It has been observed that Judges 11:5–11, the dialogue between the leaders of Gilead and Jephthah, is a mirror of Judges 10:10–16, the conversation between Israel and the Lord. Each conversation begins with a plea for help in an hour of need: Israel to God and the men of Gilead to Jephthah. In each case the plea amounts to an effort to get help from the one they had rejected: Israel had rejected God and Gilead, Jephthah. Each plea is motivated more by desperation than by a change of heart. Each plea is then rebuffed because of insincerity. God says to Israel, Why should I come to your rescue every time you get yourselves into trouble and cry out to me, when the rest of the time you forsake me?
Jephthah says to the men of Gilead, Why should I return to Gilead and help you when you’re in trouble, after you betrayed me and drove me from my home?
Then, in both cases the request for help is pushed once again. And then, finally, Israel confessed the Lord as their God, removed the foreign gods among them, and served the Lord. In chapter 11 the men of Gilead swear their allegiance to Jephthah and make him, in a solemn ceremony, ruler over all their people.
Where the two episodes differ sharply is in the final response given by Jephthah and Yahweh. Jephthah promises to rescue the Gileadites, on certain conditions; the Lord makes no such promise. This one inconsistency in the otherwise parallel conversations confirms that God has lost patience with his people.
What does this parallelism intend to tell us? The way the Gileadites treat Jephthah reflects how Israel approaches the Lord.1 And the name of this game is manipulation. The repentance
in each conversation is manipulative. Israel, and the Gileadites, want the Lord, or Jephthah, to act according to their wishes.2,3
5 And when the Ammonites made war against Israel, the elders of Gilead went to bring Jephthah from the land of Tob.