Jephthah, a Rash Vow, and the Spirit of God

Recently, on a Facebook Christian theology group I am a member of, the following request for help was asked by one the other members. I thought it would be a good idea to turn the answer into a blog post with a bit of extra detail to my original answer as I had found that there was not a great deal of help to be found, either by commentaries or from internet articles. Here is the question:

“In the final section of Judges 11 Jephthah makes a rash vow that he will give whatever comes through his front door up for a burnt offering if he beats the ammonites. low and behold his daughter walks through and so he offers his daughter. So I’m trying to understand it said in a couple verses before he gave the vow that he was in the Spirit of The Lord but God ultimately knew that his daughter would be the one to come through the door.

I know God is good and isn’t the author of sin obviously so I’m just trying to understand this passage in light of this truth and need some help.”

This really is such a good question, due in part to the fact that I was unable to find the explanation that touched upon all the subject’s related aspects in one place! Here is my own humble attempt to do so:

In Judges 11, we find Jephthah, who was an Israelite from the region of Gilead. He had been exiled from his home by his own brothers for being an illegitimate child, the son of a prostitute. Presumably, Jephthah was deemed to be a source of familial shame by his pure-blooded siblings, who decided one day to drive him out of their midst.

During Jephthah’s time in exile, he became renowned as a skilled and courageous leader, leading a group of fellow outlaws who had joined together with him as a means of survival. The people of Ammon started to wage a war against Israel at some point during this time. As Israel set about assembling its strongest possible army, the elders of Gilead naturally turned to the Gileadean who had now established himself as a skilful and courageous leader, Jephthah, asking him to be a commander in the Israelite army.

Quite understandably, Jephthah was a little nonplussed by this sudden turnaround in treatment that he was receiving from his native people, and so bargained for the leadership of his hometown should he take up this role as commander in the army and successfully help the Israelites to victory. The elders of Gilead, out of desperation, agreed to the request.

(There are a couple of certain points that will prove helpful to note at this point as we consider the controversial vow of Jephthah. Jephthah, as a child, and despite his father’s indiscretion, would have certainly been taught about the Israelite religion, their laws and of Yahweh, their God. Perhaps even during that same time, but certainly after his ejection from Gilead, Jephthah would have also learnt about local pagan religions, some of which would have included human sacrifices.)

Jephthah became a key commander in the Israelite army and helped them bargain for an end to the conflict with the king of Ammon, albeit unsuccessfully. It is at this point we come to the part of the story that is of the most interest regarding our question:

v.29 “Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he passed through Gilead and Manasseh, and passed through Mizpah of Gilead; and from Mizpah of Gilead he advanced toward the people of Ammon.

v.30 And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord, and said, ‘If You will indeed deliver the people of Ammon into my hands,

v.31 then it will be that whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the people of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering.’”

As we can see, in v.29, the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah. He then undertook a journey that led him right to the battlefront, and at this point Jephthah made what is often described as his rash vow. To follow the story yet further, the first person to come out of the doors of his house to greet him on his return from a victorious battle proved to be his daughter, his only child. Jephthah was devasted. His daughter was devastated. Both agreed that Jephthah’s vow to the Lord must be kept.

Before we come to answer the initial question regarding Jephthah’s vow, the Holy Spirit influence, and God’s foreknowledge of where this vow would ultimately lead to, it is worth mentioning that not all commentators agree that the daughter was killed as a sacrifice. As Warren W. Wiersbe explains,

“More than one expositor has pointed out that the little word ‘and’ in the phrase ‘and I will offer it up’ (11:31) can be translated ‘or’. (In the Hebrew, it’s the letter waw, which usually means ‘and’…) If we take this approach, then the vow was twofold: Whatever met him when he returned home would be dedicated to the Lord (if a person) or sacrificed to the Lord (if an animal).”

