Mila's Tale Read Online Free PDF

invisibility. 
    Yet, the Bible is a book built on details, those storytelling devices that shape both the tales themselves and their deeper content.  In the centuries-long process of recording oral tradition into canonical documents, minutiae have been left scattered in all directions—cities never again seen, the number of camels owned, a dozen generations of descendents who are little more than a name.  Does this particular young woman lack detail because she is insignificant beside the actions of her father?  Or is it rather that she is beyond mere naming?  That she has taken on a larger identity than herself, as she leads her young women into the mountains?  Is she perhaps now imbued with a mythic identity, the energy behind a yearly ritual of womankind, as the young women go up into the mountains to mourn her?  (Although, as noted above, there is also a strong element here of painting a pagan ritual with a slightly less offensive tint: better to show the young women of Israel mourning one of their own, than participating in a dangerous fertility cult.)
    Behind this conundrum lies an even more profound question.  Was the young woman who proceeded the rest of the household through the gates of the compound, singing and dancing to greet the victor, truly ignorant of her father’s deadly vow?  This is another place where the storytellers of the Hebrew Bible, despite their general habit of including the most unimportant of facts, are oddly silent—even the rabbis of the Talmud do not argue here. 
    Which causes the thoughtful reader to reflect: perhaps Jephtha’s vow was indeed a private declaration, between him and his God.  But what if it was made in public?  That would have been natural enough—a way for a charismatic leader to focus and bring together a band of unruly men on the brink of a major battle.  Would not the news of the vow have flown back to the general’s home, even before the results of the battle were known?   Was his daughter indeed blithely oblivious when she came out of the gates?   Was she a mere pawn, first pledged by a faithless thug of a father, then sacrificed unransomed because of his political maneuverings? 
    Or did the young woman know full well what she was doing?  Was she the one who made the choice here, stepping forward—nay: dancing—as a willing and deliberate self-offering, a young woman whose faith became both a rebuke to her faithless father, and a claim to her own immortality?
    Perhaps the only way to answer this question is to frame it in a different manner, through a shift of time and place.  To create midrash out of it, looking at the story through a storyteller’s eyes.
    To give the girl a name, and see what she tells us.

    Tools for Further Reading:
    One of the more frustrating aspects of scholarship for both amateur enthusiast and serious student is that the ideas and interpretations that excite the most enthusiasm often bear the heaviest burden of suspicion: If an idea is too enticing, it’s probably either a figment of some translator’s imagination, or a scribe’s typo or margin commentary that was drawn into the original text somewhere along the centuries.  The general reader is particularly vulnerable to abuse, marooned in a sea of scholarship without the necessary tools to turn his desert isle’s stand of palm trees into a secure vessel.  A person can hack and cobble, but how to test his vessel without getting in and sailing away?  How to know if the book in hand is a piece of sound scholarship, or if its author is just another fantasist—or worse, someone intent on grinding an axe on the dull wits of unsuspecting readers?
    Generally speaking, the more outlandish and elaborate the theory, the less likely it is to be true, the more likely to be the work of an axe-grinder, but how does one know?  When an art historian writes a book (supposedly non-fiction) that gives a hard feminist twist to archaeological finds, how much trust are we to have