Bloody Hand: the Sacrifice that God did not Stop

You could say that Jephthah’s daughter was wronged by the world, by her father, and by God. But her death has meaning across the millennia.

1. The story of Jephthah’s daughter’s death.

Jephthah was a judge – a leader – of ancient Israel. Surprisingly for a man who rose to that position, he was the son of a prostitute. His story is told in the biblical Book of Judges, starting at chapter 11. One part of his story is the death of his daughter, his only child.

Jephthah and Israel warred with the Ammonites. Jephthah vowed to God that if God gave him victory over the Ammonites, whatever emerged from his door on his return from battle he would sacrifice as a burnt offering. God gave him victory. His daughter emerged from his door to greet him. She emerged dancing.

Jephthah wanted to renege on his vow; his daughter would not let him. Instead, she asked that she be permitted to go up into the mountains for two months with her friends, who mourned with her that she would never marry. Then she returned and submitted to her father’s knife. She became smoke from an alter.

This gave rise to a tradition in Israel. At a certain season, daughters of Israel left for four days to commemorate Jephthah’s daughter.

This was right. These daughters had much to commemorate, much to mourn, for Jephthah’s daughter and themselves.

2. Much to mourn: proxies.

They could mourn because of the Ammonites. The Ammonites are a proxy for all wars, wars that devoured the loved ones of women and devoured women themselves. Maybe the Ammonites, a proxy for war, are also a proxy for all violence against women by strangers. They are a proxy for all such rapes, beatings, and robberies. They are a proxy for the recent attempted assassination of Malala Yousufzai by the Taliban, men who were incensed that a girl such as she should speak out to an international audience against their ban on the education of girls like herself. Malala Yousufzai and Jephthah’s daughter might have been the same age.

The Ammonites, like the Taliban, were an outside force. But Jephthah was no outsider; he was his daughter’s father. So the daughters of Israel could also mourn because of Jephthah. Jephthah’s rash vow led to his daughter’s death. In this way, he is a proxy for all violence against women by the hands of a near person. He is a proxy for incest, intimate rape, beating by a husband or brother. He is a proxy for honor killings, practiced today in some parts of the world.

The daughters of Israel could mourn because of God. Jephthah’s daughter is like Isaac, but also unlike. God told Abraham, Isaac's father, to sacrifice Isaac. But at the last moment, God stopped Abraham’s knife-hand from slicing into the flesh of Isaac. But at the last moment, God did not release Jephthah from his rash vow.

3. Much to mourn: the virtue of Jephthah’s daughter.

The daughters of Israel could mourn because of the death of someone as good as Jephthah’s daughter. Jephthah’s daughter is a Job-like figure. She was virtuous. She did not complain: she plainly saw that Jephthah had to fulfill his vow. She accepted death resolutely.

She had the virtue of Job. In fact, she suffered more deeply than Job. Job’s family, wealth, and health were taken from him. But Job was permitted to live; Jephthah's daughter was not. In this way, everything that was taken from Job was taken from Jephthah’s daughter. She lost her family, she lost the comforts of life. She lost everything that she cherished when she gave herself to her father’s knife.

And calamity fell upon Job. Suddenly it was there. But Jephthah’s daughter submitted to it. She went up into the mountains to mourn with her friends. After two months, the agreed time, she came down from the mountains.

4. Much to mourn: the love of Jephthah’s daughter.

And see who Jephthah’s daughter loved and feared. She loved her father. She accepted death for his sake, so that he would not go back on his vow to God.

She loved her nation. She accepted death for its sake, so that the leader of her nation would not incur guilt on its behalf by going back on a vow to God.

She loved her friends. She chose to prepare to die by going with them up into the mountains for two months to mourn. In a way, this foreshadows the Last Supper, where Jesus had fellowship with his disciples on the night that he knew he would be taken captive to be crucified.

She feared God. She realized that a vow to God had to be respected, had to be fulfilled. God was large to her, larger even than her love of life.

5. The meaning of Jephthah’s daughter: eternity.

There’s more to the story of Jephthah’s daughter than sorrow and love.

The Bible does not say the season when this story took place. But it appears that in Old Testament times there were fighting seasons, as there are in Afghanistan today. In the biblical book of 2 Samuel, the story of King David and Bathsheba is introduced with the phrase, "In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war . . ..." (NIV.) This story took place after that fighting season, when Jephthah returned from war.

Summer is suggested by other circumstances aside from fighting seasons. Jephthah’s daughter and her friends retreated to the mountains for two months. It's likely that the mountains teemed with food; certainly Jephthah's daughter and her friends would not have carried two months worth of food into the mountains.

This meant that Jephthah’s daughter was in the wilderness in the season of nature’s aliveness. On the edge of death, in that two months, maybe she contemplated the seasons, the yearly cycle of life and death in nature. Maybe she saw in this eternal cycle a hope of the renewal of her own life, like the renewal of life in the growing seasons. The succinct biblical narrative does not say.

