The Story of Jephthah and his Daughter: Then and Now 337 servants at Shiloh (21). That Judg 11 thinks in terms of consecrated virginity is therefore improbable (22). (iii) Some have taken the two clauses to indicate alternative outcomes, arguing that the w“ here has the force of or. So, for example, Junius (23) and Sir Thomas Browne (24). Browne quotes as a parallel Exod 21,15 (“Whoever strikes his father w“ [=or, not and] his mother shall die”). If a clean animal should appear, Jephthah would sacrifice it; if a human being, he would consecrate it to God. The latter, Browne argues, is what happened to Jephthah’s daughter (see below on v. 39). This interpretation, which still has its advocates today, is ingenious, but contrived. Apart from the unlikelihood of the existence in Israel of consecrated virgins, one may note that the vow, on this reading of it, makes provision for either a human being or a clean animal coming forth first, but not for it being an unclean animal that presents itself. (iv) Keddell suggests that the first clause refers to dedication, the second to animal sacrifice. Jephthah vows that the animal/person first to meet him will be dedicated to YHWH and/or [depending on whether the w is conjunctive or disjunctive in force] “I shall offer up to him [YHWH] a burnt-offering”. Keddell notes the omission of the l which one would expect if Jephthah were offering a human being as a sacrifice. He finds evidence for personal suffixes (as here with whtyl[hw) denoting the indirect object in Gen 37,4; 2 Sam 20,5; 2 Sam 15,4 and 1 Kgs 20,9 (25). Even if one should grant this to be a possible usage (26), this interpretation has no support in the Versions. (21) L. WOOD, Distressing Days of the Judges (Grand Rapids 1975) 295. (22) Kimchi envisaged Jephthah’s daughter as surviving in a state of enforced virginity but he did not think in terms of a cultic consecration, only of seclusion: “He built her a house and placed her there. She became a recluse (perûsh˝h) from mankind and from the ways of the world” (cited from MARCUS, Jephthah and His Vow, 8-9; other adherents of this view are there listed). This type of permanent seclusion would also be without parallel. (23) Testamenti Veteris Biblia Sacra…scholiis illustrati ab I. Tremellio & F. Junii. Hanoviae, typis Wechelianis, 1603. Junius says that the conjunction here has a disjunctive force, as at Gen 26,11, Exod 1,10; 21,15 and often elsewhere. (24) BROWNE, Pseudodoxia, 369. (25) KEDDELL, Dissertation, 33-36. (26) 2 Sam 15,4 is unpersuasive, since the verb used there regularly takes a direct object (e.g. at Ps 82,3). In the Genesis text, if the reading and the MT pointing are correct, the suffix does denote an indirect object (cf GKC 115c, which speaks of it as a “strange case”). The other two texts perhaps also attest such a usage.