“Beware the Vow Made in Haste”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Reading: Judges 11-1-11, 29-40
It is good, when we read the Bible, to remember we are not the first ones to pass this way. Generations of rabbis and saints have puzzled over the same stories and left behind wisdom for us. In the church, we speak of four ways to approach scripture: first literally, what does it say? Second, doctrinally, for insight about God. Third, morally, for pointers on how to live well. And fourth, in future-tense, for hope about the world God is bringing. So, Jerusalem, literally, is a city with postal codes and a sewer system. Figuratively it’s God’s people. Morally it’s the virtuous soul. In terms of hope, it’s the city of God made perfect.
Not every biblical text has each of the four. For example, our story this morning has very little future hope, but it has a lot to say about morals. Don’t make a vow. Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount says this:
33 “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ 34 But I say to you: Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. 37 Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.
No vows: clear enough, but really hard to pull off. I made vows at my wedding and my ordination. Ever since John Wesley, Methodist ministers have been asked publicly, “Are you in debt so as to embarrass yourself or your ministry?” We all say “No.” We have master’s degrees from American universities; you must want us to lie.
We make vows when we appear in court. Those being baptized or joining in membership here in church make vows. Clear command of Jesus: not followed, by most of his followers! Minority report: some Mennonites and Amish refuse to swear when in court and have suffered for it, been imprisoned, for doing as Jesus commands.
In the story of Jephthah’s daughter, we see a morality tale: Don’t swear an oath, really. Jephthah is a mighty warrior—so mighty that when his people are in trouble they go to him, hat in hand, “uh, sorry about mistreating you, now can you go fight for us?” Jephthah does, wins a victory, and so becomes head of the people who once rejected him. As Jesus will later put it, the first becomes last, and the last, first. Jephthah has no need to swear this vow, but he does it anyway.
Jephthah made a vow to the Lord and said, “If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, 31 then whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord’s, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering.”
And the first thing to come out of his tent is his daughter, his only child. She has a timbrel in her hand celebrating his victory, like the Israelite women at the Red Sea of old. This celebration will cost her her life. The vow is completely unnecessary. Jephthah was a great warrior. The Lord was with him. He has no need to make this vow. But make it he does.
We’re in the middle of a series on the Book of Judges here at the church. It’s called “There are no heroes.” All we have is a mess of a people, like us, and no leaders who can improve us. A people, who do not deserve one, in terrible need of a saviour. This particular story tastes more Greek than Jewish. It echoes Greek myths of the same sort: a warrior makes a rash vow and loses a child. You or I might not have heard of the story of Jephthah before today, but opera makers and romantics and composers love the story and many have depicted it. It’s pure tragedy. In our day if folks go to Mirvish and don’t come out laughing they want their money back. In Greek and Roman antiquity if you went to the theatre and didn’t come out crying, you’d want your money back. The sacrifice of a virgin who nobly goes to her death to fulfill her father’s vow: that’s a great Greek tragedy, snuck into our Bibles.
This could be the story Mary taught Jesus that led him to say: no vows. Don’t do it. Not ever. The command most of Jesus’ people basically ignore in courtrooms and church sanctuaries. But here’s what it’s really trying to avoid: bargaining with God. You’ve heard the joke about the person late for an important meeting and praying: God if you give me a parking place I’ll quit cussing, I’ll go to church, I’ll tithe, oh, wait Lord, never mind, here’s one. We’ve probably all negotiated with God: to get what we want, we offer what we think God wants. But the gospel says this: God has given us everything already, his Son and all the world with him. This is not a bargain, where we owe something back. It’s a gift, given without reserve, all we have to do is receive it. It is a pagan thing to negotiate, to barter with God. It suggests God is untrustworthy, has to be held to an oath or manipulated. Don’t do it. You might lose your favourite family member.
