Seder 101: Judges 11---More on Jephthah and his Vow

 The account of Jephthah's rash vow in Judges 11 leaves readers shaking their heads, as I have noted previously.   Before going to battle against the Ammonites, he promises God, 

"If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whatever comes out from the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace from the Ammonites shall be the LORD's, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering" (Jdg 11:31).    

When Jephthah returns victorious, it is his daughter who greets him, and he ends up carrying out his vow (verse 39).  Commentators are of two opinions on what he ends up doing.  In particular, the medieval Jewish commentators fall into two camps, as Shera Aranoff Tuchman explains.  Some, like Rashi and Ramban, go with the majority view that Jephthah kills his daughter, engaging in human sacrifice.  Others, like Abarbanel and Radak, believe that she lives a kind of cloistered existence in service to God, never marrying.  (I lean toward the majority.)  

What all agree on is that this vow should never have been carried out.  Some argue that the vow is incoherent, since a number of the creatures that would come to greet Jephthah do not belong to the category of sacrificial animals.  In any case, any person dedicated to God could be redeemed according to the guidelines laid out in Leviticus 27:1-8.  God, of course, hates human sacrifice (Lev 20:1-5, e.g.)

Because the laconic narrative leaves us with lots of questions, it is natural to propose possible scenarios about what happened.  One thing that is communicated in Judges 11-12 is that Jephthah was an argumentative, stubborn kind of guy who came from a tough background and didn't have much knowledge of what God was like or what God wanted from him.  It's possible that a priest or Levite tried to teach him but found him unwilling to listen.  

One problem that is evident in Judges is a vacuum of leadership and spiritual guidance from the priests and Levites.  This could be the fault of negligent teachers, unwilling students, or most likely a mixture of both.  Jephthah was not the only Israelite who ignored the Torah during the period of the Judges.

There is a midrash on Judges 12:7 suggesting that God punished Jephthah for his disobedience.  As the ESV footnote mentions, the MT in this verse says that when Jephthah died, he was buried "in the cities of Gilead."  How can a person be buried in a number of cities?   The midrash proposes that God struck Jephthah with a disease that caused him to lose one body part at a time.  The parts were then buried in the town where they fell off.