Today, I am reading and commenting on Judges 11-13.

By the way we write and talk today, reading this passage leads us to believe that Jephthah was the illegitimate son of a man named Gilead, who was in turn descended from the Gilead after whom the territory of Gilead was named.  By that reading, Gilead, the father of Jephthah, also had several legitimate sons, and those legitimate sons drove Jephthah away to avoid sharing their father’s inheritance with him.  However, it would be consistent with the way people sometimes wrote in the past for this to have a different meaning.  Perhaps, since Jephthah’s mother was a prostitute, when the writer says that his father was “Gilead” he meant that his father was an unknown man of the territory named Gilead.  Further, when the writer referred to “Gilead’s wife” having sons, he was referring to the legitimate sons of the citizens of Gilead.  By that reading, the elders of Gilead who asked Jephthah to command the defense of Gilead were the same people who had exiled him in the first place.  This second reading makes a lot more sense of Jephthah’s response to their request.  In either reading, we see that the people of Gilead were lucky that Jephthah did not hold a grudge against them for their earlier mistreatment.  Of course, on the other hand, Jephthah may not have developed the leadership skills which they needed if they had not done so.

The conflict between the Ephraimites and Jephthah after Jephthah’s victory can be hard to understand.  In order to understand what happened we need to go back to Chapter 10, where it tells us that the Ammonites oppressed the Israelites living in Gilead, east of the Jordan River, for 18 years, and then began raiding into Judah, Benjamin, and Ephraim.  The Ammonites mustered their army in Gilead (it is not clear to me if this was in response to a religious revival among the Israelites which led to their unrest against the Ammonites, or if it was just an annual muster by the Ammonites to go raiding).  In response, the Israelites gathered at Mizpah, where the leaders of Gilead determined to call Jephthah to lead them.  This sets the stage for the battle.  Apparently, the Ephraimites gathered their forces somewhere else (or decided to wait to join the muster).  In any case, after Jephthah had won, the Ephraimites were angry because they did not get a share of the loot which the victorious Gileadites had acquired by defeating the Ammonites and threatened to kill Jephthah and his family.  This dispute illustrates that the warriors of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh were prescient when they built the altar as a monument as they returned home after Joshua’s wars.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.