Mila's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

in her conclusions that God was once a woman?   When a huge best-seller of a novel dredges up a load of the more unlikely heresies of Christendom and presents them as a composite of Hidden Truths, how much hair is the serious historian required to tear out before she abandons any attempt to clear the record?
    On the other hand, just because a theory is beautiful, is it necessarily wrong? And if a tale is told by a popularizer, must it be classed as pap?  Short of enrolling in a ten-year program of archaeology and arcane languages, what’s an amateur to do?
    If only novels had footnotes!  If only we could take the author by the collar and demand, Where did this piece of information come from?
    Fiction writers invent things; real scholars are generally required to work within the boundaries of the material given.  A scholar who in vents data—why, plagiarism is nothing compared to outright academic fraud.  But a fiction writer who wears the mask of academia yet practices not the skills?  The sea of confusion rises up and overcomes us.
    Thus, the commentary portion of “Mila’s Tale.”  I am a storyteller, first and foremost.  I earn a living by making things up; I believe in the power of fiction, to teach, transform, and—yes—to entertain.  However, I am also a vestigial scholar, who has more than once thrown a best-seller across the room (albeit gently—my mother was once a librarian) at the growing awareness that I was being had.  More profound than my dislike of being duped, however, is my respect for the originals: Because I cherish the texts themselves and believe them worth knowing by everyone, I wish to make clear where the lines are between text and midrash.  
    Textual scholarship is a science, and the stories of the past are best served by recognizing its requirements.  However, it is also an art, and a joy: it is Midrash.  A story tells us many things, of the past and of the present, of oth er peoples and of ourselves.               
    A good starting place for the amateur scholar is : Don’t believe your translation.  There is really no such thing as an “accurate” translation, of the Bible or any other document—any rendering from one language into another owes as much to the art of interpretation as the science of grammar.  If you are stimulated into investigating the Hebrew or Ugaritic originals, more power to you, but you’ll have to take your research a little farther than I can go here.  I only wish to tantalize, to make you suspect that the author is hiding something from you…
    And as you suspect your translation, similarly you should beware of the idea that a story is simple just because you’ve heard it a hundred times; there are shadows to every tale, wherein lie hidden meanings. 
    But most of all, I beg you, don’t trust what I do with the material.  After all, I’m a storyteller.
    I lie for a living.
    *  *
    Translations: For Jephtha’s complete story, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible combines a dignity of language with accurate translation—or as accurate as any translation can be. For an illustration of the problems inherent in Biblical translations, the site “Bible Hub” is a useful tool that gathers the major translations together on one page, shows the Interlinear Hebrew/English, gives a very basic lexicon, and offers comments.
    Commentaries: For explanations and the background of topics such as “Sacrifice,” “Judges,” and “Jephthah” himself, look under those articles in the Abingdon Press Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible.  For a wider explanation of the book of Judges as a whole, Robert G. Boling’s Anchor Bible series translation and commentary Judges , despite leaving out most of the issues discussed above, is intended for use by lay readers.
    The Rabbis: the original Biblical commentary came from the endlessly inquisitive minds of Talmudic scholars, continually striving to understand the will of their God in the