Her screams shattered the night air and echoed off the mud and straw-block walls of the crude shelter. Although it had four walls and a roof of sorts, anyone giving it a quick glance would have thought it a shed for animals. It was a hut, nothing more, and crudely built at that. Bits of straw—the few stems which hadn’t been nibbled off by goats—poked out from the shabbily made blocks at incongruous angles. The mortar, little as there was, had in many places simply cracked and fallen out, leaving gaps between the blocks. The roof was a series of wooden poles that had been lashed to the top tier of blocks with leather straps. On top of the poles had been interlaced a thatched roof of goat skins, dirt, and assorted bits of dried brush, all gingerly held in place with more strips of leather.
The wind rattled the makeshift wooden door against its frame, and if it hadn’t been for the sturdy latch, the door likely would have blown off its leather hinges. Even with the door closed, the wind poured through the cracks, swirling gritty sand and coating everything with a fine layer of dust. As long as the wind held at a constant speed, the thatched roof and shaky walls could probably withstand the blowing, but a sudden gust would likely send the dilapidated mess crashing to the ground, and no one, especially the two women inside, wanted that to happen.
Another scream cut through the air, this one longer and more intense, causing the man and three small children huddled outside the hut to cringe. They sat clustered together with their backs to the wind like a small bunch of grapes, their bodies acting as a wind break for the small fire that struggled for life in front of them. Whenever the wind momentarily slowed, the orange flames licked at the faces of the pathetic group. The warmth took the raw edge off the chill of the desert night, but it did nothing to relieve the anxiety and fear that gripped their minds and hearts with each new scream that pierced the black night.
For more than two hours, the man had wrapped his arms around his sons and tried to console them. He did his best to explain why their mother was screaming in pain, but at two, four, and six years of age, even the simplest explanation was beyond comprehension and did nothing to relieve their concerns. The same question followed each scream, “Why is Momma screaming?” Followed by the same answer, “Because she’s having a baby, and it is painful.” Twice the man had attempted a more detailed answer, but he gave up when the six-year-old cut him short, “But the sheep don’t scream when they have their babies; why is Momma screaming?”
With the last scream, the little two-year-old slipped from his father’s arms and attempted to bolt for the door, crying, “Momma, Momma, Momma,” as he went. He made it three steps before his father lunged out, grabbed the sleeve of the boy’s hole-filled robe, and hauled him back. “I want Momma,” he yelled, kicking and twisting to escape his father’s grasp.
The man shook his head in a combination of disgust, anger, and remorse. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to be living in a real house with solid walls, not this forsaken hovel, but nothing had gone as planned. For eight years he had labored countless hours building a life for himself and his family. They lived in a small but comfortable home on the edge of Jezreel, a growing and prosperous village of shopkeepers, shepherds, and farmers. Each year, he planted and harvested a little more wheat than the year before. While most farmers sold their surplus grain in the fall, immediately after the harvest, he stored his until springtime when demand was greater and prices were higher. His shrewdness had earned him a handsome profit year after year, and he had saved it all.
Over the same eight years, he’d slowly enlarged his flock of sheep. When Jehovah blessed an old ewe with twins or triplets rather than a single lamb, he would raise the extra lambs and keep them in his flock rather than sell them. He had also been shrewd when it came time to sell the excess wool. He never sold in the spring like others. He waited until winter when prices soared and demand was great.
For the last three of those eight years, he had kept his eye on a small farm outside the neighboring village of Shunen. Countless times the man who owned it told him he would sell—for the right price. The modest but sturdy house attracted his wife; the land mesmerized him. The ground was fertile and the hillside pastures thick with luscious grass in the late spring and early summer. As the weather turned hot and the grass in the lower valleys turned brown and dry, he could lead his sheep to the high mountain valleys of Mount Tabor with its cooler temperatures and abundant streams and grass.
For years they scrimped and saved every farthing to purchase the property, and at last it was so close it was almost his. But he had chosen to gamble with Mother Nature—and he lost.
Months earlier he had faced a difficult choice. He could continue as he had in the past, and in another two years he would have saved enough money to buy the house and land. Or, he could speculate. He could borrow money for more wheat seed and plant the fields his neighbor no longer used. By doing that, he would make a profit and have enough money to buy the property in only one year. He and his wife had carefully weighed the options and spent many nights discussing what would be best. She was more cautious and wanted to wait, but the lure of the land made him want to borrow the money and plant. It was a gamble. “But,” he reasoned with her, “everything in life is a gamble.” In the end, she reluctantly agreed.
All spring he worked night and day to get the seed in the additional ground. In the early stages of pregnancy, his wife had labored at his side as much as she was able, and even their small children helped clear rocks and chop weeds. The spring rains came, and the wheat sprouted, poking its head from under the soil into the bright yellow sunlight. The moisture-laden ground and warm sunshine caused the grain to grow rapidly, and before long the fields were green and lush. In not many weeks, the wheat was ten inches tall, and early summer breezes sent flowing ripples through it like gentle waves on a pond. It would be a perfect crop with greater yields than he had imagined, he told himself over and over. And then Mother Nature began toying with him.
