, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

  “You have to get out of here!” he shouted into the room, but the women could only stare at this figure from another universe. Get out? How could they possibly do that?

  “We’re surrendering to the general, and you know what that army of his does. You have to leave and go hide in the hills.”

  The midwife protested. It was not possible to move this mother and child, certainly not into the unprotected hills. The messenger turned pale, and after listening to the arguments for a minute, shook his head and ran. Mila got up to pour water into a basin and bathe her hands. When they were clean again, and her face cleansed of sweat and smears, she borrowed a fresh shirt from the midwife and left the clinic.

  The town was in a panic, mothers bundling children and possessions in one direction, men running in the other, chickens flapping wildly for the roof-tops. Mila alone walked calmly, making her way through the chaos to the town gate. It was attended by a very nervous old man. He squinted up at her as if he had never seen such a creature before, and said he could not possibly open the gate for her to leave.

  So she opened it herself, straining to lift the heavy bar with her tired muscles, allowing it to drop uselessly to the dust. The sun was coming up in the eyes of the invading army when she walked out of the gate onto the road, chin raised, a white-shirted figure with the sunlight dancing behind her.

  Shots rang out, a volley of dedicated fury at this, their only permitted victim. At the same instant, a hoarse voice screamed for his men to stop, to hold their fire. The newsman’s video of the moment shudders, blurs, and then comes to a focus again on the running general. The sound of shots trails off, as an army watches a man fly up the road and gather up the crumpled figure.

  General and victim hold for a moment, as he listens to a whisper or reads a message in her eyes. Then his figure folds in, as he pulls the limp figure to his chest.

  The reporter’s story flashed around the world: the vow; the defeated village; the opening gate; the sun coming up behind smoking wreckage. It was a stunning image, with a story that caught at the mind and heart: a young girl who taught the women and healed the helpless; a night spent birthing a child; Mila coming out from the gates to receive her father’s sworn revenge; the father weeping into his daughter’s hair. In days, the world knew the name Mila, and knew what the young healer had died for.

  One woman, walking out to meet a bullet, may in the end wield more power than all the world’s generals.

  The text:

  “Mila’s Tale” is a midrash (see below) based on Judges 11:1-40. The story there, known as “Jephtha’s Vow,” goes as follows:

  Jephtha the Gileadite was a warrior. He was the son of a prostitute, but Gilead was his father. Gilead’s wife also bore him sons, and when they grew up, they thrust Jephtha out and said, “You will not inherit in our father’s house, for you are the son of another woman.” So Jephtha fled from his brothers and lived in the land of Tob, where he gathered to himself worthless men and led them in raids.

  When the Ammonites went to war with Israel, the leaders of Gilead said to Jephtha, “Come, be our leader.” And Jephtha said to the elders, “If you take me back in order to fight the Ammonites, and Yahweh gives them into my hand, then I shall be your ruler.” And the elders of Gilead said to Jephtha, “As Yahweh is our witness, we will do as you ask.”

  [There follows lengthy negotiations with the Ammonites, but agreement is not reached.]

  The spirit of Yahweh came over Jephtha, and he moved against the Ammonites. And he made a vow to Yahweh, saying, “If you will really give the Ammonites into my hand, then whatsoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me when I return victorious, that shall belong to Yahweh and be offered up as a burnt offering.”

  [After Yahweh gave him victory,] Jephtha came home to Mizpah, and there his daughter came out to meet him, dancing with a tambourine. She was his only child; he had neither son nor daughter beside her, and when he saw her, he tore his clothes and cried, “Ah, my daughter! You have brought me to my knees, for I have spoken to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow.”

  So she said to him, “My father, if you have spoken to the Lord, do to me according to what has been said, now that the Lord has avenged you on your enemies the Ammonites.” But then she said to her father, “Let this thing be done for me: give me two months to go and wander on the mountains and mourn my virginity, I and my companions.” And he said, “Go.”

  And at the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to the vow which he had made. And it became a custom, that the daughters of Israel go for four days every year to lament the daughter of Jephtha the Gileadite.

  Notes:

  (The above is my translation, and omits portions that have little to do with the daughter. For the full story, I recommend the Revised Standard version.)

  Date: The episode takes place approximately 1100 BCE (Before the Common Era, also known as BC or Before Christ) when the Ammonites, longtime enemies of the people Israel, were pushing west. The kingdom of Ammon is now part of Jordan is now, their capital Rabbath Ammon, modern Amman. The Book of Judges itself was compiled as a written document some five centuries later, around 550 BCE.

  Midrash: The rabbinic term Midrash comes from the Hebrew root drš, meaning to seek, to study, or to investigate. It is Biblical exegesis (that is, an interpretation based on critical techniques) but more specifically for our purpose, it is a traditional rabbinic sermon or interpretation in which a familiar passage is reinvented. Details are changed, material is added, the basic story rearranged and expanded in order to capture an essence or illuminate a hidden aspect: teasing out some subtle truth, that one’s audience might notice afresh the undying wisdom of Scripture.

  Gilead: Jephtha is both a son of a man named Gilead, and a man born in the land of Gilead, a hilly tribal territory between the Ammonites and the Jordan River.

