Taking up the words of the questioning challenge by Colonel Ingersoll to Dr. Field “What think you of Jephthah?” Mr. Gladstone writes: “I am aware of no reason why any believer in Christianity should not be free to canvass, regret, or condemn the act of Jephthah. So far as the narration which details it is concerned, there is not a word of sanction given to it more than to the falsehood of Abraham in Egypt, or of Jacob and Rebecca in the matter of the hunting (Gen. xx, 1-8, and Gen. xxiii [this is a misprint for xxvii]); or to the dissembling of St. Peter in the case of the Judaising converts (Gal. ii, 11); I am aware of no color of approval given to it elsewhere. But possibly the author of the reply may have thought that he found such an approval in the famous eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the apostle, handling his subject with a discernment and care very different to those of the reply, writes thus (Heb. xi, 32): ‘And what shall I say more? for the time would fail me to tell of Gideon, of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthah: of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets.’ Jephthah, then, is distinctly held up to us by a canonical writer as an object of praise. But of praise on what account? Why should the reply assume that it is on account of the sacrifice of his child?”
I submit that to condemn the voluntary human sacrifice by Jephthah to Jehovah, it is necessary to condemn the Bible presentment. A believer in Christianity who condemned the act of Jephthah would in this necessarily condemn also the devotion to the Lord of a human being and the carrying out the vow by actual human sacrifice. But Leviticus xxvii, 28 and 29, authorises such a vow, and enacts the result in precise language. Kalisch, writing on this (“Leviticus,” Part I, p. 385), says: “The fact stands indisputable that human sacrifices offered to Jehovah were possible among the Hebrews long after the time of Moses, without meeting check or censure from the teachers or leaders of the nation.”
Mr. Gladstone correctly enough maintains that the Bible gives no more sanction to the conduct of Jephthah “than to the falsehood of Abraham in Egypt.” I quite admit that this is accurately stated, but God frequently described himself as the “God of Abraham;” Abraham is pictured as being in heaven; special promises were made to Abraham; and if these were not as sanctioning his conduct, they nevertheless were marks of approbation without blame of that conduct. In ordinary cases where reward is given it is not unnaturally associated with the narrated conduct of the person rewarded. Abraham and Jephthah stand on much the same footing on the question of readiness to offer human sacrifice, except that in Jephthah’s case the initiative is with him. In the case of Abraham, the initiative is from the Lord.