The moral import is clear enough: don’t make rash vows. Or any vows at all. Our ancestors point out some further reasons against vows. Most figure Jephthah is imagining offering an animal—a sheep or a calf as was common in Israelite worship then. But rabbis point out a non-kosher animal could have walked out first, like a dog. Some ancient Christians wonder if Jephthah is hoping to sacrifice his wife. Maybe his daughter is offering herself in place of her mother. She foils her father’s attempt to shuffle the spouse deck. One thing ancient pagans and Jews and Christians all agree on: Jephthah couldn’t go back on his word. I’d have tried that: hey, uh, didn’t mean it, my bad. But words have power. Once they’re spoken, they can’t be unspoken, they commit us and others. That’s why courts and armies and churches want us to swear oaths. And why Jesus says not to.
But wait! There’s a way out of this predicament! Scripture is gentle, God knows we fail, we make rash oaths and may need an out.
4 When any of you utter aloud a rash oath for a bad or a good purpose . . . you shall confess the sin that you have committed, 6 and you shall bring to the Lord, as your penalty for the sin that you have committed, a female from the flock, a sheep or a goat, as a purification offering, and the priest shall make atonement on your behalf for your sin.
Oaths happen, so God makes a way out. And Jephthah doesn’t take it! This is an argument for coming to Bible study: there may be a loophole in the book that’ll save a life! So, this is another takeaway our forebears point out: know your Bible, your tradition, or have people around you who do. Jephthah is more pagan than Jewish, so he makes rash vows and doesn’t even know there’s a remedy for that, doesn’t have friends or elders to point it out to him.
Let’s back up a bit, see what more we can glean here. Jephthah, we’re told right away, is the son of a prostitute. Not a great way to get ahead in world. Tim Keller writes this:
In the world’s eyes, leaders are people who have an ivy league or Oxbridge pedigree, strong family background (and thus emotional health), and no police record! But Jephthah is someone without any of those things.
He would’ve had trouble getting hired at TEMC! Jephthah’s brothers drive him out of the family—a move they’ll regret. When they need him to fight for them, they promise to make him head of the tribe. There’s a bit of the mafia boss in Jephthah. After he’s driven out by his brothers, we’re told “outlaws gathered around Jephthah and went raiding with him” (Judges 11:3). He forms a gang, and they pillage together. So, a son of questionable provenance, rejected by his own, who gathers losers around him—I wonder if you squint, do you see a glimpse of Jesus here? I do. And I see us: the dregs and rejects who gather around Jesus.
The Ammonites come and make war against Israel and Jephthah goes and delivers us. All that tough guy training came in handy. I love this—biblical history isn’t always so direct. What’s the capital of the kingdom of Jordan today? Amman. That’s the power base for the Ammonites, then and now. Jordan made piece with Israel in the early 1990s in a brave and successful diplomatic coup—we need people as bold for peace as others are for war. But I digress.
So, Jephthah makes this rash pagan vow to sacrifice whatever comes out of his tent first. Please let it be the missus. Uh, no. It’s our daughter. Now remember in the ancient world of power politics, children aren’t just cute replicas of ourselves. They’re power. If Jephthah wants to be king, and he could be, he needs heirs. This daughter is his only child and so his only possible heir. Jephthah mourns not just her death but his own legacy and possible dynasty.
But his daughter takes it like a champ! ‘You have to do this dad. Just let me go mourn with my friends two months,’ and they go together to the mountains. There’s one artist’s imagination of Jephthah’s daughter, perhaps when she realizes what her father has promised. Most cultures, except ours, peculiarly, have traditions to mark girls’ entry into womanhood. Jephthah girl’s transition is one of mourning, not dancing.
Now, here’s the biggest challenge in this story: does Jephthah go through with it? Does he offer his daughter as a burnt sacrifice? Commentators are divided. The text seems clear enough: “At the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to the vow he had made” (11:39). But child sacrifice is a pagan abomination, scripture is clear. So why follow a wrong—swearing a rash oath—with a worse wrong—carrying it out? Commentators ancient and modern have tried to get Jephthah off the hook by saying he dedicates his daughter to the Lord in a special way. She’s committed to life in the temple, made a special servant of God, like a nun. That’d be better, wouldn’t it? No sacrifice, no burning one’s child alive, no barbarous vow-keeping or God-manipulating. It’s possible. Our story nowhere describes the sacrifice as one of death. It’d be like Abraham, who came awfully close to sacrificing his son Isaac, before an angel intervened at the last possible second. I confess I like this reading.
But maybe it’s a little too clever. The text seems, most plainly, to say Jephthah did as he swore, he didn’t take the get out of jail free card in Leviticus. He offered her. And I just wonder if we see here a glimpse of Christ’s sacrifice for us. This girl seems the most Christlike character in the story. She is innocent, done no wrong. She goes to her death willingly even though she doesn’t deserve it. Again, if you squint here do you see the crucified one, wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, offered up to God as a pleasing sacrifice?
So, what do we make of this story? What do we take from it into our Monday-through-Saturday lives? Well, one, don’t act like this. Don’t act like any of these anti-heroes in Judges. Don’t swear unnecessary or rash oaths. Don’t try to manipulate God: we can’t offer God anything God doesn’t already have. The God we know in Jesus offers us everything without price, no bargaining, no manipulation, just all free. But two, look at the slight glimpses of Jesus, just out of the corner of your eye you can see him in Jephthah: driven out only to return and save those who rejected him. The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. We can see Jesus in this daughter, going to undeserved death without protest or guilt. And anytime, anywhere we see Jesus, however fleetingly, we stop and worship and give thanks.
There’s a commentator on scripture who can help us. Rene Girard was an anthropologist, taught at Stanford, serious about his Christian faith. He points out this grim fact: all societies we can find in the ancient world practiced human sacrifice. All of them. Israel included. You can see a glimpse of this in one of scripture’s most famous passages:
With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good,
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God?
Beautiful. That last bit is carved in elegant wood in our boardroom. But wait: are you really pondering offering your firstborn for your sins!? Why would you, Micah? This is a memory of a time when Israel did just that, as all people did. We are all violent, my fellow humans. Girard points out that a mechanism rose up to limit this inevitable violence: scapegoating. We choose one undesirable among us and gang up on them. That’s bad news for the scapegoat of course, but it limits violence to one victim and keeps us from a war of all against all. Girard points this out so we’ll stop doing it: don’t single out someone for violence. You’re tempted—our ancestors limited violence that way. But don’t do it. That’s what Jesus’ cross shows for Girard: look what our violence yields. Now live another way. There are hints of human sacrifice throughout the Jephthah story: he promises whatever emerges from the tent. His daughter takes on her dreadful duty with noble moral fiber. Equilibrium is restored.
Here’s what the Christian story says. Don’t sacrifice anyone. God’s preference is for the weak. God defends the orphan and widow and those with no friends. And if anyone’s going to be sacrificed it’s not any human being, let alone a weak one. It’s God himself. God takes on the role of our sacrificial victim in Jesus Christ, limiting violence to himself. Like Jephthah’s daughter, Christ goes to his cross uncomplaining, since it accomplishes salvation for the world. If every human civilization offers up sacrificial victims in the name of peace, God does not. God says the only one whose blood needs spilling around here is mine. And I’ve already offered the last and final sacrifice for humanity’s healing.
I started by saying Christians have traditionally found meaning on four levels in scripture: the literal first. Like Jerusalem with street cars and open-air markets. This story is a tragedy worthy of the melodramatic Greeks. We interpret it morally: like Jerusalem the holy soul. Don’t make rash oaths, you might regret having to keep them. We interpret theologically, like Jerusalem the holy city: Jephthah goes from outcast to captain, and that’s the whole story of the Bible—the first becomes last, and the last first. We can even squint and see Jesus in this innocent girl accepting undeserved suffering. Finally, we read looking for hope. Jerusalem to come, the bride descending to marry her husband. Such hope isn’t much to be found here or much of anywhere in Judges, or really anywhere in our world, is it? We sure need a saviour. Not that we deserve one. Good thing to have a God better than we deserve. Amen.