Did Jephthah Kill His Daughter?

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Did the ancient Israelite judge and warrior Jephthah actually kill his own daughter? Perhaps rashly, he vowed to sacrifice as a burnt offering “whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return” if the Lord would only grant him a victory over the Ammonites (Judges 11:30–31).¹ He succeeds in battle and returns home. Jephthah’s daughter, his only child, rushes out to meet him with timbrel and dance! After two months, “he did to her as he had vowed” (Judges 11:39).

The “inhuman sacrifice” of Jephthah’s daughter qualifies Judges 11, to use Phyllis Trible’s phrase, as a “text of terror.”²

Trible is not alone in being troubled by this text. If guilty, Jephthah has committed toevah (abomination)— the abhorrent, abominable, unmentionable murder of his only child, offered up as an olah (a burnt sacrifice to Yahweh). The story raises many questions.

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Jephthah, a Gileadite and an able warrior, is the son of a former prostitute and a married man of property. Denied a share of his father’s property by the sons of his primary wife (Jephthah’s half-brothers), Jephthah flees to the country of Tob. There he gathers around him “outlaws” who go out “raiding” with him (Judges 11:3, New RSV).

Some time later, the Ammonites attack Israel. The alarmed elders of Gilead ask the renegade Jephthah to lead their forces against the Ammonites. At first, Jephthah is skeptical, remembering that he had been rejected and driven from his father’s house. The tribal elders press him, promising to make him commander of Gilead if he will only lead their forces against the Ammonites. Jephthah accepts.

As his opening ploy, Jephthah tries to dissuade the Ammonite king from engaging the Israelites: “What have you against me that you have come to make war on my country?” (Judges 11:12). The Ammonite king replies: “When Israel came from Egypt, they seized the land which is mine, from the Arnon to the Jabbok as far as the Jordan. Now, then, restore it peaceably” (Judges 11:13).

Jephthah denies that Israel seized the Ammonites’ land. In a lengthy explanation of events in Israel’s history after their departure from Egypt, Jephthah makes a detailed case that the Israelites never entered the land of the Ammonites and that the land the Ammonites are claiming has legitimately belonged to Israel for 300 years (Judges 11:14–24). Unconvinced, the Ammonite king rejects Jephthah’s plea.

Then “the spirit of the Lord” comes upon Jephthah (Judges 11:29) as he prepares to engage the Ammonite army.

Jephthah makes the vow that leads to the shocking event that we still struggle to understand:

“If you deliver the Ammonites into my hand, then whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return from the Ammonites shall be the Lord’s and shall be offered by me as a burnt offering” (Judges 11:30–31).

The Hebrew words hayotze asher yetze are translated here as “whatever comes out.” This is the New Jewish Publication Society translation. These words can also be translated as “whoever comes out” (RSV) or as the “first person” to come out (New Jerusalem Bible [NJB]; Good News Bible), thus implying that Jephthah anticipated that a human would come forth from his house. The Hebrew word liqrati, translated here as “to meet me,” literally means “towards me,” implying intelligence and intent, which also seems to suggest that Jephthah’s expectation was that the “whatever” would be human.³

In the battle against the Ammonites, the Israelites, led by Jephthah, “utterly routed them” (Judges 11:33). Triumphant, Jephthah returns home: “There was his daughter coming out to meet him, with timbrel and dance!” (Judges 11:34).

In despair Jephthah cries out: “Alas, daughter! You have brought me low…. For I have uttered a vow to the Lord, and I cannot retract.” His unnamed daughter^a responds: “Do to me as you have vowed, seeing that the Lord has vindicated you against your enemies, the Ammonites.” Jephthah’s daughter then says to her father, “Let me be for two months, and I will go with my companions and lament upon the hills and there bewail my maidenhood,” for she had never known a man (Judges 11:37).

In two months’ time she returns. In stark and chilling words, the Bible tells us: “He did to her as he had vowed.”

The question is: What did Jephthah really do? Did he sacrifice his daughter as a burnt offering in fulfillment of his vow?

