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
ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com