Verses 34-35
Jephthah's Vow. - Jdg 11:34, Jdg 11:35. When the victorious hero returned to Mizpeh, his daughter came out to meet him “with timbrels and in dances,” i.e., at the head of a company of women, who received the conqueror with joyous music and dances (see at Exo 15:20): “and she was the only one; he had neither son nor daughter beside her.” ממּנּוּ cannot mean ex se, no other child of his own, though he may have had children that his wives had brought him by other husbands; but it stands, as the great Masora has pointed it, for ממּנּה, “besides her,” the daughter just mentioned-the masculine being used for the feminine as the nearest and more general gender, simply because the idea of “child” was floating before the author's mind. At such a meeting Jephthah was violently agitated. Tearing his clothes (as a sign of his intense agony; see at Lev 10:6), he exclaimed, “O my daughter! thou hast brought me very low; it is thou who troublest me” (lit. thou art among those who trouble me, thou belongest to their class, and indeed in the fullest sense of the word; this is the meaning of the so-called בּ essentiae: see Ges. Lehrgeb. p. 838, and such passages as 2Sa 15:31; Psa 54:6; Psa 55:19, etc.): “I have opened my mouth to the Lord (i.e., have uttered a vow to Him: compare Psa 66:14 with Num 30:3., Deu 23:23-24), and cannot turn it,” i.e., revoke it.
Verses 36-37
The daughter, observing that the vow had reference to her (as her father in fact had, no doubt, distinctly told her, though the writer has passed this over because he had already given the vow itself in Jdg 11:31), replied, “Do to me as has gone out of thy mouth (i.e., do to me what thou hast vowed), since Jehovah has procured the vengeance upon thine enemies the Ammonites.” She then added (Jdg 11:37), “Let this thing be done for me (equivalent to, Let this only be granted me); let me alone two months and I will go,” i.e., only give me two months to go, “that I may go down to the mountains (i.e., from Mizpeh, which stood upon an eminence, to the surrounding mountains and their valleys) and bewail my virginity, I and my friends.” בּתוּלים does not mean “youth” (נעוּרים), but the condition of virginity (see Lev 21:13). The Kethibh רעיתי is a less common form of רעותי (Keri).
Verse 38
The father granted this request.
Verses 39-40
At the end of two months she returned to her father again, “and he did to her the vow that he had vowed, and she knew no man.” I consequence of this act of Jephthah and his daughter, “it became an ordinance (a standing custom) in Israel: from year to year (see Exo 13:10) the daughters of Israel go to praise the daughter of Jephthah the
