Judges 11:29-40
Then the spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah, and he passed through Gilead and Manasseh. He passed on to Mizpah of Gilead, and from Mizpah of Gilead he passed on to the Ammonites. And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD, and said, "If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord's, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering."
So Jephthah crossed over to the Ammonites to fight against them; and the LORD gave them into his hand. He inflicted a massive defeat on them from Aroer to the neighborhood of Minnith, twenty towns, and as far as Abel-keramim. So the Ammonites were subdued before the people of Israel.
Then Jephthah came to his home at Mizpah; and there was his daughter coming out to meet him with timbrels and with dancing. She was his only child; he had no son or daughter except her. When he saw her, he tore his clothes, and said, "Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low; you have become the cause of great trouble to me. For I have opened my mouth to the LORD, and I cannot take back my vow."
She said to him, "My father, if you have opened your mouth to the LORD, do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth, now that the LORD has given you vengeance against your enemies, the Ammonites." And she said to her father, "Let this thing be done for me: Grant me two months, so that I may go and wander on the mountains, and bewail my virginity, my companions and I."
"Go," he said and sent her away for two months. So she departed, she and her companions, and bewailed her virginity on the mountains. At the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to the vow he had made. She had never slept with a man. So there arose an Israelite custom that for four days every year the daughters of Israel would go out to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite.
A warrior makes a foolish, unnecessary vow, and then through a horrifying twist of fate, believes he is obligated to sacrifice his daughter, burning her to death on an altar. This terrifying tragedy may evoke outrage, disbelief, and horror in us, and it should. Yet, since it is scripture, we must find some way to make sense of it, if we are to continue to believe that the Bible is God’s word to us.
One tradition in Christian worship is that when the worship leader finishes reading a passage from the Bible, she says, “This is the word of the Lord,” to which the congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.” This response reminds us that the Bible is a gift to us from God, which we must study and give thanks for. It is hard to find a way to be grateful for this story, which is probably why this difficult text has become obscure. It never comes up in the standard lectionary cycle of readings. We may wonder, is this really scripture? Does it show God’s action or will in any way? It is tempting to rule it a mistake in the canon, tear that page out of our Bible, and forget it, or at least to mark it ‘PG13' in red letters and hide it from the innocent eyes of our children.
Before we tear any pages, we must attempt to struggle faithfully with this text. People of faith have wrestled with it for thousands of years and their struggle to understand it gives us a starting place. Jewish rabbis, around the time of Christ and in the five centuries that followed, engaged this story in their midrash. Midrash is writing that attempts to fill in the margins and to write between the lines of scripture to make its meaning clear. It is work of both prayer and scholarship, which is preserved and used through the generations of Jews, as they carry on a living conversation with God over the centuries.
One of the gifts of the midrash writers who studied this text was a name for the anonymous ‘daughter of Jephthah.’ Scripture neglects to record her name, so the rabbis called her Sheilah. A name is symbol of a person’s individuality and of their value. We carefully choose names for our children, and many of us have been told by our parents the meaning or origins of our own names. The failure to record a name for Jephthah’s daughter symbolizes her expendability to her father and reflects the patriarchal tradition of the Bible, which generally values females less than males and frequently omits the names of women from its pages.
From the biblical writer’s point of view, it is primarily Jephthah’s story, and it is necessary to learn something about him to understand it. The events occur during the time in history after the promise to Abraham and before the beginning of a dynasty of kings who ruled Israel, when the people were led by a series of judges. Jephthah was one of the judges, the military and community leaders of Israel, during the time before a centralized government was established, when the people lived as independent clans and cities. While some of the judges, like Deborah, were great leaders, others were not. It became a time of corruption and turning from God in Israel, and Jephthah’s leadership reflects this spiritual emptiness and foolishness.
His mother was a prostitute in Mizpah, the main city in the region of Gilead. The author ironically records his unknown father as “Gilead,” representing him as the unclaimed son of the whole area. While the whole town may have created him, they wanted nothing to do with him as he grew up. Jephthah was rejected by his hometown and driven out. Without a proper family, he was an expendable member of the community. Jephthah became a bandit, and a vicious and efficient warrior.
