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Jephthah Continued Jephthah Continued Go to Judges 11:29. Since it is Easter, I thought about preaching a more traditional message but I decided not to. I want to move forward to get to a certain point in this series, past the moon god of the Old Testament. Now last Sunday evening I left off here, even though I went into some explanation concerning this particular verse and the possible disappointment that Jephthah felt when more people, in this case the tribe of Ephraim, did not respond to the call. We are going to look at verses 29-40 and then go back and concentrate on a few of the verses. “Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah, and he passed over Gilead, and Manasseh, and passed over Mizpeh of Gilead, and from Mizpeh of Gilead he passed over unto the children of Ammon. And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the LORD'S, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering. So Jephthah passed over unto the children of Ammon to fight against them; and the LORD delivered them into his hands. And he smote them from Aroer, even till thou come to Minnith, even twenty cities, and unto the plain of the vineyards, with a very great slaughter. Thus the children of Ammon were subdued before the children of Israel. And Jephthah came to Mizpeh unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter. And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me: for I have opened my mouth unto the LORD, and I cannot go back. And she said unto him, My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the LORD, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the LORD hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon. And she said unto her father, Let this thing be done for me: let me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains, and bewail my virginity, I and my fellows. And he said, Go. And he sent her away for two months: and she went with her companions, and bewailed her virginity upon the mountains. And it came to pass at the end of two months, that she returned unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed: and she knew no man. And it was a custom in Israel, That the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year. And the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together, and went northward, and said unto Jephthah, Wherefore passedst thou over to fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee? we will burn thine house upon thee with fire. And Jephthah said unto them, I and my people were at great strife with the children of Ammon; and when I called you, ye delivered me not out of their hands. And when I saw that ye delivered me not, I put my life in my hands, and passed over against the children of Ammon, and the LORD delivered them into my hand: wherefore then are ye come up unto me this day, to fight against me?” Now if we continued reading to verse seven we’d find that Jephthah judged Israel for six years. In my opinion, that judging started in chapter eleven when the children of Israel decided to make him the judge or the leader, the one who would lead them into battle. And of course Jephthah’s service came with a cost. If you calculate the time, which I don’t have time to do now, he spent a lot of time in wars, at least two to them that we know of, and the policing of the Ephraimites, which when it was all said and done the toll was 42,000 Ephraimites that were killed in the battle for no reason at all except they got angry because Jephthah supposedly didn’t call them, which was a lie. Now that I’ve read you the latter part of the story let’s go back to verse twenty-nine in chapter eleven “Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah, and he passed over Gilead, and Manasseh, and passed over Mizpeh of Gilead, and from Mizpeh of Gilead he passed over unto the children of Ammon.” The best way I can describe this is he was kind of making a circle. He was probably waiting for a response of who would go to battle with him, who would respond to the call to fight against God’s enemy and who would not. As I said in the last message, he was probably hoping and wishing that the Ephraimites would decide to come and be by his side, or even take the forefront, because like I said they were the war machine tribe in those days—and by the way they still are today if you know where Ephraim is at and located. They are the war tribe. Like I said, they were the Navy Seals, the Army Rangers, the Green Berets of the fighting squad. They knew how to fight, they wanted to fight in most cases, but for some strange reason they were so beaten down in fear that they decided not to fight this time for whatever reason. It’s not like they didn’t know about the fight, what the Ammonites were doing, and the oppression that came by their takeover of tribal territory that belonged to the children of Israel. They were not naïve to it. If we go back to chapter ten in verses eight and nine we read, “And that year [before Jephthah was called ] they vexed and oppressed the children of Israel: eighteen years, all the children of Israel that were on the other side of Jordan in the land of the Amorites, which is in Gilead. Moreover the children of Ammon passed over Jordan…” Not only is the oppression 18 years on one side of the river but these Ammonites crossed over. “Moreover the children of Ammon passed over Jordan to fight” against who? Judah, which was more to the southeast, not very far, “and against Benjamin, and against the house of Ephraim…” Who? THE HOUSE OF EPHRAIM. So why wouldn’t the Ephraimites fight? What made them come to the decision to ignore there was a problem? Now they have someone leading but maybe they didn’t like the leader, who knows. We really don’t have a clue. All we know is they are lying when they are saying back in Judges 12:1, “Wherefore passedst thou over to fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee? We will burn thy house…” And Jephthah replied back saying, “I and my people were at great strife [quarrel] with the children of Ammon: and when I called you, ye delivered me not out of their hands.” So they were called, and they were also being oppressed and attacked by the Ammonites. Verse nine in chapter ten also makes that very clear, “Moreover the children of Ammon passed over Jordan to fight also against Judah, and against Benjamin, and against the house of Ephraim; so that Israel was sore distressed.” They were sore distressed, they cried unto the Lord and said, “We have sinned against thee.” We’ve covered this. I want you to look at these maps so you get a feel for where this battle and these confrontations took place The Ammonites are in red with the arrow pointing to the east. You can see where they were positioned. The Dead Sea is at the bottom of the map and the river Jordan leading up to the Sea of Galilee. Now this particular map does not necessarily show all the positions and all the places Ammon went to attack from and oppress the children of Israel. Here on this map it only shows them going to the tribe of Benjamin. A little south and east of that is where Jerusalem is, to give some orientation to this map. And of course you see a green arrow, the one on the left where the tribe of Ephraim was placed. Just north of that on both sides of the river you find west Manasseh and east Manasseh and so forth. On the right side of this map in the gray area we see the territory of Ammon. Tob, where Jephthah lived after being kicked out being the son of a harlot, a bastard child, is located north of what this map displays. We also see on this map where Jephthah went to battle against Ammon when he crossed over from Mizpah. You can see several locations where battles took place. This was not an overnight victory, folks. This took some time. As I said, Jephthah spent six years as a judge. Not finding anything to disprove it, I believe he spent the rest of his life fighting.
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