In all this was clearly taught the lesson that what God required from His people was not a dead body, but a “living sacrifice.” It is much harder to live for God than to die for God. It takes much less spiritual and moral power to leap into the conflict and fling a life away in the excitement of the battle than it does to live through fifty years of misunderstanding, pain and temptation. It would have been easier for Jephthah’s daughter to have lain down amid the flowers of spring, the chants and songs of a religious ceremonial, the tears and songs of the people who loved her, and know that her name would be forever enshrined, than to go out from the bright circle of human society and all the charms of youth and beauty and domestic and social delight, and live as a recluse for God alone, giving up the dearest hope of every Hebrew woman, not only to be a mother, but to be the mother of the promised Christ; giving up also, along with her father, the fond desire of a son to share his honor and his sceptre, to prolong his name. All this it meant. This was the sacrifice she made. And so we read that she did not go aside to bewail her approaching death, but she went aside for two months to bewail her “virginity,” the loneliness of her own life, then gladly gave her life a living sacrifice to God. There are several other considerations that might be added if necessary to establish this construction of the passage. It is enough to briefly refer to the fact that the phrase in the eleventh chapter of Judges, verse thirty-nine, is in the future tense, and refers to her future virginity and not her past, and also that the translation of the fortieth verse in one of our versions, is that the daughters of Israel went yearly “to talk” with the daughter of Jephthah four times in a year. It is not necessary to pursue the argument further. Enough for our present purpose that we catch the inspired lesson. That lesson is supreme, unqualified, unquestioning fidelity to God.