Jephthah's Daughter

Judges 11 tells the story of Jephthah and his daughter.  Jephthah was a warrior and prayed to God to deliver the Ammonites into his hands.  He promised God that if hs defeated the Ammonites, then he would sacrifice whatever came out to greet him first as a burnt offering to God.  It just so happened that his one and only virgin daughter, unnamed in the biblical text, came out to greet him.  He told her of the promise he had made to God, and she asked him to allow her two months in the mountains to mourn.  She returned after the two months and Jephthah kept his promise.

How do we view Jephthah in this story? He was perhaps careless and arrogant with his vow, seeing as he only had his daughter and his wife as family.  Why wouldn't they greet him first?  Perhaps he was expecting an animal of some sort to greet him.  In the New Testament, he his held in high regard.  Perhaps he is held in a positive light because he was a good warrior and he kept his promise.

God does not speak in the story.  Why was God silent?  Could it be that God was silently judging, or possibly that the narrator just did not bother to include dialogue between God and Jephthah?  We may never know the answer because, as we have learned in class, the Bible is cryptic.

There are many parallels with the story of Isaac and Abraham in Genesis 22.  Both are to sacrifice their "only" child (Abraham had Ishmael, but he is not mentioned much) as burnt offerings.  The mountains are another parallel between both stories, serving a different purpose in each.  Abraham takes Isaac to the mountains to sacrifice him, and Jephthah's daughter runs to the mountains as a place of refuge and mourning.

In the Genesis story, God intervenes before Abraham kills Isaac, substituting a ram, whereas he does not intervene with Jephthah's daughter.  Why did he not intervene? Was it to punish Jephthah for being careless with his vow? Or was Abraham just more special or more worthy of keeping his offspring in God's eyes?  Again, the Bible is cryptic.

This tragic story is often looked over or forgotten.  I had not read it until Monday, and I wondered why I had never come across it before.  Why should this story not be told?  Is it because people would question, like our class did?  Do teachers not want their students to know that God does not always intervene?  Does this passage make God look bad?  Not necessarily.  Maybe what we can take from this is to make good on promises and to not be careless with them.