40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Judges 11:12-40 (Episode 210)

Episode Date: April 4, 2020

Jephthah sends messengers to the king of Ammonites, who it turns out is not interested in peace or a history lesson. Jephthah makes an ill-advised vow to God before going into battle and then tragically fulfills it. Does God approve of this vow? Does Jephthah actually do what it seems to say he does? Where is Christ in all of this? Chad and Daniel spend eight extra minutes discussing all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 podcast, network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. check out all the other podcasts that are living over there chad it has been a couple of weeks uh almost almost a month since you and i have got on the microphones people don't realize this because the episodes have been coming out but we had a ton of travel that we were going to be doing i say going to be so we had got out ahead because we we were not going to be able to record and uh turns out that we would have had just plenty of time to record because all of those

events that we had been pushing and you would be like i haven't heard you pushing events well that's because i had to edit those events all out of those those podcasts but you might have been wondering as you listen to the podcast man these guys have decided that they are going to ignore what is going on entirely they know they're not they don't sound like they're phased one bit do they even they are they even aware this is going on well we are living in a cave somewhere yes uh so chad uh this is the first episode recording during the great quarantine of 2020 and uh yeah so we we are aware uh we are we are practicing all me and chad are very distant right now we're practicing all the all the safe things so we're aware uh and you know hopefully

you know the the as we we've been trying to come up with uh more content for you guys to to watch or listen to while you're while you're shut up in your house so how are you holding up chad in the in the quarantine well i i'm all right uh you know i i work from home so uh most of the time i'm here anyway but uh i do go places you know like church on sunday i go to the gym about three times a week So I do get out of the house. So it's been a, it's been an adjustment for me, but not quite the same as for, as for other people. And, uh, my wife is home now since her, uh, her office closed down. So she's been here for a week, 10 days. So it's been bigger adjustment for her. Needless to say, our house is extremely clean and organized. that's what she's been doing to keep herself busy yes i yeah it's uh this has been harder on my wife than me as well i mean i'm used to being by myself all day uh so in a lot of ways i have more people around me than i usually do uh that my wife and daughter are both home uh all day every day so

that's not normal usually from you know eight o'clock in the morning till four o'clock in the afternoon it's just me so so i'm i'm fairly used to that but even for a guy who is completely used of that you're right like i do go do stuff and uh and it is weird that i'm like i haven't seen anybody but those people you know apart from on screens in weeks now so it's it's definitely that part even for a guy like me i'm a little bit like you know i'm ready to hang out with somebody at some point yeah i want to go get some mexican food yeah yeah have a drink somewhere or something yeah we're actually actually recording this um on my on my anniversary uh so uh 13 years today not with not the day this releases but they were recording 13 years and uh i got this morning i was

like well i don't know maybe we'll get takeout or something i don't know it's gonna be a cheap anniversary not not not a lot of things we can do here yeah yeah i hear you yeah i've been trying to take advantage of the unplanned extra time because i you know like everybody had a ton of events canceled and i time bracketed to prepare for those so i'm putting out about a video a week i've done uh two or three of those so far done another one this week either later today or tomorrow on palm sunday so check those out on the 1517 uh facebook page or 1517 youtube channel and you guys have been doing a bunch of stuff too yeah yeah formula concord yeah so uh eric sorenson and uh dr scott keith and myself have done a series of videos by the time this releases

i believe they'll all be out um it's 13 uh 13 videos uh where we just walk through uh the entire epitome uh which is the the formula of concord yeah we go through the whole thing just talking about the different articles each video we talk about a different article uh we do an introduction we talk about the the controversies which is basically how the formula works it's all addressing different controversies uh but uh yeah so we we recorded they're about they're between 25 and 35 minutes long each and those are all up on the 1517 youtube channel so uh we we released one every day for for two weeks and so if you're uh if you're interested in that uh go over there in fact if you if you've never been to the the 1517 youtube channel go ahead and go

