The net effect of her understanding is the same: there was no human sacrifice, nor any devaluation of women in the passage.

Did He Go Through With It?

The final and ultimate question is: Did Jephthah actually go through with a human sacrifice? Many commentators think so, but the text points in another direction. We note, along with the incongruities cited by Miller above, that Jephthah's daughter spent some time in the wilderness bewailing the fact that she would always be a virgin and never have children. This sounds like Temple service to me, or else a child with wrong-headed or peculiar priorities.

Furthermore, Jephthah'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 he 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 Jephthah was not a particularly wise person, 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?"

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.

Objection: Jephthah got exactly what he asked for, specifically victory over the Ammonites. In fact, the text tells us explicitly 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?

This is a non sequitur in context, arguing that no other meaning can be drawn 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. The problem 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. It might be claimed that the military victory itself provides evidence that the vow was accepted, but this does not follow. If the critic were to vow to kill someone 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?

The daughter clearly expects to be killed. I saw a movie where a girl reacted the same way.

To claim based on a movie -- that such a reaction was perfectly understandable and normal for someone about to die is far from adequate. We cannot cavalierly assume 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, Jephthah'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. We gave more reasons why Jephthah would be upset even beyond this, courtesy of Glenn Miller (and there are more below); it is wrong to say that if Jephthah had merely promised to hand his daughter over to Temple service, he had lost very little thereby.

Jepthah wouldn't be sad, because he would see her again.

That 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". In addition, for the ancients, to pass one's property on to a descendant was of the utmost importance.

He could have just had another child, so he couldn't have been sad because of all of that.

That would be far from a sure thing, given that after all this time this was Jephthah's only child. In addition, we must factor in an infant mortality rate of around 50% and another cut before people reached the age of 6, and Jephthah's likely age at the time, in a day when living to be 35 was unusual.

It says he "did with [his daughter] according to his vow which he had vowed". You can't get around that.

This has already been answered, but let us take this to the overliteral extent the critics seem to think is required. We have shown that Jephthah would not under any circumstances have expected anything but an animal to emerge when he arrived home, It is too much to suggest he would have adjusted his thinking in accordance with something happening contrary to expectations, and that the later language would have adjusted implications accordingly? What if Jephthat had arrived and someone threw a rock out of the doorway? Would he have offered the rock as a sacrifice? What if a fly came out of the house first?

In 11:40 it says, "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.

The word for "lament" means to ascribe praise to or celebrate. Note that it is not the same word used to speak of Jephthah'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..

We close by re-iterating and adding to the list of Miller's points (save one I disagree with):

In August 2007, a reader advised me that this article was noted in a book titled Everything You Know About God is Wrong. One contributor, Bobbie Kirkhart, who credentials to comment on the social world of the Ancient Near East seem to be quite lacking (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? 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[hthah]."

   I skated around nothing: I rendered the question moot through the detailed analysis that followed, to which Kirkhart provides no answer. Strangely she does admit that what I provided that followed made the former issue of "little difference" but somehow she felt there was need to say this anyway.

3. In terms of all those details, Kirkhart ignores just about all of it, save the point that Jephthah'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, 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 Jephthah'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.

Kirkhart has not told the whole truth.

-JPH