THE PROBLEMATIC ABSENCE OF

YHWH IN JUDGES 11:2940

Meredith Brown
We sacrifice this girl in the theatre of war
For the Lord your God is a jealous God . . ..
We sacrifice this girl because she danced at the wrong moment
Her filthiness was in her skirts . . ..
We sacrifice this girl because she asked for it.
For all his ways are justice.1
Exegetical writing surrounding the sacrifice of Jephthahs
daughter in Judges 11 is both wide and deep. From rabbinic midrash
to feminist academia to the ponderings of internet bloggers, the story
has inspired multitudes of men and women to tackle some pressing
questions that arise from its reading. Much of the scholarship revolves
around more technical, historical questions: did Jephthah actually kill

Meredith Brown is a Religious Studies Major at Alma College.

Several pieces of her writing have appeared in school publications,
such as See Spot Run, the Almanian, and the Pine River Anthology.
She volunteers with the elderly population and at the Pine River
Correctional Facility as a poetry workshop leader, and she hopes
to go on to graduate school for an M.F.A in Creative Writing.

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his daughter, or is it to be taken metaphorically2; what did Jephthahs

daughter and her female companions do during their two months in the
mountains?3
While these questions certainly do merit honest questioning,
the presence (or really, the absence) of YHWH in the text is a much
more theologically challenging and complex issue. God is present to
send his spirit upon Jephthah, and to deliver the Ammonites into
Jephthahs hands, but then mysteriously disappears from the text. After
YHWHs disappearance, a horrific murder is committed in his name,
and to his glory. What does Gods absence in the story indicate? One
might wonder why an omniscient God would allow, and aid, Jephthahs
defeat of the Ammonites when could foresee that the fulfillment of
Jephthahs vow would mean the death of an innocent woman. YHWH
does not stop Jephthah in any manner: not through direct
communication, not through his daughter, and not even through the
counsel of a person of authority. Does this mean that Jehovah accepts
and desires human sacrifice? Another important aspect to question in
this passage is the relationship between YHWH, Jepthah, and Jepthahs
daughter, in all possible pairings. By exploring some of these issues,
it might be possible to state whose hands are ultimately stained by the
blood of Jepthahs daughter, and what the story is meant to teach those
who read it. Is the story, as Barbara Miller tentatively suggests, written
to show that God is not involved in the minute events of human life or
is it that humans are responsible for the consequences of their own
actions?4 Is the story, as David Janzen suggests, a more or less natural
happening in the context of the whole book of Judges, given that the
Israelites had mixed with people of other religious backgrounds,5 and
therefore not so tragic or extraordinary as a modern audience might
think? A solid grounding in literary, historical and social context will
aid in the exploration of these possibilities.
The Context of Judges 11
The book of Judges, as a literary genre, is a book of history. It
is not an objective account of historical occurrences, however, but
rather a historical account filtered through a series of very thick
theological lenses. As Hebrew and Old Testament professor James
Martin points out, [T]he books of the Old Testament are . . . written
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from a particular point of view, namely that all history is controlled and
guided by God.6 This perspective on history is clear through the cycle
Israel and God participate in throughout the book of Judges, which is
summarized by J. Clinton McCann as follows:
1. The people do evil by worshiping Baal and other
gods;
2. God is angry at the peoples faithlessness and
allows them to be oppressed by their enemies;
3. God raises up a judge/deliverer in response to the
peoples crying out for help . . .. The oppression is
relieved, and there is stability as long as the judge
lives.
4. The judge dies; the people turn again to idolatry and
disobedience; and the cycle begins again.7
It is important to keep in mind that the writers/editors of this
book are clearly males, and therefore are writing from a male
understanding of the relationship between YHWH and his creation.8 It
is also important to understand that the biblical narratives found in
Judges have been passed down orally through generations of people (at
least 400 years)9 before being recorded on paper. As a consequence,
these stories were continually adapted to different audiences over
time, and so people sharing the narratives might add or subtract parts
of the original story to maintain their own understanding, or to bring
out certain themes of the tale.10
One of the most pertinent questions to ask when we look at the
story of Jephthahs daughter, then, is where in the cycle of
apostasy/forgiveness the story lies. By Judges 11:29, Jephthah has
clearly become a judge (or leader) of the Israelites against their
oppressors, the Ammonites. Indeed, the spirit of the LORD was upon
him before he enters in to the battle against the Ammonites, a phrase
used in Judges to signify Gods power or inspiration that comes upon
an individual and enables one to exhibit great courage or wisdom.11
Presumably, then, YHWH is intimately involved with Jephthah, and
even if he did disapprove of the vow made by Jephthah before the battle
began, he still allowed Jephthah to dominate his enemies, for Jephthah,
[I]nflicted a massive defeat on them from Aroer to the neighborhood
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of Minnith, twenty towns, and as far as Abel-keramim (Judges 11:33).

