Judges 11 Study Notes

11:1-3 The candidate that the Gileadites were seeking soon emerged. Jephthah is described as a valiant warrior, the same epithet the angel of the Lord used to address Gideon in 6:12. Yet Jephthah was also a social outcast, the son of a prostitute. Driven from his home, Jephthah lived the life of a bandit in the land of Tob, where he was joined by worthless men. This is the same phrase used to describe Abimelech’s mercenaries in 9:4. Jephthah was a man without a home, a family, or a future.

11:4-6 When the Ammonites waged war against Israel, the elders of Gilead invited Jephthah to be their commander. There is a parallel between Israel’s sudden interest in the Lord when the Ammonites attacked them in chap. 10 and the Gileadites’ sudden interest in Jephthah. Both appeals seem prompted by desperation rather than a genuine change of heart. In 10:18 the Gileadites had offered their own citizens the position of leader (Hb ro’sh), which implied long-term leadership over the tribe, but they offered to make Jephthah a military commander (Hb qatsin), which was a lesser position.

11:7-11 Jephthah was not immediately won over by this appeal. Earlier, the leaders of Gilead had been happy to send him elsewhere; now, in their hour of need, they wanted his help. In response, the elders of Gilead increased their offer to Jephthah, saying they would indeed make him leader (Hb ro’sh, v. 8). Jephthah brought the Lord’s name into the discussion as he conditionally accepted their offer. The elders of Gilead made a vow in the Lord’s presence and made him their leader and commander. The elders and Jephthah both seemed to be using the Lord’s name in support of their own interests.

11:12-13 As the new leader, Jephthah acted in king-like fashion, speaking to the king of the Ammonites as an equal and claiming that the land of Gilead was his own personal property (my land). The king of the Ammonites contested this claim, arguing that the region east of the Jordan, from the Arnon River in the south to the Jabbok River in the north, belonged to him and had been illegally seized when Israel came from Egypt. This claim was false. At the time Israel came up from Egypt, the land was occupied by the Amorites, not the Ammonites (Nm 21:21-35).

11:14-22 Negotiations went through another stage, as Jephthah sent more messengers to the king. They introduced their communication with the standard royal ambassadorial address, “This is what Jephthah says.” They said that the land of Gilead had never belonged either to Moab, Ammon’s southern neighbor, or to Ammon. Rather, when Israel came up out of Egypt, they were careful to respect the territorial boundaries of Edom and Moab. But when Sihon king of the Amorites attacked them, they had no choice but to engage him. The Lord then gave Israel Sihon’s land, which is the land that the king of the Ammonites had described (vv. 21-22; cp. v. 13).

11:23-28 It was commonly understood in that day that whatever land your god gave you belonged to you. Since the Lord God of Israel had driven out the Amorites, the land was Israel’s to possess. If Chemosh, the god of the Ammonites, had real power, he could take the land for them. In this speech, Jephthah seems, either accidentally or deliberately, to have confused the deities of Moab and Ammon. Elsewhere in the Bible, Chemosh is the god of Moab, while Molech is the god of Ammon. Balak earlier had tried to curse Israel by means of the prophet Balaam, but he was unable to do so (Nm 22-24). The Lord would be the ultimate judge of their dispute. At this point diplomacy was over, and the war began.

11:29-33 The Spirit of the Lord came on Jephthah, empowering him for action. He toured Gilead and Manasseh to muster his troops and headed out against the Ammonites. The Lord in turn gave him victory over twenty . . . cities of the Ammonites, from Aroer all the way to . . . Minnith and to Abel-keramim—three towns that defined the traditional border between Israel and Ammon. In between empowerment and victory, though, there was an intervening episode that undermined Jephthah’s triumph. Jephthah sought to ensure the Lord’s favor by vowing to sacrifice as a whole burnt offering whoever came out the doors of his house to greet him after he had won his victory.

Jephthah probably had a human sacrifice in mind, since animals do not normally come out to greet the returning troops. Just as he confused Chemosh and Molech in the previous section, so now he confused the Lord with Chemosh and Molech. The gods of the Moabites and Ammonites accepted human burnt offerings as a sign of total dedication (2 Kg 3), but such offerings were an abomination to the Lord. The Lord would have delivered Israel anyway, even without Jephthah’s rash vow.

11:34-35 After the victory, Jephthah’s vow came back to haunt him. The one coming out to meet him was his daughter, with tambourines and dancing, the traditional greeting for a returning hero. She was his only daughter, and more importantly, his only child. Jephthah would be left without progeny. Jephthah tore his clothes and mourned her loss, though perhaps his mourning was not so much for her but for himself.

11:36-40 Jephthah’s daughter was very different from her father. She had no recriminations for him, only an exhortation to fulfill his vow, just as the Lord had fulfilled the conditions. Unlike Abraham, whose faithfulness to God’s demand resulted in a multitude of descendants, Jephthah’s “faithfulness” issued in the complete cutting off of his line. That is part of what made the fact that she would die a virgin something to be mourned. She died unfulfilled because she would never get married and have children. Such a fate would normally condemn someone to be numbered among the unremembered in Israel. However, though Jephthah’s daughter has no name in the text, the young women of Israel honored her memory year after year.

A few scholars suggest that Jephthah did not kill his daughter but dedicated her to the Lord for her whole life (cp. 1Sm 1:11,24-28). She would remain a virgin, hence the yearly celebration of her willing sacrifice. In this case, Jephthah would still be without progeny. However, the natural sense of the Hebrew—literally “he did to her his vow that he had vowed”—is that he slaughtered her.