JEPHTHAH’S SACRIFICE:

HOW TO KEEP A VOW AND BREAK A COVENANT

Scripture Text: Judges 11:29-40

Introduction
A man of his word is hard to come by. Psalm 15:4 described the person “who
keeps his oath even when it hurts” (NIV) as worthy of dwelling in God’s presence. But
are all forms of promises meant to be kept? This is a difficult question as it not only
concerns the integrity of the person making the promise, but the integrity of the promise
itself—is it a right promise in the first place? And sometimes the wrong promise made
reveals more insights into the promise-maker than he or she realized. This is what we
discovered behind the vow of Jephthah, one of Israel’s most controversial judges. What
we see behind his vow offered insights not only in Jephthah’s character, but the character
of Israel as a whole. The vow he made was really contrary to Israel’s covenant with God;
thus, by keeping it, he actually violated the covenant and suffered unnecessary
consequences as a result. His negative example has much to warn us today.

The Context of Jephthah’s account: Israel in a Covenant-Breaking Spiral

One of the themes that ran through the book of Judges was Israel’s apostasy and
unfaithfulness to her covenant with God. This theme was set from the beginning in
Judges 2:11-14, “And they abandoned the LORD, the God of their fathers who had
brought them out of the land of Egypt.” Even though God raised up judges to deliver
them, “yet they did not listen to their judges, for they whored after other gods and bowed
down to them” (2:17, ESV). An overview of the book reveals that with each cycle of the
major judges Israel was actually in a downward spiral of spiritual decline, gradually
forsaking their covenant with God.

The account of Jephthah was set towards the end of that spiral. The major judges
before him were increasingly problematic as well; by the time of Gideon, Israel was led
into idolatry due to the ephod he made (8:27); it was followed by the destructive episode
of Abimelech (ch. 9). By the beginning of the Jephthah account in Judges 10:6-16, the
Israelites had reached the apex of their idolatry and apostasy. In verse 6, an extended
lists of Israel’s idols emphasized the extent and severity of their apostasy, showing how
the Israelites were themselves responsible for breaking their covenant with God. It was in
the light of Israel’s prior breaking of the covenant that God delivered them into the hands
of the Philistines and Ammonites, and explicitly declared that He would not intervene
this time (vv. 11-14). Although the Israelites did confess their sin and seemed to put away
their foreign gods in vv. 15-16, God responded by being “impatient over the misery of
Israel” (ESV)1. God seemed to see through the superficiality of their apparent repentance;
it was, as Daniel Block described it, a “conversion of convenience”2.

If the people were not genuine in their repentance, they were merely using God to
their own ends. “Only please deliver us this day” (v. 16) was the motivation. Such a
motivation led them to put away their idolatrous objects, but presumably did little to put
away their idolatrous hearts. This was the heart of their negotiation. The immediate
benefit (deliverance) was what they were really bargaining for. The terms of the bargain
are merely expendables to create impression. We can say that their goal was really to
manipulate God to do their bidding, to deliver them one more time. The putting away of
their idols might impress some of us, but it probably did not impress God. The original
Hebrew word for ‘impatient’ literally read His “soul/person is short”, an expression of
frustration, exasperation and anger in the face of an intolerable situation.3 It should worry
us that God can get exasperated with our pretense at repentance!

The dubious background of Jephthah as given in 11:1-3 also shed light into how
far the Gileadites had strayed from their covenantal relationship with God. Jephthah
was the son of a prostitute (11:1), implying the practice of prostitution in Gilead, when
God’s covenant prohibited any sexual relations outside marriage. If his mother was an

1
Most Bible scholars believed that God really recognized their genuineness of their confession and was
moved to mercy. The NIV renders it as “He could bear Israel’s misery no longer”. But the text did not give
any hint of how God “repented” or “relented” from His judgment in any way, as how He was described in
Exodus 32:14 from destroying the people after the Golden Calf incident.
2
Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth (NAC; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999), p. 349
3
Ibid., pp. 348-349.
Israelite, this was a direct violation of God’s prohibiting a father selling his daughter into
prostitution (Lev. 19:29); if she was a Canaanite, the problem was compounded by God’s
prohibition of intermarriage with the Canaanites (Exodus 34:15-16; Deut. 7:1-5) and even
suggests the father’s patronage to Canaanite idols through cult prostitution4.

Jephthah’s Covenant-Breaking Vow

If the background of Jephthah was only suggestive of the extent of Israel’s
deteriorating relationship with God, his vow explicitly demonstrated the brokenness of
Israel’s covenantal faithfulness to God.

