p. 147Ladies and Gentlemen,—
What can you say to the story of Jephthah? There are features about it that you may feel to be unpleasing, and even shocking; but what is there about it to suggest that it is not true? Reflection must certainly reveal to you that it is on a par with all the other narratives we have passed under notice as regards its unintelligibility on any supposition of its having been invented, and as regards its truth, being the only rational explanation of its preservation in the solemn archives of the scattered nation.
Take its prologue, first of all: “The children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord. . . . and forsook the Lord and served him not. And the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and He sold them into the hands of the Philistines and into hands of the children of Ammon.” Consider this is written in the children of Israel’s own history. Is it conceivable that a nation would thus give away its p. 148 own character in sport or fiction? If true, and if the record is a Divinely-superintended one, we can understand it. If not true, it is unintelligible.
The narrative proceeds to inform us that “the children of Ammon passed over Jordan to fight against Israel,” so that Israel was sore distressed,” and that in their distress, Israel cried to the Lord to save them, and that God addressed this message to them: “Did not I deliver you from the Egyptians, and from the Amorities, and from the children of Ammon, and from the Philistines?. . . . Ye cried to me, and I delivered you out of their hand. Yet ye have forsaken me, and served other gods. . . . Go, and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen; let them deliver you in the time of your tribulation.”
Ladies and Gentlemen,—For what purpose could such a posture of affairs have been invented, or imagined? It bears the impress in every line of terrible earnestness and truth. It is preserved by Jewish hands in Jewish records, to Jewish discredit in every way. Can you account for such a thing if it is not true? Try; I think you will lamentably fail. It is all very easy to theorise in the general that these ancient documents are the products of legendary growth, so long as you skim over the surface of things, and run your fingers through the leaves, as it were, in a mechanical kind of way; you may honestly reconcile your mind to such a thought as affording a plausible explanation. But when you fairly face the details in a thorough manner, you are made to feel how impossible it is to attribute these narratives to romance or vanity or fiction of any kind. Everything bears the impress of the mould it has come out of; and if these things were the product of rumour or imagination, they would shew the character p. 149 of their origin in the nature of the narrative, as all such things do, but which these are the very furthest from doing, imaginable. They are the sturdy, thick-set, prickly plants of a real natural earnest vegetation, not shewing the least trace of artificiality or buckram.
Then we read that Israel acknowledged their sin, and put away the strange gods, and that the Lord “was grieved for the misery of Israel.” Then the people of Gilead, whose district was the first to be affected by the invasion of the Ammonites, concerted measures of resistance, and looked round for a man fit to lead them. Their choice fell on Jephthah, who was a man of the requisite capacity; but Jephthah demurred on account of the treatment he had received among his people years before. He was the son of a Manassite father, by a harlot; and when he was grown, his father’s other sons “thrust out Jephthah, and said unto him, Thou shalt not inherit in our father’s house, for thou art the son of a strange woman.” And now that they said, “Come and be our captain that we may fight with the children of Ammon,” he said, “Did ye not hate me, and expel me from my father’s house? Why are ye come unto me now when ye are in distress?” However they made it up, and Jephthah accepted the command, and placed himself at the head of the considerable Israelitish forces that had collected at Mizpeh.
The first thing was the despatch of messengers to the Ammonites, to enquire what they had come for. The answer of the King of the Ammonites was: “Because Israel took away my land when they came up out of Egypt, from Arnon even unto Jabbok and unto Jordan; now, therefore, restore those lands again peaceably.” Jephthah’s rejoinder is set out at p. 150 length. It is chiefly valuable for the evidence it contains of the knowledge then existing of the arrival of Israel from Egypt three hundred years previously, in the way described by Moses. “When Israel came up from Egypt,” says Jephthah, “and walked through the wilderness unto the Red Sea, and came to Kadesh, then they went along through the wilderness and compassed the land of Edom and the land of Moab and came by the east side of the land of Moab. . . . And the Lord God of Israel delivered Sihon and all his people into the hand of Israel, and they smote them; so Israel possessed all the land of the Amorites. . . . So now the Lord God of Israel hath dispossessed the Amorites from before his people Israel, and shouldst thou possess it?. . . . While Israel dwelt in Heshbon and her towns and in Arder and her towns, and in all the cities that be along by the coast of Arnon, three hundred years, why did ye not recover them within that time? Wherefore I have not sinned against thee, but thou doest me wrong to war against me: The Lord, the Judge, be Judge this day between the children of Israel and the children of Ammon” (Judges xi. 12-27).
No peaceable answer came back to this remonstrance. “Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he passed over. . . . unto the children of Ammon,” to make onset against them. Before attacking, “he vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt, without fail, deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, then it shall be, that whosoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.” He then went on with his work, and overthrew the Ammonite host p. 151 with a very great slaughter, and chased a miserable remnant out of the country.
On his return from the overthrow of the Ammonites, Jephthah found a section of Israel (the Ephraimites) in a state of high dudgeon, because they had not shared in an enterprize that had turned out so well. They were angry with the anger of envious unreasonable men. They had, in fact, been invited by Jephthah, but had refused. Jephthah reminded them of this, but they were not to be pacified. Nothing would satisfy them but an attack on Jephthah, which they commenced with great bitterness. Jephthah got the better of them and they fled to escape over the Jordan, but Jephthah got possession of the fords before them, and slew every Ephraimite. How they knew the Ephraimites in this operation was by the way they pronounced “Shibboleth,” which has given a proverb to the word ever since.
A sadder incident than this followed the victory. Jephthah’s only daughter and only child “came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances. When he saw her, he rent his clothes and said, Alas, my daughter! Thou hast brought me very low. . . . I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back. And she said to him, My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon. . . . . Let me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains and bewail my virginity, I and my fellows. And he said, Go. And it came to pass at the end of two months that she returned unto her father, who did with her according to the vow which he vowed. . . . And it p. 152 was a custom in Israel, that the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite, four days in a year.”
Ladies and Gentlemen,—This story you perceive finishes in a very tragic and painful manner; but it is not upon this that I desire to lay stress. I ask you to believe that such a story in all its surroundings could not be invented by the people to whom it relates, and if it had been invented by anyone else, it could not have obtained place in the State records of the people affected. I ask you to believe that the simple explanation of its existence is the fact that the things narrated happened just as they are narrated. Any other view will tax your ingenuity to the utmost, and will leave you finally confronted with the inexplicable circumstances that such a story, if not true, should be incorporated in a righteous book with the sanction of generations of the best of men, concluding with the Lord Jesus, who said the Scripture could not be broken.
If a true narrative, then see how powerfully it involves the collateral facts upon which the whole scheme of Divine revelation rests. See how it proves that Israel had been in the land of Canaan 300 years prior to the days of Jephthah (B.C. 1160). See how it proves that as a matter of common knowledge in these days, with the Ammonites as well as with Israel, Israel at the beginning of that period, had come out of Egypt and had passed through the wilderness on the way. With this proved, the whole question of the exodus and the subsistence of a multitude for years in a sterile region is forced upon you as a problem calling for solution—a problem, Ladies and Gentlemen, which I make bold to affirm can rationally be solved one way only, and that is, that these p. 153 things happened through Divine co-operation with Moses, as Moses relates. As an unaided natural operation, the exodus and the wilderness sojourn are inexplicable. As a Divine operation, they bring us the pledge of God and all He has said and done since that time, from Samuel down to the apostles of the Lord Jesus.