To the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, the risen Jesus explains “things concerning himself in all the Scriptures,” beginning with “Moses and with all the prophets” (Luke 24:27). He repeats the lesson to the Eleven: “all things which are written about me in the Law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (24:44). Jesus claims the entire Hebrew Bible prophesies of his suffering and glory.
We’re incredulous. “All things” in Scripture are fulfilled in him? Really? Everything? Ehud thrusting a sword into obese Eglon? Jael cracking Sisera’s skull with a tent peg? David clipping and heaping up two hundred Philistine foreskins? Jehu gleefully slaughtering sons of Ahab? We dodge and backpedal, protecting Jesus from his hermeneutical excess. “Every episode and person contributes to the story of Jesus,” we say. “But not every single person or event is directly about Jesus.” There’s something to that, but it’s often a cop-out. And it keeps us from grasping the height and depth of Jesus’s glory.
Jephthah is a test case. Even fictional characters like Hamlet know one and only one thing about this judge of Israel: He made a rash vow to God. “If you give the Ammonites into my hands,” he says, “whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the Lord’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering” (Judg. 11:30–31). Jephthah is victorious, and the first person to meet him is his daughter. Judges says he “did to her as he had vowed.” So did Jephthah sacrifice his daughter? How does he foreshadow Jesus?
We’ll come back to his daughter, but let’s start at the beginning. Jephthah is the son of a prostitute. It sounds damning, until we recall that the tribal lineage that leads to David and Jesus begins with Judah’s intercourse with his daughter-in-law, whom he mistakes for a prostitute. Mary’s pregnancy is a scandal too, so much so that righteous Joseph plans to put her away quietly. Rumors circulated, and years later the Pharisees mock Jesus: “We were not born of sexual immorality.” Maybe the son of a prostitute points ahead to the son of Mary who is the son of God.
Jephthah’s brothers hate their bastard half-brother, drive him away, and disinherit him. Fraternal conflict is endemic in the Bible. Cain kills Abel, Esau plots to destroy Jacob, Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery. All these, including Jephthah, foreshadow the experience of Jesus. When he first preaches in Nazareth, his hometown, they try to throw him off a cliff. At one point, Jesus’s “mother and brothers” are so worried about his mental health that they stage an intervention (Matt. 12:46–49).
At the time of Jephthah, Israel is battered and shattered both by Ammonites who occupy the Transjordan highlands of Gilead and by Philistines who squeeze in from the west. Gilead needs a savior, and Jephthah’s brothers turn to the one mighty man who has the clout and the foot soldiers to mount a defense, their estranged brother Jephthah.
The narrative playfully toys with the paradigmatic conflict of brothers, Cain and Abel. Jephthah is apparently the eldest, and thus seemingly the Cain of the story. Then his brothers attack him, and he looks more like Abel. They drive him to the land of Tob, which nearly rhymes with Cain’s exilic land of “Nod.” But “Tob” means “Good,” so Jephthah isn’t a wandering Cain after all. When Jephthah’s brothers get into trouble, they ask him to deliver them. The Cains gang up, not to kill this new and better Abel, but to ask him to kill Ammonites on their behalf. Jephthah is an Abel who survives and saves his brothers, which sounds vaguely like another Savior.
Jephthah fights in the power of Yahweh’s Spirit, the same Spirit who empowers Jesus to battle Satan, demons, disease, impurity, death, and everything else that afflicts Israel and the nations. Before the battle, Jephthah lays down demands: If I save you, you must make me Headman. Backed up against the wall, they agree. The disinherited bastard becomes chief and inherits Gilead, as the virgin’s Son inherits all nations.
So far, so Jesus: A man of scandalous origins who is attacked by his brothers rescues them and rises to become head, claiming the land as his own.
I promised to return to Jephthah’s vow and his daughter. Whatever his vow means, it cannot be offensive to God, since Yahweh honors it by giving Ammon into Jephthah’s hand. I don’t think Jephthah intended to kill anything at all, much less a human being; no goat or sheep was going to come bounding out of the doorway to greet him and Yahweh strictly forbids human sacrifice. Rather, his vow follows the logic of Passover. Doorways symbolize birth (Gen. 18:1–10; Exod. 12:22–23); whoever comes to greet Jephthah is “firstborn” and therefore, like firstborns after Passover, dedicated to Yahweh (Exod. 13:2, 13–15), given to priests as a quasi-Levite. The firstborn from the house turns out to be Jephthah’s actual firstborn, his only child, and he “sacrifices” her by devoting her to services as a dedicated virgin at the sanctuary in Shiloh (1 Sam. 2:22). At Passover, Yahweh’s firstborn son was born again through the bloody doorway of Egypt. Jephthah’s daughter represents Israel as she rises in a new exodus from Ammonite oppression, to make her way to the mountain of God’s house.
Jephthah proves himself a righteous man who swears to his own hurt but does not change (Ps. 15). Astonishingly, his daughter readily submits, all but pre-quoting Mary: “May it be done to me according to your word.” Jephthah’s harlot mother is a figure of Israel, who plays the harlot after the Baals. His daughter symbolizes a renewed Israel, who does what all Israel is supposed to do, blazing up as a lifelong sacrifice and keeping herself only for her divine husband. Jephthah’s daughter foreshadows the work of Jesus, who miraculously virginizes a harlot people.
My daring conclusion is: Jesus was right after all. He is the key to all Scripture. When we discover him in a text, all its riches are added to us.
