Jephthah Made a Vow and His Daughter Walked Into It

Jephthah made the vow standing in front of his army, before the crossing, in the voice a commander uses when he wants the men to hear him. If God gave him the Ammonites, then whatever came out of the doors of his house first to meet him on his way home would go up as an offering.

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Heaven answered him immediately, and not to his face.

"So Jephthah has vowed to offer me the first thing that meets him. If a dog had come out first, would a dog be sacrificed to me? Then let his vow fall on his firstborn, on his own child, on his only daughter. I will deliver my people even so, not for his sake, but for the sake of the prayers of Israel."

The Door Opened on Music

The Ammonites broke. He came back to Mizpah at the head of a column with the whole country behind him, and the first sound out of his own house was not a dog barking or a goat in the yard. It was timbrels.

She came out dancing. She was his only child and there was no son and no other daughter, and she had dressed for the day her father won a war.

He tore his clothes in the road. "Rightly were you named Sheilah, the one demanded, so that you should be given up. Who will put my heart in one pan of the scale and my soul in the other, so that I can stand there and see whether what has happened to me today is joy or grief? I opened my mouth to God, and I cannot take it back."

She Argued Better Than He Did

She did not fall down and she did not beg.

"Why are you grieving over my death, when the people have been delivered? Do you not remember what happened in the days of our fathers, when the father brought his son up as a burnt offering, and the son did not refuse, and the one who offered and the one offered were both glad? So do what you said."

Then she took the argument apart. An offering comes from the herd and from the flock. It has never in one line come from anybody's daughter. Jacob swore to give God a tenth of everything he owned, and Jacob had twelve sons and never once read his own vow as covering one of them. If the words meant anything they meant animals and property, and if they were going to be forced to mean her, they had to be annulled or read some other way, and there were men whose whole occupation was reading them.

What she was actually afraid of was not the knife. She said it plainly. When her father made his vow he had not been thinking of her. She was not in his mind when he spoke, and an offering nobody intended is an offering that may not be accepted, and then she would have died for nothing at all.

Nobody Could Answer Her

She took her companions and went to the sages of that generation and put the whole case in front of them, and they had nothing.

Not one of them could give her an answer. The law she was quoting was correct, her father was not bound, he did not even owe her value in money, and every man she stood in front of had forgotten it. Jephthah would not go to Phinehas the priest, because a judge of Israel does not walk to a priest. Phinehas would not go to Jephthah, because a priest does not walk to a judge. So the two men who could have ended it stood in their own houses being important, and she went out to the mountain.

God came to her on Mount Telag at night.

"I have shut the mouths of the sages of my people in this generation so that they cannot answer the daughter of Jephthah one word, so that my vow may be fulfilled and nothing I have determined be left undone. I know that she is wiser than her father and wiser than all the wise men. Her soul will be accepted, at her own request, and her death will be precious in front of me for all time."

The forgetting had been arranged. The scholars lost the ruling because Jephthah had slaughtered thousands of the men of Ephraim at the fords, and the account for that was settled through his daughter.

Two Months in the Hills

She asked him for two months. He gave them to her, and she went up into the hills with her friends.

"Listen, mountains, to what I am saying. Hills, hear the tears in my eyes. Rocks, be witnesses to it. My words will go up to heaven and my crying will be written in the sky. I was not brought to a wedding. The wreath for my betrothal was never finished. Nobody put ornaments on me or myrrh on my neck. The oil my mother prepared will be poured out on the ground. The white clothes she sewed will be eaten by moths. The wreath my nurse wound for me will dry up. The blue and the purple will go to worms. Mother, the grave is the bridal chamber you were making all that for. Trees, bend your branches down and weep over my youth."

At the end of the two months she came back down and walked into her father's house.

The Other Three Who Made That Vow

Three men before him had opened their mouths the same careless way.

Eliezer stood at the well in Nahor and said he would take for Isaac whichever girl came out and offered water to his camels, and any girl in that town could have come, and Rebecca came. Caleb offered his daughter to whoever took Kiriath-sefer, and any soldier in the camp could have taken it, and Othniel took it. Saul offered his daughter to whoever killed Goliath, and it could have been anybody in that valley, and it was David.

Three times heaven caught the vow before it landed. The fourth time, the door opened on music.

Her name is not in the book of Judges. She is the daughter of Jephthah there and nothing else, and the tradition would not leave her that way, so it gave her the name Sheilah and kept it. Four days a year the daughters of Israel went out of their houses to sit with her, and they did it every year for generations, for a girl whose father had won a war.