On the Cusp of Christianity: Virgin Sacrifice in Pseudo-Philo and Amos Oz

This article suggests that the Apocryphal "rewritten" Bible known as "Pseudo-Philo" had a significant impact – heretofore unacknowledged - on Amos Oz's early story, Ish Pere [Wild Man, 1966]. I argue that four decades ago the young Oz fortuitously stumbled on a Hebrew rendition of a small fragment of "Pseudo-Philo," which had been published without any attribution. Oz was obviously unaware of the problematically marginal source of this text. Yet it was precisely its marginality, or perhaps liminality, that offered him a different vantage point, an "extraneous" perspective, from which he could re-envision the two troubling sacrificial narratives of the Hebraic [and Zionist] canon: The Binding of Isaac, and the Sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter.

The particular sacrificial amalgam created by Oz was greatly facilitated by one of Pseudo-Philo's celebrated narrative extravagancies: his magnification of the role of Jephthah's daughter, whom he named for the first time ever, and whom he daringly made identify - self consciously and enthusiastically - with Isaac as a willing sacrifice. This move was to be later embraced by Christianity but severely criticized by Rabbinic Judaism. It was this proto-Christian blending, I suggest, that inspired Oz's unobtrusive anticipation of both the feminist critique of the daughter's sacrifice and the Israeli psycho-political assault on the son's binding-qua-sacrifice, commonly traced to the impact of the 1967-1973 Wars.