JEPHTHAH jĕf’ thə (יִפְתָּ֥ח, he opens; LXX and NT ̓Ιεφθάε, G2650). KJV JEPHTHAE (Heb 11:32). Gileadite warrior, who as a judge delivered Israel from the Ammonites, sacrificed his daughter to fulfill his vow to God, and defeated the Ephraimites (Judg 11:1-12:7).

1. Name. The Heb. (or W Sem.) name Jephthah (יִפְתָּ֥ח) also appears as a place name, Iphtah (Josh 15:43). It is a hypocorism of the longer, theophoric names such as ypth-’l and ypth-hd (“the god El opens” or “the god Hadd opens”). In fact the “valley of Iphtahel” (Josh 19:14, 27) is a valley on the border between Zebulun and Asher, prob. the modern Wadi el-Melek NW of Nazareth. The significance of the verb is either that the god mentioned opens the womb or that he frees captives.

2. The Ammonite oppression. The pattern of the episodes in the Book of Judges is cyclical. The people of Israel lapsed into idolatry and disobedience of God’s commands. God punished them by surrendering them to one of the surrounding nations who oppressed them. In their misery, the Israelites repented of their apostasy and cried out for forgiveness and deliverance. God sent a leader (called a “judge”) through whom He gave victory over the enemy oppressor.

The background of the Jephthah story, therefore, is an Israelite lapse followed by oppression from the Ammonites (Judg 10:6-9). The duration of the Ammonite oppression was eighteen years (10:8). It consisted of two phases. First, the Ammonites exerted direct and sustained pressure on the Israelites settled in Gilead to the E of the Jordan, in the land formerly controlled by the two Amorite kings—Og, king of Bashan, and Sihon, king of Heshbon (Deut 2; 3). Second, Ammonite raiding parties crossed over the Jordan to plunder and harass settlements in the territories of Ephraim, Benjamin, and Judah (Judg 10:9). This twofold campaign caused intense suffering and misery among the Israelites, who confessed forsaking Yahweh to serve the local Baals (10:10, 15) and removed the idols of foreign gods from their midst to show their sincere determination to return to the God of their fathers (10:16).

3. Jephthah the judge. Jephthah was the son of a man named Gilead. Some scholars have supposed that the real name of his father was unknown, so he was reputed to be the son of an eponymous hero who had given his name to the territory of Gilead. But since Gilead (gl’d) occurs as the name of an ordinary citizen in Ugaritic tablets from c. 1250 b.c., only a cent. before Jephthah, it seems unreasonable to refuse the possibility that a real man named Gilead was Jephthah’s father, regardless of the relationship of that man with the place name Gilead. Jephthah’s mother was a harlot, for which the word used is Heb. zonā. Some have considered her to have been a temple prostitute, but the word for this is qedesha. The LXX renders it gyne porne “(common) harlot.” Because he was not born of Gilead’s legitimate wife, Jephthah was excluded from his father’s inheritance by his half-brothers (11:1, 2). To make a living, Jephthah gathered a group of comrades in arms and formed a robber band, which operated out of Tob on the Euphrates to the NE of Ramoth-gilead. When the Ammonite crisis arose, the leaders (Heb. sarīm, 10:18) of Gilead, also called “elders” (ziqnē Gil’ad, LXX presbyteroi), traveled to the land of Tob to secure the services of the robber baron against the Ammonites. The elders offered to make him their temporary “leader” (Heb. qasīn) in battle against the Ammonites and following the successful defeat of the enemy their permanent chieftain (Heb. rōsh). The contract was solemnly entered at Mizpah, accompanied by the exchange of oaths (11:9-11). The term “judge” (Heb. shōfet) was employed by neither of the two parties. It was applied to him in retrospect by the inspired author-editor of Judges, who saw Jephthah as a member of the larger group of “judges” whose stories are told in this book.

4. Jephthah defeats the Ammonites. In Judges 11:12-28 is recorded an exchange of indictments between Jephthah and the Ammonite chief much in the spirit of the charges and counter-charges exchanged before battle by later kings (Abijah and Jeroboam 1 in 2 Chron 13:2-20; Amaziah and Jehoash, in 2 Kings 14:8ff. and 2 Chron 25:17; cf. also the exchange of challenges before battle in 1 Sam 17:41ff.). Some scholars insist that this is unhistorical and the adornment of a Deuteronomic editor, apparently unaware that such indictments were exchanged through envoys before most battles in the ancient Near E (cf. many examples in the Annals of the Hitt. King Mursili II). Indeed, in modern times, no nation goes to war before first attempting to seek redress of wrongs through diplomatic channels. Other scholars judge this section (Judg 11:12-28) irrelevant to the Jephthah story, since it deals with Israel’s seizure of the land from the Amorites and the Moabites, not the Ammonites. They also point to Jephthah’s identification of his enemy’s god as Chemosh (11:24), who was the national god of Moab, whereas Ammon’s god was Milcom. But Jephthah recounted the story of the Israelite conquest, singling out Moab and the Amorites, because the Ammonites had accused Israel of taking their land when they took the territory of Gilead. Jephthah’s reply was to point out that Israel took it from the Amorites (Og and Sihon), and not from either Ammon or Moab. His second argument was that a people should keep what its god gives to it. The mention of Chemosh (LXX Khamōs) may be explicable in that Ammonites and Moabites venerated one another’s gods, as was often the practice in polytheistic societies.

