J'S DAUGHTER: Oh, boo-hoo! Daddy is going to sacrifice me tomorrow!

FRIEND: How awful!

DAUGHTER: Yes, but you know what the worst part is? I'm ALWAYS going to be a virgin! BOOO-HOOOOOO!

Furthermore, Jeppie's own misery is perfectly understandable; as Miller explains: "As the only child, and if given to the priest in this fashion, Jephthah's entire estate would go to someone else." As important as this was in the ANE, small wonder Jeppie was upset! That vow cost him not only his daughter's life with him at home (and since he was thrown out of his own house, that made the companionship all the more valuable to him), but any chance he had of giving his property to a true descendant.

We therefore conclude that while Jeppie was not a particularly bright fellow, he neither promised nor committed a human sacrifice in this instance. We can surmise that there is a bit of literary "trickery" here...the abrupt ending of the account and the non-specific "he did to her as he vowed" is perhaps designed to shock the reader and make them wonder, "Hey...did he? He didn't!" This would be in perfect keeping with the purpose of Judges as a mirror of Israelite moral anarchy in this period. The reader is shown in various places how bad things got; and this story easily encourages one to wonder just indeed how bad things did get. It is yet another case of the Bible, the Word of God, forcing us to take a long, hard look at ourselves, warts and all.

And now for a response from the "Ebon" website. Ebon allows that this article "does a satisfactory job of clearing up some minor side issues" (which ones does Ebon refer to, we wonder?), then centers his criticism on our contention that Jephthah probably did not kill his daughter in the course of offering her in sacrifice. Ebon claims that treating this issue amounts to an admission that the allegation of contradiction is on-target, but that simply doesn't follow. That focus simply recognizes that the text is ambiguous concerning the fate of Jephthah's daughter, which challenges the Skeptic's claim that the text indicates a contradiction. Ebon's claim is a pose for effect. Ebon subsequently sinks into a ridiculous attack mode where he suggests that the Jephthah account is such a fine example of a plain contradiction that the dispute over the passage shows how Christians will refuse to accept the obvious. Then he finally gets around to the meat of his argument. He thinks we need to add a fourth question to the above:

2a. Did God accept Jephthah's vow knowing a human would be involved?

Ebon apparently has no recognition that the question itself is of no relevance if indeed Jeppie did not, and would not have, enacted a human sacrifice. But taking this as it is, in fact, Ebon's question may be simplified:

Did God accept Jephthah's offer of sacrifice?

Ebon sums up the problem seemingly oblivious to the fact that he concedes the issue in the immediate context:

Of course, to ask this question presupposes that God did accept Jephthah's offer. If Mr. Holding wants an out, I'll give it to him: No explicit reply from God is given. However, the very next verses go on to tell us that Jephthah got exactly what he asked for, specifically victory over the Ammonites. In fact, the text tells us explicitly that Jephthah did not win just by lucky chance, but that "the Lord delivered them into his hands" (11:32). What other meaning can be drawn from this, other than that God did indeed accept the offered bargain?

Ebon's question, which seems intended as a rhetorical one, amounts to an argument from ignorance. Ebon does not know what other meaning can be draw from the fact that Jephthah was given victory in battle apart from God honoring Jephthah's vow, therefore God accepted the human sacrifice that was offered. Note above that Ebon specifically allows that "No explicit reply from God is given." The problem for Ebon is that the text itself gives the specific reasons why Jephthah was given victory in battle:

1. Judges 10 relates the circumstances whereby God elected to deliver Israel, including "Then they got rid of the foreign gods among them and served the Lord. And he could bear Israel's misery no longer." (Judges 10:16, NIV)
2. Jephthah received the spirit of God for the purpose of waging war in accordance with the preconditions set in Judges 10. Subsequent to receiving the spirit of God for that purpose (which we find is standard in the book of Judges), Jephthah makes his vow.

Thus, we find that the defeat of the Ammonites is foregone prior to Jephthah's rash vow, regardless of precisely how rash it actually was. The answer to Ebon's crucial fourth question is answered in the negative. Ebon's argument from silence cannot carry the day against the clear indication of the text. Ebon might claim that the military victory itself provides evidence that the vow was accepted, but this does not follow. If Ebon were to vow to grind his daughter into hamburger as an offering to God if the next car to drive past his home happened to be an import, would a subsequent import drive-by show that God had accepted his vow?

