Jephthah and his daughter: Judges 11 v 29-40: ‘She was an only child’
I’ll put my cards on the table straight away – I have a daughter and this story makes me recoil with horror. It’s not only that Jephthah’s action in killing his daughter (for whatever reason) is morally repugnant but also that God seems to be involved. We may well wish that this story was not to be found within the pages of the Bible but it is very important that we don’t use nifty footwork to bypass these difficult bits and stick to the passages we like. However reluctantly, we must address them.
Jephthah had a difficult start in life. He was the son of a prostitute whose exclusion from the Israelite community was engineered by his legitimate half-brothers. Growing up and then being chucked out of a family and nation in which you represent by your very existence the moral failings of your father must have left its mark on him, eating away at his self-esteem day by day. However the exploits of this mighty warrior and his band of followers had made a deep impression to the extent that the elders of Israel come knocking at his door when the Ammonites declare war (Judges 11 v 1-4). Jephthah makes the obvious point, ‘you’ve never wanted me around and you’ve only come crawling now because you are desperate!’ and, perhaps because he has very little trust in them, insists on being put in overall charge of the nation (v 9-11). It is in this meteoric rise of a complex and troubled man that the seeds of his catastrophic error of judgement lay.
We pick up his story after he has sent a placatory letter to the king of Ammon which has been ignored. This means war and Jephthah’s campaign is explicitly stated, uncomfortably to our ears, to be Spirit inspired (v 29). So why does he even make a vow that in the event of victory he would sacrifice the first thing that comes out of his house as a burnt offering? Did it never occur to him that it might be a member of his family, even his precious daughter? Reading verse 34 you can almost hear the storyteller weeping for this woman in the prime of life, especially in underlining that she was an only child.
I wonder if this is a case of somebody who approached a task feeling full of inspiration, thinking that the world was his oyster but who then took it too far and didn’t stop for a moment to think of the possible consequences. I think, in a different context, of Tony Blair who, in his early years as Prime Minister had some brilliant foreign policy successes (The Good Friday Agreement and the liberation of Kosovo spring readily to mind) but then, possibly as an example of prime ministerial hubris, allowed himself to get caught up in George W. Bush’s war against Iraq with its ongoing narrative of destruction and instability.
Those in positions of leadership do need to look themselves in the mirror on a regular basis, even or especially if they are successful, and remember that they remain flawed, fragile human beings. Peter Starstedt’s song, ‘Where do you go to my lovely’, said by some to be about the actress Sophia Loren, addresses an unnamed woman who has risen from an impoverished background to a position of great wealth. But the question he asks of her in the chorus is:
‘But where do you go to, my lovely
When you're alone in your bed?
Tell me the thoughts that surround you
I want to look inside your head, yes, I do’
The story of Jephthah is a cautionary tale about somebody who didn’t take the time just to stop and think - alone in his bed, as it were - and simply got carried away without thinking through the possible consequences. His daughter asks for a two month stay of execution to spend with her friends (very possibly it was a case of ‘with anyone but my father’) and, of course, there is the voice of another unnamed woman that we do not hear, that of Jephthah’s wife, the unknown mother of an only daughter whose screams of misery and wretchedness remain out of earshot. In our world just as much as the in the ancient world, the cries of those whose pain we would prefer not to hear, such as those whose children are dying daily of malnutrition, malaria or water borne diseases and those who are exploited so that citizens of affluent countries can buy cheap goods, so often fall on deaf ears.
I would imagine that all of us are familiar with the law of unintended consequences; we didn’t mean for this or that to happen and if we could turn back the clock we would. There was, of course, no way back for Jephthah, no way of ameliorating the suffering his family had to endure because of his rash vow.
And where is God in all this? Well we know that child sacrifice, common practice among many cultures at the time, was unacceptable to the Israelite nation; that’s really what the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac (Gen 22 v 1-18), a pretty uncomfortable read in its own right, is all about. Having said that, another profoundly uncomfortable passage in the Old Testament law instructs parents with rebellious sons to take them to the village elders for the purpose of being stoned to death (Deut 21 v 18-21). The violence that exists within the Old Testament story (bearing in mind that Jephthah was a warrior who laid waste to twenty Ammonite towns, no doubt involving wholesale slaughter - v 33) is difficult and troubling, especially as we see the shocking realities of ethnic conflict on a regular basis (as I write another such conflict, between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh, is causing much suffering).
So although both Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter and his slaughter of the people of Ammon were normative by the cultural mores of his time they are to us morally reprehensible and entirely unacceptable. It is in the light of the life, love, sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus, that God is clearly defined not as a tribal deity who requires enemies (or daughters if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time) to be eliminated but as a God of love who requires us to love our enemies rather than annihilate them. God committed himself to the nation of Israel, even to the extent that he allows the ‘Spirit of the Lord’ to become identified as the military protagonist (v 29), not because he is violent and vindictive. The defining moment in their turbulent and tragic history, the moment this history is moving towards and would ultimately be defined by, was the coming of the Messiah, King Jesus, who, in an act of conscious non-violence on the cross fully reveals a God with passionate love for the entire human family, regardless of where they come from. Near that cross another mother, this time named as Mary, sheds bitter tears for the child of her womb, yet this time the grief at this death suffused into joy and hope in the face of the Risen Lord.
Questions: Have you ever got carried away and regretted it afterwards? How did you respond and how did it change your life? How good are you at stopping and thinking before making decisions?
Prayer: Lord, forgive us when we act without thinking and hurt other people. Give us wisdom and right judgement in all things. Amen.