Jephthah the Gileadite יפתח הגלעדי

"Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valour, and he was the son of a prostitute." His brothers, sons of the lawful wife, drove him out: you shall not inherit in our father's house, you are the son of another woman. He went to the land of Tob, and "idle men" gathered around him.

When the Ammonites went to war after eighteen years of oppression, the elders of Gilead rode out to fetch him. Jephthah answered with a question worth a whole chapter: did you not hate me and drive me from my father's house? Why then have you come to me now, when you are in trouble?

Having come to terms, he did not fight at first but negotiated: he sent the king of Ammon a long letter setting out who had taken which lands three hundred years earlier and on what grounds. It is the only attempt in the book of Judges to settle a matter by legal argument. Ammon would not listen.

Before the battle he made a vow: if You give the Ammonites into my hand, then whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace shall be the LORD's, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering. The victory was complete. What came out to meet him was his daughter, his only child, with timbrels and dancing.

The text softens nothing: he tore his clothes, she asked for two months to bewail her maidenhood in the hills with her companions, and returned. "And he did with her according to the vow he had made." How exactly to understand this is disputed by every commentator: some read it literally, some as seclusion and celibacy. On either reading the fault is the vow itself: Maimonides and others write plainly that the vow was void, and Jephthah should have gone to the high priest and asked to have it annulled.

Then came the war with Ephraim and the test at the fords of the Jordan: say "shibboleth" — and whoever could not pronounce it died. Forty-two thousand men. He judged Israel six years.

The years here are computed by adding up the terms given in the book of Judges itself, counting from the death of Joshua; they are not stated as such in the source.