Beyond this Ebon tries to bolster his position with an appeal to reverse causation, an appeal that is rightly ignored as a case of presumptive deck-stacking, especially unless and until Ebon advances that argument as more than an aside and gets beyond our points that no actual human sacrifice occurred. As it is, his only attempt to get around this is:

1. To claim -- based on a movie he recently saw! -- that such a reaction as given by J's daughter was "perfectly understandable and normal..."! We really must question the cognitive abilities of a person who so rashly and cavalierly assumes the values of a fictional character in a work produced in a libertarian society, onto a real person who lived in a tightly-controlled, collectivist society. Moreover, J's daughter is not saying that she would "never know what sex is like" -- she is saying that she will remain a virgin, which has a broader conception than merely "I will not have the experience" as in Ebon's modern movie. We gave more reasons why Jeppie would be upset even beyond this, courtesy of Glenn Miller (and there are more below); this Ebon merely waves off (as though he knows more about the ANE than Miller does!) saying that the "explanation is not sufficient" because, "If Jephthah had merely promised to hand his daughter over to Temple service, he had lost very little thereby." Is Ebon paying attention here? Read it again: "As the only child, and if given to the priest in this fashion, Jephthah's entire estate would go to someone else. As important as this was in the ANE, small wonder Jeppie was upset! That vow cost him not only his daughter's life with him at home (and since he was thrown out of his own house, that made the companionship all the more valuable to him), but any chance he had of giving his property to a true descendant." That, as Ebon burps back, J could "see her again" is not at issue (the tight familial relations of the ANE, in which extended families stayed together in the same household or town, means that this service was as good as a separation, and nevertheless tremendously heartbreaking, in spite of any possible "visits"; it is not as though, as well, J could take time off an hop on a bus to visit!); the property matter Ebon naively dismisses by saying that this would happen after J's death anyway (! -- he is truly thinking anachronistically and ethnocentrically; for the ancients, to pass one's property on to a descendant was of the utmost importance, and Ebon cannot simply and blithely wave it away from his easy chair by saying, "No problemo!") and that he could have just had another kid (far from a sure thing, given that after all this time this was J's only child; an infant mortality rate of around 50% and another cut before people reached the age of 6, and J's likely age at the time, in a day when living to be 35 was unusual). Ebon is simply thinking time out of mind and assuming his modern values and experiences on an ancient text separated by a chasm of years and a chasm of cultural and social understanding.

   Ebon's next defense is that he thinks the words "did with [his daughter] according to his vow which he had vowed" are not "non-specific" but rather clear in light of 11:30-1 where J recites his vow. On the contrary, Ebon continues to beg the question and ignore the data showing that J would not under any circumstances have expected anything but an animal to emerge when he arrived home, and assumes a wooden understanding in which J would not have been able to adjust his thinking in accordance with something happening contrary to expectations, and that the later language would have adjusted implications accordingly. What if J had arrived and someone threw a rock out of the doorway? Does Ebon suppose that J would have offered the rock as a sacrifice? What if a fly came out of the house first? Ebon is playing the part of the fundamentalist here, unable to think in more than a single dimension.

   Finally Ebon belches out the defense that based on 11:40, "the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year" (11:40), we cannot believe that "the entire nation turned out to mourn and weep over a single girl being committed to Temple service..." Ebon has the KJV in front of him; the word for "lament" means to ascribe praise to or celebrate. Note that it is not the same word used to speak of J's daughter "bewailing" her virginity. The word in fact appears only one other place in the Bible in a relevant context (it appears also in Hosea to refer to "hiring" a prostitute):

   Judges 5:11 They that are delivered from the noise of archers in the places of drawing water, there shall they rehearse the righteous acts of the LORD, even the righteous acts toward the inhabitants of his villages in Israel: then shall the people of the LORD go down to the gates.

   Far from lamenting a terrible fate, the daughters of Israel were celebrating the personal sacrifice of a noble young woman who served as an honorable example. Ebon's counter fails for lamentable lack of knowledge of social, linguistic, and other relevant factors.

