Jephthah went with the elders of Gilead, and the people made him head and chief over them.- Jdg_11:11.
1. Jephthah had an infamous origin. He was the son of one who is spoken of as Gilead, and whom we may suppose to have been the prince or leading man of the country, and therefore by name identified with it. His mother was a “stranger,” or “another woman,” an Aramæan harlot; and this child of shame was cast out by those born in wedlock. His irregular birth in the half-civilized tribes beyond the Jordan is the key-note to his life.
2. Driven from home, he betook himself to a wild, marauding life on the borders of the tribe, where he became a sort of robber chieftain, the head of a band of freebooters, “levying imposts on weak Ammonites, plundering caravans, and surprising villages, as did the Arabs of those and later days,” and the Scottish Border chiefs three centuries ago. By this sort of border-chieftain life Jephthah became expert in the tactics of warfare, and in the art of leading and governing men. He was prompt in an emergency, bold in generalship, astute in policy. He was a born organizer, and out of the broken men, the thieves and outlaws that gathered to his standard, he made such an army of soldiers that one at once thinks of Cromwell and his irresistible Ironsides.
“Your troops,” Cromwell said to Hampden, “are most of them decayed old serving men, and tapsters, and such kind of fellows; do you think that such base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them?” And so, knowing that the quality of the unit was the quality of the aggregate, Cromwell insisted that every man should submit to discipline, and be sober, and live in the fear of God; for he that feareth God need know no other fear. And it was with great pride that he wrote, “My troops increase. I have a lovely company. You would respect them did you know them.”1 [Note: Samuel Horton.]
3. Meanwhile the great crisis of Jephthah's life had come. The Israelites were in sore straits from the children of Ammon. There was a great national emergency which needed an intrepid hero, and the thoughts of men turned instinctively to Jephthah. The elders of Gilead begged him to be their leader; and, after expressing surprise that such a request should be made to him, Jephthah agreed, on condition that he should become their chief when the Ammonites were defeated. A solemn compact was accordingly made, and Jephthah was appointed leader by popular acclamation. He knew himself equal to the task; but, once committed, he was filled with a profoundly religious sense of the importance and responsibility of the enterprise, and of his dependence for its successful achievement upon the favour and assistance of Heaven. In no spirit of vain confidence or self-reliance, but with a deep conviction of his personal insufficiency, apart from Divine help and guidance-in the spirit of one alert to the call of duty, and strong in the heroism of faith-did he undertake the campaign. This is the moment when, in the eyes of the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, he loomed so grandly as to be worthy of a place in the sacred roll of fame. Jephthah was at first called by the people to his office and work; but God ratified the choice by giving to him His Spirit in an extraordinary manner.
It was for this earnestness in his ascertained mission, it was because in execution of it “he waxed mighty in war, turned to flight armies of aliens,” that God accepted Jephthah. His rash and unhallowed vow, the no less rash and unhallowed performance of it which issued in the death of his daughter, his haughty and remorseless temper, were doubtless offensive in God's sight. But for these he found pardon, because, like St. Paul, he sinned in ignorance. In the chief trial of his life he found acceptance, because he displayed faithful obedience.
Of all the men who fought against the Union, General Jackson possessed the most extraordinary characteristics. With him the cause of the South was a religion. Every act of his life was undertaken with prayer; he was a Confederate Puritan. Had the cause of the Confederacy been just and right, it might have had a dozen Stonewall Jacksons.
And the result? The world remembers that so long as Jackson lived the Confederacy seemed invincible. “Who may pretend to explain the incongruity of man?” remarks the historian Rhodes, in his final comment on General Jackson. “Both the conscientious Jackson and Barère, the man without a conscience, believed in waging war like barbarians. During the wars of the Revolution the Frenchman proposed to the Convention that no English or Hanoverian prisoners be taken. ‘I always thought,' declared Jackson, that ‘we ought to meet the Federal invaders on the outer verge of just right and defence, and raise at once the black flag, viz., “No quarter to the violators of our homes and firesides.” It would, in the end, have proved true humanity and mercy. The Bible is full of such wars, and it is the only policy that would bring the North to its senses.' ”1 [Note: F. N. Thorpe, The History of North America, 312.]
