Did Jephthah Kill His Daughter?

by Stuart DiNenno

Did Jephthah offer his daughter in a human sacrifice to God (Judges 11:30-40)?

I say no for the following reasons:

— Both murder and human sacrifice were strictly forbidden by the law of Moses.

— A vow to God to do something unlawful is not a valid vow. It would have been null as soon as it came out of his lips and all his Israelite neighbors would have informed Jephthah of that.

— I don’t believe that Paul would have named Jephthah in Hebrews 11:32 as one of the heroes of faith if he had been both a murderer and a practitioner of human sacrifice.

— The plan to sacrifice her would have been known to many people in advance, since his daughter was said to be mourning her virginity with her friends for two months after Jephthah made his vow. It seems extremely unlikely that all his Israelite neighbors knew that he was going to murder his daughter and make a human sacrifice to God, and instead of intervening or spiriting her away somewhere, they silently acquiesced to the plan.

— I’m sure that a young woman would bewail much more than just her virginity, if she was about to be slaughtered like an animal by her own father.

— The daughter would have been complicit in her own killing. It’s clear that she made no attempt to escape and no plea to her father to be spared, so it would have been a suicide on her part and she would have been a willing accomplice in human sacrifice to God. It requires believing that both Jephthah and her daughter were very wicked people, but Christian charity requires us to think the best of people when circumstances are unclear.

— Jephthah, being an Israelite, would have known that any offering to God required a Levitical priest to perform it at the Tabernacle, and not even the most corrupt priest would have been willing to kill a daughter of Israel and offer her as a human sacrifice to Jehovah.

What actually became of the daughter, I don’t know. Some speculate that she became a dedicated servant of the Tabernacle like Anna was later in the Temple (Luke 2:36-37). Whatever the case, I believe she “surely became the LORD’S” according to Jephthah’s vow in Judges 11:30-31, but I don’t believe that she was “offered up for a burnt sacrifice” like a sheep or a goat.