Judges 11:31

31. Whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me Rather, whosoever comes forth. It is hardly possible to avoid the conviction that Jephthah had a human being in his mind. For what else could he expect to come out of the doors of his house to meet him? Surely not a cow, nor a sheep, nor a goat, nor a herd of these animals, for their place was not in his house, or else, as Hengstenberg remarks, “the house of the Gileadite chieftain must have been a kind of Noah’s Ark cattle and men in one room, going out and in at the same door, stall-fed alike a thing surely not to be seriously thought of. Every thing that we know of the arrangements of houses among the Hebrews is against it.” And surely not a dog, or any unclean animal. No animal, clean or unclean, would be dignified with such lofty emphasis, for “how strange it would be,” says Pfeiffer, “if some great prince or general should say, ‘O God, if thou wilt grant me this victory, the first calf that comes to meet me shall be thine!’” If he meant to offer an animal, would he not have selected the best of his flocks, and have offered, not a single victim, and the first he found, but many sacrifices? Every feature of the passage indicates that Jephthah consciously vowed the sacrifice of a human being, and the tremendous force and awful solemnity of the vow appear in the very fact that not a common but an uncommon offering is pledged, and the victim is to be taken from the members of his own household. And as the most loving and affectionate would be likely to be the first to come and meet him, he hazards even that contingency, holding nothing back, but leaving it, as it were, for the Lord to select the victim.

When I return in peace Having conquered the enemy, and thus secured a lasting peace.

Shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering Some have construed this passage so as to give the suffix pronoun it or him ( הו ) a dative sense, and refer it to the Lord. Thus, I will offer HIM (that is, to Jehovah) a burnt offering. In this case the vow is made to contemplate two distinct things, (1) a person to be consecrated to Jehovah, and (2) the additional offering of a burnt sacrifice. But such a construction would be a solecism in Hebrew. Were the sense dative, as above indicated, לו , to him, would have been used, for the suffix to the verb is always the accusative. In 2 Kings 3:27, where it is said the king of Moab took his son and offered him a burnt offering upon the wall, we have precisely the same construction. Compare also 1 Samuel 7:9. This explanation must therefore be rejected as critically untenable.

The marginal reading, OR I will offer, etc., is also untenable. According to this reading the import of the vow would be, as Kimchi and others have paraphrased it, “I will offer it for a burnt offering if it be fit for such a purpose, or, if not fit, I will consecrate it to the Lord.” But every passage in which Vav ( ו ) is supposed to be used disjunctively is capable of a different explanation. The notion that the Hebrew language is so destitute of connecting particles that Vav must be often used in a disjunctive sense is an almost inexcusable blunder, especially when it is brought to bear on the simple and positive phraseology of Jephthah’s vow. It does not appear that this vow was uttered in the heat of battle or in a moment of confusion. If Jephthah contemplated divers methods of fulfilling it, the Hebrew language did not lack words by which to express precisely his intention. If he meant to say or, there was the proper disjunctive או , which is used more than a hundred times in the Old Testament in the sense of or.

Another attempt to escape the obvious import of the vow is to take the word עולה , burnt offering, in a figurative or spiritual sense. But such a deep spiritual sense of burnt offerings as this passage would involve was alien to the age of the Judges, and no passage in the whole Old Testament can be found where the word in question has such a meaning. Every passage cited in Hengstenberg’s essay on this subject fails most signally to help his argument. Hosea 14:2; Psalms 40:7-9; Psalms 51:17; Psalms 119:108. Take, for instance, the passage oftenest quoted, Psalms 51:16-17, where the spiritual idea of sacrifices in general is expressed, and the sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart, so far from being identified with burnt offering, is put in direct opposition to it. The whole attempt to put a figurative or spiritual sense upon the word עולה , especially in our text, is a manifest striving after something which the Scriptures nowhere offer, and a prodigious effort to get rid of the common meaning of an oft-recurring word.

It follows, then, that the only translation of this verse that will bear the test of criticism is substantially the following: “Whosoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the sons of Ammon, shall be for Jehovah, and I will offer him for a burnt offering.” The last sentence is not tautological nor superfluous, but epexegetical of what immediately precedes, and shows the manner in which he meant to consecrate to the Lord the first person that came to meet him on his return home. So the language of Jephthah’s vow, according to the only defensible meaning of the words, clearly involved a human sacrifice.