The Whoreson's Daughter

By Celia Crotteau

Chapters 11 and 12 in the Book of Judges recount how a rash vow forced the military victor Jephthah to sacrifice his beloved only daughter. While scholars agree that she was sacrificed, for centuries they have debated the exact nature of that sacrifice. Some argue that Jephthah's daughter was ritually killed on an altar, her throat slit like an animal's. Others maintain that she forsook marriage and motherhood to devote the rest of her life to serving her god. Whatever occurred remains a mystery. But might the unnamed young woman's too eager compliance have disguised more than submission to her father and her faith? Did she stray beyond the accepted norms for her day? What forbidden passions did she pursue? In her own quiet way was she as reckless as her famous father?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796088595

Celia Crotteau

A Biblical scholar and educator, Celia Crotteau's fascination with women's roles in ancient civilizations has inspired her to imagine how certain Old Testament heroines might have told their own stories. In earlier novels she gave voices to the prophet Hosea's wife Gomer and Ruth's sister Orpah. Now, in her sixth book of historical fiction, she does so with Jephthah's daughter. Celia has also published award winning essays, poetry, short stories, and textbooks and has taught literature, history, and writing to students from sixth grade through college level.

Book preview

THE DAUGHTER

Truth: my grandmother, my father’s mother, was a prostitute.

For a few coins she allowed men to enter the cleft between her legs, that much I can say with certainty. But how did she react while they hammered away at her unresisting body which they and she treated as a commodity, during a quick process that both parties viewed as a business transaction?

Perhaps she lay back, bored, even listless, and shifted hooded eyes away from the reddened face gasping above her with the self-concentration a runner exerts as he nears the end of a race, until, at last, finish line reached, the stranger collapsed on her breast with a sob. Then she could wriggle out from under him, adjust her clothing, and saunter off knowing that, like the stranger, she had also reached a goal, hers being to pay for tomorrow’s bread.

Or maybe she was a more experienced whore, one who saw no shame in the act. Brazen, she called out in a sultry voice to those men whose footsteps slowed while they considered her offer. With honeyed words she enticed and wheedled, and, squirming beneath them, feigned pleasure enough to encourage a return visit.

While I would prefer to think of her as the first type of prostitute, a poor woman desperate to feed herself and a starving family, I reluctantly admit that she was probably the second. She was older, and not surprised when she fell pregnant, always a possible complication of her profession, and one she had experienced before. No, what shocked and frustrated her was that no remedy she tried would rid her of this burden. Resigned, she shrugged and accepted her mysterious fate. Likely she continued to whore, swearing under her breath when her swollen belly forced her to mount the men instead of they, her. Too much hard work, that! Eventually she bled to death birthing a large, sturdy boy. A regular customer eagerly claimed the child, though whether or not the boy was truly his no one knew. An elderly man, the claimant had been married twice, with no children from either union. Of course he blamed the women.

From the day of his birth, my father’s detractors snickered that his sire was Gilead, which was the name of the region, not of the man who took him in. That snide moniker inferred that any male could have squirted the seed into the prostitute that produced this bright-eyed infant who waved his plump arms and kicked his broad feet so vigorously.

They spoke a cruel reality.

Fortunately, the kindhearted wife of my father’s benefactor welcomed the baby to rear as her own. She named him Jephthah, in Hebrew Yiftach, meaning whom Yahweh sets free. My Aunt Machia firmly believed that, rather than the little one’s rescue, the name signified her mother’s release from the shame she had suffered as a barren wife.

More about Aunt Machia soon. She will often surface in my narrative, just as she intruded in my life, sometimes when not wanted. She acted as more a mother to me than an aunt, and, from my youthful perspective, more of a scourge than a boon.

But for now, Yiftach’s mother, the supposedly barren wife: within a short time, blessed for her compassion, she found herself pregnant. Not one but three boys appeared in rapid succession, their parentage guaranteed, for their mother was a godly woman. She never treated him any differently from her other sons, my father said, before admitting with a slight smile that she may have favored him as a woman does her firstborn. But, like his birthmother, his adoptive mother died bearing a child, this one a daughter, Machia. The four boys grew into men, my father taller than the others by a head, and handsomer. His jeering half-brothers never let pass an opportunity to remind Yiftach of what his birthmother had been. When their father died, those three younger sons banded together and drove my father from their house, denying his legitimacy, depriving him of an inheritance and ensuring his bitterness. Thereafter he fell in with an unsavory group of men who lived on the fringes of respectable society.

