Sacrifice Controversy
Since the 18th century, some scholars have questioned the traditional interpretation of Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter. Alternative views of the events have been proposed claiming mistranslations or comparing the sacrifice to other biblical events and given the contradiction in the moral message, seeking a more poetic interpretation.
A modern commentator, Solomon Landers, believes that a plausible alternative is that Jephthah's vow was most likely modified and that she was not in fact sacrificed, but rather, her fate may have been perpetual virginity or solitary confinement. This saving of Iphis also occurs in Handel's 1751 oratorio, Jephtha. This story stands in stark contrast to the Binding of Isaac in Genesis, where an angel of God directly intervenes and stops the sacrifice.
Ethelbert William Bullinger, looks at the word "and" in the Jephthah's vow (Judges 11:31: "whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the people of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord's, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering"). As he explains the Hebrew prefix "ו" that is translated in the above passage as "and" is often used as a disjunctive, and means "or", when there is a second proposition. Indeed this rendering is suggested in the margin of the A.V. Bullinger goes on to give examples from the Bible where the same word has been translated as "or". According to him, the right translation of this passage is: "whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the people of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord's, or I will offer it up as a burnt offering." Jephthah's daughter, being the first that came out of the house, was thus, according to Bullinger, dedicated to God. He also says: "In any case, it should have been unlawful, and repugnant to Jehovah, to offer a human being to Him as a burnt-offering, for His acceptance. Such offerings were common to heathen nations at that time, but it is noteworthy that Israel stands out among them with this great peculiarity, that human sacrifices were unknown in Israel."
This interpretation is disputed by, for example, the Catholic Encyclopaedia, noting that the Israelites of the time were decidedly barbarous; that Mosaic law (which forbade human sacrifice) was at this time widely disrespected; and that there are several other examples of rash vows to God with similarly terrible consequences.
Adam Clarke's Commentary has an exposition of the issues at stake in this passage and contends that the vow Jephthah made was not as rash as it sounds.
Read more about this topic: Jephthah
Famous quotes containing the words sacrifice and/or controversy:
“He who strays from the customary becomes a sacrifice to the extraordinary; he who keeps to the customary becomes its slave. He is condemned to perish in either case.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)