over there and you should subscribe to that and ring the bell over there because all the video content that we release even if we release it in other places it all lives there so like everything that we do ends up there and it's a good way to make sure that you don't miss any of it uh and there might there might be content there that you don't that you don't know about you didn't see before and if you're just you know looking for different things to watch and that sort of thing there's a there's a ton there i mean all our every conference every city event that we've ever done all those videos are there and then special stuff like the stuff that you're doing and the stuff that we're doing now it's all there so i'll put a link in the show notes to the the channel but

if you just go to youtube and search 1517 it's the first thing that pops up so well all right man well we we left uh we left off in a in a strange spot we had to think about where we left off because it's been a minute and uh we left off maybe we were just avoiding this chad maybe that's what it was yeah i think this must have been what it was this is this this is not a section that anyone uh wants to talk about let me let me put it this way this is not a section usually that your pastor will pick no everybody avoids this uh like the plague sorry for the pun but it is true yeah i don't think i've ever heard a sermon preached on judge 11 the story of jephthah i mean i'm sure somebody has but i've never i've never heard it because i mean it's just

it's hard. It's hard not only because the story is hard, but because there are some ambiguities in here, which we will get to. What we're alluding to is the vow that Jephthah makes with regard to sacrificing as a whole burnt offering, whatever or whoever comes out of his door when he returns from a victory over his enemies. So if you're not familiar with Judge 11 that's what the latter half of the chapter is about so that's we're going to get to that in just a minute but that's uh that's kind of what we're facing today yeah yep and we will answer all your questions uh we're gonna we're coming with so much certainty yeah there'll be no more ambiguity after we after we discuss this now what i plan to do uh is to kind of go through

some pros and cons about various interpretations just kind of you know give people a an idea about I don't want to present it as like, yeah, I've got the answer, but rather to just kind of, you know, weigh things as to the various arguments. Because I think there are legitimate arguments on either side of an understanding of what this is all about. Yep. Okay, we'll get to that in a minute. That starts in verse 29, but we are starting in verse 12 because, of course, that is where we left off last time. We were introduced to this guy named Jephthah in sort of the latter half of chapter 10, at least kind of sets the context for him.

And then the first 11 verses of chapter 11 of Judges are where we are really introduced to who he is. So he is from the area of Gilead, says he's a valiant warrior, but he has a bit of a problem with his pedigree, at least a problem from the perspective of his family, and that he was the son of a prostitute. So he grows up evidently in the household of his father, but when he gets a little bit older, his half-brothers run him off, saying, yeah, you're not going to have any inheritance with us. So he goes and lives in this place called Tov, which in Hebrew means good, and he surrounds himself with a bunch of worthless fellows and i'm guessing that they were just kind

of a marauding band of you know doing whatever they did robbing people uh pillaging who knows but through this all he got to be yeah pretty pretty military kind of uh leader he had a reputation. He had some street cred, we might say. So when his family, his people, actually faced the Ammonites, who did they go to but the guy that they had run off? And so Jephthah, realizing he has an opportunity here, he kind of negotiates a better contract than what they offered. They first offered, hey, we'll make you, you know, like sort of our chief. And he's like, no, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it right. So you're going to make me the head of all the inhabitants of Gilead, you know, whatever you want to call that, whether that's

like the mayor of the city or the kind of the city king or whatever it might be, he's going to be top dog. And so they say, yes. So that's kind of where we're left off. They make him head over the Gileadites, and they swear this vow, making everything official. Now, verse 12. Now Jephthah is going to really do his first duty as the leader of his people. And actually, you know, you got, despite what we hear from the latter half of Jephthah's life, at this point, he seems to actually have a pretty good head on his shoulders. At least the way that he approaches this particular the conflict with the ammonites indicates that you know he's not a dummy he's a man of intelligence he uh is is well spoken he can present a logical argument even though he messes up in a couple of

