~ Jephthah & Jephthah Daughter ~
“Now Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valour, and he was the son of an harlot: and Gilead begat Jephthah. And Gilead’s wife bare him sons; and his wife’s sons grew up, and they thrust out Jephthah, and said unto him, Thou shalt not inherit in our father’s house; for thou art the son of a strange woman. Then Jephthah fled from his brethren, and dwelt in the land of Tob: and there were gathered vain men to Jephthah, and went out with him.”* (Judges 11:1-3)
God here acquaints us with the unfair pressures that shaped Jephthah’s life. It wasn’t Jephthah’s fault that his father sinned and put him in such a predicament. Nor was it fair for the other sons of Jephthah’s father to treat him in such a way as to make him feel obligated to leave the country, especially since he seems to have achieved some merit in his life: “Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valour.” It is a further measure of just how respected he was for his valour that (in spite of the thrusting of him out of the home) when the Israelites were in trouble with the Ammonites, they went to him for assistance (see vs. 4-11).
And so this man, Jephthah, responded to a life-or-death crisis. He would either prevail against the children of Ammon or they would prevail against him and his people. The trial would either make him or break him. To fail would be utterly disastrous; to succeed would mean everything.
Such pressure as this brings out a great deal of what we have. And we are given a picture of how Jephthah thought and how spiritually prepared he was for the crisis of his life by the conversation between Jephthah and the king of the Ammonites.
In verse 12, Jephthah asked the king of the Ammonites, “What is wrong? Why do you want to fight us?”
This king replies to Jephthah, “Israel took away our lands [300 years ago]. Now restore them” (vs. 13).
Jephthah then makes a long reply to the Ammonites in verses 14-27. Basically he says that the lands were not taken because Israel just wanted them. The Israelites merely wanted passage through the lands of Ammon (and Moab) to get to Canaan. But these countries would not give that passage and attacked Israel. They were defeated and their lands taken, but not because of Israelite aggression. Furthermore, they have had 300 years to recover their land and had not done so. Jephthah concludes, “Wherefore I have not sinned against thee, but thou doest me wrong to war against me: the LORD the Judge be judge this day between the children of Israel and the children of Ammon.” (Judges 11:27)
This argument reveals a great deal of knowledge about God and His dealings in the past with the Israelites and their neighbors. It is accurate knowledge. God had indeed done those things, and it had happened as Jephthah related it. What is missing is a current relationship with God, characterized by faith and confidence in Him. Jephthah knows about God, and his knowledge about God is correct, but Jephthah doesn’t know God! Think of this! He is facing the greatest crisis of his life, and he doesn’t know God! He only knows about Him.
All of this comes out in the vow that Jephthah made. “And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, then it shall 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.”* (Judges 11:30-31)
A man that knew God and had faith in Him would not feel the necessity of making the vow that Jephthah made. He would understand that God did not want or take pleasure in such an extreme commitment. Jephthah misunderstood the character and nature of God. He thought within himself that God was of a nature to be moved to help by the extremity and severity of his sacrifice, and he still thought this (as did his daughter), even when the full extent of that rash vow became apparent. The awful tragedy of the whole matter is that God was not as Jephthah understood Him. God was all too willing to help and did help them, but God took no pleasure in Jephthah’s vow. As the Lord said at a later time to the Israelites, “They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind.” (Jeremiah 19:5)
Now God could have delivered Jephthah from the consequences of his rash vow, just as God delivered the Israelites from the Ammonites. God could have fixed it so that Jephthah’s daughter, his only child (Judges 11:34), did not come out of the house, but God let it be. God let Himself be misunderstood. God let the matter proceed as it did. There were reasons why Jephthah had not gotten to know God as God really is, and this story stands as a warning to all of mankind of what we can get into if our heart is not taught of God. If we only know about God, rather than knowing Him as He is.
Please note that Jephthah still didn’t know God even after his ignorance bore terrible fruit. His daughter didn’t either. She felt the “necessity” of her father keeping his vow (Judges 11:36). At terrible cost, the vow was kept, and still they knew not that God took no pleasure in it.
There are many Jephthahs today who imagine that God requires or delights in such and such a thing. Many of these imaginations proceed from a profound misunderstanding and misinterpretation of what God is and what He has done in the past.
