Judges 11
The outcast Jephthah is recalled to lead Gilead against Ammon, defeats them decisively, and then returns home to find that his vow has claimed his only child.
Summary
Jephthah the Gileadite is a mighty warrior, the son of Gilead by a prostitute. Gilead's wife also bears sons, and when they grow up they drive Jephthah out — you shall not inherit in our father's house, for you are the son of another woman. He goes to the land of Tob, where worthless fellows gather around him. When the Ammonites make war against Israel, the elders of Gilead go to fetch Jephthah from the land of Tob. If you bring me home to fight the Ammonites and the Lord gives them over to me, I will be your head, Jephthah says. They agree. Jephthah then sends messengers to the Ammonite king asking why they have come against him. The king says: because Israel took our land when they came out of Egypt. Jephthah responds with a lengthy diplomatic and theological argument: Israel did not take Moabite or Ammonite territory; they took only the land of Sihon king of the Amorites, who had attacked them first; the Lord God of Israel gave that land to Israel. Three hundred years — why have you not recovered it in all that time?
The king does not listen. The Spirit of the Lord comes on Jephthah. He makes his vow: if you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me when I return victorious shall be the Lord's, to be offered up as a burnt offering. He strikes the Ammonites with great slaughter from Aroer to Minnith — twenty cities — as far as Abel-keramim. The Ammonites are subdued. Jephthah returns to Mizpah to his house. His daughter comes out to meet him with timbrels and dancing — his only child; he has no son or daughter but her. He tears his clothes: alas, my daughter, you have brought me very low. I have opened my mouth to the Lord and I cannot take back my vow. She says: if you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth. Grant me two months to go and wander on the mountains and bewail my virginity with my companions. He grants it. She returns, and he does with her according to the vow he had made. It became a custom in Israel for the daughters of Israel to go year by year to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in the year.
- Judges 1Chapter 1 functions as a historiographical preface to the whole book, cataloguing the success or failure of each tribe to dispossess the Canaanites after Joshua's death.
- Judges 2Chapter 2 is the hermeneutical key to Judges.
- Judges 3Chapter 3 introduces the judge cycle in action for the first time.
- Judges 4Chapter 4 is the prose account of the same events that chapter 5 will sing.
- Judges 5The Song of Deborah in chapter 5 is widely considered one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew poetry in the entire Bible, possibly dating to the twelfth century BCE, nearly contemporaneous with the events it describes.
- Judges 6Chapter 6 is the opening of the Gideon narrative, which runs through chapter 8 and is the longest major-judge story in the book.
- Judges 7Chapter 7 is the central action of the Gideon narrative and one of the most memorable military scenes in the book.
- Judges 8Chapter 8 is the darkest portion of the Gideon narrative.
- Judges 9Chapter 9 is the longest chapter in Judges and the only episode in the book devoted to an anti-judge — a man who makes himself king by violence and holds it for exactly three years.
- Judges 10Chapter 10 performs two functions.
- Judges 11Chapter 11 is one of the most morally complex chapters in the Hebrew Bible.
- Judges 12Chapter 12 begins with a conflict that is structurally parallel to the Ephraimite quarrel after Gideon's battle in chapter 8, but this time Jephthah's response is not diplomacy — it is war.
- Judges 13Chapter 13 is the birth narrative of Samson, and it is the most elaborate annunciation scene in Judges.
- Judges 14Chapter 14 introduces the adult Samson and establishes the pattern that will govern the rest of his narrative: a desire for a Philistine woman, a display of supernatural strength, a riddle or trap, betrayal by intimacy.
- Judges 15Chapter 15 escalates the private vendetta between Samson and the Philistines into a series of increasingly spectacular acts of violence.
- Judges 16Chapter 16 is the climax and conclusion of the Samson narrative.
- Judges 17Chapter 17 begins the two-part appendix with which Judges closes, and the shift in tone is immediate.
- Judges 18Chapter 18 is the first of the book's two closing appendices.
- Judges 19Chapter 19 is one of the most disturbing chapters in the Hebrew Bible, and the text makes no attempt to soften it.
- Judges 20Chapter 20 is the longest military account in Judges and is remarkable for what it shows about what has gone wrong with Israel as a political and moral community.
- Judges 21Chapter 21 closes the book and extends the moral horror of chapter 19-20 in a different register: the horror of improvised solutions to self-inflicted catastrophe.