Jephthah Research Articles

Putri Yefta, Korban Perang Sang Ayah: Menafsir Ulang Hakim-Hakim 11:29-40

The purpose of this paper is to show that Jephthah's innocent daughter fell victim to her father's war. Indeed, she did not participate in the war directly but it turns out that she even became a victim after his father went to war. This event begins with Jephthah's vow that whatever comes out of his door to greet him will be offered to God. Jephthah risked his household to become victims of the post-war. To that end, the author will reinterpret Judges 11:29-40. The author first outlines the meaning of the vows, the authorship of the Book of Judges, and reinterprets Judges 11:29-40. This research aims to find that Jephthah offered his daughter as a burnt sacrifice because Jephthah had to be responsible for fulfilling his vows. Besides, there was no voice from heaven to prevent his daughter's sacrifice or offer a substitute sacrifice. Jephthah's daughter fell victim to her father's war.

“Reading the Judge Jephthah with Seoja (Inferior Son)’s Han (Grudge)

“Reading the Judge Jephthah with Seoja (Inferior Son)’s Han (Grudge)

Jephthah and His Daughter

Jephthah and His Daughter

Appealing to Heaven: Jephthah, John Locke, and Just War

Appealing to Heaven: Jephthah, John Locke, and Just War

The Josephan Judge Jephthah

This article offers a detailed comparison of Josephus' account (Ant. 5.255-270) of the judge Jephthah both with its biblical prototype (Judg 10,6-12,7) as attested by the ancient text-witnesses (MT, LXX, etc.), and with another, virtually contemporary, retelling of the Jephthah story, i.e. that of Pseudo-Philo in L.A.B. 39-40. Josephus' version involves abbreviations, expansions, rearrangements and other modifications of the biblical data. As a result of his application of these rewriting techniques, Josephus presents his Greco-Roman readers with a streamlined, easier-to-understand rendering of the Jephthah story in which, e.g., the divine role is downplayed, and Jephthah's vow is explicitly censured. In comparison to both the Bible and Josephus, Pseudo-Philo eliminates whole components of the story shared by them (e.g., the slaughter of the Ephraimites, 12,1-6// 5.267-269), while also going beyond both in his highlighting the tragic figure of Jephthah's daughter.

Jephthah's Kin:The Sacrificing Father inThe Merchant of Venice

<b>Jephthah's Kin:</b>The Sacrificing Father in<i>The Merchant of Venice</i>

Jephthah's Kin: The Sacrificing Father in The Merchant of Venice

Jephthah'S Kin:The Sacrificing Father in The Merchant of Venice Michelle Ephraim (bio) And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, then that thing that commeth out of the doors of mine house to meet me, when I come home in peace from the children of Ammon, shall be the Lord's, and I will offer it for a burnt offering. Judges 11:30–11 After Jessica steals his jewels and elopes with Lorenzo, a Christian, Shylock famously wishes her death in Act III of The Merchant of Venice: "I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hears'd at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!" (3.1.87–90).2 Presumably, Shylock does not intend to kill Jessica himself; her departure, however, transforms his "ancient grudge" against the Venetian Christians into active bloodlust. Buoyed by news of Antonio's doomed argosies, Shylock declares that he will "plague" (116) and "torture" (117) the Christian merchant by demanding their agreed-upon penalty—"an equal pound/Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken,/In what part of your body pleaseth me" (1.3.149–51)—should Antonio forfeit the loan he solicited on Bassanio's behalf. Though Shakespeare gives us clear evidence of Shylock's mercenary desires and cruelty in this scene, in Shylock's responses to his friend Tubal, who reports on Jessica's sale of Shylock's deceased wife's turquoise ring "for a monkey" (3.1.119) and provides consolatory news of Antonio's own economic misfortune, he also constructs a Jewish father more grief-crazed than pointedly homicidal. Indeed, [End Page 71] Shylock's heartfelt lament for Leah—"I had it of [her] when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys" (121–3)— reveals a history of familial loss that perhaps provides explanation for Shylock's brief reference to his synagogue at the end of the scene; an intimation of prayer and mourning ritual that flickers incongruously alongside his retributive declarations. Shylock's quick allusion, I believe, also foreshadows his audacious justification of Antonio's murder during the trial scene as the fulfillment of a private vow he has made to God. In this essay I contend that early modern responses to Jephthah in Judges 11:29–40, a Jewish father honored as a "hero of faith" in the Epistle to the Hebrews despite the fact that he sacrifices his only daughter, illuminate our reading of Shakespeare's ambivalent depiction of the sympathetic would-be murderer Shylock. As I will show in my discussion of Judges below, the story's ambiguous entangling of pious and profane aspects fascinated Christian readers: in the immediate aftermath of leading the Israelites to victory, Jephthah fulfills his divine vow to sacrifice the first "thing that commeth out of the doors of [his] house" (should he defeat the Ammonite enemy) by killing his daughter who has run out of the house to greet him. Although Shakespeare does not explicitly refer to Judges 11 in Merchant, his allusions to Jephthah's vow and sacrifice in 3 Henry VI and Hamlet make clear his familiarity with this provocative story.3 Like Jephthah's unnamed daughter, Jessica devastates her father by leaving the family home. This narrative echo, however, also sharply distinguishes Jessica from the obedient daughter in Judges and highlights the difference between Jephthah's deadly turn upon his daughter's departure and Shylock's. Jephthah does not intend to kill his daughter yet ultimately does so in order to demonstrate his piety; Shylock's bitter vision of Jessica and his subsequent claim to "the heart of [Antonio]" (3.1.127) are driven by vengeance and pride—his refusal to be made "a soft and dull-eyed fool" (3.3.14) who passively accepts the Christians' affronts. Poised to take a pound of Antonio's "fair flesh" (1.3.150) in Act IV, Shylock's crude form of "justice" seems to confirm contemporary notions of Old Testament blood sacrifice as evidence of the Jew's spiritual inferiority...

