Jephthah's Daughter

In a true moral dilemma, where one cannot act without sinning, the least evil course of action is what should be pursued, in spite of how one should ultimately carry out neither action and thus proactively avoid walking into situations with actual moral dilemmas (not dilemmas of moral feelings or obligatory versus optional things).  As rare and avoidable as such situations really are, a particularly intense example is found in Judges 11.  A man empowered by God to defeat the Ammonites vows to offer whatever comes to greet him from his home after his victory as a burnt offering, and his daughter comes out to meet him out of every living thing in his house.

Judges 11:30-32, 34-35--"And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord: 'If you give the Ammonites into my hands, whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph with be the Lord's, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.'  Then Jephthah went over to fight the Ammonites, and the Lord gave them into his hands . . . When Jephthah returned to his home in Mizpah, who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of timbrels!  She was an only child.  Except for her he had neither son nor daughter.  When he saw her, he tore his clothes and cried, 'Oh no, my daughter!  You have brought me down and I am devastated.  I have made a vow to the Lord that I cannot break.'"

Even his daughter encourages him to do as he promised, and the account does say he carries out what he had pledged himself to do (11:36-39).  Do not assume that her sadness over remaining a virgin means she has resigned herself to something other than being sacrificed to Yahweh in fire: if one is about to die, and one is a virgin and will not marry or have sex in the remaining time one is alive, then lamenting never having sex or marrying is not exactly out of place for someone who desires such things, though it would be possible to rush into a short marriage within the two months Jephthah's daughter requests.  People who assume that the real fate experienced by her is a life of perpetual virginity seem desperate for it to be the case that there is no human sacrifice in the narrative, when the behaviors of anyone in a story simply are irrelevant to whether those behaviors are obligatory/permissible or evil in Biblical ethics.  It is a red herring concern despite the gravity of the sin.

Human sacrifice, particularly of children, is one of the exact sins the Bible says the pagan inhabitants of the Promised Land would deserve to eventually be driven out or killed over, along with other miscellaneous sexual sins and acts of sorcery (Leviticus 18:24-30, 20:22-24, Deuteronomy 18:9-13).  After all, morality is universal on Judeo-Christianity as would be logically necessitated if there really is such a thing as good and evil, contrary to both Rabbinic Judaism and evangelical "Christianity".  See the aforementioned Torah passages or Numbers 15:15-16, Deuteronomy 4:5-8, 9:5-6, 24:14-15, 31:12, and so on for blatant examples of such affirmations from just the Pentateuch alone out of the whole Old Testament; see passages like Matthew 5:17-19 with 28:16-20 or Romans 3:9-31 or 1 Timothy 1:8-11 in the New Testament.

As the sin greater than breaking an oath, human sacrifice should have been the one avoided by Jephthah in this case where he would indeed err either way.  His own carelessness trapped him so that he would sin regardless, either in breaking a vow to God or in murdering a human being in an act Yahweh specifically condemned the Canaanites as deserving death for.  Logically, in such a scenario, sinning in the lesser way is obviously what one should do, with murder being a capital sin and thus more severe than violating an oath, in addition to unjustly killing a person made in God's image being clearly worse than "merely" failing to uphold a vow to God:

Deuteronomy 12:31--"You must not worship the Lord your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates.  They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods."

Exodus 21:14--"'But if anyone schemes and kills someone deliberately, that person is to be taken from my altar and put to death.'"

Leviticus 20:1-2--"The Lord said to Moses, 'Say to the Israelites: "Any Israelite or any foreigner residing in Israel who sacrifices any of his children to Molek is to be put to death.  The members of the community are to stone him."'"

Jephthah's oath is very clearly careless in some respects, and it should be quite easy to see this with or without the prompting of the narrative.  It does not matter, now, if an action one vows to perform is good.  The person who vows to carry it out thoughtlessly would at best not be fully examining their own willingness to uphold the commitment.  Listing it among other unintentional sins that need to be repented of, Leviticus condemns this sort of negligent vow as evil even if the object of the oath is otherwise righteous (Leviticus 5:4-5).  For instance, suppose someone with the materials means to do as they say/intend promises to God that he or she will lift a poor person out of poverty completely.  Careless commitment to this vow is still sinful!  Jephthah was already guilty based on this alone.

To shift to another related issue, of importance is that the book of Judges itself does not trivialize this incident because it was "only" a daughter who came out to meet Jephthah.  Nor does Jephthah respond within the story in his irrationality and unrighteousness with anything less than genuine sorrow at the prospect of losing his daughter.  If Jephthah held to sexism in either direction, he would be even more deeply irrational (logically and Biblically, human sacrifice is worse than breaking a vow!) and even more evil according to the laws attributed to God himself and his later instructions to the prophet Jeremiah (Exodus 21:28-31, Deuteronomy 18:9-10, Jeremiah 7:30-34).  Sons and daughters are equally valuable (Genesis 1:27, 5:1-2) and thus have the same moral rights.  That an event is presented as if it occurred according to the narratives of the Bible would not in any way mean that the actions of any person therein are morally legitimate or illegitimate according to the Bible.  This is as true of sexism as it is human sacrifice.

As should be plain, the relatively brief account of Jephthah's vow and his daughter connects with a multitude of vital philosophical matters inside and outside of the worldview proposed by the Bible.  Yes, the story does seem to involve literal human sacrifice, albeit one not intended by Jephthah when he makes his vow, yet this is not authorized by God.  Jephthah sinned by making a careless vow and then sinned by choosing the greater evil when he did not keep himself from entering a situation where he would have to morally err no matter what.  Thankfully, all such situations are avoidable.  If we by unfortunate negligence find ourselves in any scenario where we will truly sin either way even if by total accident, the rational and obligatory thing to do is to choose the lesser evil.