Judges 10:6-9 -- Because of their unfaithfulness in chasing every pagan god and goddess from the Canaanites and surrounding nations, God withdrew His protection from Israel. The wording in Hebrew is emphatic that the Children of Israel left no stone unturned in looking for new deities to worship. Thus, they fell under the oppression of two nations. They were pressed on one side by the ever-increasing presence of the Philistines, and on the other by Amorites. In the midst of all this, the Ammonites had mobilized to take advantage of their weakness.
10:10-18 -- The folks called on God and He told them their sin. They turned around, and put aside their pagan habits. The Ammonites had gathered in Gilead. This had once been their home long ago between the Arnon and Jabbok Rivers, but the Amorites had driven them out into the wilderness to the east. The army of Israel mashalled at Mizpeh or Mizpah. The word means "tower" and could be any number of places in Israel where such a structure stood, but was probably the one northeast of Gibeon. The leaders of the Gilead clans, as the primary victims of this event, decided that if they could find a decent commander, he would become their king.
11:1-3 -- There was a particularly heroic warrior named Jephthah. He was the illegitimate son of Gilead by a harlot. When Gilead's legal heirs grew up, they ran off this whoreson. Obviously they had the support of the community elders. He moved to the area called Tob, just to the northeast of Gilead, far out in the upper Valley of Jair. Being such a grand warrior and leader, all sorts of adventurous types gravitated to him. The term "vain men" means those like himself who had little to lose.
11:4-11 -- So when the Ammonites began ravaging the land, the elders sent messengers to Jephthah and begged him to come home and help out with the war effort. He answered harshly with the question, "Where were you when I needed you?" They promised to make him their king, as it were, and he yielded. The whole thing was confirmed in a solemn ceremony before the Lord -- that is, in the presence of the priests, etc. with lots of witnesses.
11:12-28 -- Jephthah showed incredible tact in dealing the Ammonites. He explained how the nation endeavored to pass through in peace, and found the disputed territory in the hands of the Amorites. While Israel avoided conflict with Edom and Moab, they were directly attacked by the Amorites. They trusted God, won the battle and won the land by right of conquest. Showing his limited understanding of Jehovah, Jephthah commented that a nation should gladly accept whatever land their god gives them -- Chemosh, the Ammonite god, had apparently given them their territory east of the Amorites, just as Jehovah had given Gilead to Israel. Balak never went to war with Israel, but tried to persuade Jehovah to abandon His people. Would the Ammonites claim to be any better able? In many ways, the Ammonites were regarded as more or less one with Moab, since they were both sons of Lot. Moab's lack of dispute over Aroer, right on the north bank of the Arnon, gave Israel tacit right to keep it. In all that time, not once did the Ammonites present their claim. Now they want to stake their claim? Jephthah used a typical exaggeration of about 300 years, a round number, when it may have been just over 200.
11:29-40 -- Jehovah fell upon Jephthah and empowered him to lead the army over the Jordan, paste some unknown landmark called Mizpah of Gilead, and right down on the encamped army of the Ammonites. He defeated them, and pursued them. The narrative names places we cannot now identify, but the scene described is one of pushing them back out into the wilderness areas. The Ammonite forces were so badly reduced they could not rise again for quite some time.
In the midst of all this, we see Jephthah vowing to offer Jehovah a human sacrifice. He clearly had insufficient knowledge to understand this was not a part of God's ways. However, by this time the copies of the Law of Moses may have been unseen for a long time, and certainly not commonly taught, as the priests had been commanded. I'm sure Jephthah expected to lose one of his better servants, but it was his daughter, and only child, who met him that day. He was heart-broken, and many claim he could not possibly have carried out his vow literally. It is my contention he did just that, since she wept not for anything so simple as being forced to remain a virgin. Rather, it was a deep shame for a woman to die childless. Without giving birth, she had completely failed her purpose, according to that culture then. The resulting festival of weeping would have little meaning if she had simply lived without marriage.
12:1-7 -- Ephraim had been slow to support Gideon, and had pulled the same stunt here. Then they had the gall to complain that Jephthah had hastily gone off to battle without them. Recall that Jephthah had gone in God's timing, at God's urging. Taunting the Gileadites as deserters of the tribe of Ephraim, they mobilized and crossed over the Jordan in Gilead. So Jephthah's army reassembled and met their cousins at Zaphon, somewhat north of the Jabbok on the easter hills above the Jordan. The Ephraimite army was soundly defeated. Further, to prevent them escaping back home, elements of the Gileadite forces held the fords of the Jordan and proposed a test to see if anyone crossing was from the West Bank. By this time, they had lost the sharp "sh" pronunciation, having softened to an "s" sound. It became apparent when they were asked to pronounce the word "shibboleth" -- meaning "an ear of grain."
Jephthah's tempestuous rule ended after six years. His burial appears to have been near the fort from which he launched his attack on Ammon, Mizpah of Gilead.
12:8-15 -- We see relatively uneventful periods of rule from Ibzan, Elon and Abdon.
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Ed Hurst
revised 05 April 2004
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