Judges 11 Study Notes

11:23-28 It was commonly understood in that day that whatever land your god gave you belonged to you. Since the Lord God of Israel had driven out the Amorites, the land was Israel’s to possess. If Chemosh, the god of the Ammonites, had real power, he could take the land for them. In this speech, Jephthah seems, either accidentally or deliberately, to have confused the deities of Moab and Ammon. Elsewhere in the Bible, Chemosh is the god of Moab, while Molech is the god of Ammon. Balak earlier had tried to curse Israel by means of the prophet Balaam, but he was unable to do so (Nm 22-24). The Lord would be the ultimate judge of their dispute. At this point diplomacy was over, and the war began.

11:29-33 The Spirit of the Lord came on Jephthah, empowering him for action. He toured Gilead and Manasseh to muster his troops and headed out against the Ammonites. The Lord in turn gave him victory over twenty . . . cities of the Ammonites, from Aroer all the way to . . . Minnith and to Abel-keramim—three towns that defined the traditional border between Israel and Ammon. In between empowerment and victory, though, there was an intervening episode that undermined Jephthah’s triumph. Jephthah sought to ensure the Lord’s favor by vowing to sacrifice as a whole burnt offering whoever came out the doors of his house to greet him after he had won his victory.

Jephthah probably had a human sacrifice in mind, since animals do not normally come out to greet the returning troops. Just as he confused Chemosh and Molech in the previous section, so now he confused the Lord with Chemosh and Molech. The gods of the Moabites and Ammonites accepted human burnt offerings as a sign of total dedication (2 Kg 3), but such offerings were an abomination to the Lord. The Lord would have delivered Israel anyway, even without Jephthah’s rash vow.

11:34-35 After the victory, Jephthah’s vow came back to haunt him. The one coming out to meet him was his daughter, with tambourines and dancing, the traditional greeting for a returning hero. She was his only daughter, and more importantly, his only child. Jephthah would be left without progeny. Jephthah tore his clothes and mourned her loss, though perhaps his mourning was not so much for her but for himself.

11:36-40 Jephthah’s daughter was very different from her father. She had no recriminations for him, only an exhortation to fulfill his vow, just as the Lord had fulfilled the conditions. Unlike Abraham, whose faithfulness to God’s demand resulted in a multitude of descendants, Jephthah’s “faithfulness” issued in the complete cutting off of his line. That is part of what made the fact that she would die a virgin something to be mourned. She died unfulfilled because she would never get married and have children. Such a fate would normally condemn someone to be numbered among the unremembered in Israel. However, though Jephthah’s daughter has no name in the text, the young women of Israel honored her memory year after year.

A few scholars suggest that Jephthah did not kill his daughter but dedicated her to the Lord for her whole life (cp. 1Sm 1:11,24-28). She would remain a virgin, hence the yearly celebration of her willing sacrifice. In this case, Jephthah would still be without progeny. However, the natural sense of the Hebrew—literally “he did to her his vow that he had vowed”—is that he slaughtered her.