dado

if he had refused to make good on his vow he would have been breaking one of the Ten Declarations. once he had made his inappropriate commitment, there was no real path out - either violate daughter or violate HaShem - and establishes the point of the story. if there were no moral quandry, it wouldn't be much of a story. if you are arguing that the author could have had HaShem refuse the sacrifice, yes, it could have gone that way, but then it would have lessened the link between action and consequence and again, it's not much of a story.

i believe there is a Midrash where he offered himself instead - since it was his error - i'll see if i can dig it up. as a story, i think it works very well: action, unintended consequence, devestation. somebody was "reading" Homer.

dado

that is very possibly true. throw in Moshe and the others as well. but it doesn't really matter: the value of a book or story is more about what the reader brings than what the author brings. we all get something different out of Doesteyevsky, doesn't matter if Raskolnikov was real or not, and there is no reason to approach Torah any differently.

(yes, i realize many christians - especially those with their own TV shows - would damn me to hell for saying that.)

Doctor X

Ipse dixit and unfortunately wrong. You try to argue religion--belief, apology--rather than scholarship and reality. Jewish scholars such as Levenson, rather understand that text predates the "oral" texts which are commentaries and, usually, apologies for issues in the text. Hence your mistake by trying to find a part of Mishnah to explain the sacrifice of Jepthah. It has no bearing on what the author of the text intended.

If only declaring wishes made them come true.

Given your posts it seems I have a far better understanding than you pretend to yourself. However, the issue is not "Judaism" but the texts and the religions they represent through history.

Save no one declares the Raskolnikov is real. No one pretends the incidents in Doestoyevsky's stories are real. This is a false analogy. Furthermore, Doestoyevsky does not try to create a mythic past for his followers.

If one wishes to engage in scholarship and try to understand what the texts actually say--and what the authors might have intended--then, yes, one needs to approach the Torah differently then you advocate.

What a religious group, on television or not, think about it or your final disposition is irrelevent to scholarship.

--J.D.

dado

while the daughter is spending two months in the hills fornicating with fawns and unicorns, Jephthah is trying to reason a way out of this, and this dilemna becomes well known enough the high priest hears of it. the high priest has the authority (power, whatever) to annull the vow, but both men are sitting on their high horses and neither makes the first move towards the other. "I'm a hero, he should come to me...I'm the high priest, he should come to me...", the usual political bullshit. it is this immobilization by arrogance that ultimately dooms the daughter, and the midrash concludes with Jephthah being torn limb from limb and the priest losing his position.

there are midrash on the midrash concerning the different punishments meted out to the two men: some say Jephthah was more wrong because it was his daughter at risk, some that you have to go to the priest because he's the priest, some that the outcome is simply an artifact of the story being written/redacted by a priest or someone connected with the priesthood.

dado

and again you show a failure to understand the difference between judaism and christianity: propogating belief is a christian attitude, not a jewish attitude. judaism is not about belief, it is about action.

your continued comments on the relative lack of worth of Oral Torah do nothing but show how little you actually know about the subject. for every word of Written Torah read in yeshiva there are 10000 worlds of Talmud and commentary and responsa studied. Written Torah cannot accurately be placed in its context without the rest of it.

you're a bright guy/gal, but you are doing yourself a serious disservice and missing out on a lot of interesting conjecture/debate by continuing to ignore this. you are acting like Homer Simpson at the power plant: all these buttons, but who needs a manual?

ps it is quite possible Raskolnikov was more real than was originally believed, but that's a topic for another thread, and ultimately it doesn't really matter.

dado

a sentence containing its own contradiction, i like it. Judaism is one of those religions, and is the religion responsible for creating the texts. they cannot be separated in any meaningful way, you cannot understand one without understanding the other.

but you can certainly pretend.

Amaleq13

Yet, by doing so with a human sacrifice, did he not violate one of God's commandments? Does God value keeping vows over avoiding murder?

I would think that, if Jephthah knew human sacrifices were unacceptable to God, he would assume that God would want the first nonhuman coming out the door to be burned.