There is certainly some weight to the view that Jephthah’s daughter was dedicated to the Lord in the sense of her being given over to serve at the temple for the remainder of her life. The fact that the Bible repeats the fact that “she knew no man” after the vow had been carried out (v.39) is curious, though far from conclusive. There is also an argument that the custom to lament Jephthah’s daughter ought to be translated as the custom to commemorate, which again, adds intrigue but does not prove conclusive. I think I would agree with Dale Ralph Davies, Matthew Henry, and others, that the vow was to dedicate to the Lord by burnt offering, as both the language and the gist of the story would seem to lean toward this the most.[1] It would have been extremely unlikely, and in contravention of the Jewish temple laws, to have a woman serve within the temple in such a way as some have suggested.

Now, back to the question at hand.

In v.29, God has placed His Spirit upon Jephthah, and in v.30, 31, Jephthah makes a vow to the Lord that will ultimately lead to the sacrifice of his own daughter (either through sacrificial death or sacrificial life of dedication). The Spirit of the Lord was upon Jephthah. Jephthah makes a rash vow that contravenes God’s law. God is good and cannot be the author of sin, so how can we make sense of these three verses?

Having consulted a few commentaries, it seems that very few make much insightful comments on the Spirit of the Lord being upon Jephthah (at least as it pertains to our question). Many commentators deal with Jephthah’s vow in some detail, but none of them link the Spirit of the Lord being upon Jephthah to the vow he made in the next verse. Here is my conclusion as to why:

None of the commentators that sit on my bookshelves are likely to believe that it was the Spirit of the Lord that led Jephthah to make a vow that the Lord knew would lead to the death of his daughter. It was Jephthah who made that vow outside of the influence of the Holy Spirit. That is the conclusion, and the right one at that, but it is not an explanation – and I could not find a complete or satisfactory explanation for this anywhere I looked. This, then, constitutes my attempt to offer that explanation.

The Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah (v.29), which gave him the capabilities and confidence to pass through Gilead and Manasseh all the way to the front of the battle. This journey was something very important and helpful to the Israelite war effort. Did Jephthah collect key allies for the battle along the way (it seems odd to specify his journey through Gilead, the land of his kinsmen, for no reason), or was this simply a journey through his homeland that led to the battlefront? Ultimately, we are not told, but with the Lord’s Spirit being imbued upon Jephthah for this journey, it was clearly for a vital as well as for a particular reason. The Lord acted graciously toward Jephthah, and more vitally to His people through Jephthah, in doing this.

When we move on to Jephthah's vow in the next verse, we must not forget that we have moved on quite a bit in time (whatever time it took to journey through Gilead and Manasseh at the absolute minimum). The question we then need to ask here: is the Spirit of the Lord still upon Jephthah in the making of the vow, or was the Spirit upon Jephthah through the journey only? I would argue that the Spirit was upon Jephthah for that journey alone, and that this was so because of the importance of that journey in relation to Israel’s war efforts in repelling the Ammonite forces.

Matthew Poole's commentary offers a key insight here. In speaking of the Spirit of the Lord being upon Jephthah, Poole writes that this "endued him with a more than ordinary courage and resolution".[2] Was a wisdom also needed, to collect those key allies or merely for the direction taken? More than likely, but Jephthah also needed this additional courage to make the journey as well. It was, after all, a journey that would lead him to the frontline of the Israelite army, with a war now inevitable.

Matthew Poole’s insight also helps with linking verses 29 to 31 together, of understanding why Jephthah made that vow, and more importantly, what influences he was under when he made it.

The increased courage that Jephthah was endued with, combined with the success of such an important journey, seems to have tapped into his pride. It was Jephthah’s swollen pride and inflated ego that led him to make such a brazen and law-contravening vow to the Lord. There was now no Spirit of the Lord upon Jephthah in his making of the vow, but rather it was a spirit of pride, vanity and thoughtlessness that culminated in such a reckless, irresponsible, and iniquitous vow.

We must view this vow of Jephthah as an incredibly sinful response to the Lord's gracious working in Him and through Him. It tapped into his pride, and it was whilst drunk on success and his own pride and ego – as opposed to being filled with the Spirit – that Jephthah made the rash vow that led to the sacrifice of his daughter; a vow which completely contravened the law of God.

[1] Dale Ralph Davies, Judges: Such A Great Salvation (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2011), p.147. [2] Matthew Poole, A Commentary on the Holy Bible Volume 1: Genesis-Job, (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1979) p.484.