The summer showers that usually bathed the land didn’t come. Every afternoon, massive thunderstorms rose in the west like towering monsters and hurled lightning across the sky, but not a single drop of rain fell. As the days turned hotter, the tender shoots of wheat sent their roots deeper in the ground in a fruitless search for moisture. Finding none, the delicate plants changed from luscious green to yellow gold and, finally, dead brown. Eventually the hot winds snapped the dry stocks and blew them away, leaving nothing but barren fields of stubble.
At harvest time, the creditors arrived at his door demanding payment for the money he’d borrowed. He tried everything he could to stall their demands, but in the end, they would not be put off. “Pay what you owe, or in keeping with the law, we will sell your children into bondage to satisfy the debt.” It took all the money they had saved as well as the sale of their little home and land to meet the creditors’ demands, and now he sat huddled around a campfire while his wife gave birth inside a hovel that was better suited for birthing animals than humans.
The man wanted to take the children away from the screams, but there was no place to go. The night was too dark and the distance too great to take them to the home of even the nearest person, an old man whose pock-marked face and gaunt appearance would cause more terror in the children than the screams of their mother. In daylight he would have made the five-mile trek to his brother’s home and left the children with him and his wife, but not at night; the terrain was too rough. Had a full moon lit the sky, he might have attempted it, but not on a black, moonless night like this. No, they would sit here on the ground, huddled against the stinging wind, and offer silent prayers to the Great Jehovah that their wife and mother would make the journey into the valley of death and safely return with a new life.
Another burst of noise shot from the hut. Not a scream, but an intense and labored groan followed by the muffled sobs of an exhausted woman. Less than a minute passed, and the same labored groan punctured the air, but this time it was followed by a loud sigh, a clear sigh of relief, the kind of sigh that conveyed it was finished.
* * *
“You did very well, Miriam,” an aged female voice said calmly. “Jehovah has not blessed you with a son, but you have a healthy daughter.”
The expended woman sank back off her elbows and lay on the makeshift bed of straw and animal skins. She knew the man outside would be disappointed with the news of a daughter, but she was thrilled. She finally had the daughter she had wanted for years. Every morning and night for nine months, she had begged and pleaded with Jehovah to send her a daughter, and her pleas had not gone unanswered.
“Let me hold her,” the new mother pleaded anxiously. “Does she have all her fingers and toes?”
“Be patient, Miriam,” the old woman said. “You would think this is your first child!”
“She may not be my first child, but she is my first daughter, and I want to hold her,” she said as she expelled a long sigh and laid her head on the sweat-soaked piece of lamb’s wool that was her makeshift pillow.
The ancient woman chuckled as she suspended the infant upside down by its feet and cleaned mucus from its nose and mouth. “Most Jewish women would be saddened with the birth of a daughter but not you.”
Miriam started to speak, but her words were cut off by the soft cries of the newborn. It was a delicate cry, so different from the boisterous noise each of her sons made as they entered the world.
“I love my boys, but I have prayed Jehovah would bless me with a daughter. Please, Abish, can’t you hurry? I want to hold her.”
“Lie back and rest. You’ll have her soon enough,” the woman ordered as she expertly tied and cut the umbilical cord with a flint knife. Resting the infant on a shaky wooden table she had previously covered with a coarsely woven camel-hair cloth, she quickly washed the baby with a soft linen rag dipped in a clay pot of warm water. After the baby was bathed clean, the midwife blotted the infant dry and then rubbed salt over the tiny baby’s skin as a cleanser and disinfectant.
“With the wind blowing as it is, this baby will be covered in more dust than salt,” Abish said more to herself than to Miriam.
Miriam propped herself on her elbows and grimaced as a mild contraction coursed through her body. “Please tell me again, Abish, is she healthy?”
Abish smiled at the question as she poured oil from the earthen pot into her hand. Every mother is the same, she thought. “Of course, she’s healthy. And more than that, she’s beautiful. But considering the baby comes from you and Gideon, I would expect nothing less,” she said as she coated the baby’s arms, legs, head, and body with a fine film of lightly scented oil.
Miriam watched the old woman gently wrap the lightly whimpering baby in soft strips of swaddling clothes. “You’ll be in your mother’s arms soon enough,” she cooed as her aged and well-practiced hands deftly wound the cloth around the tiny body.
With the baby wrapped securely, Abish shuffled to the bed and bent over, handing the small infant to her mother. “There’s your baby girl,” she said soothingly.
“Will you please tell Gideon that everything is well?” Miriam asked, accepting the baby and sliding back the cloth from around the newborn’s face to gaze into her blue eyes.
“Not until I’ve taken care of you,” Abish replied as she stepped to the far side of the shack and lifted a goat skin from the dirt floor. Holding it away from mother and baby, she brushed off what dirt she could and placed it behind Miriam’s back to support her while she held the baby.
The women smiled at each other when they heard a voice from outside. “Tell me, Abish, do I have a son?”