4. At this moment, it would seem, when Jephthah was at Mizpah of Gilead, he went to the holy place or altar, and there, “before Jehovah,” registered a vow to sacrifice whomsoever should be the first to meet him when he returned victorious. That he had a human victim in his mind is clear from the language which he used. We must consider the vow separately and carefully, but let us continue the history at present.
In his dealing with the Ammonites Jephthah appears as a man of courage and dash, and an eager champion of Jehovah, whom he regarded apparently as only the national God of Israel, as Chemosh was the divinity of his enemies. He, attempted expostulation with the Ammonites before taking up the sword. The latter asserted that the Israelites, when they came up from Egypt, had taken away their land from Arnon to Jabbok. Jephthah reminded them (1) that neither Moab nor Ammon had allowed Israel even to pass their borders when they were marching on Palestine; (2) that the territory in question had been taken, not from Ammon, but from Sihon, king of the Amorites; (3) that no complaint had been raised for three hundred years against the Israelite occupation. The conclusion was that Ammon ought to be content with what Chemosh their god had given them, and if they were not, then “Jehovah be judge this day.”
The Ammonites remained obdurate to these historical arguments, and Jephthah boldly led his army southwards to attack them on their own ground. No details of that bloody war are given; we are told merely that he smote the enemy from Aroer, close to Jordan, to Minnith, sacking twenty cities, and sweeping the region as far as a place which cannot now be identified, but was then called Abel-Cheramim-the meadow of the vineyards-“with a very great slaughter.” The triumph was complete; “the children of Ammon were subdued before the children of Israel.”
5. Jephthah returned in triumph to his home at Mizpah. The first person who came to meet him was his only daughter, accompanied by a chorus of women. The overwhelming grief of the father, the noble self-surrender of the daughter, and her courageous resignation to her fate, are told with admirable skill and reserve. “He did to her what he had vowed to do.” It became henceforth a custom in Israel to celebrate the tragedy of Jephthah's daughter by four days' mourning every year.
In all poetry-all at least that I have seen-nothing comes up to that. “She was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter.” The inspired writer leaves the fact just as it stands, and is content. Inspiration itself can do nothing to make it more touching than it is in its own bare nakedness. There is no thought in Jephthah of recantation, nor in the maiden of revolt, but nevertheless he has his own sorrow. He is brought very low. God does not rebuke him for his grief. He knows well enough the nature which He took upon Himself. He does not anywhere, therefore, forbid that we should even break our hearts over those we love and lose.… He elected Jephthah to the agony he endured while she was away on the hills! That is God's election, an election to the cross and to the cry, “Eli, Eli, lama Sabachthani.” “Yes,” you will say, “but He elected him to the victory over Ammon.” Doubtless He did; but what cared Jephthah for his victory over Ammon when she came to meet him, or indeed for the rest of his life? What is a victory, what are triumphal arches and the praise of all creation, to a lonely ?Man_1:1 [Note: Mark Rutherford, The Revolution in Tanner's Lane.]
Since our country, our God,-oh, my sire!
Demand that thy daughter expire;
Since thy triumph was bought by thy vow-
Strike the bosom that's bared for thee now!
And the voice of my mourning is o'er,
And the mountains behold me no more;
If the hand that I love lay me low!
There cannot be pain in the blow!
And of this, oh, my father! be sure-
That the blood of thy child is as pure
As the blessing I beg ere it flow,
And the last thought that soothes me below.
Though the virgins of Salem lament,
Be the judge and the hero unbent!
I have won the great battle for thee,
And my father and country are free!
When this blood of thy giving hath gush'd,
When the voice that thou lovest is hush'd,
Let my memory still be thy pride,
And forget not I smiled as I died!1 [Note: Byron, Hebrew Melodies.]
