Judges 12:7

JEPHTHAH’S DEATH, Judges 12:7.

7. Judged Israel six years His dominion, probably, never extended to the west of the Jordan. The elders of Gilead had made him their “head and captain,” (Judges 11:11,) and after his victory over the Ammonites, and his defeat of the Ephraimite invasion, he seems to have been content to rule over the inhabitants of Gilead.

Buried in one of the cities of Gilead From this indefiniteness about the place of his burial, compared with the fact that the burial of Abimelech is not mentioned at all, Wordsworth infers that a dark shadow hung over the name and memory of Jephthah. But he seems to have been honoured and respected among the eastern tribes, though we have no record of his making any efforts to lead back his people to the first principles of the theocracy, from which they had greatly departed. The eastern tribes still felt themselves to be of Israel, and never lost that feeling; but their isolation from the western tribes, causing the dialectic variation noticed Judges 12:6, and their remoteness from the tabernacle, whereby they were cut off in a great measure from the practice of the divine worship, greatly weakened the ties of nationality. Jephthah’s offering, too, of a human sacrifice, taken in connexion with the fact that it seems not to have occasioned any feelings of horror among the people, creates the belief that they had become generally ignorant of the requirements of their own law, and estranged from the principles of Moses.

Our impression of Jephthah’s character is reverent. Driven by wrong from home and country, he wrought for himself a heroic name that made the chiefs of eastern Israel realize him to be their only hope. Recalled by their repentance, he, like Camillus, forgave all, and returned to his native home and altars. The dark vow that shades his character was an act of mistaken piety; yet his very fidelity to his vow shows it to have been a profoundly conscientious piety. At the same time it furnishes, in the self-devoting response of the daughter, one of the most touching strokes of pathos in all history. His diplomacy was as honest as his chivalry was brave. No shadow but his mistaken vow rests upon this heroic chief.