Today the first reading at Mass was the story of Jepthah’s daughter (Judges 11:29-40). It is some distance from being the most edifying story in the Bible, and even more of a contender for David Ker’s Bad Boy Bible study than Elisha and the bears. Coming up with a short reflection was made even more complex by the Gospel reading: Matthew’s version of the parable of the Wedding Banquet (Matt 22:1-14). Either reading on its own could do with a full scale exposition. Sometimes the lectionary doesn’t do us any favours.
Although this wasn’t what I taked about, it did strike me afresh (listening to the story being read aloud) that there are cultural as well as linguistic false friends. That is just as a word or phrase in another language can seem familiar and yet mislead about its meaning (a classic is the French jolie meaning pretty and not jolly), so can cultural concepts.
In our culture, the poor girl bewailing her virginity would be along the lines of “But I can’t die before I have sex and become a complete woman.” In the culture of Judges I take it that it is about perpetuating her family, and so having a future remembrance in the land. It is, in short, about family, duty, memory and inheritance, rather than about sex. (Interestingly the way in which this is put over, in the context of her being Jepthah’s only daughter prevents the story from being read simply as misogynistic.)
In the culture of the text, the natural response is to spent two months bewailing with her friends that she shall never be a mother. In our culture it would be to go out and get laid. The different responses clue us in to the fact that something different is being bewailed.
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Or perhaps that she was only 11 or 12 years old.
Actually what do teenagers receiving a death sentence (e.g., incurable cancer) do in our culture?
What I know, I know confidentially, so all I’ll say is, it depends on their family, their age and their character.
However, it’s not really a comparable situation is it? Nor is taking an aetiological story of dubious facticity as a factual comparison a particularly useful approach. Which is why my point was rather different from yours.
An excellent example of how proper exegesis can enrich a story while lack of exegesis can lead to really rotten hermeneutics.
This is one of those cases where I see the male perspective of of the narrator. Maybe I’m so rooted in my own culture that I don’t get it, but it’s hard to believe that a young woman about to die is only going to bewail her lack of motherhood.
I don’t disagree – but unfortunately none of us have time machines
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