Many Christians have struggled with assessing the morality of Jephthah, but not because the morality of sacrificing one's daughter is an issue that divides Christendom. Rather, Christians have two major difficulties with the story in Judges 11. First, Jephthah's daughter refuses to allow her father to back out of his oath. Whatever we might think, the victim herself believed that Jephthah needed to kill her.¹ The

second difficulty is that the Bible is silent about God's perspective on all this. Nowhere do we read anything either condemning or supporting Jephthah's decision. Thus, an ethical case that seems to be

open-and-shut against the daughter-killer becomes a bit trickier.

So, to assess Jephthah's morality, it will be helpful to analyze what he did through the categories Aristotle set out to judge morality. Before we begin, however, I should note that there are actually two moral

events in this story. First, Jephthah makes a promise in the heat of battle. Second, Jephthah ultimately decides to fulfill that promise. Because this is not a typical case of human sacrifice, we must evaluate

both actions of Jephthah or we will not be able to give fairly assess his actions.

In the book of Judges, we read that “The Spirit of the LORD was upon Jephthah,”² causing him to go to war against the Ammonites. The next verse describes the action in question: “And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD and said, 'If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whatever comes out from the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace from the Ammonites shall be the LORD's and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.”³

We do not have much information on the first category of circumstances—the “accidental and morally irrelevant”⁴ category—but we do know that Jephthah made this vow against the Ammonites.⁵ By definition, this category of circumstances is irrelevant in our assessment of Jephthah's morality.

For the second category, however, there is a factor that does indeed “aggravate or diminish its moral character and the weight that we attach to it,”⁶ namely, that Jephthah made this vow in anticipation of a battle that he was waging for the Lord. War, of course, is a very serious undertaking, and the holy war that the Israelites waged was all the more serious for its being commanded by God. Thus, we who sit in an air conditioned seminary classroom three thousand years later in a time of relative peace should keep in mind that Jephthah is essentially praying for protection and victory in battle. That, in itself, is a noble prayer, and we should recall that King David often did the same thing, even if the details of his vows were different. This does not necessarily take Jephthah off the hook, but it does diminish the moral weight that we should attach to Jephthah's vow.

It is in the third category that Jephthah makes his greatest moral blunder. The vow that he makes to the Lord (which, again, is a not morally evil activity) is a vow that promises to sacrifice the first thing that comes out of his house to meet him upon his return. Setting aside for the moment the likelihood that he was planning on something other than his daughter coming out to him (a factor we will look at in the next section), there is no doubt that Jephthah should have known that his daughter (or any other human being, for that matter) could have been the one to come outside to greet him. The likelihood that this vow was not malicious in its intent cannot detract from the sheer carelessness and foolishness of this vow. We must judge this vow, in the terms of the third category, to be morally evil.

Finally, we need to assess Jephthah's motivation in making his vow. First, it is wholly unlikely that Jephthah ever intended to kill his daughter, especially when we consider that he tore his clothes and lamented the fact that it was his daughter who greeted him upon his return.⁷ So, we cannot say that Jephthah intended to do harm.

Nevertheless, there is a second aspect to Jephthah's motivation: his pride. Anyone willing to wager anything in his house capable of movement seems a bit more desperate for victory than is healthy. The text does not make any statement that pride necessarily factored into Jephthah's vow, and we cannot therefore know for sure; but, we should note as a likelihood that Jephthah might have been carried away by his pride for conquest.

So, in my judgment, Jephthah cannot be exonerated for his vow as though it were an honest mistake, but I do not think that we can judge him too harshly. I would only condemn Jephthah, in relation to his vow alone, as being careless and reckless. Some Christians may disagree with this assessment by arguing that Jephthah should have known that it was more likely for a human to come out of the doors of his house to greet him than for anything else to do so. After all, why would a sacrificial lamb, goat, or bull be in his house in the first place, and how would such animals have the mental capacity to rush out to greet him? I, on the other hand, do not think that Jephthah ever would have made the vow if he had actually planned on a human being coming to greet him. Thus, he does not act wickedly, although he certainly acts carelessly.

Jephthah's second action, however, looks a little different. We are not given any first category information, such as how Jephthah went about killing his daughter, but only that he “did with her according to his vow that he had made.”⁸ For the second category, though, I think that the morality of Jephthah's sacrificing a human was indeed aggravated by the fact that she was his daughter, and further aggravated by the fact that she was his only child.⁹ If Jephthah should have protected anyone, it certainly should have been his daughter. Unfortunately, he did not, and that factor makes this crime all the more heinous.

In the third category, there are again two parts to Jephthah's action. 1) Jephthah kept his vow; and 2) Jephthah killed his daughter. In general, we would consider a person virtuous for keeping a vow; in this situation, however, the circumstances of the vow have the opposite effect. Jephthah sinned in his carelessness by making the vow, and now he more grievously sins by keeping his vow. The circumstances of the vow dramatically “changes the objective nature of the moral act.”¹⁰

As to Jephthah's killing, we should remember that killing is not always wrong by noting that Jephthah had just come from “virtuously” killing in his battle against the Ammonites. In that circumstance, God had commanded the waging of war, and Jephthah rightly responded to that call. In the circumstance of killing his daughter, though, Jephthah sinned.

Again, some Christians might disagree with me that Jephthah sinned, siding the the logic of Jephthah's daughter: “My father, you have opened your mouth to the LORD...”¹¹ Certainly, God wants us to keep vows that we make to him. Nevertheless, God also detests the sacrificing of one's children.¹² Thus, while it is a sin to vow to do something wrong, I think that it is another sin to follow through by committing that wrong action. I think Jephthah should have broken his vow and protected his daughter.

The fourth category is the most difficult to assess. On the one hand, we might say that Jephthah's motivations were noble, pointing to his desire to keep a vow made to the Lord, even if it was wrong to keep that specific vow. I certainly think that a sense of honor and fidelity to one's commitments factored into Jephthah's decision-making. On the other hand, I think that this might be further evidence of pride in Jephthah's life.

In a similar biblical story, Herod commands the execution of John the Baptist because of an oath he had given to the daughter of Herodias, who danced a pleasing dance. Matthew suggests that Herod's pride was an over-arching factor in his decision, writing, “And the king was sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests he commanded [John's head] to be given.”¹³ Clearly, Herod did not want to lose face in front of his guests by doing the right thing in sparing John's life. It is possible (although the text in Judges gives us no certain indications) that Jephthah similarly did not want to lose face.

So, I think that we should condemn Jephthah's keeping his vow and killing his daughter based on a failure in every category. The only exception might be Jephthah's motivation, but, again, pride may have played a large role in swaying Jephthah to see virtue in keeping his vow rather that rescuing his daughter from himself.

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