Jephthah, a warrior-judge of Israel, vowed that if God helped him defeat the Ammonites, he would sacrifice the first person who came out of his house to meet him upon his victorious return. Tragically, his daughter, his only child, dancing and playing timbrels, appeared to greet him. After two months, during which the daughter lamented her fate with her companions, the grief-stricken father kept his vow.

Natan Heber was trained by his father in Poland to be a ritual slaughterer. In 1925, he joined the Zionist movement "Mizrachi" and in 1936 immigrated to Palestine where he opened a poultry shop in Haifa. He began to paint at the age of sixty-one, after ill health forced him to retire. Driven by a need to memorialize his family and their shtetl community lost in the Holocaust, he drew scenes of traditional Jewish life. Unfamiliar with the conventions of scale and perspective, he set his heavily outlined frontal figures on steeply rising surfaces and often portrayed his father in monumental size to mark his importance.