Jephthah was a natural negotiator. He secured his position as leader over Gilead
through negotiating terms with the elders (11:4-11). He also employed his negotiation
skills in his diplomatic exchanges with the Ammonite king (11:12-28). But he made a
terrible mistake when he thought he could negotiate with God:

And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD and said, "If you will give the
Ammonites into my hand, then whatever comes out from the doors of my house
to meet me when I return in peace from the Ammonites shall be the LORD’s, and
I will offer it up for a burnt offering." (11:30-31)

The structure of the vow suggests that Jephthah was really bargaining with God. There
was a condition: “If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, …when I return in peace
from the Ammonites” and an offer: “then whatever comes out from the doors of my
house to meet me… shall be the LORD’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.” What
was in Jephthah’s mind when he made this vow?

We see that Jephthah intended to sacrifice “whatever” comes out of his house as a
“burnt offering”, in order to secure his military victory over the Ammonites, so much that
Yahweh became a tool to manipulate for his self-interested ends. Such a vow does not

4
My argument in the preceding paragraph is indebted to Daniel I. Block’s treatment of this passage in his
Judges commentary. See Block, p. 353.
speak of faith, but really faithlessness—a sense of insecurity towards God’s power and
intention to deliver the Israelites. It betrayed Jephthah’s near-obsession to cling on to
what he had so painstakingly gained for himself—leadership over the clan, personal
victory and safety.

But what made his vow covenant-breaking was not merely the intent, but the
content of the vow: did Jephthah actually refer to a human sacrifice? While the use of the
masculine gender as an indeterminate reference in v. 31 (“whatever/whoever”) could
refer to anything in Jephthah’s house that comes out to meet him, including animals5, the
fact that it did not exclude the possibility of sacrificing humans was itself appalling;
moreover, the very fact that Jephthah was shocked and grieved when his daughter greeted
him confirmed our suspicion that he was indeed willing to sacrifice a human being if it
was one—just that he did not expect his daughter to be the one.

The very content of his vow mutinied against the spirit of God’s covenant with
Israel: Israel was to drive out the nations in the land of Canaan that the LORD their God
gave them. These nations were to be driven out because of their wicked idolatrous
practices (Deut. 9:5), of which human sacrifice was one of them (Lev 18:21). The
prohibition against child sacrifice was so severe that not only would the offender suffer
the death penalty, but God would cut off even his clan if they closed their eyes to his
crime (Lev 20:1-5). It seemed that either Jephthah was ignorant of this prohibition when
he made his vow, or he was blatantly disregarding it in his desperation to secure divine
guarantee for his military victory. In either case, the vow was made, and by keeping it
and sacrificing his daughter, he had committed what was tantamount to breaking the
covenantal relationship with Israel’s God.

Such an act not only speaks negatively about Jephthah’s character, but his
theology as well. Earlier in his negotiation with the Ammonite king, Jephthah had already
showed worrying signs of compromise when he seemed to assume that the Moabite idol
Chemosh was of equal standing with Yahweh (11:24). Here the error was far more
5
K. Lawson Younger Jr., Judges and Ruth (NIVAC; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), p. 263.
blatant: by even supposing that Yahweh could accept a human sacrifice, had Jephthah
believed Him to be no different from Chemosh, the god of Moab whose leaders were
known to sacrifice children6? As Block puts it, Jephthah was thinking and acting in an
“outrightly pagan” 7 way through his vow: he had reduced Yahweh to a bloodthirsty idol
of Canaan. In doing so the purpose of the covenant was inverted: no longer was Israel
a light to the nations, nor a kingdom of priests and a holy nation unto the LORD (Exodus
19:6); instead, she had become as pagan as the nations she was commanded to dispossess.

The consequence of Jephthah’s wrongheaded vow was tragic and filled with
ironies. We could imagine the shock on Jephthah’s face as “behold, the daughter came
out to meet him with tambourines and with dances” (v. 34). The daughter came out to
celebrate the victorious return of her father; how ironic that this father was actually
prepared to sacrifice her! The text also pointed out the uniqueness of the daughter: she
was his “only child”, and he had neither son nor daughter “beside her”. This daughter
was all he had. One can imagine the regret and grief in his heart as he “tore his clothes”
and cried (v. 35).