Furthermore, after the sacrifice of Jephthahs daughter in Judges 11:39,
Jephthah goes on to be the judge of Israel for six years (Judges 12:7).
This may indicate that Jephthah was not to be remembered as a great
judge, as other judges were said to have ruled forty years after
establishing peace, but nevertheless in the biblical text he was not taken
down from his position nor explicitly punished for the murder. He is
allowed to die a natural death, in contrast to the early unnatural death
of his innocent daughter. In fact, no mention of the murder is made
again in the book of Judges, or in the text of the greater Bible. It is
almost as if it never happened.
Another question that is entrenched in the historical context of
the book of Judges follows after this background information. Did
YHWH ask for/accept human sacrifice? It is very clear that He did not.
In the book of Leviticus, rules for correct animal sacrifice are spelled
out, but human sacrifice is forbidden.12 As Janzen writes, Sacrifice,
even sacrifice to YHWH rightly performed, is not what is most
essential in Dtr. More important is understanding and doing the
command of YHWH, and the question of child sacrifice is hardly a
borderline issue.13 Did Jephthah actually have this piece of crucial
information, though? If he did not, then in some way, is the blood not
equally on the hands of YHWH, and on the hands of the religious
community that failed to inform him, as it is on Jephthahs? The
rabbinic midrash, an ancient source of Jewish commentary on scripture,
may help in answering these questions.
Midrashic Commentary: Avert Your Eyes
The midrash is a beautiful and rich part of the Jewish tradition,
but one should not come to it with the expectation of easy, clear
answers to the questions of YHWHs role in Judges 11. The rabbis
studying the story of Jepthahs daughter realized it might encourage a
negative view of Gods own moralitythat it might cast doubt on the
goodness of their deity, who is supposed to be the essence of justice.
So, as Shullamit Valler writes, they [T]ried very hard to impute
wickedness to Jephthah and thus foil any possibility of placing the Holy
One, Blessed be He, in any connection with the terrible deed of offering
up the daughter as a sacrifice.14 So instead of dealing with the hard
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questions posed by the story about Gods goodness, the midrash

Genesis Rabbah and the Tanhuma instead spend a great deal of time
attributing the wrongful murder of Jephthahs daughter to three sins of
Jephthah, and then in explaining the cause of each sin. The first sin
Jephthah committed was the way he formulated the vow, which was
caused by Jephthah not comprehending what faith truly meant (for if
Jephthah had understood this, he would have known that there was no
need to bargain with YHWH for the military victory). The second
sin was Jephthahs intent to redeem the vow literally. The source of
this sin was Jephthahs ignorance towards the Levitical laws of his
people. Lastly, Jephthah sinned in going through with his vow, which
the midrash attributed to his lust for power and honor.15
A defense for Jepthah is not being made here. He clearly made
a violent error in sacrificing his daughter, and should not be portrayed
as a hero for any reasonthe blood of his daughter without a doubt
stains his hands in part. However, the midrashic writings that blame
Jephthah entirely for the event are missing some of the complexities
hiding in the text.
Firstly, the writers of the midrash ignore Jephthahs past. He
was not a typical judgehe was not risen up by the LORD like the
others, but instead was coerced into leadership by desperate Gileadite
men (Judges 11:510). He did not come from a household where he
would have been educated in Jewish history and law; instead, he was
the son of a prostitute, and was chased out of his home by his half
brothers (Judges 11:2). Presumably he became homeless, and he is
reported to have surrounded himself with outlaws and gone on raids
(Judges 11:3). For these reasons Jephthah would have had no deep
understanding of the history and law of the Jewish people. He would
not have known what the proper way was to construct a vow. He
would not have necessarily even understood what he was experiencing
when the spirit of the Lord came upon him: perhaps he thought he
had to respond to it in some way. He would not have known the story
of Abrahams near sacrifice of his only son, Isaac, nor the detailed
sacrificial laws in Leviticus. Furthermore, he would not have known
that there were means of absolving his vow unto the Lord as later wre
spelled out in the Mishnah.16

