2. Gilead’s wife bore him sons. The probable, though not inevitable, inference is that the legitimate sons were born after Jephthah, he belonging to his father’s wild-oats phase.

You shall not inherit in our father’s house. This declaration, accompanied by the banishment, appears to be a performative speech-act with legal force.

for you are the son of another woman. They don’t dare call his mother a whore to his face, and so they use a euphemism. Their behavior toward him, however, is brutal (in this regard, see the next comment).

3. And Jephthah fled from his brothers. The fact that he has to flee suggests that their driving him out was implemented with a threat of doing him bodily harm.

the land of Tob. This is a remote region in the northeastern sector of Gilead.

no-account men. The same term, reiqim (literally, “empty”) is also used for the mercenaries hired by Abimelech. It probably refers to men without property, on the margins of society, who have nothing to lose and readily join a band of guerillas or bandits. The young David also puts together a private militia of this sort when he flees from Saul.

5. the elders of Gilead went to take Jephthah from the land of Tob. Their going to seek him out in the badlands where he has located with his fighters obviously reflects the dire straits in which they find themselves.

6. Come, be our captain. Their initial speech to him is brusque, devoid of deference or diplomatic gesture. The position they offer him is military commander, qatsin.

7. Did you not hate me and drive me out from my father’s house. We now learn something new about the banishment: the brothers’ harsh act either had the tacit endorsement of the elders or was actively abetted by them.

8. Therefore now we have come back to you. The “therefore” amounts to a concession on their part: precisely because we were complicit in your banishment, we now come to you to make amends. “Come back” or “bring back” is a thematic key word in this story.

chief. Now they up the political ante: he will not be merely a captain but chief, or head, roʿsh, of the whole community.

9. If you bring me back. The man who was driven out now contemplates being brought back, as the elders have “come back” to him. Instead of accepting the immediate offer to be chief, he stipulates that he will assume that position only if he is victorious in battle, but he would have to become captain in order to undertake the battle.

it is I. The Hebrew puts the pronoun “I,” usually not needed, before the conjugated verb in a structure of emphasis.

10. May the LORD be witness. Literally, “May the LORD listen.”

11. the people set him over them as chief and captain. In the event, both positions are conferred on him before the battle.

Jephthah spoke all his words before the LORD. This is a prayer before the battle or perhaps an inquiry of an oracle.

12. And Jephthah sent messengers to the king of the Ammonites. The scholarly consensus is that this entire passage of attempted diplomatic negotiation has been spliced in from another source. According to the account in Numbers 20 and 33, it is Moab, not Ammon, that refuses right of transit to Israel, and, in fact, Moab is mentioned first here (verse 15) and more often, together with Edom and the Amorites. “The land of the Ammonites” may well be an editorial addition intended to link this passage with the surrounding narrative. Chemosh, the deity mentioned in verse 24, is the national god of the Moabites, whereas the Ammonite god would be Milcom.

24. Do you not take possession of what Chemosh your god gives you to possess? The theological assumption of this statement is perfectly characteristic of this early period of Israelite history. Israel has its own God, YHWH (“the LORD”), believed to be more powerful than other gods, but each nation has its guiding deity, assumed to look after the national destiny.

25. Did he strive with Israel, did he do battle with them? In fact, he fought against Israel, as is reported in Numbers 22, but to no avail, for YHWH caused him to be defeated.

29. And the spirit of the LORD was upon Jephthah. Only now, when Jephthah actually leads his troops into battle, do we have the formula of the investment by the divine spirit, the leader’s charisma, that is used for most of the other judges.

31. whatever comes out of the door of the house to meet me. The Hebrew is ambiguous: it could mean “whatever” or “whoever.” Some scholars have argued for the latter because “to meet” seems to imply a person, but the Hebrew, which is in fact a preposition and not a verb, has the sense of “toward,” and it seems unlikely that Jephthah would have deliberately envisaged human sacrifice from the start. In any case, it is a rash vow: the Midrash Tanhuma shrewdly notes that the first creature out of the house could have been a dog or a pig, animals unfit for sacrifice. The vow focuses on the act of return to the house, but the killing of Jephthah’s only child will mean the destruction of his house in the extended sense of the term.

32. the LORD gave them into his hand. This is all we are provided by way of a description of the battle.

34. and, look. As repeatedly used elsewhere, the presentative term marks the switch to the visual point of view of the character.

with timbrels and with dances. It was the role of young women to celebrate the victory in this fashion. The dance of joy will immediately turn into lamentation.

35. my daughter. This is an affectionate form of address, like “child.”

for I myself have opened my mouth to the LORD. The Hebrew incorporates a crucial pun. Jephthah’s name, yiftaḥ, means “he opens.” The verb used here, patsah, is slightly different from the verb pataḥ on which the name is based, but it is a close phonetic and semantic cousin. The belief shared by father and daughter is that vows to God are irrevocable and nonnegotiable: what comes out of the mouth cannot be brought back (“I cannot turn back,” a locution heavy with ironic resonances in light of Jephthah’s attempt to come back to the house from which he was driven).

36. Do to me as it came out from your mouth. Neither she nor her father can bring themselves to mention explicitly the horrific content of the vow. She speaks almost as though the vow were an autonomous agent that came out of her father’s mouth and cannot be called back.

37. And she said to her father. This is one of the most arresting instances of the convention of repeating the formula for the introduction of speech with no intervening answer in order to indicate a difficulty in responding on the part of the interlocutor in the dialogue. Jephthah, hearing his daughter’s declaration that she is willing to become a burnt offering in fulfillment of the vow, is dumbfounded and doesn’t know what to say. His daughter then goes on to add her special request to the affirmation of compliance she has just uttered.

weep. The Hebrew verb weyaradti in the form in which it appears would normally mean “and I shall go down,” but going down upon mountains doesn’t make much sense. The least strained solution is to assume it is a scrambling of ʾarid, which in Psalm 55:3 is a verb associated with weeping or complaint. Another possibility is to link the term here with the rare verbal stem r-w-d, which probably means something like “wander.”

38. And he said, “Go.” Jephthah’s extreme brevity of response suggests a man choked with emotion, barely able to speak.

her and her companions. Here and in the previous verse, it is unambiguous in the Hebrew that the companions are female—nubile young women like Jephthah’s daughter.

39. he did to her as he had vowed. The narrator, like father and daughter in the dialogue, avoids spelling out the terrible act of child sacrifice. This whole story has parallels elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, the most obvious being Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in order to obtain favorable winds to sail to the Trojan war. The parallel episode within the Bible is the Binding of Isaac, but here, in contrast to Genesis 22, the ending is tragic.

and she had known no man. This concluding note about her virginity underscores the point of keening for her maidenhood: she is cut off from the living without ever having had the opportunity to enjoy the fulfillment that life has in store for a woman.

40. each year the daughters of Israel would go to lament the daughter of Jephthah. The long-standing scholarly hypothesis that this is an etiological tale to explain an annual ritual still seems valid: one suspects a pagan practice in which young women go off to mourn the descent into the underworld each year of a vegetation goddess, a virgin like themselves, roughly analogous to the Greek Persephone and to the Mesopotamian male vegetation god, Tammuz.