Saturday, June 9, 2018

Answers within the Bible


                           
"Then the spirit of the Lord came on Jephthah, and he went through Gilead and Manasseh, and came to Mizpeh of Gilead; and from Mizpeh of Gilead he went over to the children of Ammon. And Jephthah took an oath to the Lord, and said, If you will give the children of Ammon into my hands, then whoever comes out from the door of my house, meeting me when I come back in peace from the children of Ammon, will be the Lord's and I will give him as a burned offering. So Jephthah went over to the children of Ammon to make war on them; and the Lord gave them into his hands. And he made an attack on them from Aroer all the way to Minnith, overrunning twenty towns, as far as Abel-cheramim, and put great numbers to the sword. So the children of Ammon were crushed before the children of Israel. Then Jephthah came back to his house in Mizpah, and his daughter came out, meeting him on his way with music and with dances; she was his only child; he had no other sons or daughters. And when he saw her he was overcome with grief, and said, Ah! my daughter! I am crushed with sorrow, and it is you who are the chief cause of my trouble; for I have made an oath to the Lord and I may not take it back..."  (Judges 11:29-35)

There are a few places in the Bible that bother me when I read them.


One of them is from Judges 11 (see above)



What did Jephthah expect to see when he came home (other than his loved ones)? Why did he make such a horrible promise to the Lord?



Why then did people think that giving a burned offering to the Lord is the ultimate way to please God?



Thanks to the prophet Micah who wrote the following sentences about three hundred years later (8th Century BC) - a much mature idea of "offering" to the Lord:

"With what am I to come before the Lord and go with bent head before the high God? Am I to come before him with burned offerings, with young oxen a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of sheep or with ten thousand rivers of oil? Am I to give my first child for my wrongdoing, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has made clear to you, O man, what is good; and what is desired from you by the Lord; only doing what is right, and loving mercy, and walking without pride before your God." (Micah 6: 6-8)

Yes...
He has made clear to you, O man, what is good; 
And what is desired from you by the Lord; 
Only doing what is right, and loving mercy, 
And walking without pride before your God.



* Comments

Yes, it took the Israelis hundreds of years to realize that God preferred loving actions and social justice rather than burnt sacrifices.  We see this in Mica, we see this in Amos.
However, As I read Jephthah’s tragic story in the Book of Judges, another question pops up in my mind: “Why God did nothing to spare Jephthah’s daughter’s life, as he did for Isaac, Abraham’s son?  Granted, Jephthah took an oath voluntarily to offer whoever came out greeting him when he came home in triumph while in Abraham’s case it was God who requested the sacrifice of Isaac.  Does that entitle God to demand the burnt offering of Jephthah’s daughter even though she was completely innocent in this bad deal?  Why was it not reported that God show mercy to Jephthah or compassion toward an innocent young woman?  Is that because she was a woman in a time when women were treated as a “thing” and not fully a human being in a male dominant culture?  Note that Jephthah’s daughter in this story didn’t even have a name.
Questions like this point to the reality that human civilization is an evolving process, including religions.  The word “feminism” did not show up until 19th century; and women could not vote in the United States until 1920.  We certainly cannot expect that stories in the scriptures, apparently written by humans, could escape the “evolutionary” understanding of the infinite God.  Understandably, with very few exceptions, authors of the scriptures, predominantly males living in a male-dominantly society, would write in a mentality of male supremacy.   


by Poshu Huang   6/15/2018


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