Judges 11:40 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

The daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah The Hebrew word לתנות, lethannoth, here rendered, to lament, occurs nowhere else in Scripture, but Judges 5:11, where it is rendered rehearse, or celebrate, namely, There shall they rehearse, says Deborah, the righteous acts of the Lord, surely not lament them. And the word might certainly be much more properly rendered to celebrate, or talk with, here, than to lament. Buxtorf interprets it thus, on the authority of the Jewish rabbi, Kimchi, allowed to be the best Hebrew grammarian the Jews ever had, and famous as a commentator on the Old Testament. His words on the passage are “Ad confabulandum juxta Kimchium, ut amicis colloquiis eam de virginitate et statu vitæ solitario consolarentur.” To converse with her, according to Kimchi, namely, that by friendly discourses they might comfort her concerning her virginity, and the solitary condition of her life. Houbigant translates the words, They went to the daughter of Jephthah to console her, four days in a year. If we render the clause thus, the matter is put beyond dispute; for they could neither converse with, nor console her, after she was sacrificed: but if we translate the expression, to celebrate, or even to lament, its being repeated four times every year, plainly indicates that she was alive, because we nowhere find that the Israelites ever had any custom of celebrating or lamenting the dead after the funeral obsequies were performed. Their law rather tended to prohibit every thing of the kind, and inspire them with an abhorrence of it, by representing the dead as unclean, and those who came near and touched them as defiled thereby. So that there is not the least reason to conclude that the daughters of Judah went yearly, much less four times every year, either to lament or praise the daughter of Jephthah after she was dead; but rather that they went while she lived, to visit and converse with her, and comfort her with their company and discourses. All, therefore, that Jephthah did with his daughter, according to his vow, was to devote her to a single state, as a Nazarite, or consecrated person, to be employed in the service of God in the tabernacle, under the care of the high-priests, probably in making the hangings and other ornaments of it, the habits of the priests, the show-bread, the cakes used in sacrifices, and other such like offices, and to continue in a virgin state till the day of her death. Thus Samuel was vowed to the Lord by his mother, 1 Samuel 1:11. That his daughter must live and die single was felt by Jephthah as the greater calamity, because she was his only child, Judges 11:34, a circumstance which the sacred historian dwells upon, observing that besides her he had neither son nor daughter. But, says Mr. Henry, “we do not find any law, usage, or custom, in all the Old Testament, which doth in the least intimate that a single life was any branch or article of religion.” “And do we find,” replies Mr. Wesley, “any law, usage, or custom there, which does in the least intimate that cutting the throat of an only child was any branch or article of religion?” If only a dog had met Jephthah, would he have offered up that for a burnt-offering? No, because God had expressly forbidden this. And had he not expressly forbidden murder? But Mr. Pool thinks the story of Agamemnon's offering up Iphigenia (put for Jephtigenia) took its rise from this. Probably it did, as the Greeks used, as he observes, “to steal sacred histories and turn them into fables.” But then let it be observed Iphigenia was not murdered. Tradition says that Diana sent a hind in her stead, and took the maid to live in the woods with her. Upon the whole, this one single circumstance, mentioned above, that, when the sacred writer had informed us, Jephthah did with his daughter according to his vow, he adds, and she knew no man, renders it as “clear as the light,” as Dr. Dodd observes, that her father's vow was thus fulfilled; “for if she had been slain as a burnt-offering, it would have been absurd enough to have told us that she afterward knew no man. And indeed,” adds he, “the passage is so plain, that one would wonder it could ever have come into the heads of writers, to conceive that her father, who was a truly pious man, (Judges 11:11,) could have thought of offering up his daughter as a sacrifice to that God who never allowed or admitted such horrid sacrifices, and whose great quarrel against the baneful idols of the heathen was, that they called for and accepted the sacrifices of sons and daughters:” see Leviticus 18:21; Leviticus 20:2; Deuteronomy 12:31; Deuteronomy 18:10.