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Context No. 794 of 4322 · Judges

Context · Reflection

Judges 11:1-6: in context

1Now Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valor. He was the son of a prostitute. Gilead became the father of Jephthah. 2Gilead’s wife bore him sons. When his wife’s sons grew up, they drove Jephthah out and said to him, “You will not inherit in our father’s house, for you are the son of another woman.” 3Then Jephthah fled from his brothers and lived in the land of Tob. Outlaws joined up with Jephthah, and they went out with him. 4After a while, the children of Ammon made war against Israel. 5When the children of Ammon made war against Israel, the elders of Gilead went to get Jephthah out of the land of Tob. 6They said to Jephthah, “Come and be our chief, that we may fight with the children of Ammon.”

Jephthah starts life with two strikes against him. He is a capable man, a warrior, but he is the son of Gilead by a prostitute, and when his father's legitimate sons grow up, they drive him out of the house. You will have no inheritance here, they tell him, because you are the son of another woman. So Jephthah flees to a place called Tob, and there, as rejected men often do, he gathers a band of other outcasts around him and makes a life on the margins. He is what his family decided he was: illegitimate, disinherited, gone.

And then the Ammonites go to war against Israel, and Gilead has no one who can lead them, and the elders remember the man they threw away. They travel all the way out to Tob to find him, and their request is stripped of any pretense: come and be our commander, so we can fight. The people who had no room for him as a brother suddenly have great need of him as a general. It is one of those hard, familiar reversals. He was rejected for who he was, something he never chose, and now he is wanted for what he can do. The outcast is recalled, not because anyone repented of casting him out, but because they are in trouble and he is useful. How a person answers a homecoming like that, offered only when they are needed, is the question the rest of his story will wrestle with.

Jephthah was thrown out for his birth and fetched back only when they needed a fighter. Have I been wanted only when I was useful, and is there someone I dismissed whom I now find I need?

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