When Gilead was threatened by the powerful Ammonites, they called Jephthah back and asked him to lead their army. They needed a ruthless mercenary to survive, and he fit the bill. He agreed to fight for them, but he fought for power and personal vindication, not for God or for the safety of his people. Despite his motives, God chose Jephthah and sent God’s Spirit down on him, which was a guarantee of victory in Old Testament battles. But, Jephthah either wasn’t aware of the power given to him by God’s Spirit, or he wanted to hedge his bets. He made an oath that if he won the battle, when he returned to his house in Mizpah, he would sacrifice as a burnt offering to God the first one who came to greet him.
We do not know what he intended by this vague oath. He may have expected an animal would be the first living thing he would encounter when he returned home. A guard or a slave might also have greeted him. But, it is clear that he did not expect his daughter to be the victim of his vow. Yet when she comes out of the house to welcome him, dancing and playing her tambourine, he does not renounce the vow. In resignation and mourning he tears his clothes, and then blames her for causing the tragedy. He says, “Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low; you have become the cause of great trouble to me.” He doesn’t question his action in making the vow, try to comfort her, or call on God to remedy the situation.
The contrast between this and other child sacrifice stories in the Old Testament is striking. Abraham was also faced the situation of feeling obligated to kill his beloved, only child as a sacrifice to God. In that case, God stopped the sacrifice and sent a clear message that human sacrifice was never to be required in the future. Later in history, king Saul felt compelled to fulfill a vow by killing his son Jonathan. That time, the community intervened and stopped Saul. It is painful and frustrating to realize that for Sheilah, neither God nor the community intervened to save her.
Her death was triply tragic according to the beliefs of the time. It was shocking, first, because she was so young, and second, because she would die a violent and premeditated death at the hand of her father. Finally, her death was terrible because she had not fulfilled the one thing that an Israelite woman could do to be respected and remembered after her death: she would never bear children. As a childless women, she would be one of the “unremembered” of history. Sheilah was sacrificed, but she was not simply a submissive victim. The text records that she responded to her father by agreeing that he should fulfill his vow, but asking that she first be given time to prepare. She asked for two months to be in the wilderness with a group of her girl friends to mourn the loss of her unlived life. Her father agreed to let her go away for two months, and she surrounded herself with people who supported and understood her.
One writer speculates that Sheilah may have intentionally been the first person to greet Jephthah. Perhaps Jephthah had let his daughter know of his public vow, so that she would be careful not to be the victim. If she knew of the oath and still rushed to her father, then she made a conscious choice to substitute herself for the slave or guard whom Jephthah felt was “expendable.” We will never know what her intention was: whether she was an innocent victim or a hero. We do know that she returned to Mizpah to be killed.
It is an ending I find extremely unsatisfying. A few years ago I heard about a preacher who got to the sacrifice part of this story and said she wished she could have talked to the girl. The preacher wanted to yell, “Get off that altar and run! Run to the hills and never come back!” I want to yell that, too. The Bible is supposed to tell about God’s love, power, and faithfulness, but they seem totally absent here. How can this story be part of God’s revelation?
The best insight I have found into this problem is from biblical scholar Phyllis Trible. She writes that the only way to understand this story as scripture is to let go of the idea that it is an example of God’s will being done. Instead, she calls it a “text of terror,” a particular category of scripture. Texts of terror don’t represent the world as it should be, but instead record things so horrible that they must never be forgotten to ensure that they will never be repeated. As survivors of the Jewish holocaust in this century vow “never again,” so I believe the point of including this story in our scripture is to prevent this kind of outrage from ever happening again. Judges 11 ends with these words about remembrance, “So there arose an Israelite custom that for four days every year the daughters of Israel would go out to lament the daughter of Jephthah.” By remembering Sheilah, the Israelite women brought the only justice and meaning they could out of her death.
Its easy to think that the faithlessness that let a father murder a child, and that allowed one of God’s chosen people to see another person as expendable, is a barbarism from ancient times that has no relevance to us today. Maybe we don’t need to remember this anymore. That is not the case. There are countless examples in our lives of people whom we view as ‘expendable,’ although usually in more subtle ways than Jephthah did. Phyllis Trible writes that Jephthah’s sin was “faithfulness to an unfaithful vow.