places just as far as some factual information we're going to read through what he's going to have his emissaries tell the king of the ammonites yeah it reads like it's a it's a very good way of approaching this from a rhetorical and political perspective. So basically, he's trying to avoid a conflict with the Ammonites by a presentation of what he thinks are logical arguments and historical arguments. So here's how it starts out. He doesn't go himself, but he gets some messengers together, and he sends them to the king of Ammon and says, what is this between you and me that you've come to me to fight against my land and the king responds he so he sends this message back to Jephthah through his messengers and he makes

this accusation he says because Israel took away my land when they came up from Egypt from the Arnon as far as the Jabbok so those are two rivers the Arnon river the Jabbok river and the Jordan therefore return them peaceably now well there's a bit of a problem here because Israel never took that land from the Ammonites because it didn't belong to the Ammonites so I don't know I mean it it's hard to tell at this point I mean did the king of Ammon just I mean this was a long time ago this was like probably two or three centuries prior to what's happening now so was he just like did he like get a d in history his history class so he was confused about you know or get a f in geography and he didn't quite understand which land was

his by ancestral right but either way it wasn't because it belonged not to the ammonites but to the amorites and israel did take it from the amorites but only after the amorites rebelled against them attacked them and israel defeated them so he says israel took away this land that belonged to us but that's the problem it never did so israel didn't take it away from you so so you're wrong let's that that's the first exchange anyway yeah this is this is what happens when you have just all these like warring factions and like a you know in a relatively small place i mean it's not as though we don't have any uh modern day examples of people fighting over land trying to figure out like never happens what what like in the middle east what belongs to who

uh this this rage is on forever i mean who knows maybe maybe that land belonged to them a thousand years ago and then these people took it from them and then they attacked israel and then israel took it from them and maybe he's saying look if you go far enough back dude this was ours yeah yeah who knows right who knows well that it but that is the way i mean of course that's the way it works when you don't have any well-defined uh geographical boundaries and of course back then they weren't conducting surveys they weren't building walls at least not in this part of the world usually at this time the way that they determined and it was if there was a definitive way to determine okay my land stops there and yours starts there it was by some kind

of natural feature of the land mountain ranges was one of course and rivers or a sea i mean those were easy ways to be like okay my property goes to the arnon river and then your property begins on the other side of the arnon river that's easy or israel's eastern border is the jordan river and then after that belongs to other people i mean these were easy ways to determine where one person's land began and one person's land ended but if you can kind of picture in your head a map of this this region this is happening east of the Jordan River and there are a couple of kind of east and west flowing rivers a couple of them are mentioned here the Arnon and the Jabbok but there's not once you go a little bit farther east there's not a whole lot of

of geographical features that you can use to plot these borders between lands but that being said at least when Israel came up from Egypt we know from the historical record that they did not take the Ammonites land from them in fact we know from the historical record that they purposely avoided the Ammonites because the Ammonites if you remember were the descendants of the incestuous union between lot and one of his daughters so one of one of them was was moab and then one of them was was was named ben ami which means son of my father and from the ben ami came the the ammonites and we have god saying to his people israel hey i gave the ammonites their land leave them alone and that's going to be their that's going to be their possession and

Israel did. They didn't try and take the Ammonites' land from them. But two, three hundred years later, along comes the king of Ammon saying, oh yes, you did, and give it back or else. All right, well, that was just the first exchange. That didn't go so well, obviously. So Jephthah, verse 14, says, well, okay, let's try this again. I'm going to send a longer message this time, and I won't read the whole thing to you because it's quite long. It begins at verse 15, and it ends all the way at uh, goodness, verse 27. So it's a long speech that, that Jephthah puts in the mouths of his emissaries. And what he does basically is trace the history of his people. It's actually a, it's a very interesting section to, to read through item by item, because you can kind of

relive, if you will, the journey of the Israelites. He starts out by saying, we didn't take the land away from Moab nor for the sons of Ammon because listen we came out of Egypt yes and we wanted to go through Edom it would have been easier it's like the shortest possible way to go