The textual reference to the fact that this was his “only child” reminded us of the
other biblical instance of Abraham commanded to sacrifice his only child Isaac (Genesis
22). But there are fundamental differences between the Jephthah and Abraham. While in
Genesis 22 it was God who took the initiative to test Abraham’s obedience by
commanding him to sacrifice Isaac, here it was Jephthah who acted on his own accord to
test God’s commitment by using a vow to secure divine guarantee for his military
victory. Abraham acted in faith as he submitted to God’s command and prepared the
sacrifice; Jephthah acted in faithlessness in that he would not trust God to be the ‘Judge’
(11:27) of the battle, always wanting to take things into his own hands. The manner in
which the two events ended were striking as well: Abraham’s sacrifice was interrupted by
God’s voice, and God made a promise assuring Abraham’s future and that of his son; for
Jephthah God remained silent and did nothing to stop the sacrifice; there was no future

6
2 Kings 3:27; see Block, p. 367.
7
Block, p. 367.
for Jephthah and his daughter.8 We can bring the last point further: comparing to
Abraham’s obedience through his sacrifice, which led to God reaffirming His
covenant with him, Jephthah’s sacrifice by contrast highlighted his disobedience to
and breaking of the covenant with God. In other words, what seemed similar between
the two were actually opposite: Abraham’s noble sacrifice actually contrasted Jephthah’s
ignoble sacrifice, and brought out the emptiness of his vow even more.

But what about the silence of God? Does the text imply that God through His
Spirit (v.29) influenced Jephthah in some way to make that vow? Some scholars like
Cheryl Exum thought so. Exum thought that, by giving the Ammonites into Jephthah’s
hands, it was already a “tacit acceptance” of his vow and determined his tragic fate;
God’s “silent transcendence, if not a form of hostile transcendence, clearly raises
questions about divine benevolence”9 But such an interpretation, albeit plausible, fails to
take into full consideration the context of Judges. As mentioned earlier, Israel at the time
of Jephthah was in full decline and extreme apostasy far more serious than ever before;
God had delivered them repeatedly through Othniel, Ehud, Barak and Gideon, now He
shall intervene no more. The absence of an active divine voice should not surprise us as
we read Jephthah’s account; it is the presence of divine intervention (in endowing
Jephthah with the Spirit and in destroying the Ammonites) that should, in a sense,
surprise us that God still delivered them out of sheer mercy and grace. God could well
have given the paganised Israelites over to their own depravity (Romans 1:24-28); the
fact that he did not gave them up totally showed that He is benevolent after all.10

8
See Block, Pp. 371-372, for a table of comparison between Abraham’s and Jephthah’s sacrifices
9
Exum, J. Cheryl, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative, (Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.
59-60.
10
Block cited Webb in making the more plausible interpretation that “the military victory is casually linked
to the endowment of the Spirit but only incidentally linked to the vow”. See footnote in Block, p. 379.
Younger also commented that “Jephthah alone is the agent of violence against his daughter. The vow is not
Yahweh’s doing. …Yahweh did give the victory, not because of Jephthah’s vow but because of his
compassion and grace in saving Israel. Thus Jephthah’s action in fulfilling the vow is due to a
misunderstanding and ignorance on his part for the role the vow even played in the victory over the
Ammonites…Yahweh’s nonintervention permits Jephthah’s machinations to take their natural
consequences with the loss of his line.” See Younger, p. 267. In this sense, one could say that God did give
Jephthah over to the folly of his vow; in trying to secure the present for himself, he had ended up
sacrificing his future.
 In fact, what was striking was not so much the silence of God, but the silence
of Israel. From Jephthah’s making of the vow, to his and everyone else’s realization
when the daughter came out of his house to greet him, to his permission for her to lament
with her companions for two months, and to the final execution of the vow, the text made
no mention of any protest on the part of the Gileadites! The only response recorded was
how the “daughters of Israel” commemorated his daughter through a yearly ritual
(11:40), which in itself contained no explicit protest against Jephthah and his vow. Had
the clan forgotten the admonition in Leviticus 20:15, that they should punish the child-
sacrificer or at least prevented him from doing so? Were there no Levites who could
direct Jephthah to the Mosaic Law in Leviticus 27:1-8, that perhaps some provision could
be made when one person devotes another to the sanctuary for sacred service but later
finds it impossible to fulfil the vow? Even if all were ignorant of the words of the law,
were there anyone with a sense of righteousness to speak up for the daughter, just as the
men of Saul spoke up for Jonathan when Saul made a similarly rash vow that threatened
Jonathan’s life (1 Samuel 14:45)? But there were none, not a single voice spoke up even
within the two months of “cool-off period”, and thus Jephthah went ahead and “did with
her according to the vow that he had made” (11:39). Such silence could only lead us to
conclude one thing: Israel, at least the clan of Gilead, had tacitly assumed Jephthah’s
paganised views of Yahweh, and coalesced in his breaking of the covenant, knowingly or
unknowingly. As the book of Judges concludes, “Everyone did what was right in his own
eyes.” (Judges 21:25) Jephthah did what he thought was right, and fulfilled his covenant-
breaking vow to the letter; his act was really a microcosm of the spiritual reality of Israel,
who conformed to the patterns of their Canaanite neighbors and lived according to pagan
lifestyle, such that acts like Jephthah’s was almost too commonplace to even suggest that
it could be wrong.