Your explanation does not actually address the point that God apparently accepts the sacrifice by failing to prevent Jephthah from making it.

There seems to be no indication in this story that the idea of sacrificing a human to God was unthinkable or unacceptable. Jephthah is depicted as assuming God would accept it and God is depicted as accepting it by failing to prevent it.

dado

yes. he's created a situation from which he cannot extricate himself. that's one way of framing the story: don't paint yourself into a corner unless you have a long ladder. he starts a chain of events where he gets deeper and deeper, finally feeling compelled to make a ridiculous committment, and it all ends badly.

do you apply this level of forced interpretation to greek and later dramatists who wrote plays on simliar themes?

that can't be answered from this alone. it is a valid question. i doubt there is a universal answer.

then there would be no story and we wouldn't be here discussing it. "man wins battle, kills many bad guys, goes home, cooks dog. fade to black..." pretty dull, no? the same type of "criticism" can be directed at all literature, but what would be the point?

first, my explanation is exactly that: *my* explanation. if you have an interpretation from which you derive value, then that interpretation is as equally valid. i disagree with the way you are reading it, but the fact is if it makes your life better, who am i to tell you to shut up?

back to the issue at hand...

again, if HaShem had done that, there would be no story and we wouldn't be discussing it today. the fact that you can't count on HaShem bailing you out of a situation you create for yourself is part of the story: action, consequence, no divine intervention, no Big Daddy to save you.

wait a minute: now you're complaining about a story that *doesn't* have divine intervention?

look, that is one way of looking at it. but if HaShem had intervened, then your criticism might well be "what a crock dog doo, there's that damn deus ex machina saving the day". an equally valid way to read it is that you need to be prepared to clean up your own mess, ie, don't count on divine intervention to save your ass. it is another small step on the path of removing the dependancy on the supernatural. on the path towards self reliance. note that in this entire story, G-d is silent: he never says anything, nor does ever actually do anything.

the story was included in Tanakh for a reason: it forces us to ask these questions. by forcing a black and white pejorative reading of the text, what are you doing is, in effect, punishing the authors for making the story interesting. in all seriousness, would you rather the story was Hollywoodified with a nice happy ending for all?

:shrug

imo, that's what Lion King is for.

this entire epiosde could have been avoided if Jephthah had realized the power to succeed lay in himself and he didn't need to call on thunder and lightning to succeed. which is yet another way of framing it: have faith in yourself.

dado

Jephthah did some not too bright things. Jephthah is a fundamentally flawed character, the story even points out he was the son of a hooker and spent a chunk of his life living with "low characters". to conclude from Jephthah's actions that he is representative of a typical Jew of the time is like assuming George Bush is typical example of american literacy just because some people think he's a hero.

Amaleq13

First, there is nothing forced about taking the text as it plainly reads. Jephthah clearly believed that God would consider his daughter an acceptable sacrifice. God is not depicted as thinking otherwise. The author of the story gives no indication that he expected his readers to think any of this was strange. Second, you seem to have forgotten the original argument of this tangent. If someone were claiming that the cultures that produced those plays considered human sacrifice unacceptable yet the plays seemed to unapologetically depicted otherwise, then I would also suggest that the plain meaning of the text of those plays denied the claim.

The bottom line is there is nothing in the story of Jephthah to suggest that human sacrifices were considered unacceptable by the culture that produced the story.

More relevantly, you would be able to show that human sacrifices were clearly not considered acceptable to God by the culture that produced the story. God doesn't, so you can't.

Not complaining but observing what would provide you the evidence you need to establish the claim that human sacrifices were not considered acceptable to God by the ancient Jew(s) who wrote and read the story.

If that were the case, I would have referred to the story and suggested to Doctor X that this constituted evidence that the culture that produced the story considered human sacrifice unacceptable to God. He, in turn, would have thrown a tantrum and accused me of tormenting him. Luckily for him, that is not the case.

He probably read the story of Moses and assumed otherwise.