“All men are the same,” Abish said quietly as she moved the pot of water beside Miriam. “Sons, sons, sons, they all want sons, but without us women, no work would ever get done!” Then without pausing she called out over the noise of the wind, “You have three sons, don’t you know?”
“No . . . I mean, yes, I know that, but do I have a new male child?”
Abish smiled as she tended to Miriam and called over her shoulder, “You have better than that; you have a daughter.”
* * *
Upon hearing “daughter” the corners of Gideon’s mouth pulled back into a smile and almost immediately gave way to a tooth-filled grin that seemed to cover his entire face. Down deep, he too had been hoping for a daughter, not so much for himself, but for his wife. Reaching out he scooped all three of his sons up in his arms and shouted, “You have a sister! You have a sister!”
“Oh no, not a sister!” exclaimed six-year-old Uzzi. “What good is a sister? She can’t be a warrior.”
Four-year-old Hanan clenched his fists and said, “I want a brother. Send her back; I want a brother.”
It was all too much for two-year-old Caleb. His only reaction was, “Momma?”
“Abish,” Gideon called out, “how is Miriam? Is she all right?”
The door of the small hut opened slightly, and the soft light of a single oil lamp flooded into the darkness. “She’s fine. Come and see for yourself.” Then pointing a crooked old finger at the three boys in their father’s arms, she warned, “You boys must be very gentle to your mother and to your new little sister. Do you understand me?”
Each boy slowly nodded his head. They really didn’t know who this strange old woman was—with her straggly gray hair and dressed in black robes, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows—but the sternness with which she spoke caused fear. Seeing each of them nod, Abish opened the door wider and stepped aside so the four of them could enter. “Hurry, hurry,” she commanded, “before the wind blows any more dirt into this animal sty.”
Stepping into the small shack, Gideon stooped over and set the three boys on the ground. As if they hadn’t heard a word Abish said, all three instantly ran toward their mother, who was reclining on the makeshift bed with the tiny bundle wrapped in white rags in her arms. When they were still three feet away, a thunderous “Stop!” shattered the air. The word was hardly out of her mouth before Abish had inserted herself between the boys and their mother.
All three boys skidded to a stop then quickly backpedaled a step, their terror-filled eyes locked on the wrinkled woman.
“What did I tell you?” Abish said sternly as she pointed a menacing finger at them.
“They’re just fine, Abish,” Miriam said softly. “I’m sure they’ll be gentle; won’t you, boys?”
All three boys nodded in unison, still staring up at Abish. Only Uzzi spoke. “We promise to be gentle,” he said with a quivering voice. With that, Abish moved from their path, and the boys cautiously eased to their mother’s side without taking their eyes off the ancient woman.
A small cloud of dust stirred as the boys knelt on the ground beside their mother’s straw bed. Without the slightest hesitation, little Caleb leaned over and hugged Miriam tightly around her neck, completely disregarding the infant in her arms. “Momma okay?” he said as he nuzzled his face against her neck.
“Momma’s fine,” Miriam said softly as she raised an arm to caress the boy’s head. Running her fingers through his straggly hair, she lightly kissed him on the head and repeated, “Momma is just fine.”
The two-year-old released his hug and sat back slightly. Then extending his hand, he patted Miriam lightly on the cheek and asked again, “Momma okay?”
Miriam reached up, took Caleb’s hand in her own, and kissed each of his dirt-streaked fingers. “Yes, Caleb, Momma is okay.”
It was only then that the worry drained from his eyes and his usual perpetual smile returned. Sitting back on his haunches, he folded his hands in his lap and looked at the small head with its layer of black hair that protruded from beneath the strips of white cloth.
“What are we going to call her?” Uzzi asked as he softly patted the back of the cloth-bound infant.
The question was not new. It had been debated countless times by the family as they spent Sabbath afternoons resting from their labor and eating a simple meal. In the end, they all agreed if the baby was a boy, he would be named Joshua. As hard as they tried, though, they simply couldn’t agree on a girl’s name. Uzzi was holding out for Ziklag, the name of his favorite dog. Hanan refused to even consider a girl’s name because he refused to believe the baby would be anything other than a boy. Caleb was too young to care.
Gideon and Miriam each had their own favorites. His was Nirit, but Miriam grimaced at the name. “A plowed field?” she asked incredulously as she considered the interpretation. “You want to call our daughter a plowed field?”
“I like how it sounds not what it means,” Gideon replied honestly.
Miriam said she preferred Renana because it meant singing or making a joyful sound. The longer they went without agreeing, the more convinced Gideon became that Miriam had another name, a secret name, she really wanted. Only two days before the baby was born, they reached a decision. If it was a boy, he would be named Joshua. If it was a girl, then Miriam could choose any name she wanted.
“So,” Uzzi repeated, pointing at the bundle, “what are we going to call her?”
There was silence, and everyone, including Abish, looked expectantly at Miriam.
“I want to name her Gili,” Miriam said as she hugged the child tenderly to her breast.
An understanding smile spread across Gideon’s lips, and he nodded his head approvingly. “My joy, my happiness,” he said softly as he considered the meaning. “Gili it is,” he said proudly. “She will be our joy and our happiness.”