The scene is very graphically described: When “Jephthah came to Mizpah unto his house, 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 can not go back.” This noble child of faith certainly was equal to her father’s trial, and lovingly replied, “My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth.” There has been much discussion as to the real meaning of Jephthah’s vow, and the real fate of his lovely, obedient daughter. That the daughter of Jephthah was really offered up to God in sacrifice, slain by the hand of her father and then burned, is a horrible conclusion, and contrary to all we know of his life, upon which we have dwelt at some length in order to bring out its characteristics. With such a sweet trust and confidence in God as is manifest in his every act, we can not believe that either Jephthah meant to make a human sacrifice, or that his daughter so understood it. There are several passages and constructions which can leave no doubt in the mind of the candid reader that such was not the literal intention, and that this fair child of faith and obedience was not to be slain upon the altar like the children of Ammon before their god of fire, but that her fresh life was given in all its purity as a living sacrifice of separation and life of service to Jehovah. In the eighteenth chapter of Deuteronomy we find the most solemn warnings given to Israel against imitating in the least degree the cruel and wicked rites of the Ammonites, especially in offering human sacrifices. Now these Ammonites were the very people against whom Jephthah had gone forth to war, and as godly follower of Jehovah he must have been familiar with the commandments of the book of Deuteronomy. For him, therefore, to directly disobey these solemn injunctions would have been to prove false to all his character and all the meaning of his victory in the name of Jehovah. Again, in the twelfth chapter of Exodus, it is clearly taught that the first-born of Israel were all to be recognized as the Lord’s, and liable, therefore, to death, like the Egyptian first-born. But, instead of their lives being literally required, they were redeemed by the blood of a lamb, and the Paschal lamb was offered instead of the life of the Hebrew, and that life was still regarded as wholly the Lord’s, given to Him in living consecration, of which the whole tribe of Levi was regarded as the type, and therefore it was separated unto the service of the Lord as a substitute for the lives of the first-born.