Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

JEPHTHAHS DAUGHTER

A young girl sacrificed as a burnt offering in fulfillment of her father’s vow (Judg. 11:34-40). While leading Gileadite resistance against Ammonite oppression, Jephthah sought to secure victory by vowing to offer up to Yahweh whatever was the first to come out of his house upon his return. (Whether Jephthah intended human sacrifice is unclear.) Jephthah does defeat the Ammonites, but his triumph turns to tragedy when he is greeted by his daughter, an only child. Jephthah mourns but persists. The daughter accepts her fate without protest, asking only for two months in which to “lament her maidenhood” with her female companions. At the end of that time, she is slaughtered.

Judg. 11:39-40 links the story to an annual ritual in which young women go into the hills for four days of lamentation. The lack of correspondence between two months and four days of the ritual suggests that the link is secondary. The ritual may have been a rite of passage in which adolescent girls mourn the passing of a life stage.

The story of Jephthah’s daughter is one of several biblical passages having to do with human sacrifice. Prophetic and legal texts refer to the practice of immolating children in a desperate attempt to obtain Yahweh’s favor (2 Kgs. 16:3; 17:17; Ezek. 20:25-26; Ps. 106:37-38). Gen. 22 recounts Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac at God’s command. 1 Sam. 14:24-45 narrates Saul’s vow that whoever had broken his command to fast should be put to death and his discovery that the culprit was his heir, Jonathan. But the prophetic and legal texts consistently condemn human sacrifice; God prevents Abraham from killing Isaac, and the people intervene to rescue Jonathan. Only Jephthah’s daughter is sacrificed without intervention or condemnation.

Traditional appraisal of Jephthah’s deed has been ambivalent. The OT and NT praise Jephthah’s faithfulness (1 Sam. 12:11; Heb. 11:32). The Haggadah condemns his immolation of his daughter as ignorant and sinful. Some modern interpreters describe Jephthah as “exemplary”; others condemn the sacrifice of the girl as inhuman. Others critically assess the patriarchal values of blind obedience and female sacrifice encoded in the story, or wrest its focus away from Jephthah to mourn his daughter’s fate.

Bibliography. P. L. Day, “From the Child Is Born the Woman: The Story of Jephthah’s Daughter,” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis, 1989), 58-74; D. N. Fewell, “Judges,” in The Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. C. A. Newsom and S. H. Ringe (Louisville, 1992), 67-77; E. Fuchs, “Marginalization, Ambiguity, Silencing: The Story of Jephthah’s Daughter,” JFSR 5 (1989): 35-45; P. Trible, Texts of Terror. OBT 13 (Philadelphia, 1984).

Carolyn Pressler

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

JEPHTHAHS DAUGHTER

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)