Judges 11:14

ARGUMENT NO. 1

This argument was simply that Israel had not taken the disputed land away from the Ammonites; they had defeated the Amorites and had taken it away from them, not from the Ammonites, who did not originally own the land. This point was elaborated by Jephthah in Judges 11:14-22.

"And Jephthah sent messengers again unto the king of the children of Ammon; and he said unto him, Thus saith Jephthah: Israel took not away the land of Moab, nor the land of the children of Ammon; but when they came up from Egypt, and Israel went through the wilderness to the Red Sea, and came to Kadesh; then Israel sent messengers unto the king of Edom, saying, Let me, I pray thee, pass through thy land; but the king of Edom hearkened not. And in like manner he sent unto the king of Moab; but he would not: and Israel abode in Kadesh. Then they went through the wilderness and went around the land of Edom, and the land of Moab, and came by the east side of the land of Moab, and they encamped on the other side of the Arnon; but they came not within the border of Moab, for the Arnon was the border of Moab. And Israel sent messengers unto Sihon king of the Amorites, and the king of Heshbon; and Israel said unto him, Let us pass, we pray thee, through thy land unto my place. But Sihon trusted not Israel to pass through his border; but Sihon gathered all his people together, and encamped in Jahaz, and fought against Israel. And Jehovah, the God of Israel, delivered Sihon and all his people into the hand of Israel, and they smote them: so Israel possessed all the land of the Amorites, the inhabitants of that country. And they possessed all the border of the Amorites, from the Arnon even unto the Jabbok, and from the wilderness even unto the Jordan."

This is a very important paragraph, a great deal of it being a repetition, much of it verbatim, of what is written in the Books of Moses, namely in Numbers 13:26; 14:25; 20:1; 18-21; 21:21-24-42. This fact establishes every word of what Jephthah stated here as absolutely accurate and is also a glorious proof of the fact that the Pentateuch existed many, many years before the Book of Judges. As we have often pointed out, nothing is any more erroneous and ridiculous than is the radical critical dictum that the Pentateuch did not exist until the times of Josiah. That "fairy tale" is comparable only to those of Hans Christian Andersen.

The summary of Jephthah's argument here is simply that Israel had not taken the land away from the Ammonites at all, but had defeated and displaced the Amorites who were originally the inhabitants of the land. It was a perfectly true and reasonable argument.