The words of Judges 11:29 immediately precede not only Jephthah’s trek toward the Ammonites but also his vow. This confronts the interpreter with the dilemma of whether the Spirit led Jephthah to make the vow and is therefore responsible. Some propose such a scenario.1
Several factors taken together suggest the Spirit did not prompt Jephthah’s vow. No such link is explicitly made in the text. But even more significant is the occurrence of textual links between the stories of Jephthah and Gideon. Here we draw attention only to those relating to the Spirit of the Lord.
The Spirit comes upon both at a critical moment, when the troops need to be rallied, and then each deliverer indeed assembles the army (Judges 6:34–35; Judges 11:29).
The Gideon narrative reveals that even after he receives the Spirit and before he engages in battle, he asks for a sign from God to reassure him, and still does not fully trust that the victory will be his until he gets confirmation from the dream of a pagan (Judges 7:13–15). Similarly Jephthah, though Spirit-empowered, still makes a vow to doubly ensure victory. Each lacked trust in God; the Spirit’s presence neither removes all personal doubts nor neutralizes personal volition.
After their respective victories, both Gideon and Jephthah face internal conflict with the men of Ephraim (Judges 8:1–3; Judges 12:1–6).2
The presence of the Spirit of the Lord, therefore, does not mean that the judge is thereby prevented from making sinful decisions, nor does it imply that his will is overwhelmed. Instead, the impression one gets is that the Spirit’s empowerment is to be tied to what immediately follows, the rallying of troops.
This seems to bear out at a syntactical level as well, at least as far as Jephthah is concerned. There is a disjunction at the end of Judges 11:29, signalled by two features: 1) The final of the four verbs in Judges 11:29 is preceded not by a waw consecutive (
and
as prefixed to the verb) but by a simple waw and two nouns, which breaks up the pattern in the series; 2) the beginning of Judges 11:30, recording the vow, restates the immediately antecedent subject (from Judges 11:29): “And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord.” This restating, with no different subject intruding into the narrative in the previous clauses, suggests that the vow introduces a shift in the narrative. That shift is only temporary, as after the vow the first clause in verse Judges 11:32 is resumptive, carrying on where the narrative left off in verse Judges 11:29, with another repetition of the only subject in these verses as well as the oft-used verb of verse Judges 11:29:So Jephthah crossed over [עָבַר] to the Ammonites to fight against them.
3,4,5
Thus, it cannot be defended that Jephthah’s vow was either motivated by or approved of by the Spirit. It looks as though the author has structured the text in order to foster a tension between the intervention of the Spirit and the vow.
30 And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD and said, “If you will give the Ammonites into my hand,