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.”* (Matthew 23:25)
It is clear that this rash vow of Jephthah was excess. Excess is defined as “The state of surpassing or going beyond limits; the being of a measure beyond sufficiency, necessity, or duty; that which exceeds what is usual or proper; immoderateness; superfluity; superabundance; extravagance.” Think of what it means to be guilty of excess in the eyes of God! A lack of Holy-Ghost-inspired temperance. The strain of people trying to please their idea of what God is without being taught of Him how to worship Him in Spirit and in truth.
“And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit.”* (Ephesians 5:18) We are quite willing to say that there is no excessiveness in the requirements and dealings of the Spirit of God. Verily, He requires only reasonable service (Romans 12:1), as He defines reasonable. Now folks who are of a mindset to think that the Lord doesn’t care, that He is rather indifferent to much of how we live or do; they also do not have a rightful picture of what God is like, either. Their problem is not the strain of making rash vows; they are more inclined to go to excess in the opposite direction and conclude that God doesn’t really require much of anything. And so we see that if we are not led by the Spirit of God, we will be led by something, and that something will be of a tendency to excess in one direction or the other.
One end of the human reaction scale is compromise and the other end is fanaticism. We submit to your thinking that the right path is not on the human reaction scale at all. Only the Divine Mind knows how we should walk and do (Jeremiah 10:23), and He wants us to know Him and His way for us. “But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the Lord.”* (Jeremiah 9:24) It is not in being a “moderate” as we define what moderation is. It is being taught of God in our heart and the fruits that follow of really knowing Him. “It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me.”* (John 6:45)
~sigh~ But; I digress. Let's continue on with the story and what we can learn from it.
The story of Jephthah and the untaught hearts of the children of Israel does not end with the eleventh chapter of Judges. It continues into the twelfth. Even the deliverance that God had given the Israelites from the enemy without (the Ammonites) did not unite them. There arose internal dissension over who got left out of the victory, etc., and soon Israelite was shedding the blood of Israelite. When God does not keep the house, even when He in mercy gives relief and help for certain needs, things still do not go well overall, for human effort is in charge. When we do not understand God or His ways correctly, it is not enough to recognize that an individual is really, truly saved (an Israelite). Human wisdom will impose artificial barriers and means of identifying which camp you are in. Are you an Ephraimite? “Say now Shibboleth.”* (Judges 12:6) And if you can’t say it just right (by their definition), they will slay you, spiritually speaking.
This is the same thing we read about in Revelation 13:17, “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” In Jephthah’s time, you were rejected and slain if you couldn’t say “Shibboleth.” In the Revelation, you are rejected and cannot buy or sell if you do not have the “correct” number or name.
The professed Christian world is divided into a multitude of lands, all professing to be Israel. Many people who sing ...
“We reach our hands in fellowship to every blood-washed one,
While love entwines about each heart in which God’s will is done”
... have not the faintest idea of a fellowship really based on just being saved. They recognize what they think is saved… plus something. This plus something can be as simple as being saved plus “attending our services.” The disciples applied an additional test of fellowship beyond salvation when they forbid the man casting out devils in the name of Jesus to continue “because he followeth not with us.”* (Luke 9:49-50) Jesus reproved them for forbidding him. They misunderstood the character and nature of God. We see then that a lack of understanding God leads to more of a lack of understanding of God. It just gets off further and further. The rash vow of Jephthah was grievous, but the civil war was infinitely more so.
God wants to be properly understood. He is seeking for true worshipers who want to know, yea, who will not be satisfied with anything else than to really know, what He is really like (John 4:23-24). Oh, He is seeking for those who want to know Him as He is! There are so many diligent, careful, false worshipers who hold in reverence “another Jesus!”* (2 Corinthians 11:4)
If we misunderstand God’s motives and His character, we are at enormous disadvantage in pleading His promises or properly interpreting what He does or does not do for us. A son that properly understands the character and love of his father expects good things, nor is he disappointed. “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?”* (Luke 11:11-13) Do you see from this scripture that God wants to bless you? Do you understand that He is on the giving hand, a God that is near “and not a God afar off?”* (Jeremiah 23:23) To properly understand God is to really admire and adore Him. It will stir firm confidence (faith), complete trust, and rest.
“When thou liest down, thou shalt not be afraid: yea, thou shalt lie down, and thy sleep shall be sweet.”* (Proverbs 3:24)
“God loves to be longed for, He loves to be sought,
For He sought us Himself with such longing and love:
He died for desire of us, marvellous thought!
And He yearns for us now to be with Him above.”