but we went to Edom and the Edomites the king of Edom was like nope not going to happen so we had to like go all the way around the land of Moab and same thing happened with Edom same thing happened with Moab but we went all the way around these

two countries in order to avoid conflict we didn't like we didn't want to have a fight before we got to our own land we were actually trying to engage these people peacefully they didn't want to so we went around their land and then we get and then we get to uh the place that belongs to to Sihon king of the Amorites and we said the same thing hey can we just pass through your land but the problem was that Sihon is like not only did he say no he attacked us I mean it would have been one thing to say no we would have gone around him but he said no and then he attacked us and so you know we we beat him we went to war with him and we defeated the Amorites and we took that property away from them so this is Jephthah kind of going through the history of what actually

happened when he's addressing the the king of amman i will say that uh jeff was saying that they they left egypt and took the long way around it might be like the understatement of the of the century that's a lot to get warmed up they went in circles for about four decades listen man we didn't make a straight line to anywhere yeah yeah yeah there was no straight He lied for the Israelites, those poor people going in circles for years and years and years. Yeah. And then when they finally, it's like, when God finally says, okay, go back, they can't take the long way around. They got to take the loop.

They can't go through downtown. So then he picks up, he says, that God gave us this land. And then this is where he kind of makes a mistake in verse 24. He says, he's speaking again through his emissaries to the King of the, of the ammonites and he says do you not possess what kamosh your god gives you to possess so whatever the lord our god is driven out before us we will possess it well here's the problem uh how do you want to say that name kamosh or chemosh or i don't know how we would pronounce it in english but that wasn't the god of the ammonites the god of the ammonites was milcon so i who knows

maybe Jephthah was just a little bit confused about which God belonged to which particular people. But his point is, apart from that factual mistake, his point is, listen, the way this works in the Near East is your land is whatever your God has given to you. Now, we can, of course, quarrel with Jephthah with the fact that, hey, it wasn't commotion. It wasn't Milcom. It was the Lord. It was Yahweh who gave this land to the Ammonites. So he messes up in a couple of different ways theologically as well as factually but the point he's trying to make from a political perspective is listen egypt has their land because their egyptian gods gave it to them the moabites have their land because their moabite god gave it to them so you your god gave you your land you

ought to be happy with that and the land that we have is the land that our lord has given to to us and then when he finishes this all up by reference to moab and then says in verse 26 more or less why in the world did you wait so long it says look israel has been living in these villages on the banks of the arnon not not for three years not for 30 years but for 300 years so why did you not recover them within that time i mean this is just like a preposterous uh request or threat that you're making you've had all of this time and all of your predecessors had all this time to make these claims saying hey this is our land and give it back and nobody did we've been living there for uh for you know for three three hundred years and and this this never

happened. So after saying all that, he finishes it this way. He says, I therefore have not sinned against you, but you are doing me wrong by making war against me. May the Lord, the judge, judge today between the Israelites and the Ammonites. And I find verse 28 a little bit humorous. You know, he goes to all this trouble crafting this argument, making sure his emissaries get it just right and then here's the response to the king of the ammonites he just disregarded the message that jeff just sent him it's like rip the message up throw it away he wasn't interested in any kind of argumentation he just wanted land right yeah he's not yeah he's not interested in the history lesson he's yeah all he's looking for is uh his property he wants to expand his territory

and he's going to do that in any way that he deems fit so anyway that kind of that sets up the whole scenario for uh what is about about to follow so this is obviously not going to work so what what's going to happen well as it usually happens they're going to go to war now it it starts out here seemingly this section starts out here seemingly good i mean it's going to be the same language we've heard about Othniel and Gideon, and later we'll hear about Samson. It says, the Spirit of Yahweh, the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah. Like, oh, good, good. So, you know, here we have God appointed this guy, the Spirit is upon him, and he is going to be the deliverer for Israel, which is true, but as we're going to see, things go downhill pretty quickly.

