Collateral Bloggage What passes for thought around here…

Theology Thursday: Redeemed

Back on New Year’s Eve, I engaged in a short debate-ish thing with my Esteemed Partner in Pavement Pounding about Jephthah, and specifically about whether he sacrificed his daughter in Judges 11. (Whoa, I just totally pulled that chapter reference out of my head!  Sweet!)  I took the negative proposition, that Jephthah did not sacrifice his daughter, though the wording of the passage seems to indicate he did.  (You can go read it if you want.  I’ll wait.)

Mostly my position is based in logic.  And it goes like this:

1. God does not approve of human sacrifice
2. God approved of Jephthah (Hebrews 11)
3. Therefore, Jephthah did not engage in human sacrifice

But then, a couple of weeks ago, I came across an additional bit of support for my position.  (By the way, you’d probably like to know what I think Jephthah did sacrifice, right?  The short answer is something acceptable.)

My new evidence came from Exodus 13, when the Lord commanded the consecration of the firstborn.  Here’s the passage:

Exodus 13:12-13 (ESV):

12 you shall set apart to the LORD all that first opens the womb. All the firstborn of your animals that are males shall be the LORD’s. 13 Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem.

The “shall be the LORD’s” part seems to indicate that they would be sacrificed.  But not all species would be sacrificed.  Only clean animals.  Others would be redeemed with a lamb.  And firstborn sons, in particular, were consecrated to the service of the Lord (see Numbers 3), though later the tribe of Levi was taken for that service (but all firstborn sons of other tribes still had to be redeemed).

But my main point here is that an Israelite couldn’t offer just anything to God.  Even when bringing a clean animal to sacrifice, it had to be spotless.  God seemed to be very particular about what could be offered. 

In this passage, the example of a donkey is given.  Checking Leviticus 11 (a lot of 11th chapters in this post), we note that the donkey doesn’t have cloven hooves, so it’s unclean.  It has to be redeemed (or throttled, apparently).

So, back to Jephthah’s case.  He promised to offer what came out of his tent to the Lord.  But he was an Israelite, and knew that he could only offer something clean.  Anything unclean, he would have to redeem.  But it would still belong to the Lord.

So, Jephthah’s daughter would have been redeemed, but would have been consecrated to the Lord.  If this is so, and she was dedicated to service, she may not have been able to marry.  This makes a good deal more sense when one considers that she lamented not her impending death, but rather her virginity.  Jephthah’s grief would be explained by his knowledge that his line would end with her, since she was his only daughter.

This also seems to match the chronology of Judges 11, as one of the concluding verses says this:

Judges 11:39 (NKJV, just because it’s more word-for-word)

39 And it was so at the end of two months that she returned to her father, and he carried out his vow with her which he had vowed. She knew no man.

It might be stretching things a bit, it seems the “she knew no man” happened after Jephthah had fulfilled the vow.

BTW, I’m comfortably out of the mainstream with my interpretation here.  Most commentators think that in the time of the Judges, the Law wasn’t observed particularly well, and so resorting to human sacrifice wasn’t be all that surprising, and Jephthah was honored for keeping a painful vow.  But the writer of Hebrews doesn’t mention the sacrifice at all, so I think my explanation fits.

Now that we’re done with that, I’m shocked that my feeble little brain is just now really connecting the redemption of the firstborn with the fact that mankind was redeemed by the Lamb of God.  The unclean redeemed by the clean.  The broader idea of redemption by a lamb/bull is pretty well documented, but this specific idea is just now settling in for me.  Guess I need to keep reading.