JEPHTHAH’S DAUGHTER
JUDG. 11:34, 35, 40 |
Jephthah, ninth judge of Israel, makes public vow to offer a burnt offering in case of victory. He is victorious, but learns his daughter must be his offering. She accepts her father’s pledge with meekness and patience. |
EXAMPLE OF NOBLE SUBMISSION
SCARCELY a century had elapsed since Deborah’s great victory. The people freed by her were now plunged into idolatry and threatened by foreign domination again. In the darkness of this era the figures of a father and daughter, his only child, emerge as the providential agents of restoration.
The daughter had such a sublime reverence for a promise made to God that she was even willing to lay down her life for it. The father, Jephthah, described as “a mighty man of valour” (Judg. 11:1), was the son of a distinguished Hebrew named Gilead, who lived in a territory of that name. His mother was a stranger to the tribe, an inferior woman described as a harlot (Judg. 11:1, 2). Despite his mother’s foreign blood and the heathen qualities of many of his tribesmen, Jephthah became a great commander and a believer in the one God.
In the early part of his life, because of his illegitimacy, he had been banished from his father’s house and had taken up his residence in Tob, not far from Gilead. Here he became head of a warring tribe of freebooters who went raiding with him. When war broke out between the Ammonites and the Gileadites, the latter sought Jephthah as their commander. He consented only after a solemn covenant, ratified on both sides at Mizpeh, a strongly fortified frontier town of Gilead.
Here he established his residence temporarily and brought his daughter. After a fruitless appeal for peace to their leaders and for aid to the adjacent tribe of Ephraim, Jephthah, urged by the “spirit of the Lord,” sped through the territories of Manasseh and his own Gilead, summoning the Israelites to arms.
It seems that his army represented a small minority compared to that of the enemy. In his perplexity to give fresh courage to his troops and to sustain his own confidence against such fearful odds, he made a vow publicly to the Lord. In that reckless vow he exhibited a rude and unenlightened piety typical of the wild mountaineer fighter that he was when he declared, “If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, then shall it be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering” (Judg. 11:30-31).
What a contrast between Jephthah’s vow and that of Hannah who had pledged to lend her child to God as long as he lived. What a contrast, also, to the simple and sublime trust of Deborah, who went against a fearful enemy strongly armed with faith in God. Not so strongly armed, Jephthah was willing to make any kind of promise to insure victory.
Jephthah routed the Ammonites, and twenty of their cities fell before him. Elated with his unexpected success, he hurried to Mizpeh, where he had left his daughter. The women and maidens had assembled to greet this victorious warrior with songs and dances. Who should be the first to come out from Jephthah’s own doorway but his beloved daughter! Probably he had thought a servant or hound dog would precede her. Or maybe not until this moment had he stopped to realize how rash and cruel had been his vow. But now his shock was great and his distress poignant as he looked and saw his beautiful daughter standing there in front of his own doorway.
Let us visualize her in all the freshness of youth, with her luxuriant hair falling loosely over her shoulders, and with the wind blowing her hair and at the same time swaying her full-skirted and brightly colored dress. Her red lips were probably parted in a radiant smile and her eyes were filled with joy as she beat a timbrel and sang. Her country was free again. The enemy had been annihilated, and her own father had been in command. Now he would be first in Israel.
She ran to embrace him. Had he not been all in all to her? Born in exile, reared amid the wild scenes of desert life, she had known no other protection but her father’s tent, no greater love than his. And we can be sure that, mighty warrior though he was, whose name had spread panic throughout all neighboring lands, he had been to his beloved daughter the tenderest kind of parent.
While the whole land echoed the triumphant shouts of freedom, all the glory died out for Jephthah as he embraced his daughter, only to cry loudly, “Alas, my daughter! thou has brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me: for I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back” (Judg. 11:35).
With heroic courage Jephthah’s daughter gave the answer that has become a classic: “My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon” (Judg. 11:36). His daughter’s noble submission to his vow now made the consequence of it even harder for Jephthah to bear.
Pure of heart and unmindful of tragedy, Jephthah’s daughter probably did not at first grasp her father’s distressing predicament. Then she began to know that the life she had envisioned as a wife and mother, the hope of every woman in Israel, was gone. Let us imagine she needed spiritual strength to face such a crisis and so she asked her father for two months, so that she might go to the mountains with young friends and “bewail her virginity” (Judg. 11:38).
Then it was she returned calmly and obediently to her father, who, the Scriptures say, “did with her according to his vow” (Judg. 11:39). A great many Bible commentators take this story literally, saying Jephthah did go forth and offer his daughter for a burnt offering. There is little argument for a different interpretation except in that earlier phrase, “shall surely be the Lord’s” (Judg. 11:31), indicating he could have meant to offer her to the service of the sanctuary.
Some commentators make the point that while Jephthah’s daughter was in the mountains for two months her father had time to weigh with himself the rashness of his promise. And, despite the turbulent times, there were in Israel many noble, God-fearing men and women who intelligently understood and practiced the wise and merciful system of Moses, that of not offering human beings as burnt sacrifices. If so, Jephthah’s daughter gave her life to service in the tabernacle. The phrase “she knew no man” (Judg. 11:39) conveys the thought that she became a celibate. It has been suggested that what the daughters of Israel bewailed was not her death but her celibacy.
We are positive that she did not marry and bear children, and for an only child of a mighty warrior to die unmarried and leave a name in Israel extinguished was indeed a heavy judgment. But despite the seeming tragedy of this daughter of Israel, she lives on, even now, almost thirty-one centuries later, as the embodiment of a courageous young woman who was both meek in spirit and patient in suffering.