Jephthah’s daughter is not known by name. I don’t know why. It might be that by the time that the story was written down, her name had been consumed in the forgetfulness of years.

But one thing is certain: she is known to God. And he is the God of the living, not the dead.

Sometimes the Best Teaching is No Teaching at All

I have liked this story, from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 17. It's the story of Jesus and the ten lepers. I repeat it to show how it can be mangled.

11And it came to pass, as [Jesus] went to Jerusalem, that he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee.
12And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood afar off:
13And they lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.
14And when he saw them, he said unto them, Go shew yourselves unto the priests. And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed.
15And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God,
16And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan.
17And Jesus answering said, Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine?
18There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.
19And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.A kindergarten teacher told this story to her charges, I among them. This was a year or two before the Supreme Court started to take religion out of schools. That started around 1962, and I was in kindergarten in 1961.

So, fine. It’s a good story. It’s dramatic and succinct.

But the teacher apparently feared that we children wouldn’t on our own, with our tiny understandings, suck from this story all of its gospel juice. So she elaborated for our benefit.

And she explained what the story itself failed to say – something that she somehow knew, but didn’t explain how she knew. She told us that the nine lepers who did not return to thank Jesus suffered divine justice on their way to show themselves to the priests. They literally fell apart as they ran. Their disease reasserted itself, worse (apparently) than it was before they saw Jesus.

The teacher's God was a dick, and she wanted our God to be like hers.

Here’s another story she told us. From the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 10, it's the story of Jesus and the children:

13And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them.
14But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.
15Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.
16And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.Again, this is a fine story. Children have loved it for almost two-thousand years.

But the teacher wasn’t through with the telling of it at the end of the story. She explained it to us, too. She explained what we did not know, and could not know.

She explained (and I am paraphrasing): "Before Jesus, people didn’t love children. They were just [makes gesture of shunting children away, with a facial gesture of faint disgust]."

Did you know that?

Now, here’s a story she did not tell us, from the Book of Judges, chapter 11. Jephthah was a mighty man of valor, and he was on the cusp of battle. He promised that if the Lord would give him victory over the Ammonites, then, when he returned to his home, whatever came out of his doors to meet him, Jephthah would give to the Lord as a burnt offering.

It turned out to be his daughter.

Jephthah was devastated. But he kept his promise to God.

Now, my kindergarten teacher did not tell us this story. There were probably three reasons for this omission.

First, she probably did not know the story. Looking back, I do not have a high opinion of her deep biblical knowledge.

Second, it might have given us children nightmares. (But is it really worse than certain folk tales?)

And, third, Jephthah’s torment would have been hard to explain, since our teacher had already explained to us that children were loved only after a particular moment in Jesus’s life, many hundreds of years after Jephthah’s daughter became smoke.

But if our teacher had told us that story, I would relish the memory of her explanation of it.

Now, I have no way to judge this woman. She might have been a loving wife and mother; a rock of her neighborhood; a baker of cakes; a consoling shoulder. Or she might have been the opposite. I don’t know.

But I think of her when I think of people who rage against the separation of church and state. I think of her when I think of people who want children to learn about religion in schools, not just in the family, and not just in church or synagogue or temple or mosque.

Don’t mistake me. I’m not shoulder-to-shoulder with the Christopher Hitchens’s of the world, who deem religion malignant. ("God is Not Great".) Count me with people like Francis Fukuyama ("The Origins of Political Order"). Fukuyama has spent years studying societies, and he believes that religion provides cohesion. I believe that, and I believe that in religion there is salvation, like a jewel that surpasses value that will be found by the ones that God reveals it to.

But I don’t expect salvation to come from public schools. I don’t expect that any more than I expect that we were going to be made into good drivers in drivers-ed by those silly 1970's driving-simulators.

If a person enters heaven, then it’s because of God. God may choose to use the prayers of that person’s parent, like St. Augustine’s mother’s prayers for his conversion to Christianity. ("Confessions of St. Augustine".) God may choose to use the example of a Godly parent to call that person, like Corrie ten Boom learned Christianity by growing up with her loving, brave father. ("The Hiding Place".)

Or, in church, a child might be inspired by a pastor, who has walked in the ways of God for his whole life.

Parents and pastors have a stake and a responsibility in the salvation of children. That makes them different than the teacher who sandwiches in a little gospel between social studies and math, who might or might not have a clue.

I don't regret the loss of religion in schools. I think that that loss doesn't leave God without resources, and better resources, too.

So let’s never grow nostalgic for that element of the "good old days". Let's never yearn for a return to a time when teachers, like my kindergarten teacher, were free to fill our heads with the cast-off husks of their own silly notions of religion.

My conscience pricks me. Before I close, I acknowledge teachers who are wise and, so far as I know, Godly.