ratified before Jehovah.

He that has a righteous cause will not shrink from having it thoroughly sifted. It was not because Jephthah

feared the battle, but because he wished to avoid bloodshed, that he twice sent an embassy of remonstrance

to the king of Ammon. The claims of the latter upon the land between the Arnon and the Jabbok were

certainly of the most shadowy kind. That country had, at the time of the Israelitish conquest, belonged to

Sihon, king of the Amorites. True, the Amorites were not its original owners, having wrested the land from

Moab (Numbers 21:26). Balak might therefore have raised a claim; but, although he hired Balaam to protect

what still remained of his kingdom against a possible attack by Israel, which he dreaded, he never attempted

to recover what Israel had taken from the Amorites, although it had originally been his. Moreover, even in

dealing with the Amorites, as before with Edom and Moab, whose territory Israel had actually avoided by a

long circuit, the utmost forbearance had been shown. If the Amorites had been dispossessed, theirs had

been the unprovoked attack, when Israel had in the first place only asked a passage through their country.

Lastly, if 300 years' 296 undisputed possession of the land did not give a prescriptive right, it would be

difficult to imagine by what title land could be held. Nor did Jephthah shrink from putting the matter on its

ultimate and best ground. Addressing the Ammonites, as from their religious point of view they could

understand it, he said: "And now Jehovah God of Israel hath dispossessed the Amorites from before His

people, and shouldest thou possess it? Is it not so, that which Chemosh  297 thy god giveth thee to possess,

that wilt thou possess; and all that which Jehovah our God shall dispossess before us, that shall we

possess?" We do not wonder that of a war commenced in such a spirit we should be told: "And the Spirit of

the Lord came upon Jephthah." Presently Jephthah passed all through the land east of the Jordan, and its

people obeyed his summons.

We are now approaching what to many will appear the most difficult part in the history of Jephthah -

perhaps among the most difficult narratives in the Bible. It appears that, before actually going to war,

Jephthah solemnly registered this vow: "If thou indeed givest the children of Ammon into mine hand -and it

shall be, the outcoming (one), that shall come out from the door of my house to meet me on my returning in

peace from the children of Ammon, shall be to Jehovah, and I will offer that a burnt offering." We know that

the vow was paid. The defeat of the Ammonites was thorough and crushing. But on Jephthah's return to his

house the first to welcome him was his only daughter - his only child - who at the head of the maidens came

to greet the victor. There is a terrible irony about those "timbrels and dances," with which Jephthah's

daughter went, as it were, to celebrate her own funeral obsequies, while the fond father's heart was well-nigh

breaking. But the noble maiden was the first to urge his observance of the vow unto Jehovah. Only two

months did she ask to bewail her maidenhood with her companions upon the mountains. But ever after was

it a custom for the maidens in Israel to go out every year for four days, "to praise 298 the daughter of

In so doing we must dismiss, as irrelevant and untruthful, such pleas as the roughness of those times, the

imperfectness of religious development, or that of religious ignorance on the part of the outlaw Jephthah,

who had spent most of his life far from Israel. The Scripture sketch of Jephthah leaves, indeed, on the mind

the impression of a genuine, wild, and daring Gilead mountaineer - a sort of warrior-Elijah. But, on the other

hand, he acts and speaks throughout as a true worshipper of Jehovah. And his vow, which in the Old

Testament always expresses the highest religious feeling (Genesis 28:20; 1 Samuel 1:11; Psalm 116:14; Isaiah

19:21), is so sacred because it is made to Jehovah. Again, in his embassy to the king of Ammon, Jephthah

displays the most intimate acquaintance with the Pentateuch, his language being repeatedly almost a literal

quotation from Numbers 20. He who knew so well the details of Scripture history could not have been

ignorant of its fundamental principles. Having thus cleared the way, we observe:

1. That the language of Jephthah's vow implied, from the first, at least the possibility of some human being

coming out from the door of his house, to meet him on his return. The original conveys this, and the evident

probabilities of the case were strongly in favor of such an eventuality. Indeed, Jephthah's language seems

to have been designedly chosen in such general terms as to cover all cases. But it is impossible to suppose