Always my father craved the deference an unblemished reputation bestows, which explained his mild remonstrances when I tested conventional feminine boundaries. Yet he also encouraged my audacity. Conflicted, he warred within himself, and without. By nature an easygoing man, when young he behaved as needed to survive, meaning he raided, pillaged, and killed alongside his fellow outlaws. So superbly did he perform, he became their leader.

Truth: the circumstances of my father’s birth shamed him. They saved me.

Thank you, oh grandmother whose name I do not even know. Except for your immorality, I might have been forced into a role for which I was ill-suited. Although your sin killed you, it spared me.

Yahweh’s ways are wondrously strange. I accept my lot, as did my nameless grandmother. I believe that I resemble her, and so did my aunt, as I will soon reveal. I look like my father, who displayed no likeness whatsoever to the woman he called sister, my Aunt Machia, supposedly a female version of her father: short and slight, with squinty eyes set too close together and a chin that receded into a scrawny neck. Not only was Aunt Machia homely, she was lopsided, one leg shorter than the other, the result of the difficult labor that killed her mother. Aunt Machia did not walk, she limped. When she hurried, instead of running she jerked.

No man asked for her, no man accepted any generous offer her three full brothers dangled before him. Tired of the outspoken resentment of her sisters-in-law and daring in her own way, finally Machia slipped out and walked for several days, to present herself at her oldest brother’s house. Her timing was perfect. Just days after bearing me, my own mother had died. My bewildered, grieving father welcomed his sister’s surprise appearance and turned me over to her to raise. She not only received his protection, she received a child, and she deemed her life complete.

Truth: birth delivers life. Too often it also bestows death. Early on, hearing my familial history, I declared that I wanted no part of women’s traditional lot. I would never marry, never risk motherhood.

Aunt Machia studied me and said calmly, You may have no choice. Your breasts have not begun to bud and your hips are as straight as a boy’s, but already men inquire of your father, either for their sons or themselves. You look too much like her.

She meant the prostitute. In her childhood hamlet Aunt Machia had overheard a catty neighbor remark that my father inherited the prostitute’s dark beauty which allowed her to ply her contemptible trade. Often when I study my reflection in a still pool of water, I pretend that I gaze at the woman who began it all, this unconventional life. Silently I ask her how she would have handled all that happened to me. But she cannot answer. I am left to consider how, if Yahweh had treated more gently both her and the man who links us, her son, my father, this tale might have played out differently.

His ways are mysterious and not for me to question. But I do. Yes, I admit that I do.

Is that wrong, a sin, to wonder, speculate?

Hear my story and advise me. I will relate it in its entirety and then ask that you decide.

But first hear me out. No interruptions, no scoffing, no prejudging. If you cannot agree to my terms, leave me now. Like my grandmother, I drive a hard bargain. We both gambled, but she, she lost, while I– I will let you determine whether or not I won.

My name? Just as through the ages the force I call Yahweh has answered to different appellations and titles, so have I.

Aunt Machia named me Avigail, a hollow declaration of joy I did not bring my newly widowed father.

I have been called Yiftach’s girl by my people, by non-Hebrews Jephthah’s beloved only child.

But I prefer a tribute to that long dead forebear, the woman who began the spinning of this strange tale. The prostitute. Yes, I heard the whispers: I was the whoreson’s daughter. The women muttered loud enough that I caught the epithet as I passed by their huddle, sufficiently soft that none needed own the ugliness if I swung around to confront them. Which I never did. Instead I lifted my head, proud to confirm what was said of me.

Indeed, I am the whoreson’s daughter.

I am not better than those women. Neither am I worse.

Circle back to where we started.

Truth: my grandmother, my father’s mother, was a prostitute.

She acted in darkness, but from the darkness sprang light.

The good forms bad, and the bad, good. What seems simple is complex. What appears complicated is easily solved.

Intrigued? Then listen to what I say.