so what does he do well the spirit comes upon him it says he goes to gilead he goes through manasseh to gather all these troops who are going to rally to his side when he goes against the ammonites and then he passes through mizpah of gilead and from mizpah of gilead he goes on to the sons of ammon now mizpah is where he and the gileadites took that vow that he was going to be their their ruler. Then we get to verse 30, and verse 30 introduces us to what we were talking about at the beginning. So here's what he says. Jephthah made a vow, literally in the Hebrew, Hebrew always says they vowed a vow. It likes to repeat verb and noun. So he vowed a vow to the Lord, and here's what he said. If you will indeed give the Ammonites into my hand,

then it shall be that whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace from the Ammonites, it shall be the Lord's, or it shall belong to the Lord, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering. So we'll stop there just for a second before we pick up the rest of the story, talk about this vow. And I want to finish the whole story before we go into all the pros and cons, but I just want to point out a couple of things here with regard to the language itself before we wrap up the rest of this account and then get to what happens to his daughter so if uh if when when you look at this in the in the original in the hebrew that particular word which in my translation says whatever comes out of the doors of my house

i mean that that could be hebrew is not grammatically as specific as some languages are like uh greek for instance or or even romance languages english and french and spanish i mean And sometimes there's usually some ambiguity in this language. And that's what we have here. So it shall be that whatever or whoever, in the Hebrew, it's literally he who comes out of the doors. But we shouldn't take that he in kind of a literal sense that it's got to be a male. It's the Hebrew way of saying whatever or whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me. And that's one other point I want to make about the language.

the verb that's used here in the in the hebrew for meat is kara and it's it's never used of like your dog coming out to meet you when you get home this is this is all it's always a person who comes out to meet you so it if some people argue well he's thinking maybe i guess what a lamb or a goat or a calf or something that's going to come out to meet him. No. Well, at least if we look at this from a purely linguistic perspective, this verb is only used in the Old Testament to refer to one person meeting or greeting another person.

So what he says is it shall be that whoever or whatever comes out of the house to meet me when I return in peace from the sons of Ammon, meaning of course when he returns having been victorious then it shall belong to Yahweh and then he goes on to say not only will it belong Yahweh but I will offer it up as a burnt offering and just one more thing to clarify just in case people are wondering about this in the Hebrew that's not an unusual word that's the same Hebrew word that occurs in Leviticus and all over the Torah, and not really all over the rest of the Old Testament, to refer to the whole Bart Offering, the Ola.

We talked about it repeatedly in the book of Leviticus. So there's nothing unusual, in other words, about that language. And to my knowledge, anyway, it's never used in any context in the Old Testament to refer to anything other than a literal sacrifice. In other words, it's never used as like a spiritual sacrifice or a metaphorical sacrifice or anything like that i'm not saying that it's it's impossible to be used in that way but in every occurrence in the old testament where whole burnt offering is used it's in reference to a real sacrifice of a real animal and it doesn't have some sort of metaphorical sense of someone like

like in the new testament we say uh we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice okay that's of course a metaphorical way of speaking. We're comparing what we do with our bodies to what literally happened to the animals, but it never occurs that way in the Old Testament. It's always in reference to an animal that really gets killed and burned on an altar. Yeah, I think one of the things that's good to point out before you get into how this plays out is that Jephthah is the one that initiates this vow uh and and it's a bad idea no matter how this turns out it's not as though god said so you're gonna go do war with uh with these people and if i deliver them into your hand what will you give me yes this is this is not how this goes down there's no vow required here

God is not the kind of God who does things because you promise him that you'll do something else there's not there's not some transaction that God is looking for or anything like this I mean this is this is Jephthah trying to figure out a way to ensure that God will give him the victory which he does not need to do he's not been asked to do it it's not it's not required it's not the reason that he's successful uh this is a bad idea all the way across the board you shouldn't go you shouldn't go making promises to god's a bad idea yeah just as a general rule right yeah that's a that's a that's a great point uh so however one ends up interpreting what happens the way that Jephthah approached this was wrong from the beginning.

