Mila's Tale by King Laurie R

Author:King, Laurie R. [King, Laurie R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ladies of the spirit, misrash, Mystery, old testament, judges 11, biblical, bible fiction, jephthah, Contemporary
Amazon: B00LY9CSRY
Goodreads: 22817152
Publisher: Laurie R. King
Published: 2014-07-18T07:00:00+00:00

Laurie’s Remarks:

Once upon a time I was an academic. I wrote things that required footnotes, that depended on more than one alphabet, that took the specific and narrowed it down still further.

Then I left the ways of Truth and walked into the life of crime: a while after finishing my Master’s Thesis on “Feminine Aspects of Yahweh,” I began to write mystery novels, abandoning the pure habits of the scholar.

“Mila’s Tale” was originally delivered to an audience at Hanover College, Indiana, where I spent a week as artist in residence. Hanover is a liberal arts college with long-standing links to the Presbyterian Church, and a dedication to intellectual curiosity and the exploration of personal responsibility. As a writer of fiction, it seemed to me appropriate to create a story for my Guest Lecture, since storytellers are those who dig meaning out of tradition.

One of the characteristics shared by my past training and my current profession is the close attention to detail both require. When interpreting a Hebrew passage, one must not overlook even the smallest of details: verb endings, odd phrasings, repetitions with a slight variation must all be examined. Some of these peculiarities may be accidents of a scribe, or poetry for the sake of beauty—theological red herrings, as it were. But at other times, the meaning lies within those very oddities—in Scripture no less than in a whodunit.

At times, the tale itself is the oddity, when it reveals some dark aspect of a hero, a distressing truth about someone we are being urged to emulate.

Some of the more problematic tales in Scripture feel almost as if they’re put there, not despite, but because of the uncomfortable itch they cause. Why on earth did the compilers of the Hebrew Bible include such deeply troubling tales as Noah’s drunken sprawl, or Lot first throwing his daughters to his lust-filled neighbors, then fathering two sons on the young women? What about Elisha sending bears to tear apart some mocking boys—or the young woman, without so much as an identity to call her own, literally laid on the altar of her father’s ambitions? (Genesis 9:21; Genesis 19: 8, 33; 2 Kings 2: 23-24; Judges 11.)

Perhaps the Rabbis want us to wrestle a bit with the angels, or with our own demons.

Wrestling with demons is what fiction is all about. And wrestling to create a three-dimensional narrative out of naked clues and events is what crime fiction is about.

Thus, as a writer of mysteries, I began as every good detective must: by setting aside the commonly accepted story and looking at its facts from a different point of view.

When I did that, the brief episode of the young woman in Judges began to take on another meaning entirely. If one assumes that this is the story of a victim, a two-dimensional character with as little gumption as she had identity, then her fate looks like one thing. But what if we turn the story around a little? What if this girl actually did

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