A wild creature I have tamed, the gentle dove perches on my shoulder, one loose, wispy feather caressing my cheek. Or is it a breeze that strokes my face while breathing into my ear divine encouragement for the beauty Yahweh created which I attempt to recreate?

Am I a holy woman set aside for service, a prophetess with dried clay beneath her fingernails, or a harlot who follows my ancestress’s ways, albeit with my own deviant twist?

Mayhap you can tell me what I have yet to fathom.

HER

From Sheol’s depths I follow my granddaughter’s ramblings.

They are pointless, although I do not and will not inform her. Perhaps cannot. When, why, and how the dead may communicate with the living I am uncertain. However, I must admit that I have never tried, not since I found myself transferred from the garish world aboveground to this subterranean one that most dread and strive not to enter. They struggle in vain, for death calls us all.

I like it. The state of death, I mean, and this place, Sheol. It is cool and dark and roomy.

Death offers me what life did not: an opportunity to distance myself from others. During my earthly tenure, I endured enough body on body and body in body contact, if you understand my meaning. I imagine you do.

Yes, I am the prostitute. Also the mother and grandmother. Though all three titles describe relationships, the first differs markedly from the last two. Or does it? Because, honestly, what do relationships signify other than a give and take between individuals? The men who sought me out, they allowed my survival. Physical, that is. And I allowed theirs. I gave them physical pleasure, yes, but more often I met emotional needs: I comforted, pretended to understand, pushed back the despair of loneliness. While most meetings lasted just long enough for the act, again and again a smattering of men returned to me, such as the one who called himself my son’s father.

As for my son, did not my denial of his existence make our relationship as brief or briefer than the connections I experienced with those many men? Long did I refuse to acknowledge that he would not be washed from my womb with the right tonic or spell, so stubbornly did he cling to life inside me. Then, amidst rolling crescendos of intense pain, he did leave me. I glimpsed a cap of scrunched black hair, heard a wail of protest, before the midwife gasped in horror and my body released not the afterbirth, not another child, but a wet flood. My eyesight blurred and blackened. Her voice, and the baby’s, if that mew qualified as a voice, both voices faded into echoes, then were silenced.

I came here.

So swiftly did I depart, I developed no attachment to my son. Another assumed the role of mother, which I gladly relinquished to her. Like all arrivals in Sheol, I set about accustoming myself to this new reality. After I had settled in, when I thought to wonder what had happened to the boy who took life from me as I gave it to him, he was already a man grown, with a man’s strengths, flaws, and concerns. Chief among the latter was the daughter.

She, now, she is different. As is the timing. With her I would welcome a relationship. She was not an inconvenience I tried to rid myself of as I tried, and failed, to rid myself of her father. Meeting him, I would feel a stirring of– what? Guilt? Regret? Not so with my granddaughter. The resemblance between us, physically, emotionally, mentally, is startling.

She does not realize that the image staring back at her from beneath the scum of that shallow puddle she calls a pool is not her likeness, but me, my own self, venturing as far as I dare, no, as far as I am allowed, from these peaceful caverns toward that too bright, overloud messiness she inhabits.

How this wandering will progress I have yet to be informed. For now I content myself with the privilege I have been granted. Others weep because they have been denied what I enjoy. But possibly they loved overmuch. I did not, and I do not. I will not.

THE DAUGHTER

My first memory? An easy answer, that: a goose-pimpled, engorged, yellowish-brown mound, the meandering dark veins of which I eyed with avid curiosity while sucking and swallowing the warm mouthfuls of froth that mound produced.

A breast. Yes, a breast.

I can easily figure whose.

Not my mother’s.

Not Aunt Machia’s, though her low-pitched, almost masculine rumble hovers among the sensory riches that enliven this split-second flash. Always present, Aunt Machia planted herself firmly in the foreground of my early life. But she did not insert herself between me and my milk source. Not that she did not want to, only because physically she could not. And while she did not appreciate the milk’s originator, Aunt Machia understood the originator’s contribution to my welfare. She accepted that other woman’s required presence. Grudgingly, which translated into bossy instructions to my wet nurse on how to suckle me.