God’s standards are not peculiarity for the sake of being peculiar. He does not delight in us being strange to worldly minds around us just to be strange. It is strange and peculiar to really live holy. It is strange and peculiar not to hold grudges and forgive others their trespasses. It is very strange to be humble and meek, to be little in our own eyes. It is completely foreign to natural human nature to live a surrendered, consecrated life without any ambition other than to please God and be accepted of Him. And God takes pleasure in such a dedicated, plain, careful life. He knows when it begins to become an end in itself, too. He knows when it is too loose and gives undue liberty to the flesh, and He knows when it is strained, stretched, and characterized by rash vows. God is not a God who delights in human stretching and straining. God is not pleased by fanaticism. God is not pleased by compromise.
God knows when our idea of His salvation is characterized by too much leaning to our own understanding—a reasoned salvation of human effort mostly, rather than being filled with the Spirit. There is vastly more to God than intellectualism. God is able to bring you into His pavilion until your soul is filled with a sense of His greatness and your appropriate and rightful (humble) relationship to His bigness. He not only saves us from sin; He can save us from ourselves and the inappropriate use of our capacity. It does not have to go with us as it did with Jephthah. Jephthah did not have to do as he did. He could have settled on this reality: “God has delivered Israel all down through the years. I’ll just trust Him to deliver us again.” How infinitely better this would have been than the path of the rash vow!
Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah. ~ Judges 11:29
We've all heard stories of individuals who have overcome extreme hardship during their childhood years. Children of alcoholics, orphans who never have parents, loss of parents to a fatal crash, childhood disease and so on. These are all difficult circumstances to overcome.
Jephthah was a man who overcame his obstacles and refused to allow his circumstances to prevent him from becoming a great warrior. He was born to Gilead, a result of his father's adulterous encounter with a prostitute. Gilead's wife, who had bore more sons, decided to reject Jephthah, and drove him away from their home saying, "You are not going to get any inheritance in our family because you are the son of another woman." Imagine the rejection this young man felt as he was cast away from his own family.
This experience taught Jephthah to become a hardened warrior. As he got older, his reputation as a warrior became known to those in his country, so much so that when the Ammonites made war on Israel, the elders of Gilead went to Jephthah and asked him to be their commander. Jephthah had to fight off those feelings of rejection from previous years.
"Didn't you hate me and drive me from my father's house?" he responded. He overcame his hurt and pain, and responded to the call God had on his life.
It is said that if we were to help the butterfly remove itself from the cocoon, the butterfly would not be strong enough to survive. It is the struggle that prepares the butterfly to become strong enough to fly. Without the struggle in the cocoon, it could not survive as a butterfly.
The Lord prepares each of us in similar ways. Some of our childhoods seem to have been harsh and born from a seemingly unloving God. However, the Lord knows our struggle and will make our life an instrument in His hand if we will follow Him with an upright heart. He does make all things beautiful in His time if we are willing to be patient.
Jephthah's Rash Vow (Judges 11:21-40)
There are some stories in Scripture that present us with challenging questions, often because they come from a world and a culture far removed from our own, and because we have certain ideas about Scripture that prevent us from hearing the stories in that context. One of those Old Testament stories is the story of Jephthah and a foolish vow he made that cost his young daughter's life (Jud.11:36-40). With our modern sensibilities, we recoil from the story. Why did Jephthah sacrifice his daughter? Since God would never receive a human sacrifice, does that mean that if we say stupid things we should do them even if it is against what we understand about God?
In this case, an unfamiliarity with the nature of Scripture and how the Israelites used narrative to communicate theology causes us problems in hearing this story. There are many things in Scripture that recount past events that are not meant to be presented as positive or as models for our actions today. The book of Judges is an especially good example of that.
Recall, in the book of Judges (21:25): "all the people did what was right in their own eyes."
Throughout Judges, most of the leaders (called a shophet, a "judge" or tribal military chieftain) that emerge are seriously flawed. They were only able to accomplish anything because God worked in spite of their failures.
Jephtah’s Daughter
Names in the Bible often say something about the person, but in this case the young woman in the story is nameless. People without a name seem less real, so leaving the girl without a name minimized the horror of Jephthah's act, and made him more acceptable as a hero of Israel.
Jephthah means ‘he opens’; the name may refer to Jephthah’s fatal habit of speaking without thinking - he opened his mouth to make the vow when it would have been better if he had remained silent.
The vow of Jephtah, Judges 11:1-11, 29-33.