Flavius Josephus, the first-century C.E.^b Jewish historian, understood the account to mean that Jephthah indeed burned his daughter on Yahweh’s altar. Josephus disapproved however; the deed was “neither conformable to the Torah nor acceptable to God.”⁴ Similarly, pseudo-Philo, the late first-century 031C.E. Judean author of Biblical Antiquities, records that Jephthah offered his daughter as a burnt offering (olah) after finding no sage in Israel who would annul his foolish vow.⁵

The sages of the Talmud^c also agree with Josephus.⁶ In Jewish tradition, Jephthah was censured and punished, as was the high priest Phinehas, who could have annulled Jephthah’s vow debut refused to do so: “Jephthah died a horrible death, being dismembered limb by limb. And from that moment on, the Divine Spirit abandoned [Phinehas].”⁷

In the biblical account, however, the expected censure and punishment are conspicuously absent. It is surprising and puzzling that the Bible—which spares neither Moses for disobeying God by striking a rock to bring forth water (he never reaches the Promised Land [Deuteronomy 32:50–52; Numbers 20:1–13]), nor David for killing Uriah to obtain Bathsheba (their child dies [2 Samuel 12:1–23])— seems to exonerate Jephthah by a complete absence of censure.

The Talmud (Taanit 4a) terms Jephthah’s vow shelo kehogen (that which is not worthy or proper). The Talmud tells us that, as an improper, “illegal” vow, Jephthah’s vow could have been annulled.⁸ Or, if not annulled, the vow could have been fulfilled by payment according to the specifications of votary pledges in Leviticus 27:2–7:

“When anyone explicitly vows to the Lord the equivalent for a human being, the following scale shall apply: If it is a male from twenty to sixty years of age, the equivalent is fifty shekels of silver by the sanctuary weight; if it is a female, the equivalent is thirty shekels. If the age is from five years to twenty years, the equivalent is twenty shekels for a male and ten shekels for a female. If the age is from one month to five years, the equivalent for a male is five shekels of silver, and the equivalent for a female is three shekels of silver. If the age is sixty years or over, the equivalent is fifteen shekels in the case of a male and ten shekels for a female.”

My own view is that it is more than likely that Jephthah’s vow was modified and that Jephthah’s daughter was not, in fact, sacrificed.

In the story known as the Binding of Isaac, or the Akedah (Genesis 22), God says to Abraham “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you” (Genesis 22:2). Then as Abraham, reluctantly obedient, raises the knife to slay Isaac, the angel of the Lord calls to him: “Abraham, Abraham…. Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me” (Genesis 22:12).

The primary purpose of the command not to slay Isaac was to demonstrate to Abraham and his debut descendants that God abhorred human sacrifice with an infinite abhorrence. Unlike the cruel heathen deities, God required spiritual surrender alone.⁹

The burning of sons and daughters is explicitly forbidden by the Torah. It is detestable, abhorrent in the religion of Yahweh, one of the very reasons why Israel was given license to remove the Canaanites from the Land of Promise.

Listen to Deuteronomy 18:9–12:

“When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to imitate the abhorrent practices of those nations. Let no one be found among you who consigns his son or daughter to the fire… anyone who does such things is abhorrent to the Lord, and it is because of these abhorrent things that the Lord your God is dispossessing them before you.”

Or this passage from Deuteronomy 12:30–31:

“Beware of being lured into their ways after they have been wiped out before you! Do not inquire about their gods, saying, ‘How did those nations worship their gods? I too will follow those practices.’ You shall not act thus toward the Lord your God, for they perform for their gods every abhorrent act that the Lord detests; they even offer up their sons and daughters in fire to their gods” (see also Leviticus 18:21, 20:22).

The Bible records another incident of human sacrifice: In 2 Kings, Mesha, king of Moab, seeing that his battle with the Israelites was going against him, in desperation, takes “his firstborn son, who was to succeed as king, and offer[s] him up on the wall as a burnt offering” (2 Kings 3:27). This human sacrifice brought great wrath (qetzef gadol) upon Israel; the Israelites retreated from Moab and returned to their own land. Professor Baruch Margalit defines this as “psychological breakdown or trauma that affected the Israelite forces when they beheld the sign of human sacrifice atop the walls of Kir-Hareseth.”^d

Unlike the episode of Mesha, Judges does not specifically state, for example, that Jephthah “took 042his only daughter and offered her up at the sanctuary at Shiloh for a burnt offering.” tersely records, “he did to her as he had vowed” (Judges 11:39). Classical Jewish commentators such as Rabbi David Kimchi (known as Radak, 1157–1236 C.E.), Rabbi Levi ben Gershom (known as Ralbag, 1288–1344) and Rabbi Yitzchak ben Yehudah (known as Abarbanel, 1437–1508) interpret Jephthah’s words “whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me… shall be the Lord’s and shall be offered by me as a burnt offering” to mean that if it were something which could not be offered upon the altar (a human being, for instance) it would be otherwise dedicated to the service of Yahweh. If it were suitable for a sacrifice it would be so offered¹⁰. But if not, not. By this understanding, Jephthah’s oath calls for something other than the murder of his daughter. For Jephthah’s daughter is clearly not a suitable offering.