Yeah, yeah. This is not something that God was requiring of him. God didn't ask for a vow. He didn't ask him to make a promise to him or anything like this. And yet he does. And no matter how you end up interpreting this, it's tragic any way you look at it. And I would even say that this is not even a vow that God accepts in the sense that you don't see God say, cool, deal, you know, at the end of it. There's no response from God here saying like, okay, deal acknowledged.

Now let's go do this thing. Yeah, God is silent through this whole ordeal. Yes. Yeah, there's never anything he says. All right, so we'll come back to this in a minute. uh quickly what happens next uh verses 32 and 33 is he's basically victorious he he goes to the ammonites he fights against him the lord gave them into his hand he struck them with a very great slaughter and they were subdued before israel so he was he mission accomplished right

he set out to do what uh was required militarily and he was he was victorious so he's going to come back home, which is what happens in verse 34. When Jephthah came to his house at Mizpah, behold, his daughter was coming out to meet him with tambourines and dancing. Now she was his one and only child. Besides her, he had neither son nor daughter. And it came about when he saw her that he tore his clothes and said alas my daughter you have brought me very low literally in the Hebrew that's you have brought me to my knees and you are among those who troubled me for I have given my word to the Lord and I cannot take it back I'm going to go ahead and read the rest of this so we can hear the whole thing so she said to him my father you have given your word to the

Lord, do to me as you have said, since the Lord has avenged you of your enemies, the Ammonites. And she said to her father, let this be done. Let this thing be done for me. So she's making one request. Let me alone, leave me alone for two months that I may go to the mountains and weep because of my virginity, I and my companions. Then he said, go. So he sent her away for two months and she left with her companions and wept on the mountains because of her virginity and it came about at the end of two months that she returned to her father who did to her according to the vow which she had made and she had no relations with a man thus it became a custom in israel the daughters of israel went out yearly to commemorate the daughter of jephthah the gileadite

four days in in the year yeah and that and that word commemorate is like a lament yes yeah not not not sort of like um i don't know the way we would think of commemorating something uh this is they went out there and this is a a morning yes yeah exactly exactly yeah so okay uh how do we want to approach this well you get you get the basic story at least as it appears in uh as it appears in translation and i will say this that i mean it's not like there's some sort of uh maybe if you could read in the hebrew that there's like some sort of hidden you know extra message that's going to clarify things there's not i mean of course there's some things that are a little bit clear in the hebrew but as far as like coming to a very clear 100

clear understanding of exactly what happened the hebrew is not going to be of that much help to us here so what you have in translation is pretty much yes yes what happened so there are there are two basic ways of interpreting what happens when jephthah gets home obviously his daughter is the first one to come out to meet him and you can see jephthah's response to this so and then you get to the end and it doesn't say something there's no like graphic description like and so jephthah did to her according to the vow which he had made he built an altar and he placed her upon it and he took his knife you know it's like there's no like genesis chapter 22 kind of language here all it says is he did to her according to the vow which he had made and you notice more than once

like three or four times her virginity is mentioned the fact that she that she is she's a that she's a maiden, that she's of a meritable age, but she hasn't been married. So I'll go to kind of the minor interpretation, minor only in the sense that fewer scholars hold to this, but there are some who hold to this. What they would argue is that what is meant by sacrifice is a metaphorical sacrifice.

so rather than Jephthah actually literally sacrificing his daughter and offering her up as a sacrifice so rather than him engaging in this horrendous God condemned act of sacrificing a child instead he sacrificed her metaphorically in that he gave her over for lifelong service to the sanctuary, maybe the sanctuary at Mizpah, maybe the actual sanctuary of God at the tabernacle, where we know there were actually serving women in the Old Testament. And so the sacrifice that was made is that she was committed to lifelong virginity. She would have no husband, no children, and that virginity, that lifelong virginity would be in service to the Lord at his sanctuary yes it's it's sort of the equivalent of of she goes becomes a nun and and doing this uh