Medieval Monasticism and the Evolution of Jewish Interpretation of the Story of Jephthah's Daughter

Exegesis, Jephthah, Monasticism, Judges, Karairte In unanimous fashion, the midrashic exegetical tradition affirmed that Jephthah's vow was a commitment to sacrifice the first creature that greeted him upon his victorious return from battle against the Ammonites (Jgs 11.31). Several medieval rabbinic exegetes, however, posited a different interpretation of the vow: were the first creature to greet him be a person, then that person would indeed be dedicated to God, Not in the form of a sacrifice, but through a life of devotion to God through seclusion. An extensive understanding of monastic practices reveals these exegetes to be highly sensitive to the economic, familial, social, institutional and ceremonial contexts in which women religious engaged the monastic life, and the imaginative, if anachronistic, way in which the medieval exegetes read these insights into the story of Jephthah's daughter. The evolution of exegesis to the story of Jephthah's daughter from its Karaite beginnings through the late middle ages, also sheds new light on Ibn Ezra's use of Karaite legal material in the formation of his biblical commentary. These rabbinic readings are further illuminated when we examine the evolution of patristic and Christian scholastic scholarship to this story in search of lines of mutual fructification.

Interview with Jeptha Dalston, Ph.D., President and CEO of AUPHA and ACEHSA, Washington, D.C.

Interview with Jeptha Dalston, Ph.D., President and CEO of AUPHA and ACEHSA, Washington, D.C.

Why Would the Deuteronomists Tell About the Sacrifice of Jephthah's Daughter?

It is commonly assumed that the story of Jephthah's vow refers to an 'old tradition' that was integrated into the Deuteronomistic History. But such a view is contrary to Dtr ideology which is absolutely hostile to any human sacrifice (2 Kgs 16.3; 17.17, 31; 21.6 etc.). A literary-critical approach to Judges 11 shows that vv. 30-31 [32] and 34-40 may be considered as post-Dtr. The author of Judg. 11.30-40 seems to know the story of the Aqedah, but he is not willing to make a happy ending. There is a tragic dimension in the story and quite an Hellenistic atmosphere (the best parallels to Judg. 11.30-40 may be found in Hel lenistic texts). So this text should be considered an insertion from the end of the Per sian or beginning of the Hellenistic periods. The author tends to show that Jewish classics can be as tragic as Greek ones.

Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty (review)

Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 149 Reviews that the canon of the Hebrew Bible was fixed only "in the first and second centuries of the Common Era" (p. 65) is one of several points where he depends upon antiquated scholarly opinion. Nonetheless, Bruns perceptively if speculatively supposes that when Josiah recognized the claims of "Deuteronomy" (Urdeuteronium), he not only received illumination for himself, but he also produced, in combination with Hilkiah's priestly tradition , class struggles and national politics, a "canon" that helped tame prophetic tradition. As a biblicist, I found Bruns' reflections on the hermeneutics of literature , though sometimes difficult. nonetheless refreshing for its perspective outside of my own discipline. Speaking as one for whom God is not dead (contra Nietzsche) and for whom accordingly man is still alive (contra Kojeve and Foucault), I am less willing than Bruns to accept postanthropological "hermeneutics of freedom" for which the choice between truth and freedom is essentially a SUbjective, political one. Nonetheless, those of us trained in a narrow brand of "scientific biblical exegesis" would do well to broaden our hermeneutical horizons along the lines that Bruns suggests so as to incorporate more reflection and application. Joe M. Sprinkle Toccoa Falls College Toccoa Falls, GA 30598 TRAGEDY AND BIBLICAL NARRATIVE: ARROWS OF THE ALMIGHTY. By Cheryl J. Exum. pp. xiv + 206. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Cloth, $49.95. In everyday usage the term "tragedy" describes a wide range of untoward events or stories, and distinctions between the tragic and pathos or melodrama are blurred. Often in more technical literary study the term has a more restricted usage. Sometimes it denotes a particular form of literature , while others use it to describe a tone or vision (as in Richard Sewell's classic study). Exum seeks to employ a more expansive sense of "tragedy" in her literary study. Her use is "heuristic: it provides a way of looking at texts that brings to the foreground neglected and unsettling aspects. nagging questions that are threatening precisely because they have no answers" (p. 2). Her concern is less to come to some restrictive defmition of "tragedy" as an abstraction than to gain some sense of the shapes of the "tragic" as readers engage selected biblical texts. She confines her study to narratives Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 150 Reviews from Judges and 1-2 Samuel (Job is treated in her introductory chapter). Her movement from Saul to Jephthah and his daughter and the house of Saul and lastly to David is from texts in which tragic aspects are sustained to those with at best tragic dimensions or potential. In her treatment of the "tempered tragedy" of the rise and fall of Saul she suggests Saul experiences the hostility of God, the spillover of a divine hostility to monarchy that makes Israel's first king "kingship's scapegoat" (p. 35). Saul is haunted by dark forces both without and within; he is guilty but not evil, and it is this disparity between his fate and his flaw that leads others also to explore the tragic qualities of the story of Israel's first king. Exum's work is broadly in line with that of others, yet her reading of Saul's story in interplay with Samson's, her focus on the character of God in this story, and the relation between God and the tragic Saul enrich our understanding of this narrative. In light of the text we have, especially in its larger literary context, one wonders if Exum is reading a story embedded in the one before us. At the very least there are attempts to transform the tragic Saul into a villain in an interpretative tradition that begins in the biblical text itself. Exum has decided not to address such diachronic issues. If the deity is hostile in Saul's story, he is absent in that of Jephthah and his daughter. The deity may be silent when sought by Saul, but his stance in relation to events is clear; in Judges 11-12 the deity's absence represents a refusal to take a position in relation to events. This is reflected, for example , in Exum's compelling reading of Jephthah's vow as possibly...

Contracts of Genesis

Previous articleNext article No AccessContracts of GenesisGeoffrey P. MillerGeoffrey P. Miller Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Legal Studies Volume 22, Number 1Jan., 1993 Sponsored by The University of Chicago Law School Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/468156 Views: 15Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Resit Ergener Exchange Among Humans: Divine Supervision, (Apr 2020): 55–67.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44455-6_4Abbas Mirakhor, Hossein Askari Conception of Justice: Pre-Axial—Noah, Abraham and Moses, (Apr 2019): 97–114.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54303-5_5Calum Carmichael Law and Narrative in the Pentateuch, (Aug 2017): 321–334.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405166560.ch19Sigmund Wagner-Tsukamoto The Adam Smith Problem Revisited: A Methodological Resolution, Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines 19, no.11 (Jan 2013).https://doi.org/10.1515/jeeh-2012-0013Geoffrey P. Miller Property in the Bible, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2013).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2369435Sigmund Wagner-Tsukamoto Economics of Genesis: On the Institutional Economic Deciphering and Reconstruction of the Stories of the Bible, Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 12, no.33 (Jul 2016): 249–287.https://doi.org/10.1177/02601079X01001200304 Geoffrey P. Miller Ritual and Regulation: A Legal-Economic Interpretation of Selected Biblical Texts, The Journal of Legal Studies 22, no.22 (Oct 2015): 477–501.https://doi.org/10.1086/468173

