Amos Oz: Where the Jackals Howl

One day Jephthah and his daughter were brought before the chieftain of the nomads.

He was a lean, shriveled old man; his face was like aged leather, and only the line of his jaw retained a vestige of strength or ruthlessness. Jephthah stood before him in the gully of a lifeless riverbed. He was silent because he chose to hear first the words that the old chieftain would address to him. The old man, too, sprawled drowsily on his gray camel, waiting for the stranger to speak. For a long while they were both silent, each testing the strength of the other’s silence with stubborn patience, while a circle of thin women surrounded them at a distance.

The chieftain sat like a lizard in the sun, without flickering an eyelid. In front of his camel Jephthah stood rooted to the spot with a face of stone. At his feet his daughter Pitdah scrabbled and burrowed in the sand, trying to discover where the ants came from. Everything was still. Only the shadow of the two men, the one mounted on his camel and the other standing on his feet, moved gently, as the sun climbed higher into the white sky. It was a long silence. Finally the old man spoke, in a parched voice:

“Who are you, stranger?”

Jephthah said:

“I am the son of Gilead the Gileadite, my lord, by an Ammonite servant woman.”

“I did not ask your name or your father’s name; I asked, who are you, stranger.”

“I am a stranger, as you say, my lord.”

“And why have you come to this place. You have been sent by the Ammonites or by the Israelites to spy on us and to betray us to our mortal foes.”

“I have no part in Israel, or any inheritance among the children of Ammon.”

“You are a desperate man, stranger. I can see that your eyes are turned inward like the eyes of a desperate man. Whom do you worship.”

“Not Milcom.”

“Whom do you worship.”

“The Lord of the wolves in the desert at night. In the image of his hatred am I made.”

“And the girl.”

“My daughter Pitdah. And she is growing more like the desert every day.”

“You are a warrior. Come out with us to kill and plunder, like one of these young men. Come out with us tonight.”

“I am a stranger, my lord. I have lived out my life among strangers.”

6

JEPHTHAH FOUND favor among the wandering men of the Land of Tob.

In the course of time he fought with them against their attackers and joined them in several raids on the settled lands, for these nomads hated all house dwellers. They slipped by night through the fences of the farms and flitted like ghosts within. The slain died silently and the killers stole as silently away. They came with knives or daggers. And with fire. By morning charred embers smoked in the ruins of the farm, in the land of Ammon or of Israel. And Jephthah rose ever higher among them because he was endowed with the attributes of lordship. He had the power to impose his will on others without a movement, by his voice alone. As always, he spoke little, because he did not love words and he did not trust them.

One night the Jephthahites stole into the farm of Gilead the Gileadite, on the border of the land of Gilead, at the edge of the desert.

Shadowy shapes scurried along the paths of the estate, among the dark orchards and the dense foliage of the vineyards, to the door of the house that was built of black volcanic stone. But Jephthah did not allow the house to be burned with its inmates, because a sudden longing rose within his hatred and he recalled the words his father had spoken on a faraway night and a faraway day. You are tainted as your father is tainted. You for yourself. I for myself. Every man for himself. There is a lizard; now it has gone.

He knelt on all fours and drank from the irrigation channel. Then he gave a shrill birdlike whistle, and his men gathered and slipped away into the wasteland without setting fire to the farm.

The nomads raided Ammon and Israel alike. Every man’s hand was against them, and anyone who found them would slay them. They slept all day in crevices, crannies, and caves, with the dark shapes of their meager flocks scattered in the shade of the oak trees beside the mossy rock-hewn troughs. Lean black-robed women watched over the flocks by day, while the sun dissolved everything with its white-hot hatred. And by night the nomads emerged from their hiding places to raid the settled lands. On their return they sang a bitter song, like a long-drawn-out wail. Occasionally a man would let out a shout in the middle of the song, and suddenly fall silent.

Pitdah, too, found favor in the eyes of the nomads. She was a darkly beautiful girl, and her movements were always dreamy, as if she were made of a fragile substance, as if even the ground beneath her feet and the objects between her fingers were all longing to break and she had always to be careful.

The bitter women adored Pitdah, because no child was ever born in the Land of Tob. She would play her pipe to the hillsides and the boulders even when there was no one to hear her. Whenever Jephthah heard her playing in the distance, it seemed to him like the sound of the wind in the vineyards on his father’s estate, the plashing of the water as it ran in the channels in the shade of the orchard. Pitdah dreamed even when she was awake, and Jephthah’s heart went out to her if she told him one of her dreams or if she suddenly said to him: Father.

He loved her savagely. But he was careful whenever he stroked her hair or hugged her shoulder because he would recall how his father Gilead had held him when he himself was a small boy. He would say:

“I shall not hurt you. Give me your hand.”

And the girl would reply:

“But I can’t help laughing, because of the way you’re looking at me.”

He loved her savagely. Whenever he chanced to think of a strange man coming one day to take Pitdah away from him, his blood rebelled in his veins. Some short, fleshy man might clasp Pitdah in his hairy arms, reeking of sweat and onions, licking and biting her lips, groping downwards with clumsy fingers toward her delicate recesses. At the sight of his bloodshot eyes she laughed aloud, and he cooled his burning brow with the flat of his dagger and whispered to her: Play, Pitdah, play; and he sat listening to the music like a man going blind until the rage subsided and only a dry sadness remained like a taste of ashes in his throat. Sometimes the power of his love made Jephthah bellow wildly like his father Gilead before him, and sometimes he yearned to be able to brew her potions in the night and conjure away the threatening evil.

Jephthah and the nomads could see her growing before their eyes. When she was not gathering firewood or watering the flocks with the gaunt women, she would sit in a gully playing with pebbles from the brook, building towers, walls, castles, turrets, and gates, and suddenly she would destroy them all with glee and burst out laughing. She would also weave wreaths of thistles, when the thistles were in flower. She seemed to be in a dream, and her rounded lips were slightly parted. Sometimes she would hold up in her sun-darkened hands a whitening bone she had found, and sing to it, and blow on it, and even touch it to her hair.

She knew how to carve little figures from branches of shrubs, a galloping horse, a resting lamb, a black old man leaning on a stick. Sometimes odd occurrences that were no laughing matter made Jephthah’s daughter laugh warmly. If a woman was tying bundles onto a camel and the camel was startled and all the bundles fell off, Pitdah would erupt in soft, low laughter. Or if one of the nomads stood with his back to her and his head bent motionlessly forward, as if he were sunk deep in thought as he pissed among the rocks, she would laugh uncontrollably and would not stop even if the man lost his temper and shouted at her.