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Secondly, Jephthah had been living in a society that was highly

mixed with that of the Ammonites. The Ammonites, as Judges
describes to us, worshipped the Baals and the Astartes, the gods of
Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the
Ammonites, and the gods of the Philistines (Judges 10:6). These
deities allowed religious cults that accepted human sacrifice as a
legitimate means to placating or winning favor from the gods.17
Steeped in a foreign cultures morality, Jephthah is therefore even
further distanced from grasping Jewish sacrificial law.
And so the question arises: if Jephthah clearly had no means of
knowing that YHWH did not want human sacrifice, why did YHWH
not send some word of prohibition directly to him, through a vision or
through the guidance of a priest or other figure of authority? The
midrash suggests that such a figure was available to provide this
guidance: the high priest Phinehas. The midrash explains that Phinehas
was too proud to go to Jephthah, and that Jephthah was too stubborn to
seek Phinehas out, however, and so no warning was conveyed.18
Jephthahs pride, to some extent, finished off his daughter. There were
two entire months between Jephthahs return from war and the actual
sacrifice. The fact that Jephthah actually goes through with the murder
can, in part, be attributed to the stubbornness a human who has made
up his or her mind embodies. But the explanation of Phinehas and
Jephthahs pride (and therefore inaction) is still unsatisfactory. The
sacrifice involves the life of an innocent woman; would it not be worth
YHWHs effort to inspire some other person to address Jephthah? The
justice of God so far, as Miller writes, seems elusive at best.19 Or even
if YHWH could not do so, could the entire community of people
around Jephthah and his daughter not say that they found it distressing?
There is no mention of Jephthahs wife, so we have no way of knowing
if she existed, nor if she tried to say or do anything. The same thing
goes with all of the women who accompanied Jephthahs daughter in
the mountains. Did they not try to convince her to flee, to plead for her
life, to attempt to reason with YHWH or with her father? It appears, in
both the biblical text and in the midrash, that no one said or did a thing.
But the midrash does not stop there. The midrash goes on to
say that God himself prepared [Jephthahs] daughter for him to
punish Jephthah for his sins.20 The suggestion that YHWH
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purposefully sent Jephthahs daughter out to greet him is shocking,

though unfortunately, not out of the question. What does the midrash
say is the moral of the story, the lesson to be learned from this
punishment? The purpose of the punishment, then, is to teach others
that vows involving human life cannot be redeemed save by a value in
money.21 If this is the truth of the story, then God is playing a cruel
joke on Jephthah. Just because Jephthah ought to have known better
does not make the story okay. It is more than tough love or severe
discipline for God to accept Jepthahs vow, passively look on as
Jephthahs daughter comes out of the house to greet him, and then
permit her murder. In essence, YHWH is acting as an accomplice in
the wrongful sacrifice of a young woman. It is with this chilling idea
that we leave the rabbinic midrash, and turn to the Christian tradition
to see what they have made of Gods role in the text of Judges 11.
Christian Rewritings of Jephthahs Daughter
The Christian traditions rewriting of Judges 11 is deeply
affected by St. Augustines doctrine of original sin. This doctrine states
that when Adam and Eve chose to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree
in the Garden of Eden, they made the choice to rebel against the will of
God and thus separated humankind from its original intended state of
unity with God. This sin is passed down from humans generation to
generation; everything is seen through the looking glass of the Fall,
with humans taking full responsibility for their own decisions and
actions while still having the guidelines of Gods law to live by.22 This
perspective is important to keep in mind as background information as
we explore some of the Christian devotional writing about Jephthahs
daughter.
One of the earliest Christian rewritings of the story comes from
the letters of the monk Peter Abelard to his beloved Hloise during the
13th century. Abelard praises Jephthahs daughter for her courage to
allow her father to follow through with his vow, and presents her,
[N]ot merely a virgin who died to fulfill her fathers vow but a model
for monastic women who devote their lives to God, a sacrifice likened
by Abelard to dying.23 Abelard blames Jephthah, on the other hand,
for the rash vow and considers Jephthah to be insane. Not once in any
of his letters do we see any support or reproach of the role of YHWH.
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Once again, then, we see that as the blame is placed solely on the
shoulders of Jephthah, the question of YHWHs role in the story is
conveniently forgotten.
Another example of Christian devotional work on Jephthahs
daughter can be found in the short story of 19th century writer A.G.
Bruinses. In this short story, Jephthah is portrayed as a noble, selfless
hero, who was not foolish for making the vow to God, but instead was
humble and observant of his inability to conquer the Ammonites alone.
Jephthahs daughter is described as heroic as well, on account of her
honorable obedience.24 With Bruinses, we finally have a writer who is
going to take, straight on, one of the hardest questions that arises from
the story: if God is not interested in human sacrifice, why did he not
stop the murder? To this Bruinses responds, He could indeed have
done so, much as He can prevent every evil deed. But what would have
happened to human moral freedom? . . .. What God ordains is always
right.25 Biblical scholar Cornelis Houtman explains that this mix of
religious nationalism, emphasis on human responsibility and
submission to the will of the all-wise God is exemplary of devotional
writing during the enlightened Protestant period when Bruinses wrote.26
While YHWHs role in the story is, at least, somewhat accounted for,
it is still extremely difficult to see things from Bruinses point of view:
if God has ordained a murder, that does not make it justified. As
Houtman writes, In [Christian authors] thinking there is no room for
criticism of God, only for reverence and the recognition that the ways
of the Lord are mysterious and wonderful.27
Other examples of Christian devotional literature researched
mainly compare the sacrifice of Jephthahs daughter to the death of
Jesus of Nazareth on the cross. This not only ignores the pain and
pointless violence found in Judges 11, but also completely ignores the
separate context experienced by Jephthahs daughter and Jesus. A
comparison of these two deaths is unfair. Jesus death, at least in an
orthodox Christian mindset, served a concrete purpose: salvation of the
human race. The sacrifice of Jephthahs daughter, on the other hand,
was an ignorant act of violence that neither helped nor saved a single
person. Jesus came back from the dead, but Jephthahs daughter stayed
in the ground. Jesus lived in a time far different from the time of
Judges 11. There was a centralized government (though it was Roman,
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not Jewish), a centralized Jewish belief system, as well as a commonly

