The Haftarah Project: Hukkat—Yiftah, his Mother, and his Daughter

Image generated by Dall-E.

The haftarah for Hukkat gives more sociological context than we’ve come to expect.

Jephthah–Yiftah in Hebrew–isn’t just someone’s son, who is the son of someone else, who, tediously, is the son of yet someone else, as most biblical protagonists are. He is instead the son of Gilead, the head of the Gileadites and an unnamed “zonah.” He was brought up in his father’s household but soon becomes functionally fatherless; the upstanding Gilead boots him out at the request of his respectable half-brothers, born to their father’s wife.

Yiftah’s mother, we read in the English translation of the strikingly prim if not actively Victorian Etz Chaim, was a prostitute; elsewhere, she’s a harlot. In Hebrew, she was a “zonah.” The rabbit hole into which you fall headlong when you explore that word’s meaning seems to say that a zonah is a woman who has a relationship with someone whom she is not allowed to marry. It seems to mean that she is a woman on society’s tattered fringes. An outsider.

That brings us to another zonah, whose story we read just a few weeks ago. That’s Rahab, who might or might not have been a prostitute–the story doesn’t tell us, it just calls her a zonah–but who was as outsidery an insider as physically possible. She lived in the wall that separated Jerusalem from the wilds around it.

So more context. Yiftah’s mother was like Rahab. And given that background, the haftarah seems to tell us, Yiftah had no chance.

Despite his background, the men of Gilead soon ask Yiftah, who seems to have become a warlord, to come back to protect them; it seems that his virtuous half-brothers cannot do that. After some bargaining with them–he is sharp as he asks why he should trust them now, given how badly they’d treated him–he takes on the job; after more bargaining and some battles, and with God’s help, he wins.

The middle of the haftarah is a recitation of the bargaining and the battles. That part is not particularly compelling. But just wait.

Just before the haftarah ends, we read this verse:

“And Yiftah made the following vow to the Lord: ‘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 from the Ammonites shall be the Lord’s and shall be offered by me as a burnt offering.’”

Two more verses tell us that God did what Yiftah had asked, and the Ammonites surrendered. We’re done. Happy ending, right?

Um, no.

That was Judges 11:33. In shul we finish reading, shut the humash, and turn our attention to reshelving it. But if we were to keep reading, in the very next verse, Judges 11:34, we’d see this:

“And Yiftah came to Mizpah, to his house, and behold, his daughter was coming out toward him with timbrels and with dances, and she was an only child, he had from her neither a son nor a daughter.”

The daughter remains unnamed, but the clear implication is that her father loves her. She’s his only child. And it’s clear that she loves him; she’s dancing out to celebrate his triumphant return.

But he’s vowed to sacrifice her. What to do?

Well, sacrifice her, of course.

First, he blames her. “Alas, my daughter!” he says. “You have made me fall and you have become one of those that trouble me…” He has no choice, he tells her. He cannot go back on his word. And she agrees with him.

But Yiftah grants her the request she makes, to allow her two months in the hills with her companions before she returns and allows him to sacrifice her. The chapter makes a big point of her virginity, and it ends with these words: “From year to year the daughters of Israel went to lament the daughter of Yiftah the Gileadite, four days in a year.”

Which is cold comfort from the hot flames that consumed her.

So what to make of this haftarah? It opens with an unnamed woman and ends with another—mother, son, granddaughter. It shows the named hero, Yiftah, succeeding despite his mother’s shame–or is it telling us that he might have seemed heroic, but really deprived depravity is inescapable?–and spares the readers the horror of his daughter’s fate. That decision certainly was not accidental. It seems that the text wants us to like him.

So it all depends on context. Frame it tightly, and it’s a story of a local boy making good. Add the bits about his mother to the front end and it gets more complicated. Pull the frame back to include what happens just after it ends and you get stark tragedy–pride, pain, grief, guilt–without catharsis. Just horror.

This haftarah is enraging, but it has one thing going for it. It is not boring.

Editors Note: The reflections from the Haftarah Project represent the thoughts and opinions of the author.