Jephthah and His Vow (review)

Hebrew Studies 31 (1990) 208 Reviews JEPHTHAH AND HIS VOW. By David Marcus. pp. 77. Lubbock: Texas Tech University, 1986. Cloth. This essay is a singularly focused pursuit of the question: What happened to Jephthah's daughter at the conclusion of the story in Judg 11:29-401 What Marcus calls the "traditional" or "sacrificialist" interpretation holds that Jephthah rashly vowed his daughter to death. A minority opinion, also with some deep roots in rabbinic interpretation, regards the sacrifice as metaphorical: Jephthah's daugther was consecrated to Ood to remain a virgin for the rest of her life. After briefly recounting the history of exegesis, which rather massively favors the traditional interpretation, Marcus proceeds to a rehabilitation of the dissenting view. He is convinced that while the sacrificialist case is less than iron-clad, the alternative is not without merit. The reSUlt, he concludes , is a story shot through with intentional ambiguity. The effect of the ambiguity is to focus attention away from the unanswerable question about the fate of the daughter and on to the rashness of Jephthah's vow. There is considerable merit to the argument, and so we "sacrificialists" may well have to be less decisive about certain matters in our second editions. I am not, however, convinced that we must surrender the interpretation of the suffix on ,.,rr"lm' (v. 31) as an intended neuter, with the possibility open that Jephthah anticipated a non-human victim. If, as some rabbinic argument claims, Jephthah was assuming it would be some ''undesirable girl," why the masculine form of suffix? It is not sufficient to claim that "the only type of domestic animal that could possibly come out first ... (a dog, a donkey, a horse, or a camel) was not permitted to be sacrificed" (p. 16). Sheep and goats are often penned within the house precincts even today in middle eastern villages, like the poor man's ewe-lamb in Nathan's parable. That n",p",,~, is never said of an animal in the Hebrew Bible is an argument from silence, especially weak when a lion is said to "roar forth" mRip" in a Samson story (Judg 14:5). Marcus argues that the two parts to Jephthah's promise in v. 31 are not in apposition but consequential. That is, "will belong to the Lord" can mean consecration; "will offer him (sic!) up as an 'Ih" may be read metaphorically referring to her consecration as a sort of "sign," or the like. The argument holds together by a thread just strong enough to contribute to the sense ofambiguity noted above. The sense of ambiguity is heightened further by comparison with four other vows in the Hebrew Bible: Oen 28:20-22; Num 21:2; 1 Sam 1:11; and Hebrew Studies 31 (1990) 209 Reviews 2 Sam 15:7-8. In these examples. as in the only extant vow from Ugarit. there is parallelism in thought between protasis and apodosis-not so in Jephthah·s vow. Is the text of the vow completely intact? Marcus observes that 'iTn'''»m iT"U) is anomalous. because iT~ is normally construed with the preposition lamed. His conjectural reconstruction further undergirds the sequential reading of the vow: mU) \1n'''»m 71" iT'm "I will offer him (sic!) up as a burnt offering to the Lord'" On the other hand. the double introductory formula ~ "'WR aa"iT "whoever/whatever goes out" is more likely. I think. a conflation of variants than "a dittography of sorts:' which would bring us back to the appositional reading of the phrases in the vow. After arguing to his conclusion that the pivot of the entire story is the irrevocability of the vow once made. Marcus canvasses every conceivable interpretation of the details in the story. The daughter's reason for wanting to go to the hills is unclear. If sacrifice is intended. why is her virginity (and not her life) the subject of lament? In the non-sacrificialist reading she laments the fact that she has to live as a virgin the rest of her life. or in the most extreme interpretation. consecration as a hierodule. she bewails the virginity she is going to lose. Marcus sees...

Jephthah and His Vow

Jephthah and His Vow

Jephthah and His Vow

Jephthah and His Vow

Jephthah and His Vow

Jephthah and His Vow

Carissimi's Jephte

Carissimi's Jephte

“Tragedie of Jeptha his daughter”

“Tragedie of Jeptha his daughter”

“Tragedie of jeptha his daughter.”

“Tragedie of jeptha his daughter.”

"Jephtha," a Drama

"Jephtha," a Drama