334 Bernard P. Robinson to congratulate him after a success; grief-stricken he then hurled himself into a river, which was consequently named after him (9). Stories that remind us of Judg 11 are thus not uncommon outside Israel. Our story may be called a “type-scene”, a genre first identified in Homer by Walter Arend (10). Robert Alter, among others, has written illuminatingly on the prevalence of this literary genre in the Old Testament (11). To what extent, if at all, conscious borrowing was involved, is unclear. A more fruitful question, I suggest, is: What was the appeal of the rash-vow motif that led to its frequent occurrence over national and cultural boundaries? To this point I shall return later. a) 11,29-33: The Swearing of the Vow. On his return from Mizpah in order to do battle with the Ammonites, the spirit of YHWH comes upon Jephthah and he swears an oath: axy rça axwyh, whatever/whoever emerges and comes out (12) of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the people of Ammon, hwhyl hyhw, shall surely be YHWH’s, hlw[ whtyl[hw, and I shall sacrifice him/her/it as a holocaust (?) (11,31). A vow has functioned as an important element in an earlier episode (11,10, the elders’ vow to Jephthah). The text, as Augustine notes, neither praises nor condemns this oath, leaving us to exercise our intellect on the matter (13). This “authorial restraint” is indeed, as Webb notes, characteristic of Judges as a whole: Meaning is conveyed throughout by implicit, indirect means: through narrated events, through irony, and above all through dialogue(14). The sense of 11,31 is unclear. There are at least four ways of taking it. (i) The commonest is to suppose that a literal sacrifice of an animal or human being is meant throughout. It must be allowed, (9) W.W. GOODWIN (ed.), Plutarch’s Morals (Boston 1871) V, 477-509, 488- 489: “On the Names of Rivers and Mountains and of Such Things as Are to be Found Therein”. (10) W. AREND, Die typischen Szenen bei Homer (Berlin 1933). (11) R. ALTER, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York 1981) 47-62. (12) axy rça axwyh is tautologous; it is possible that one of the two expressions is a gloss (cf. the Versions). It is surprising that the pronoun awh is not used. (13) PL 34.812. (14) WEBB, Judges, 77. Cf. R. ALTER, The World of Biblical Literature (London 1992) 64-65.