accepted written collection of sacred texts. None of these things were
present during the time of Jephthah.28 Having been frustrated by both
the rabbinic midrash and Christian devotional rewriting, we now look
to some feminist viewpoints for any answers they might provide.
Some Feminist Critiques
Feminist author Phyllis Trible is heralded for her pioneering
book Texts of Terror, which addresses the stories of several women
from the Old Testament who are, in some way, abused by the
patriarchal system. One of the chapters in her book focuses on the
daughter of Jephthah. Like Jewish midrash, Trible looks unfavorably
on the figure of Jephthah, and remarks with frustration that,
Throughout centuries patriarchal hermeneutics has forgotten the
daughter of Jephthah but remembered her father, indeed exalted him.29
Trible endeavors to show that the focus of Judges 11 needs to be moved
to the character of Jephthahs daughter. She comments on the absence
of God from the text, but as her main goal is to show how, From
beginning to end, this faithless and foolish vow has been the subject,30
she fails to address the problem of Gods role in the narrative.
Another feminist writer who tackles the text of Judges 11 is
Esther Fuchs. She is interested in the ambiguity present in the
narrative, and argues that the multiple silences and the lack of detail
present in the text are intentional. She suggests that their purpose is to
distract the reader from feeling sympathy for the daughter of Jephthah.31
She writes, Had Jephthahs daughter been shown to ask for pity, had
she asked to be spared, had she turned to Yahweh with a plea for mercy,
the narrative would have tipped the scales too much in her favor, so
much so that Jephthahs refusal to grant her freedom would have cast
both him and Yahweh in a questionable role.32 Though the main point
of Fuchs article deals with the literary components of Judges 11 and
shows how Jephthahs daughter is ignored, this quote finally starts to
uncover something missing in the text, namely, that there is no mention
of what goes on between YHWH and the daughter of Jephthah. In fact,
theres hardly any mention of God whatsoever, and this must be an
intentional move by the writer of Judges to distract us from the
complexities underneath the surface of the passage. As Miller points
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out, [T]he most active engagement the LORD has in the narrative is
to be the conveyor of the spirit,33 making it extremely easy to forget
that God altogether.
Personal Interpretation of Gods Absence
Gods absence in the text cannot mean that he approved of
Jephthahs vow, or the killing of an innocent womanthat would be
too contradictory to the explicit laws laid out in scripture, as well as to
the story of Abraham and Isaac. The writers intention was to make us
forget about Gods potential role in the story altogether. As Barbara
Miller writes, It appears that the narrator removes the LORD from the
scene to enhance the human tragedy that follows.34 The narrators
intention in the story does not explain the narratives entire
significance, however. We must delve deeper. When we do explore
Gods absence, we have two possible meanings to choose from. The
story could signify that He was incapable of stopping the act, or that He
was not willing to. If He was incapable, then we can excuse Him, and
choose to focus on the idiotic words and actions of Jephthah as so many
have before us (even though they did not, perhaps, consciously buy in
to the idea that God was not omnipotent). We can lament the fact that
Jephthah was not better versed in Jewish law and history, and that no
one chose to stand up to himnot even his daughterand then we can
leave the story alone. It makes the most sense, however, to believe that
the sacrifice of Jephthahs daughter occurred because YHWH was
unwilling to stop it. It is a painfully realistic perspective, given how
YHWH is described in the rest of the book of Judges: an all-powerful
God who punishes His people harshly when they do wrong, and yet
also frequently acts on their behalf in national/political conflicts. Why
should he be incapable of intervening in a smaller setting? He
shouldnt be. Did YHWH allow the sacrifice to teach Jephthah a
lesson, or to punish him, as the midrash suggests, then? We cannot
know the answer for sure, but logical reasoning follows that if God
punishes his people collectively throughout the book of Judges, he
would also punish them individually. This is upsetting. It paints a
picture of a God who many might now walk away from. Nevertheless,
perhaps for reasons unknown to the reader and perhaps even to the
writer of the text, YHWH refuses to get actively involved in protecting
Jepthahs daughter.
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Conclusion
The multitude of questions that flood a readers mind upon
exploring the text of Judges 11 are not easy to answer. They are
challenging, painful, upsetting. They can rock our understanding of
who God is, and how He interacts with creation. They must be
examined carefully. Who is to take the blame in this text of terror?
The blood of Jephthahs daughter stains not only on the hands of
Jephthah, but also the multiple hands of the religious community who
did nothing to stop him. And yes, even on the hands of YHWH,
Blessed Be He, the God to whom she was sacrificed.
Notes
1
Alicia Ostriker, Jephthahs Daughter: A Lament, in On the Cutting Edge:
The Study of Women in Biblical Worlds, eds. Jane Schaberg, Alice Bach and Esther
Fuchs (New York: Continuum 2003), 247.
2
See David Marcus, Jephthah and His Vow (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press,
1986), 5055, for the summary of his thesis that that the narrative of the death of
Jepthahs daughter should be read as a metaphor.
3
See Peggy L. Day, From the Child is Born the Woman: The Story of
Jephthahs Daughter, in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. Peggy L. Day
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 5874, for an extremely interesting comparison of
Greek goddess festivals and Jephthahs daughters time in the mountains with her
female companions.
4
Barbara Miller, Tell It on the Mountain: The Daughter of Jephthah in Judges
11, Interfaces (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2005), 18.
5
David Janzen, Why the Deuteronomist told about the sacrifice of Jephthah's
daughter, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29, no. 3 (2005): 340.
6
James D. Martin, The Book of Judges, The Cambridge Bible Commentary
on the New English Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1.
7
J. Clinton McCann, Judges, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for
Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2002), 910. Though there is
no room in this paper to delve deep into the issue, the idea of YHWH oppressing his
own people as a form of re-education/punishment is, in itself, extremely disturbing and
morally problematic.
8
See Adrien Janis Bledstein, Is Judges a Womans Satire on Men who Play
God? in The Feminist Companion to Judges, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 1993) 3454, for an extremely interesting, different look at
the authorship of Judges.
9
Miller, Tell It on the Mountain, 2.
10
Ibid., 14.
11
Ibid., 3.
12
Ibid., 6. See Leviticus 18:21; 20:25, Genesis 22 (the story of Abraham and
Isaac); Jeremiah 32:25