she because she's his only child he has no offspring this would see you know especially in that day this would be a great sacrifice uh for jephthah to have no grandchildren this is the end of his lineage at that point so it's not as though the language of sacrifice is come is completely inappropriate uh it certainly is it certainly would be a sacrifice but not not not the sort of sacrifice that he that he implies right right and and i will say this uh well as far as like arguments in favor of that position i mean i i don't want to discredit that uh because i mean there are some i think legitimate arguments can be made in favor of that interpretation. Earlier, I said that whole burnt offering is never used in a metaphorical

sense in the Old Testament. That is true. But wave offering is used in a metaphorical sense. It's applied to the tribe of Levites. So the Levites are presented to the Lord as a wave offering, not a whole burnt offering, but a wave offering, so a kind of sacrifice. So there is in the Old Testament metaphorical language that is used in reference to the levites and of course we have this in the psalms right you know my may my prayers be counted as incense before you so incense was a sacrifice and and may my prayer become like this incense sacrifice to you or the sacrifices of god are a broken spirit right a broken and a contrite heart god will not despise so the old testament does sometimes use sacrificial language as as a

metaphor for giving something holy over to god it just doesn't do it specifically with the the uh the whole burnt offering so i mean you can you can make that argument another argument that's sometimes made in favor of kind of the we'll call it the nun theory right she became like a nun is that in the new testament in the 11th chapter of hebrews when you know it goes through all of these various people from the Old Testament who live by faith, Jephthah is mentioned by name among those people. And so sometimes people would say, listen, if this guy really sacrificed his child, there's no way he would have been included in these list of people that lived by faith. I can understand that from one perspective. And then I think the third strongest argument for kind of

this other interpretation is that there is no explicit condemnation in this chapter of this act. So God never comes out and says, and the thing that Jephthah did was abominable in the eyes of the Lord. It never says that. As I mentioned earlier, God is silent for the rest of this chapter. So there are arguments that can be made for that particular perspective. the the arguments against that and for a literal interpretation are pretty strong as well i mean obviously first of all let's completely do away with any any any argument that says that jeff thought maybe an animal was going to walk out of his house and eat him no that's yes it is true that in in this particular time period and all the way up to you know the first century

people did bring their animals into their houses uh they had you know separate sections where they'd keep their maybe their their their cow or maybe some of their sheep or goat whatever i mean this was not unusual at all for animals to be inside the house for like what we think of as like farm animals to be inside the house but that's that just doesn't fit here animals don't come out to greet you when you're coming back from a victorious battle did i have animals at my house and and if i'm talking about what comes out of my house uh i talk about my my wife my daughter very differently than i talk about you know my cat or my dog right and and i'm don't and even if i talk about them the same way this is a this is a very dangerous roll of the dice that you're

doing here but also my dog does not open the door yeah right yeah right yeah so uh if you've ever heard well maybe he was expecting animal no he was not this was he was expecting a person the real question what it boils down to is this is this burnt offering literal or is it metaphorical and i think that we can make an argument that it actually could have been of they actually did sacrifice his daughter first of all this would be this this is by far this is far from uncommon in the ancient world people did child sacrifice when we have tons of archaeological evidence from carthage for instance where there were lots of sacrifices of children were made we have evidence in the old testament where the israelites themselves were sacrificing the children to to

malak to a pagan deity i mean i mean and sacrificing virgins to deities is like the oldest thing ever yes yeah i mean so if it i mean it strikes us it's just almost impossible to believe that someone would do that. But you got to put yourself in this particular culture, this particular time period, understand that this would, you know, if they heard about someone sacrificing their child, it would not have struck them as like the weirdest thing they've ever heard of. It did happen. And we have evidences of this in the Bible itself where this was going on. And to bring it in close to the book of Judges, as we will see as we continue on through more chapters some extremely horrendous things happen in the book of judges itself so this would this