   We close by re-iterating and adding to the list of Miller's points, all of which Ebon will need to deal with (I omit one which I disagree with):

   1. Literal "burnt offerings" HAD TO BE male (Lev 22.18-19). Jephthah's daughter obviously wasn't.
   2. Human sacrifice was STRICTLY forbidden (Dt 12.31) and we have NO record of it being practiced (even in horrible Judges-period Israel) by mainstream Israel during this period.
   3. The lament for the daughter is about 'not marrying' NOT about 'not living'--it makes me wonder if some kind of religious celibacy is not in view. (Maybe the women at the Entrance to the Tent were celibate--Ex 38.8--living as widows in Israel later did on Temple payrolls.)
   4. Verse 39 calls his action a 'vow'. Lev 27.28 (coupled with 27.21) allowed people to be given over the Lord, who became servants of the Priests. As devoted to the Lord's service, some of them probably did NOT marry (cf. the Nazarite vow, in its restriction on becoming 'unclean' for family members (Num 6.7) omits the words 'husband' or 'wife'...perhaps it was sometimes involving celibacy. The only Nazies we know, though, were married--Samuel and Samson)
   5. As the only child, and if given to the priest in this fashion, Jephthah's entire estate would go to someone else.
   6. We have the VERY parallel case of Hannah and Samuel. She takes a vow, and offers her son to the Lord for all his life. (I Sam 1-2), and such vows did NOT allow the person to be redeemed with money (Lev 27.28-29).
   7. Burnt offerings were ALWAYS associated with condemnation/evil--not thanksgiving and vows. Even the one non-literal use of it in Dt 13.16 (in which a town is offered as a burnt offering) involves abject judgment/condemnation--NOT at all in view in the Jephthah passage.
   8. He would have had to offer her at some cultic site, which would have had a priest. I cannot imagine a priest (even those as lax as elsewhere in the book of Judges) that would have agreed to perform a human sacrifice!

   What I have to conclude from this passage is that Jephthah does not know what a BURNT offering is, and that he is meaning an 'irredeemable vow' as a thank-offering, along the line of Hannah/Samuel. This is the only way to make sense of all the particulars. (Remember, Jephthah's home life was not the best one in the world for getting a biblical education--he was the son of a prostitute, and driven away from the house by his brothers.)

   ---

   Of late (August 2007) a reader advised me that my name was used in vain in a book titled Everything You Know About God is Wrong, which on inspection proved to have been better titled Fundy Atheists Foaming at the Mouth. One such in particular, Bobbie Kirkhart, whose credentials pale in comparison to scholars of the Ancient Near East (she is a "former Sunday School teacher") had this to say about the above:

   1. For some reason Kirkhart thinks it is "obsessively important" to me that there is no evidence that the Holy Spirit inspired the vow. How she arrives at this judgment of obsession is not explained. Presumably there is some sort of mathematical formula or word count involved, or perhaps the chicken bones were auspicious after Kirkhart's visit to KFC. In any event, no answer is provided to any point made with respect to the Spirit's actual role.
   2. It is said that I "skate around" the question of "whether God, who knows everything, knew a human would greet Jep." I skated around nothing, save Skeptical ignorance; I rendered the question moot through the detailed analysis that followed, to which, of course, Kirkhart provides no answer. Strangely she does admit that what I provided that followed made the former issue of "little difference" but somehow she had a need to have some findy atheist cake and eat it too.
   3. In terms of all those details, Kirkhart ignores just about all of it, save the point that J's daughter lamented her virginity; and this she dismisses on the basis that:

   After all, nobody facing death would care about a little thing like (virginity). Okay, well, maybe Antigone and a few dozen other literary characters, but no nice Jewish girl in Holding's Bible.

   Unfortunately, Kirkhart does not name these "few dozen" other characters (apparently, the strain of naming even one was too much for her as is), and even with the one named, we are given no quoted line from Sophocles to validate the point. Little wonder, for as a reading of Antigone (found here) shows, Antigone does not have upon her mind simply virginity, expressed in isolation as a concern as with Jep's daughter, but a rolling host of concerns; and it seems as well that the alleged lament over virginity has more to do with that she never married and had children:

   And yet I honoured thee, as the wise will deem, rightly. Never, had been a mother of children, or if a husband had been mouldering in death, would I have taken this task upon me in the city's despite. What law, ye ask, is my warrant for that word? The husband lost, another might have been found, and child from another, to replace the first-born: but, father and mother hidden with Hades, no brother's life could ever bloom for me again. Such was the law whereby I held thee first in honour; but Creon deemed me guilty of error therein, and of outrage, ah brother mine! And now he leads me thus, a captive in his hands; no bridal bed, no bridal song hath been mine, no joy of marriage, no portion in the nurture of children; but thus, forlorn of friends, unhappy one, I go living to the vaults of death.

   Oh, well. It's too bad Kirkhart has to hide the rest of the facts from her readers in order to try to score cheap points. I guess the atheists need a Bobbie Kirkhart to tell them only part of the truth in order to reassure them that they made the right decision in apostasizing.

   ---