  “Worthless men”: Anashim reqim translates as “empty fellows” or “vain men,” that is, men with neither name nor property, whom Jephtha leads in raids on enemy territories.

  Mizpah: There are several towns of this name in the Hebrew Bible, but from the name—“watch-tower”—one pictures a hill town with a view across long approaches.

  His daughter: Others have confronted the namelessness of the young woman. She is called “Seila” (“ask”) in the first- or second-century Book of Biblical Antiquities (known as “Pseudo-Philo”), then under the name of Adah (“ornament”) forms one point of the Freemason’s “Order of the Eastern Star”.

  “Mourn my virginity”: Less a reference to physical virginity than her unmarried state, with neither child nor promise of one.

  The annual lament of the daughters of Israel: This is probably an attempt to explain away the cultic fertility ritual seen in, for example, Ez. 8:14, where it is called “weeping for Tammuz” (or Dumuzi, known to the Greeks as Adonis). This annual lamentation by women not only marked the seasonal disappearance of the fertility god’s rains, but attempted to instigate his return, and was one of the rituals of goddess worship regarded as abominations in the eyes of the strict monotheists: there is only one God. Clearly, however, the people (especiall
y women) clung to the deities of their ancestors.

  Laurie’s Remarks:

  Once upon a time I was an academic. I wrote things that required footnotes, that depended on more than one alphabet, that took the specific and narrowed it down still further.

  Then I left the ways of Truth and walked into the life of crime: a while after finishing my Master’s Thesis on “Feminine Aspects of Yahweh,” I began to write mystery novels, abandoning the pure habits of the scholar.

  “Mila’s Tale” was originally delivered to an audience at Hanover College, Indiana, where I spent a week as artist in residence. Hanover is a liberal arts college with long-standing links to the Presbyterian Church, and a dedication to intellectual curiosity and the exploration of personal responsibility. As a writer of fiction, it seemed to me appropriate to create a story for my Guest Lecture, since storytellers are those who dig meaning out of tradition.

  One of the characteristics shared by my past training and my current profession is the close attention to detail both require. When interpreting a Hebrew passage, one must not overlook even the smallest of details: verb endings, odd phrasings, repetitions with a slight variation must all be examined. Some of these peculiarities may be accidents of a scribe, or poetry for the sake of beauty—theological red herrings, as it were. But at other times, the meaning lies within those very oddities—in Scripture no less than in a whodunit.

  At times, the tale itself is the oddity, when it reveals some dark aspect of a hero, a distressing truth about someone we are being urged to emulate.

  Some of the more problematic tales in Scripture feel almost as if they’re put there, not despite, but because of the uncomfortable itch they cause. Why on earth did the compilers of the Hebrew Bible include such deeply troubling tales as Noah’s drunken sprawl, or Lot first throwing his daughters to his lust-filled neighbors, then fathering two sons on the young women? What about Elisha sending bears to tear apart some mocking boys—or the young woman, without so much as an identity to call her own, literally laid on the altar of her father’s ambitions? (Genesis 9:21; Genesis 19: 8, 33; 2 Kings 2: 23-24; Judges 11.)

  Perhaps the Rabbis want us to wrestle a bit with the angels, or with our own demons.

  Wrestling with demons is what fiction is all about. And wrestling to create a three-dimensional narrative out of naked clues and events is what crime fiction is about.

  Thus, as a writer of mysteries, I began as every good detective must: by setting aside the commonly accepted story and looking at its facts from a different point of view.

  When I did that, the brief episode of the young woman in Judges began to take on another meaning entirely. If one assumes that this is the story of a victim, a two-dimensional character with as little gumption as she had identity, then her fate looks like one thing. But what if we turn the story around a little? What if this girl actually did know what her father had done? What if she is the protagonist here rather than the victim, going actively to meet her fate rather than succumbing in passive namelessness? That would mean… and then… and also….

  The clues fell into place like the solution of a crime novel.

  What I wrote was midrash, the rabbinical technique of storytelling that re-works a given text to explore its hidden meanings and encourage listeners to think about it anew.

  Midrash is a sort of scholarly game, hugely respectful and loving of the original, yet at the same time refusing to allow the Canon to stand, monolithic and unmoving, until its feet have turned to stone and its mouth ceases to speak to us. Midrash is the sign of a living religion, an active and inventive means of applying received wisdom to the life of an ever-changing community. Midrash instructs, midrash (whisper it quietly) entertains, midrash makes us look at the Divine with new eyes.

  But because the rabbis were always and in all things bound to the word of God, precise scriptural references are found at the core of most midrashim. Aphorisms and human narratives are repeatedly grounded upon pithy quotes from Samuel or Genesis, lest we forget whereof we speak.

  Rabbinical midrash, then, is the paradigm for “Mila’s Tale.” Stories are how we human beings speak to each other across the generations. Stories hold—stories store—wisdom and humor: the experience of the community, the wit of the individual, the reflections of society’s most thoughtful members. Stories clarify our place in the universe, stories explain us to ourselves.

