Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Jephthah and His Vow (review)

Jephthah and His Vow (review) JEPHTHAH AND HIS VOW. By David Marcus. Texas Tech University, 1986. Cloth. pp. 77. Lubbock: This essay is a singularly focused pursuit of the question: What happened to Jephthah's daughter at the conclusion of the story in Judg 11 :29-401 What Marcus calls the "traditional" or "sacrificialist" interpretation holds that Jephthah rashly vowed his daughter to death. A minority opinion, also with some deep roots in rabbinic interpretation, regards the sacrifice as metaphorical: Jephthah's daugther was consecrated to Ood to remain a virgin for the rest of her life. After briefly recounting the history of exegesis, which rather massively favors the traditional interpretation, Marcus proceeds to a rehabilitation of the dissenting view. He is convinced that while the sacrificialist case is less than iron-clad, the alternative is not without merit. The reSUlt, he concludes, is a story shot through with intentional ambiguity. The effect of the ambiguity is to focus attention away from the unanswerable question about the fate of the daughter and on to the rashness of Jephthah's vow. There is considerable merit to the argument, and so we "sacrificialists" may well have to be less decisive about certain matters in our second editions. I am not, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Hebrew Studies National Association of Professors of Hebrew

Jephthah and His Vow (review)

Hebrew Studies , Volume 31 (1) – Oct 5, 1990

Loading next page...
 
/lp/national-association-of-professors-of-hebrew/jephthah-and-his-vow-review-PYpAV9edsY

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Copyright
Copyright © National Association of Professors of Hebrew
ISSN
2158-1681
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

JEPHTHAH AND HIS VOW. By David Marcus. Texas Tech University, 1986. Cloth. pp. 77. Lubbock: This essay is a singularly focused pursuit of the question: What happened to Jephthah's daughter at the conclusion of the story in Judg 11 :29-401 What Marcus calls the "traditional" or "sacrificialist" interpretation holds that Jephthah rashly vowed his daughter to death. A minority opinion, also with some deep roots in rabbinic interpretation, regards the sacrifice as metaphorical: Jephthah's daugther was consecrated to Ood to remain a virgin for the rest of her life. After briefly recounting the history of exegesis, which rather massively favors the traditional interpretation, Marcus proceeds to a rehabilitation of the dissenting view. He is convinced that while the sacrificialist case is less than iron-clad, the alternative is not without merit. The reSUlt, he concludes, is a story shot through with intentional ambiguity. The effect of the ambiguity is to focus attention away from the unanswerable question about the fate of the daughter and on to the rashness of Jephthah's vow. There is considerable merit to the argument, and so we "sacrificialists" may well have to be less decisive about certain matters in our second editions. I am not,

Journal

Hebrew StudiesNational Association of Professors of Hebrew

Published: Oct 5, 1990

There are no references for this article.