Application
One obvious lesson we gleaned from Jephthah’s negative example was that we
should not make rash vows. The author of Ecclesiastes warned us not to be rash with our
mouth (Ecclesiastes 5:2) and that “it is better that you should not vow than that you
should vow and not pay” (Ecclesiastes 5:5), and we saw how Jephthah paid dearly for his
vow. Our Lord Jesus Himself taught us not to take an oath at all (Matthew 5:34), the
spiritual principle being that we have no control over the things we swear by; only God is
sovereign over all things. Jephthah had presumed some form of control when he vowed
‘whatever comes out of his house’, and that presumption had caused his downfall.

But beyond this obvious lesson there are deeper implications for the church and
the individual in relation to God. Firstly, the theological implications of Jephthah’s
mistaken vow and the larger context of Israel’s covenantal unfaithfulness show how
susceptible we are to spiritual apostasy and erroneous view of God, while outwardly
assuming a form of piety. If Jephthah could ‘Canaanize’ his theology to think that
Yahweh would accept human sacrifice, we need to constantly examine our theological
assumptions lest we sin in ways contrary to our covenantal relationship with God without
realizing it. How we think about God influence the way we relate to Him. For example,
we could unknowingly be influenced by the self-serving materialistic culture around us,
or even the idolatry in folk religion, and think of our God like a deity whom we can
obtain benefits from by using our offering, our prayers or our service. The insecurity that
compelled Jephthah to make his vow could easily compel us to manipulate God in subtle
ways. We need to carefully reject any such pagan forms of manipulative exchange with
our God. Our only safeguard is a right knowledge of God through His Word, and a Spirit-
filled life of steadfast faith in His goodness towards us.

Secondly, Jephthah’s self-serving vow should call us to reflect on our human

relationships: do we make use (or worse, abuse) of people in the pursuit of our goals,
however spiritual or noble these may seem? In our zeal to ‘advance the kingdom of God’,
could we have unwittingly sacrifice the well-being of our families, our sons and
daughters, our spouses, all in the name of service unto God? No doubt there will be some
who justify such a sacrifice, just as there are some who may explain away the Jephthah’s
sacrificial vow as ‘for the greater good’. On the surface, Jephthah’s desired outcome
(victory over the Ammonites) did seem legitimate, noble and right, just like the
promotion of our ministry goals. But if Jephthah’s vow is ultimately unnecessary and
detrimental, as we have discussed, then could it be that our self-justification for all our
negligence of the fundamental relationships in life be ill-founded after all? Could it be
that God is more glorified when we attend best to our family relationships before we
manage God’s church, as 1 Timothy 3:5 would attest? A ‘win-at-all-cost’ attitude, as
Lawson Younger puts it11, may betray more of our self-exaltation rather than God-
glorification.

Conclusion
In conclusion, we all agree that Jephthah’s tragic story was one that rightfully
disturbed many of us. It disturbed us that a servant of God could steep to such low means
of manipulation. It disturbed us that God could remain silent and allowed Jephthah to
carry out the horrific consequences of his tragic vow. It disturbed us that as a nation,
Israel could become so desensitized to such pagan practices within her land and deviated
so far from God in her covenant with Him. Such disturbances are good: they call us to
question our own perceived ability to discern what is really right and wrong; they warn
us, before we carelessly wade into willful sin, that God may well discipline us by giving
us what we want should we choose to do what is right in our own eyes; they call our
church to a self-examination of her covenantal faithfulness to God. But above all they
must never cause us to lose sight of the grace of God that is greater than all our sins, as
God had chosen to save us through Christ despite our perverted morality, our willful
sinning, and our covenant unfaithfulness. Let us pursue holiness in full confidence of
God’s mercy and grace.

11
Younger, p. 268.
Bibliography

Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth (NAC; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999)

K. Lawson Younger Jr., Judges and Ruth (NIVAC; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002)

Exum, J. Cheryl, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative, (Great Britain: Cambridge University
Press, 1992)

Michael Wilcock, The Message of Judges : Grace Abounding edited by Clark H.

Pinnock.(Downers Grove, IL: IVP 1992)