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13

Janzen, 345.
Shulamit Valler, The Story of Jephthahs Daughter in the Midrash, in
Judges: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, Second Series, ed. Athalya Brenner
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 49.
15
Ibid., 57.
16
Ibid., 56.
17
Implied in Janzen, 341.
18
Valler, The Story of Jephthahs Daughter in the Midrash, 57.
19
Miller,Tell It on the Mountain, 98.
20
Valler, The Story of Jephthahs Daughter in the Midrash, 54.
21
Ibid., 54.
22
William E. Mann, Augustine on evil and original sin in The Cambridge
Companion to Augustine, eds. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzman, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 2001, 4048.
23
Elisheva Baumgarten, Remember that glorious girl: Jephthahs Daughter
in Medieval Jewish Culture, Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 2 (Spring 2007), 187.
24
Cornelis Houtman, Rewriting a dramatic Old Testament story: the story
of Jephthah and his daughter in some examples of Christian devotional literature,
Biblical Interpretation 13, no. 2 (2005): 171.
25
Bruinses, as qtd. in Houtman, 174.
26
Ibid., 175.
27
Ibid., 189.
28
See K. Lawson Younger Jr., Judges and Ruth, The NIV Application
Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 267270, for an example of such
devotional writing.
29
Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical
Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 107.
30
Ibid., 106.
31
Esther Fuchs, Marginalization, Ambiguity, Silencing: The Story of
Jephthahs Daughter, in A Feminist Companion to Judges, 116130.
32
Ibid., 126, emphasis mine.
33
Miller, Tell It on the Mountain, 21.
34
Ibid.
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