There are many people whom we ‘sacrifice,’ either physically, emotionally, or spiritually, because our society sees their lives as expendable. Whether because of their gender, race, age, ability, attractiveness, sexual orientation, wealth, or some other characteristic, we continue to let some people be sacrificed to the unfaithful values of our time. Unfortunately, there are many examples to choose from of people being sacrificed. Because this particular text is about a young girl, (one of very few in the Bible), it is worth considering for a moment what is happening to girls today. There are countries in the world where girls are valued so little that they are allowed to go hungry so that there is enough food for their brothers, they are denied the education given to boys, and they are prevented from choosing their own careers and futures. In Thailand, girls as young as eleven or twelve years old are sold into prostitution by their parents for the cost of a television set.
These are the obvious examples of girls sacrificed to unfaithful values, but we should also look much closer to home. American girls are victims of child abuse, date rape, and child pornography because adults fail to work together effectively to make the unthinkable cease to exist in our communities. Books like Reviving Ophelia and Schoolgirls inform us that there are also more subtle unfaithful beliefs that affect nearly all girls today. Studies continue to find that girls are given less attention than boys by teachers in classroom discussions, and are frequently rewarded by teachers for compliance and courtesy, while boys are rewarded for assertiveness and curiosity. Psychologists document that girls self-esteem often crumbles as they enter puberty, and their confidence and happiness evaporates. Advertising, t.v., and movies send appalling messages about girls competence and value, often sexualizing girls’ bodies. Test scores below their male peers, eating disorders, and suicide attempts are all symptoms that we are letting girls be sacrificed to unfaithful priorities. These complex social problems are not easily solvable. Yet, we can affirm to the girls in our lives that they are created in God’s image, are lovable and acceptable, and have been given unique gifts by God that we will encourage them to realize.
The ways we love our daughters, sisters, nieces, granddaughters, neighbors, students, and friends who are girls is one of the signs of our faithfulness to God. To be faithful to God in protecting and respecting those who are vulnerable often requires us to do difficult things. Most of us fear of looking at the painful parts of life: sin, death, disease, social problems, or even our own regrets and bad memories. But as Christians we have courage to face evil because we are assured that when we recognize and resist the evil we encounter, we can tap into God’s power to change it. The promise of Jesus’ resurrection is that God’s powerful love can reconcile all brokenness, forgive all mistakes, heal all wounds, and ultimately triumph, even over the power of death. Seeking forgiveness and reconciliation is the starting place of our faith journey. Again and again throughout our lives, we struggle to make peace with past.
We reconcile with God, with ourselves, and with one another so that we are free to follow where Jesus leads us and free to live joyfully. This reconciliation includes looking with honesty at the hard parts of Bible, and this story is one of the very hardest. When we retell this story, we honor it through remembrance, and we are reminded of important lessons about personal and corporate responsibility.
Jephthah failed to take responsibility for himself. He was foolish and reckless in his choices and unfamiliar with God’s ways. Growing up with rejection, he had learned to be ruthless and self-serving. When facing a difficult battle, he attempted to secure God’s favor with a vow, not understanding that God doesn’t trade favors for sacrifices, but protected the Israelites because of God’s promise and special love for them. Jephthah ’s mistakes remind us that in order to make wise decisions, we need to make peace with the painful parts of our own histories and we need to know God.
The community of Israel also failed to take responsibility. First, a town rejected and abandoned Jephthah, who became a brutal mercenary. When they were in danger, they were more than happy to accept him back as their leader. When Jephthah made a foolish vow and felt compelled to sacrifice his daughter, they failed to intervene to save her. Israel’s mistakes remind us of our responsibility to come to terms with our history and to protect and include the weak.
For us to rename Jephthah’s daughter means:
- to recall that she lived and that her life had meaning and value.
- to remember the sins, individual and communal, which were committed against her.
- to acknowledge that no community or individual is safe from abusing the weak and vulnerable unless we recall these difficult stories.
- to proclaim “never again” will we stray from God’s will by treating any human being as expendable.
- to affirm to our own daughters and sons, and to all people, that they have value, that we commit to keep them safe, and that we will try to love them as God does. Amen.
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