Did Jephthah sacrifice his daughter? Judges 11

The passages

And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the LORD's, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.

Judges 11:30-31

And it came to pass at the end of two months, that she returned unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed: and she knew no man.

Judges 11:39

The problem

The vow comes after "the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah" (11:29). His daughter, his only child, comes out dancing. The text says he did "according to his vow", and a yearly commemoration is established. Human sacrifice is forbidden in the Law (Deuteronomy 12:31, 18:10). The book of Judges does not say whether God approved, but it does not say that he stopped it either, as he did with Isaac.

What believers and scholars say

She was dedicated, not killed. Some Jewish and Christian interpreters from the Middle Ages onward argue that "burnt offering" is figurative and that the daughter was devoted to perpetual virginity, which is why the text stresses "she knew no man" and her mourning of her virginity. Marcus and others note that the Hebrew can be read both ways, and the weight of modern scholarship favors literal sacrifice.

He sacrificed her, and it was wrong. Many commentators read the story as a critique of Jephthah. Judges is a book about the decline of Israel, with leaders who become progressively worse. Jephthah's rash vow and his later civil war against Ephraim in chapter 12 fit this pattern. The narrator does not comment, but he does not need to.

An ancient story, honestly kept. Trible and other literary readers see the story as an unresolved tragedy that the Bible leaves for the reader to judge, with the daughter as the moral center. The yearly lament is a form of protest.

Where this leaves it

The plain reading is that a man killed his daughter after a vow made in a state of divine inspiration, and that the Bible reports it with sorrow but without a rebuke. The alternative readings are old and respectable, though the text is difficult to bend that way. A reader who wants the Bible to be morally clear here will not find it so.