On Jephthah’s daughter
The first reading at today’s Mass was the story of Jephthah and his daughter (Judges 11:29-40). I have to say that my first reaction was surprise that this most unedifying story was included in the lectionary. But it also drew my attention to what I’d overlooked on Sunday, that Jephthah is included in the list of the heroes of the faith enumerated by the write to the Hebrews. That is not a judgement I think we can easily share.
I’d like to attribute this, but can’t remember whose blogs I read it on, but I’ve seen several posts recently on Augustine’s hermeneutic principle:
Accordingly, in regard to figurative expressions, a rule such as the following will be observed, to carefully turn over in our minds and meditate upon what we read till an interpretation be found that tends to establish the reign of love. Now, if when taken literally it at once gives a meaning of this kind, the expression is not to be considered figurative. (On Christian doctrine Ch 15)
While I think that Augustine’s subtlety far outshines those who think that the Bible that enshrines the story of Jephthah and his daughter gives straightforward guidance for marriage, sexual ethics and the upbringing of children, I’m inclined to think that even this generally wise hermeneutic principle meets its match in this narrative.
Perhaps sometimes we need to acknowledge that not everything can be interpreted for our edification, where interpretation tends to a spiritual domestication of the violence, patriarchy and stupidity of the human beings with and in whom God still manages to work, and on whom he never gives up.
Yet this story is also read (and this is where I return to the idea that the primary place for reading scripture is in the gathered eucharistic assembly) at Mass, where the ultimate focus is on the sacrifice of him who shows us the better way. In Christ we celebrate the gift of self-sacrificing love, chosen over and against the cycle of violence returned for violence. But more, we celebrate also the sacrifice of the one who is able to give meaning and future to Jephthah’s daughter (and the one who knows and calls her by the name the author omitted), and the one who by that same sacrifice is able to redeem Jephthah from his sins and stupidity.
Then the importance of reading this scripture in Mass is less that it edifies us by a meaning recovered or created by ingenious hermeneutics, but rather it points us more strongly than many readings to the one who can embrace and empower the victim, redeem and transform the victimizer, and offer the hope of a just restoration to a relationship apparently broken beyond all repair.
August 24th, 2007 at 3:54 am
Doug,
I think your take on the passage is right on target.
I don’t have her exegesis handy (my wife’s a pastor, too, and she has the book on her shelf), but Phyllis Trible writes on this passage in her classic, “Texts of Terror.” I think I remember her defending the inclusion of this text in the Bible, and/or others like it, in a fairly recent interview. It would be interesting to look at her reasoning again; I don’t remember it.
It is a text of terror. If Yairah Amit is right, and I think she is, that the wording of Judges 11:31 suggests that Jephthah contemplated making a human sacrifice from the start, a practice the Deuteronomistic history recounts in stunned amazement as having happened several times, then we are supposed to anticipate the horror to come from that verse on (The Jewish Study Bible ad loc).
That would make Jephthah insincere with his daughter, which adds insult to injury, but fits, it seems to me, his character. Jephthah is portrayed, in another words, as an absolute wretch of a human being.
Paula McNutt laconically notes that “No angel intervenes to save Jephthah’s daughter, as is the case for Isaac in Gen 22:12 (New Interpreter’s Study Bible ad loc). To which one might add: and no angel intervened in Jesus’ case either.
It has to be done carefully, but Jephthah’s daughter can be seen as a Christ-figure, her namelessness contributing to the appropriateness of that analogy. Perhaps the justaposition, pure and simple, of reading the text and sharing the Eucharist, is more powerful than any explanation.
As for Jephthah, he is probably, as already suggested, to be seen as an utterly despicable character, flawed and tragic at the same time, to whom God gave faith nevertheless such that he was a savior of Israel. Gideon and Samson are not much different.
Indeed all the saints of the OT turn out to be swindlers, murderers, adulterers, and the like, but despite that God granted them the faith they needed to be a blessing to others.
That being so, there is yet hope for you and me.
Or, to look at it another way, and here I repeat a bon mot of my professor of church history (Paolo Ricca), only great sinners are capable of being great saints. We would all wish for such individuals that they start out sinners and end up saints, but in practice, seesawing seems to be the norm.
John Hobbins
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