When negotiation failed (11:28), the case was submitted to a trial by battle. God would decide the case by granting victory to the party in the right (11:27). Jephthah apparently did not feel sufficiently secure in the knowledge of the justness of his people’s cause. He made a vow that, if Yahweh would grant him victory over the Ammonites, he would make a human sacrifice to God of whoever came forth from the doors of his house to meet him (11:31). Because of Jephthah’s consternation (11:35) when his daughter came forth to meet him, some have supposed that he anticipated an animal. But an ordinary sacrificial animal (ox, sheep, goat) would hardly come forth to meet him from his own house. A pet dog would hardly have been an acceptable sacrifice to any god. The entire context rather suggests that he contemplated human sacrifice from the beginning. The battle took place near Mizpah of Gilead and was a total victory for Jephthah (11:32, 33).

5. Jephthah sacrifices his daughter. The daughter who came to meet Jephthah on his return (cf. Miriam in Exod 15:20, 21, and the women in 1 Sam 18:6, 7) was his only child (11:34). Perhaps he had hoped that a slave would greet him. But despite his grief (11:35) he was determined to keep his promise to God, perhaps still hoping that God would spare the child at the last moment, as with Abraham (Gen 22). The girl (like Isaac in Gen 22) was calm and full of faith (Judg 11:36), only asking that she be permitted a final farewell to life with her friends (11:37). And thus was born the custom in Israel of an annual pilgrimage of Israelite girls to lament the daughter of Jephthah (11:39, 40) for four days (cf. Judg 21:19f. for another such annual convocation of virgins). Some scholars believe that the annual four-day lamentation for Jephthah’s daughter masks a heathen rite, in which women wept for the vegetation god Tammuz (cf. Ezek 8:14) or his Canaanite counterpart Baal, fearing the perpetual “virginity” (i.e., barrenness) of “Mother Earth.” Because the season of the year of this four-day ritual is not given here, this conjecture cannot be verified.

6. Jephthah and the Ephraimites. The Ammonites during their period of harassment had raided Ephraimite territory to the W of Jordan (Judg 10:9). Jephthah had not recruited in Ephraim (12:1; cf. 11:29), apparently feeling more secure with troops from his own country, perhaps many of them members of his robber band. Indeed Jephthah says that he did call upon Ephraimites (12:2), although stressing at the same time that feud with the Ammonites was his and his people’s. The entire provocation may have grown out of a long-standing hostility felt by the Ephraimites W of Jordan and the Gileadites to the E, the former sarcastically labeling the latter as “fugitives from Ephraim.” The fighting broke out to the E of Jordan and soon went badly for the Ephraimites. When many attempted to flee across the Jordan to safety, they were put to a linguistic test by the Gileadite guards at the fording places. Since the two dialects of Heb. treated the sibilant in the word shibboleth differently, it was a simple matter for the Gileadite guards to detect Ephraimites (12:5, 6). Forty-two thousand Ephraimites failed the test and were slain.

Jephthah emerges from these chs. as a man of faith (Heb 11:32), who overcame the disadvantages of his disreputable birth, was chosen by God and his people in their hour of need, led God’s people to victory over the Ammonite foe, and secured them against further threat from that quarter until the days of Saul. He was firm with himself, refusing to hold back his only child from God. As such he was long remembered in Israel (1 Sam 12:11) and in the early Christian communities (Heb 11:32). When judged by the standards of the Christian community of the 20th cent., Jephthah may appear crude, insensitive, and bloodthirsty. But the Spirit of God saw fit to use him (Judg 11:29), and the Word of God honors him.

Bibliography G. F. Moore, Judges, ICC (1895), 275-310; M. Noth, Die israelitischen Personnamen (1928), 28, 29, 179, 200; C. F. Burney, Judges (1930), 293-334; H. Lewy, Orientalia, IX (1940), 262ff.; H. H. Rowley, BASOR, LXXXV (1942), 28ff.; A. Alt, Kleine Schriften, I (n.d.), 190f.; C. A. Simpson, Composition of the Book of Judges (1957), 45-53, 99, 100, 112, 113, 128, 129, 142-145; Y. Kaufmann, Sefer Shōfetīm (Heb., 1962), 217ff.; C. H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook (1965), 471, glossary entry 2130; A. E. Cundall, Judges, Tyndale OT Commentaries (1968), 137ff.