Or so I reckon. But is what I remember based on actual conversations I heard and absorbed while tugging at that pliant nipple, just as I absorbed the life-sustaining milk? Or do I remember what I later chose to believe, knowing Aunt Machia as I did? Did Aunt Machia’s harsh tone or my nurse’s tightening her grip as she cradled me clue the small child I was to the discord that crackled between the two women, like lightning bolts flashing in a stormy sky?

No nature-induced storm threatened that day, for I felt– and feel, when I remember– the sun’s simmering heat on the hand that clutched at the wet nurse’s breast. When she turned her head, a strand of her wiry hair tickled my forehead. I blinked, batted it away, and snuggled closer.

The wet nurse smelled of clean sweat. And milk, of course. Of its diluted sweetness.

No, Sarai! Come here! Don’t chase the rooster!

Who spoke those words? Aunt Machia scolding a wandering tot? Or that tot’s worried mother, who, weighed down as she was with her charge, controlled her own daughter through the nuances of vocal inflection? I am inclined to think the mother spoke. Aunt Machia would not have bothered herself with Sarai’s safety, certainly not summoned the begrimed little girl to her side.

Slightly older than I, Sarai was not yet weaned. Tirtzah, her mother and my wet nurse, was a young widow, an impoverished distant cousin Aunt Machia sought out to give me what she could not. Or presumed she could not. I have since heard of foster mothers who put babies to the breast and, behold, their milk flowed. I have heard of others who attempted the same, without success.

Aunt Machia managed as she saw fit. I thrived. As did Sarai. In my mind’s eye I see us nursing side by side, each girl latched firmly to a nipple and huddled close together, our arms and legs intertwined like puppies in a litter, or tree branches that grow into and around one another and cannot be separated.

Only in my mind’s eye. I doubt that Aunt Machia would have allowed us to be fed at the same time.

How odd that even now I can envision Sarai’s face but not Tirtzah’s. Or perhaps not so odd. Shyly, deeply, passionately, I admired Sarai as a younger child often does an older. I dogged her footsteps.

Anyway, her face: round, olive-complexioned with the flawless skin of the very young. A snub nose. Eyes narrowed against the glare– she must have been facing the midday sun. Her pink tongue snaking out of her half-open mouth, a creature with a life of its own. Its moist tip sliding back and forth over her upper lip before she burst into giggles over some childish riddle or lame joke. As she whirled away, her hair, the same consistency as her mother’s, bounced around her head, a springy brown mass of unkempt curls that reminded me of a bird’s nest.

I thought Sarai beautiful.

Activity: she ran. I followed, and, trying to keep up, tripped and fell. Howled with indignation. She doubled back and, squatting, shushed me and pulled me to my feet. She may have feared one of Aunt Machia’s angry outbursts or her own mother’s weary remonstrances– after all, their position in our household was shaky at best, especially after I no longer nursed. I do not remember Sarai’s words that day, but I do remember her childish treble and how proud I was to walk beside her, hand in hand.

One other memory occurring not much later, a few weeks at most: Sarai’s breath hot against my ear as she whispered that my father planned to wed her mother, which would make us sisters. She must have been holding my hand then, because she squeezed it excitedly, and I, pleased because she was, squeezed back.

Aunt Machia did not share Sarai’s enthusiasm. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she was uncharacteristically silent when I sounded her out on my new idea.

If my father marries Sarai’s mother, I asked Aunt Machia, why can’t I marry Sarai?

Usually so quick to speak, Aunt Machia hesitated. I assumed she was seriously evaluating my question.

Girls marry boys, not other girls, she said finally, and as for your father taking Sarai’s mother as a wife– She paused before adding vaguely, Let’s just wait and see what comes to pass.

I would have been about five years of age then, Sarai six. Aunt Machia had insisted that Tirtzah nurse me until a few months earlier, when I rebelled and refused the breast. My refusal consisted of the simplest means: I nipped until Tirtzah denied me access. I assumed I had won, but, no, Aunt Machia would not yet yield.

She fumed and attempted to draw my father into what was strictly women’s business.

At home his presence itself was a rare occurrence. He was frequently absent for days, supervising his ragtag band in whatever disreputable activities they engaged. Evidently Aunt Machia had decided he needed instruction on more wholesome topics.