act this child sacrifice in the book of judges kind of fits this real dark tone of a whole lot of what goes on in the in the book of judges and the fact that okay he's clothed with this not clothed but the spirit of god comes upon him so one author i read said there's no way that with the spirit of God that he would have made this kind of vow and done this sort of thing to his daughter. Well, that, that just doesn't hold any water with me because the judges were constantly doing really stupid stuff and evil stuff, even though the fact, even though the spirit had been upon them to be victorious in battle. So I don't know. Uh, I, I, I kind of, I go back and forth Dan as to, uh, as to where I, where I fall on the picket argumentation. If I was, if, if there

was a gun to my head and i was forced to choose i would probably go with a liberal interpretation just because i think it's the most straightforward and the hardest i mean it's i the virginity argument like a metaphorical sacrifice is easier it's easier to deal with it's easier to accept uh but this is the r-rated book of judges and some pretty pretty uh pretty bad stuff happens here. Yeah, I mean, the one thing you can say, as I said before, is that God does not initiate this vow. He doesn't ask for this vow. This vow is a mistake

from the beginning. And you don't see God. God doesn't respond to this vow at all. Right. I mean, He is removed from it entirely. And we can say that if Jephthah

does go through with this, if this is indeed what happened, this is not some sort of sacrifice that God accepts either. all right i mean this is this is this is one of the the things that is just outright condemned yeah by i mean the god's issue i mean he has lots of issues with it but one of his big issues with like with moloch is that there's some is the child sacrifice i mean it's what is what makes a lot of the other peoples that israel runs into so evil when it talks about like these people are evil they've done what's evil a big part of this is the sacrificing of their children yeah um and so

so you have you have all of that going on and so i i tend to agree with you and i think that one well one of the reasons i i think that's the case is actually the silence of god in the whole thing it's never addressed that there's no if this was sort of a a metaphorical thing and then you're you're putting her into the nunnery or whatever this seems like like god might be involved in this sort of thing but uh but here it seems that god just removes himself entirely from from this this whole thing what what you see jephthah do is try to do something that the only god does um which is give his only child that you might have victory over all your enemies and this is not something that that he will allow someone else to do this this is not this is not a deal

that god will cut with you well you will give your only child in order to have victory over your enemies this is something that he does and only he does and something even to the even to the point where God says that he will not share his glory with another, and that the primary glory he's talking about is the glory that his son gets in his suffering and death for the salvation of the world. And so, in a lot of ways, what you see is the tragic error of trying to sacrifice something in this case your i mean your your child to obtain a degree of salvation and how this backfires on you right like how you how you would make some kind of oath to do this and so there is this sort of unlikely and uh tragic sort of foreshadowing of of of what god what god goes

through when he does the same thing that Jephthah does in the giving of his son. But the thing that's really tragic about it is that because God is going to do this, that Jephthah has no need to do this. God doesn't need his vow, doesn't need his promise, and certainly doesn't need his daughter to die. God doesn't need any of this because his son is going to come, and he is going to be a sacrifice and he is going to purchase victory over all our enemies uh so so in that sense i think that that it's sort of doubly tragic uh where it's like man this is just so not something you needed to do yeah yeah uh that's a that's kind of a great way to to wrap up the discussion too because that that's ultimately where this takes us to is the cross where

the only sacrifice acceptable and the only sacrifice that god wanted is made and it serves as a as a good foil for what jeff was trying to accomplish on his own yeah hopefully that yeah hopefully that helps people yeah a little bit with uh understanding it's it's difficult chapter i mean i don't i don't uh have anything against someone who has a different view on it but uh hopefully this has provided people with kind of the you know the the two ways that uh that you can look at that and make make their own exegetical decision yeah there you go and we gave you some extra bonus content uh you know you tell we're in quarantine apparently 47 minutes in the yeah i got nothing else to do uh didn't want to cut that off though i'll say hey well i i mostly

i just didn't want to have to talk about this again next week it's true right so yeah we'll we'll be coming up on samson uh probably uh next episode so uh we'll get to mr strongman pretty soon all right well chad we will see you next week all right see you then Thank you.