Amaleq13

The story of Jephthah is clearly problematic for anyone contending that human sacrifice had no place in ancient Judaism.

There doesn't appear to be any good reason why the author would be compelled to choose not to depict God intervening as was done in the story of Abraham/Isaac. The stories included in the Hebrew Bible were written within a particular historical context. This story gives every indication that, at the time Jephthah is supposed to have lived, human sacrifices were not considered forbidden by the Jewish God.

I agree that faith and reason are radically different starting positions. Faith allows one to rationalize virtually any problematic aspect while reason requires one to deal with the facts as they exist. Your faith makes you free to appeal to reinterpretations that cannot be reliably dated anywhere near the best estimate of the date of the written version. Absent that faith, one can only deal with the story as it stands.

Jephthah the devout Jew thinks his God will accept a human sacrifice and the God of the Jews is not portrayed as condemning such an offering.

This seems to me entirely consistent with the depiction seen in the Hebrew Bible of a new belief system gradually differentiating itself from its pagan roots. Getting all the followers of this new faith to abandon cherished practices of the root belief system clearly took many generations.

Amaleq13

Unless you can provide evidence that these "outside" texts date as early as the "inside" text, the rational (not Christian) point of view cannot accept your claim.

She is mourning the fact that she will die a virgin.

Jephthah promises to offer up whatever exits the house first as a burnt sacrifice. The text clearly states that Jephthah did as he promised after his daughter was given the chance to lament dying a virgin.

dado

except that "rational" point of view leads straight to your other false assumption: biblical inerrancy. are you prepared to state unequivocally that the text currently preserved is the original text? if so, on what basis? if not, your above claim is prima facie unsupportable because we can't even know what the original looks like.

Amaleq13

First, I'm not sure how one is "lead" to an assumption rather than a conclusion. Typically, one starts with assumptions, considers the evidence, and then one reaches a conclusion. Second, a rational consideration of the Bible is hardly likely to lead one to a conclusion of inerrancy. Third, I'm not sure how concluding that the story fails to identify human sacrifice as forbidden by God or early Judaism as requiring one to embrace inerrancy.

Nope. I am only prepared to state unequivocally that this is the only text available. If you know of significant variants, please share. Otherwise, this smells like an old red herring coated with a thick rationalization sauce.

Why assume there is a different "original" if there is no evidence of a different version? Based on the existing evidence, the story we have is the original.

These kinds of unwarranted speculations purely in the service of preserving one's faith-based conclusions are worthy of McDowell.