What Jephthah vowed, literally was that, “whatever comes out [hayotze asher yetze; masculine gender],…. I will offer him [haalitihu]” (Judges 11:31). On grammatical grounds, however, does not give Jephthah an out. A masculine construction in Hebrew may imply all males or males and females¹¹. However the law of burnt offering or elevation toward God (qorban olah) clearly requires that the sacrificial animal must be a male without blemish (zakar tamim; Leviticus 1:3–10). As a female, Jephthah’s daughter would have been unacceptable as a sacrifice. And if the purpose of an offering (qorban) is to bring the offerer near to God, the offering of a forbidden, illegitimate human sacrifice could not accomplish the desired rapprochement The killing of Jephthah’s daughter would be murder. Murder, like all grave sins, puts infinite distance between man and God.¹²

There is a plausible alternative to murder for understanding how it was at Jephthah fulfilled his vow. His daughter’s fate may have been perpetual virginity or solitary confinement, a “living death [for] the innocent victim of violence,” as Phyllis Trible calls it.¹³ As a cloistered virgin, Jephthah’s daughter may have suffered, in the words of modern talmudist Adin Steinsaltz, “a punishment, a torture that had no like. Her fate was to remain a virgin throughout life, a tragic destiny.”¹⁴ According to this view, she was “dedicated” at the sanctuary at Shiloh, just as Samuel had been dedicated there by his mother Hannah (1 Samuel 1:22–28). In verse 28, Samuel is described as shaul, “one requested/dedicated,” a word sharing the same root as the name used in the midrash for Jephthah’s daughter, sheilah.¹⁵ This parallel between Jephthah’s daughter and Samuel suggests that the account in Judges is bewailing the perpetual virginity Jephthah’s daughter, not her death.

After the text tells us that Jephthah “did to her as he had vowed,” the story ends this way:

“She had never known a man. So it became a custom in Israel for the maidens Israel to go every year, for four days in the year, and chant dirges for the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite” (Judges 11:39–40).

A key Hebrew word in this passage letannot. “So it became a custom in Israel for the maidens of Israel to go every year, for four days in the year, and letannot the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite” (Judges 11:40). Letannot is translated in various ways. In the translation I gave above, it to “chant (dirges).” The basic meaning relates to speaking to someone or speaking about something, thus: to tell, recount, praise relate teach mention (compare, Judges 5:11, where the same verb, TNH, refers to talking about or “extolling Yahweh’s blessings” (NJB).¹⁶ According to different Bible translations, Jephthah’s daughter was “lamented,”¹⁷ “commemorated,”¹⁸ had “dirges chanted” for her¹⁹ was “talked to.”²⁰ Rabbi David Kimchi (Radak) and Yitzchak ben Yehudah (Abarbanel) contend that “the daughters Israel would visit her four days a year to speak to her and console her.”²¹ Obviously, she would have to be alive for this occur.

The observation that Jephthah’s daughter “had never known a man,” just before the verse referring to “chanting dirges” or “lamenting” and the two previous mentions of “bewailing her maidenhood” emphasize her continued virginity.

In the Hebrew Bible, Jephthah is named only once outside the Book of Judges. In 1 Samuel he is commended as one of the saviors of Israel: “And the Lord sent Jerubbaal and Bedan and Jephthah and Samuel, and delivered you from the enemies around you; and you dwelt in security” (1 Samuel 12:11).

In the New Testament, Jephthah is also mentioned only once, in Hebrews 11:32. There he is also in the company of honorable men: Gideon, Barak, Samson, David, Samuel and others celebrated both for valiant deeds and sterling faith, of whom the text declares that they “through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, received promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight” (Hebrews 11:33–34).

Could such a superlative assessment be made of Jephthah if he were a murderer, a man of abominations, an Israelite version of the pagan Moabite king Mesha? I think not I think both references to Jephthah, in Samuel and in Hebrews, indicate that the authors of these books agree with me that Jephthah did not, in fact, sacrifice his daughter, but instead consigned her to an isolated life as a virgin.

Did the ancient Israelite judge and warrior Jephthah actually kill his own daughter? Perhaps rashly, he vowed to sacrifice as a burnt offering “whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return” if the Lord would only grant him a victory over the Ammonites (Judges 11:30–31).1 He succeeds in battle and returns home. Jephthah’s daughter, his only child, rushes out to meet him with timbrel and dance! After two months, “he did to her as he had vowed” (Judges 11:39). The “inhuman sacrifice” of Jephthah’s daughter qualifies Judges 11, to use Phyllis […]