In return for victory in battle, Jephtah vowed to God that he would sacrifice the first thing he saw on his return home. In the early part of Israelite history, the leader of the clan had extraordinary powers, and under certain circumstances he had the power of life or death over members of his clan.
The consequences of the vow, Judges 11:34-40.
Jephtah won the battle and returned home. As he approached his house, his beloved only daughter ran out to meet him, which meant he had to sacrifice her to fulfill his promise.
When she was told about the promise, she courageously accepted the fact that she must die. For two months before her death she went up into the mountains with her companions, where she lamented that she would never know married love, and never hold her children in her arms.
When Jephtah returned victorious from the battle, he was greeted by women singers who went out to welcome him. They were led by his daughter.
‘Then Jephtah came to his home at Mizpah; and there was his daughter coming out to meet him with timbrels and with dancing.’
This was a normal custom of the time, and Jephtah should have foreseen it. Women normally went out to greet returning military heroes with songs and poems. We know of this from other examples, including Miriam (Exodus 15:20) and the women who praised King David (1 Samuel 18:6).
When Jephtah saw his daughter and realized what he had done, he was distraught with grief, but immediately ‘blamed the victim’, reproaching his daughter for being the one whom he saw first, rather than blaming himself for the vow he had made.
‘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”.
When Jephtah’s daughter heard of her father’s vow, she responded with dignity and restrained anger. She accepted her fate, but on her own terms.
'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”.’
Modern writers object to the daughter’s passive acceptance of her death, wishing she had objected to her father’s vow.
But in the context of the times Jephtah had to sacrifice her, and she had to accept her fate. Her father made a promise on behalf of his people and he believed that God had accepted the promise, giving him victory in return. Now the promise had to be honored despite the terrible cost, and the daughter knew this and accepted it.
But here's a thought: is it possible she knew in advance about her father's vow, and deliberately come out of the house first, thus bringing the vow onto herself rather than on someone whom her father considered expendable, for example a servant? Could the girl have taken the place intended for someone else? We'll never really know. At least not on this earthly plain.
The daughter’s real reaction to her fate is shown by what she did, not what she said. ‘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”.’
She preferred to spend the last days of her life with her friends. With them, she mourned the fact that she would never achieve the goal of all Jewish women: to hold her child in her arms. (Judges 11:37-40).
The exact method of her death is not known. If she was a burnt offering, she would have been first killed with a knife, and then her body burnt.
An annual festival for young women commemorated the death of Jephtah’s daughter – ‘for four days every year the daughters of Israel would go out to lament the daughter of Jephtah the Gileadite’.
We are supposed to recoil from the monstrosity of Jephthah’s actions. The later community of Israel who included this story in the biblical traditions knew how wrong child sacrifice was, so there would be no mistaking this for a model of right behavior. It would be another example of what happens when God’s people become confused in their thinking about who is really God and how God works in the world. This becomes another lesson for Israel that God will not be manipulated by magical incantations or bargains that we strike with him on our own terms.
That is precisely what Jephthah tried to do in making his vow to sacrifice the first thing that met him on his return home, if only God would help him win a battle. God did not need that bargain to aid Jephthah. Jephthah was yet another tragic figure in Judges who had not yet learned enough about God to know that God does not respond to magic or bargains, which lay at the heart of Ba’al worship. Jephthah’s battle against the Ammonites was not won because of his vow, but because of God’s presence (11:32). His lack of faith in God, and understanding of who God is, cost him his daughter.
The biblical traditions recall that as a great tragedy (11:39-40):
"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".
In closing; one of the greatest lessons that I have learned from this story written in Judges is that God does not bargain!
As I searched myself I realized that I am guilty of checking myself to make sure that I am completely "good" with God before I approach the Lord with my prayer requests. Are my tithes up to date?, do I have aught against anyone?, does anyone have aught against me that I need to apologize for? am I behind in my Bible reading? and so on.
All of these things are good and the right thing to do but when we only really do them so that God will honor our prayer request(s) then any way that you look at it; that's bargaining. And it isn't going to work out any better for us than it did for Jephthah.
It's God's good pleasure to give us the desires of our hearts and He will - if they line up with His plan for our lives. If it doesn't then He just isn't going to do it. As I type this I am reminded of the Scripture that says something to the effect of what Father who's child ask him for a piece of bread would then give him a snake. God isn't going to give us something that ultimately does us harm in some way.
I Praise God for the Scripture! Scriptures that ever guides us along this journey through life. Don't you?!
