Jepthah’s Daughter

            The last story we looked at in Bible Study, before breaking for the summer, was the sacrifice of Jepthah’s daughter in the book of Judges. This is clearly not the most inspiring book of the Hebrew Bible. The first five books are the stars, of course, with the origin story of the Jewish people and their relationship with God at center stage, so even when those books get boring you give them a pass (I see you Leviticus and Numbers, I see you). Then in Joshua, you get the (mostly) triumphant story of the first military leader of the ancient Israelites as they return to the land of Canaan after generations of slavery in Egypt. But then we have the book of Judges, where the ancient Israelites are living in the promised land, but still in tribal groups, and being led by one military leader (aka judge) after another. These are not the great heroes of Jewish history, and they are not portrayed as if they are.

Jepthah’s name in Hebrew (Yiftach), literally means “He will open,” and therefore my rabbi nicknamed him “big mouth,” because his most obvious quality is that he opens his big mouth when he shouldn’t. He’s introduced as the disinherited son of a prostitute, kicked out of Gilead by his more respectable brothers, living with the bad boys in a place called “Tov,” which, ironically, means “Good.” Eventually, the elders of Gilead go searching for him, because they are under attack by the Ammonites and he’s developed a reputation as a fighter.

            Of course, his first response to them is disbelief. They kicked him out of town and now he’s supposed to save them? But then they tell him that if he can deliver them from the Ammonites, he will become their leader, which would be the ultimate turnaround for him. And, we are told, God is with him. Unfortunately, Jepthah either doesn’t know that God is on his side, or doesn’t trust in God, so he makes a vow to God, “if you deliver the Ammonites into my hands, then whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return shall be yours and will be offered by me as a burnt offering.” To be fair to Jepthah, people kept animals in their houses, so he probably assumed he would be sacrificing a cow or a goat or a chicken.

            Jepthah, of course, successfully defeats the Ammonites, and when he returns home his only child, a daughter, comes out to meet him, dancing and playing a tambourine (as one does). Upon seeing his daughter, he tears his clothes in mourning. “Ah, my daughter! You have brought me low; You have become my calamity. I have opened my mouth to Yahweh and I cannot turn back.” The Mishna, composed by the rabbis 1500 years after the period of the judges, says that a vow like this that goes against Jewish law is an invalid vow, but Jepthah didn’t get to consult the rabbis and he clearly thought he had no choice. His daughter quickly accepts her fate and just asks that she first be allowed to go away to the mountains with her friends to weep for her virginity, and I was sure this would be the moment when she ran away to live on a kibbutz, or something, but no, according to the text she is then sacrificed by her father. There’s some debate among the commentators over whether she is actually killed, or if maybe she was dedicated as a servant to God (and therefore remaining a virgin for the rest of her life, which would explain the mourning for her virginity thing). The act itself is not described, so there’s some wiggle room.

The lesson of this story has come down as: don’t make a hasty vow because there are consequences to your words. Though you could also choose to learn the lesson that if you are so insecure in your relationship with God that you can’t feel when God is with you, bad things will come of it. Of course, it’s hard to focus on either one of those lessons over the horror of child sacrifice. There seems to have been a lot of confusion in the ancient world over whether God wanted human sacrifices or not, because it was something everyone else was doing at the time and it seemed like such a good idea.

            To try to make sense of this story, we read excerpts from Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror, which compares the story of the daughter of Jepthah with the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham.

            Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” and he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “the fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So, the two of them walked on together.

            When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of God called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” He said, do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now, I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.

             Later, when Abraham returns to his servants and they all go back home, there’s no mention of Isaac at all, and the interpretation has been offered that in an earlier version of the Hebrew Bible Isaac really was sacrificed, and it was only a later editor who let him live, but didn’t bother to give him anything to say, because, really, what could he say?

My rabbi has long had a fascination with the story of the binding of Isaac, if only because we read about it every year during the high holidays and he has to come up with something interesting to say each time. So, as we re-read the story from Genesis, my rabbi not-so-subtly suggested that someone should write about how Isaac felt that day. Ideally, he would take poor Isaac out to lunch at his favorite diner and get the story from him first hand, but if he couldn’t do that, then maybe someone could imagine how that conversation might go. But to be honest, after reading the scene again, I was as silent as Isaac. His father almost killed him, for no reason other than that a voice Isaac could not hear told him to do it. All of this after, in the previous scene, his older half-brother, Ishmael, is exiled from the family encampment and left to die of thirst in the desert, if God hadn’t, again, stepped in.

            Abraham is presented to us as the first person who can hear God’s voice, and the only one at that particular time, and he is so devoted to God that he is willing to sacrifice his sons because God asked him to, and poor Isaac (who, some commentators suggest is actually in his thirties or forties at the time of the attempted sacrifice) is then traumatized for the rest of his life. The end. What else is there to say? God and Abraham are the stars of the story, and Isaac’s fear, or anger, or confusion at his father’s murderous behavior are clearly beside the point. With Jepthah’s daughter it’s even worse, not only doesn’t she get a name, she isn’t saved at the last moment like Isaac is, which is probably why the commentators are looking for loop holes, because this can’t be the story, can it? Why is this even included in the canon?

 There are, if you can imagine, even more horrifying stories in the book of Judges, all meant to portray the struggles of becoming a nation, and while we tend to prefer the stories where the people are better than average and God is generous, I think the fact that we have to sit with our ancestors’ mistakes is probably the point of reading the Hebrew Bible. Sure, it’s nice to imagine that your ancestors had a direct connection to God, but how does that help you figure out how to live your life today without God telling you exactly what to do? The word “Torah,” literally means “teaching,” so it’s fair to assume that we are supposed to be learning from these stories about how not to make the same mistakes as our ancestors (though some present-day politicians seem to think those mistakes are actually a road map to be followed). Eventually, instead of leaders who are focused solely on war and security, we start to see prophets and kings and priests who are more self-aware, more strategic, and more connected to God. But we’re not there yet.

            We didn’t read the story of Jepthah’s daughter at this particular moment because we knew it would resonate uncomfortably with the present day Middle East, it was just the next book in the series, and, according to my rabbi, we have to read every word, no matter how boring, or how many unpronounceable names we come across (usually it’s my job to read the unpronounceable names, and the repetitive lists of animal sacrifices, because I’m the youngest and have dues to pay). But there’s something reassuring in knowing that, eventually, even the book of Judges will end, and better times are ahead. With new elections coming up, both in Israel in October and in the United States in November, there is the possibility that smarter, better leaders will prevail over our present-day Jepthahs, and this cycle of history can finally move on. We can only hope.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?