  I gave Jephtha’s daughter a name (because surely she had one) and I gave her a will (because the text most assuredly hints in that direction). After that, good organic writer that I am, I let her speak for herself.

  Textual Commentary:

  The book of Judges, the seventh book in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), was compiled during the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE. It concerns the period between Joshua’s conquest of the Holy Land and the rise of the monarchy under kings Saul and David. The term “Judges,” conjuring to the modern eye an image of black robes in a dignified courtroom, is misleading. Judges were essentially war leaders, men (and one woman, Deborah) with great charisma and military ability, whose authority extended past the time of immediate crisis into peace-time rule. Some seem to have become virtual dictators—but since they reached their position by a competent defense of the people Israel, clearly with the help of God, who was going to argue with them?

  Thirteen (some say fifteen) individuals are described as having judged Israel during this period, half of them too minor to account for much apart from a name. Jephtha is seen as the last of the “major” judges, highly praised on into New Testament times.

  And yet…

  The name Jephtha (somewhat ironic, in light of his story) can mean either “God opens [i.e.: the womb]” or “God frees [the captive]: his only descendent dies childless, captive to a father’s vow.

  As his story begins, Jephtha heads an apparently sizeable gang of what the text calls “worthless men,” his own personal army. When Gilead is threatened, Jephtha’s ragtag band is the only force capable of meeting the threat posed by the Ammonites. Jephtha agrees to take on the battle, but only if the elders of Gilead agree to make him head over them if he is victorious. They may have little wish to be ruled by this shady character, illegitimate in more ways than the one; on the other hand, the Ammonites are coming. So they agree, and when negotiations with the Ammonites fail, battle is met; the spirit of Yahweh comes upon Jephtha.

  And here we come to the tale’s first knotty problem: no sooner does the divine spirit come upon Jephtha than he makes a bargain with God. Note the order. Rather than accepting the inspiration of the Lord and proceeding with the trust that in-spiration should have given him (compare, for example, the attitude of young David going against Goliath in I Samuel 17:45-47) Jephtha moves to the bargaining table, offering Yahweh a sacrifice in exchange for absolute victory. Surely a true man of God—someone filled with the spirit of Yahweh—ought to know that you don’t take a gift, then turn around and bargain with the Giver for a better one?

  Next comes the problem of the sacrifice itself. As the rabbis say (in Leviticus Rabbah, a collection of remarks and sermons on the book of Leviticus), “Four asked improperly [Eliezer, Caleb, Saul, and Jephtha]. Three were granted their request in a fitting manner, and the fourth, in an unfitting manner.” What if Jephtha’s offer of sacrifice—whatever comes out of the doors of my house when I return—landed on some offensive, ritually unclean animal? The rabbis speculate, “Said the Holy One (blessed be He), ‘If a camel or an ass or a dog had come out first, would you have given that for a burnt offering?’ ”

  (One Midrashic thread, woven around the statement in Judges 12:7 that when Jephtha died he was buried “in the cities [plural] of Gilead,” says that part of his punishment for this “unfit” behavior was to die of an illness that caused his limbs to fall off, hence his burial not in one place, but in several.)

  Then, as if he had not offended God enough first by bargaining, then by chancing an unclean offering, Jephtha goes on to actually carry out the s
acrifice—he did with her according to the vow which he had made—despite any number of prohibitions and alternatives.

  Whether or not human sacrifice was permitted in early Judaism is a touchy and much-debated subject: Mosaic Law clearly forbids it when it has to do with the worship of idols, but nowhere is it flatly stated that human sacrifice itself is forbidden. (Abraham’s binding of Isaac—his willingness to offer his son, then the convenient substitution of a stray ram—can be taken either way: supportive of human sacrifice, or evidence of God’s disapproval.) Indeed, the first-born of all, man or beast, belongs to God:

  All the male first-borns of your cattle shall be the Lord’s. Every first-born of an ass you will redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it, you will break its neck. Every first born of man among your sons you will redeem. (Ex 13: 12-13)

  This was one area where daughters got a pass, requiring neither redemption nor a broken neck. Besides which, even if Jephtha’s daughter had been a first-born son, this was a time when a perfectly acceptable legal alternative to sacrifice not only existed, but was widely used: a monetary ransom to the Temple in place of an actual sacrifice.

  Why, then, didn’t Jephtha simply ransom his daughter? Rabbinical commentary goes to considerable lengths in wrestling with this problem, coming up with various explanations.

  The rabbinical commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra (1093-1167 CE/AD) suggests that, although the text does not specifically go into the matter, everyone would have understood that any such vow only applied if the sacrifice was appropriate, and that since a young woman was hardly a suitable whole, burnt offering (“holocaust”), she was instead dedicated to God, locked away in virginal and holy seclusion for the rest of her days. (The time of Ibn Ezra was, it should be noted, a period in which women’s orders of the Church were rapidly expanding.) In the following generation of rabbis, the commentator known as Radak (David Kimche, 1160-1235) asserts that the text does in fact hold that understanding: that the final vav in Jephtha’s vow, generally translated “and” (“that shall belong to Yahweh and be offered up as a burnt offering”), is here a grammatical variant best translated “or.”