Did Jephthah Bribe God (Judges 11)?
That’s certainly the impression you’d get from many commentaries. Barry Webb and K. Lawson Younger both say as much. In fact, in commentary after commentary, I hear that Jephthah’s vow in Judges 11 was manipulative, an attempt to bribe God into giving him victory.
But what’s the evidence for that claim? How is Jephthah’s vow any different from the similar vows (“If you do X, I will do Y”) we find elsewhere in Scripture (e.g., Gen 28:20-22; Num 21:2; 1 Sam 1:11)? Are all such vows manipulative? Are they all bribes?
Take just the last example. I’m 99% sure that there isn’t a single commentary out there that claims that Hannah was being manipulative and trying to bribe God when she said that if God gave her a son, she would give him to Yahweh. But if her vow isn’t manipulative — and it isn’t — then why say that Jephthah’s is?
I suspect that it’s because commentaries already think they know that Jephthah is a bad man. K. Lawson Younger, for instance, describes Jephthah this way:
Jephthah came from a dysfunctional background. He was an illegitimate son, born of a prostitute, rejected and disinherited by his family, leader of a gang. He became a man who was hurt, angry, bitter, ambition-driven, ready to fight, manipulative, ignorant of God’s Law, abusive of his daughter, lacking boundaries, contentious, emotionally reactionary, revengeful, and doing what is right in his own eyes for his own gain. He made his daughter responsible, blaming her for the disaster that he would inflict on her and making himself the victim of his rash vow.
It’s hard to see how Hebrews 11 could call such a man faithful, isn’t it? And yet it does. So how about starting with Hebrews 11 — starting with the conviction that Jephthah was, on the whole, a faithful man — and then reading the Jephthah story again in that light? If we think of Jephthah as faithful, just as we think of Hannah as faithful, then there’s no reason to think that his vow was any more manipulative than hers was. Unless, of course, you think that all vows are manipulative, all vows are lies. But that’s not what Scripture teaches.