GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
JUDGES 11:38-40
38 “Go,” he said, and he let her go for two months. So she went with her friends and wandered on the mountains and mourned her virginity. 39 At the end of the two months, she returned to her father, and he kept the vow he had made about her. And she remained a virgin.
Did Jephthah keep his vow? He could not make a burnt offering of her with any priest of Israel; it was forbidden by the Law of Moses. Although some later Israelite kings offered their children in the fire to Molech, this was especially forbidden by the Law (Leviticus 20:2-5), and it seems only to have involved infants. It is true that God commanded Abraham to offer Isaac as a burnt offering, but we also know that this was a test—the only one of its kind—and God himself provided a substitute ram that was itself a kind of foreshadowing of Christ (it was also done before the regulating of the sacrifices through Moses). From the moment Law was given through Moses, the ‘olah offering was forbidden to be given anywhere except the altar at the tabernacle, or before the ark (if they were separated), or in very rare cases elsewhere with God’s approval (such as Elijah offering the bull as a burnt offering on Mount Carmel, 1 Kings 18:38). This was no such thing.
The ‘olah or whole burnt offering always means a complete surrender of a thing or being to God. In other offerings, only a part of a thing was offered. This can be interpreted in a spiritual sense: surrender to a life of virginity in dedication to the LORD (Keil, p. 394).
In addition to this, women who dedicated their lives to the service to the Lord were not unknown in Israel. There are clear cases of it in the Old Testament both before and after this time (Exodus 38:8; 1 Samuel 2:22).
And more: Why did she want to go off into the hills to mourn her virginity? The verb here is the same one from verse 37: bacah, “mourn, weep.” She was mourning her virginity (bethulim) specifically, rather than mourning her youth or even her life. The terms virgin and virginity occur three times in the text for emphasis: This is both what was mourned as a loss (verses 37-38) and celebrated as the gift given or choice taken by the girl (verses 39-40). It seems as if the grief of not carrying on the family line is the tragedy she mourns, even though her life would continue, and this was what was celebrated later on by the daughters of Israel.
On the other hand, Jephthah certainly could have taken matters into his own hands, built an altar, picked up a knife, and gone ahead with it. Although I certainly lean toward a non-lethal conclusion to this story, there is simply not enough information in our text to say so one way or the other, and I would not fault anyone for having one opinion or the other. Indeed, it seems to be a hallmark of commentaries on Judges for the author to come down on one side or the other of this case in particular and make haughty, heavy-handed remarks about anyone who thinks otherwise.
And it became a custom in Israel 40 that the daughters of Israel would celebrate the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite for four days each year.
The word tanah “celebrate, recount” only occurs in one Hebrew stem, the piel, which modifies the word to mean that the action was done repeatedly, again and again, in this case as a tradition. In Judges 5:11, Deborah calls on Israel to “celebrate / recite (tanah) the righteous acts of the LORD.” In his early English translation, William Tyndale translated this verb with “lament,” and this later entered into the King James Version (which drew heavily from Tyndale). However, “celebrate” seems to come the closest to the force of the Hebrew word and its piel stem.
I will restate something: The details about the sacrifice, the rash vow, the likelihood of a menagerie scampering out of Jephthah’s door on any given day, and so on, all cause the edges of this story to recede into a blurry, hazy, lack of focus. The only thing that seems sharp and clear is the girl’s faith. Her confession in verse 36 is clear and sincere. That’s what we should reflect in our lives. That’s what makes the story bearable—you and I can ask her about it when we meet up with here in heaven, and celebrate her faith and her virginity for a lot more than just four days.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota