Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Burks <rwburks AT flash.net>]

George,

While I can appreciate our attempts to explain something that to us is unexplainable, it could be that the text indicates just what it says and no more.  The girl was sacrificed.  The vow foolish, or not well planned.  The text however can be taken at its face value.  To do otherwise is beyond the limitations of the language and steps into the muddy waters of interpretation.

Bill Burks

Polycarp66 AT aol.com wrote:

In a message dated 6/3/2002 7:24:56 AM Eastern Daylight Time, sh AT teol.ku.dk writes:
 
 

Sorry for not having answered before. Was on my way from Copenhagen to
Jerusalem. I should possibly have kept out of this, as I don't have a
well-thought-out and "finished" interpretation of the Yiphtach episode that
I want to promote. All I wanted to say was, if we focus on the historical
referent of the text (the past event), and so limit interpretation of the
text to questions of how that EVENT is to be understood ("an early stage in
Israelite reliogion" vs "an early perversion of Israelite religion") we
might be entirely overlooking issues of how the TEXT is to be understood,
which might have nothing to do with what may or may not have happened in the
past, but rather with how the world was perceived by the author and his
community of faith. I wouldn't necessarily call it a morality tale (as the
point could be about matters other than the strictly ethical) and certainly
wouldn't say it was "just" a morality (or any other brand of) tale, as tales
may often have more, and not less, to tell us than eye-witness reporting.
I'm not sure whether the text offers an answer or not, but it seems to me
quite obviously to be raising a philosophical question buy asking something
like "is a man to blame if he involuntarily commits himself morally (by
making a promise) to carrying out an utterly immoral act like sacrificing
his child? And what is God's role in this?". Actually I think this is rather
close to the problematic Soren Kierkegaard took up in writing about the
Aqedah/Abraham's proposed sacrifice of his son -- thanks Ben Crick for the
reference -- and I can't believe the ancients were so much more callous than
Kierkegaard that they couldn't perceive the horror of killing one's child.

Ah, yes, good old "Fear and Trembling."  I recall reading it in a class in Existentialism with Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff years ago.  It was comprehensible compared to "Sickness unto Death" which rather had my head spinning.

Regarding whether this account reflects actual events, I rarely expect that any of our texts do.  Rudolf Bultmann lead us to see the gospels as the creation of the NT church and its kerugma rather than reflective of history (or if they are, that is incidental).  I think we can say the same for the OT passages with the possible exception of the prophets.

My take on this, however, is that the story cannot be understood to be totally unreflective of history.  In this case this would not mean that such an event took place to a particular individual at a particular time under particular circumstances whom we call Jephthah.  It rather would indicate that historically such things did happen.  Regarding the 'morality play' idea, I am inclined to think that, although some searching for a moral in the story is simply a fishing expedition to attempt to resurrect the status of the text as important in the canon, there is an inherent chill which settles over one when he reads this which would lead to the impression that one should be very careful when he makes any vow or promise.  Perhaps that is the moral if it indeed has one.

gfsomsel ---
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