Bernard P. Robinson, «The Story of Jephthah and his Daughter: Then and Now», Vol. 85 (2004) 331-348
In Judges 11 Jephthah is an anti-hero, his rash vow and its implementation being for the Book of Judges symptoms of the defects of pre-monarchical Israel. The daughter is probably sacrificed; the alternative view, that she is consigned to perpetual virginity, has insufficient support in the text. The story speaks still to present-day readers, challenging them not to make ill-considered judgments that may have disastrous consequences; inviting them too to detect a divine purpose working through human beings in their failings as well as their strengths.
346 Bernard P. Robinson
without the details mentioned above, in other manuscript Bibles (60),
and in the easternmost window on the north side of Sainte Chapelle in
Paris.) This favourable conception of Jephthah’s action is paralleled in
the Syriac writers Ephraem and Aphraates:
Praiseworthy also was the deed of Jephte…his right hand he stretched
out and offered the sacrifice…upright was the priest who sacrificed
with blood of his own offspring, so that he may be an example of his
Lord, who sacrificed with his own blood (Ephraem).
Jephthah was persecuted as Jesus was persecuted…Jephthah vowed a
vow and offered up his first-born daughter as a sacrifice to his Father
for all the Gentiles (Aphraates) (61).
Such an interpretation is not without its attractions (especially
from a feminist perspective, in that it provides a female counterpart to
Isaac), but it seems to me to be badly flawed in that it goes against
rather than grows out of the original meaning (the “literal senseâ€) of
the story (62). Abraham’s abortive sacrifice is expressly presented by
Genesis as an act of faith, whereas Jephthah’s sacrifice is implicitly
presented by Judges as resulting from insufficient faith.
One may note that although the Epistle to the Hebrews lists
Jephthah among Old Testament heroes of faith (11,32), it does not
refer to his sacrifice of his daughter; it seems rather to be thinking of
his valour and success in war (11,34). As Augustine notes, Heb 11
praises Gideon too, a man who also behaved badly (he refers to the
ephod story in Judg 8,27). It seems, says Augustine, that in bringing
salvation to people God uses not only faithful, loyal mentalities but
also defective and sinful ones (63). This may well, one suspects,
accurately reflect the viewpoint of the author to the Hebrews.
(60) See WEITZMANN, “The Jephthah Panelâ€, plates 11-13, 15.
(61) The Ephraem quotation comes from his Carmina Nisibena, 70; that from
Aphraates from Demonstration 21.12. The author of the Questions on Judges
attributed to Bede interprets the story thus: Jephthah stands for Christ, who went
to the Gentiles, vowed to God and offered his own flesh (PL 93.428). Weitzmann
notes that the late medieval text, Speculum Humanae Salvationis, offers an
alternative typological reading, in which Jephthah’s daughter is a type of the
Virgin Mary (WEITZMANN, “The Jephthah Panelâ€, 352, n. 45.)
(62) “The classical figural claimâ€, writes J.D. Dawson, is “that novel Christian
meaning extends without supplanting the former Jewish meanings…the spirit does
not undermine but instead draws out the fullest meaning of the letter; the letter must
remain in the spirit because the spirit is the letter fully realized†(J.D. DAWSON,
Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity [Berkeley 2002] 217).
(63) PL 34.813-814. (In 820-821 Augustine offers also an allegorical, and
rather far-fetched, reading of the story.)