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RenéGirard on Jephthah’s Daughter’s Sacrifice

Yoon Kyung Lee 1

1이화여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Feminist theologians have ascribed the primary cause of the tragic death of Jephthah’s daughter to her father’s hasty vow. But this paper addresses that Jephthah’s vow itself was not the real cause. Rather, his vow could be considered to be a pious religiosity, considering the context of the battlefield. The real problem of his vow should be found in the very result of human sacrifice. Yet this paper presents that the daughter’s sacrifice was not the problem entirely of an individual, her father, but that of both her father and the community of the Gileadites through the interpretive lens of René Girard. This narrative reveals two aspects of mimetic crisis behind the scene. One aspect is between Jephthah and the Gileadites, and between the Gileadites and the Ammonites. Jephthah wants to be the insider of the Gileadites. In turn, the Gileadites want the political, military and administrative constitution like the Canaanites. This mimetic desire inevitably results in military conflicts. Jephthah’s daughter was entangled in such a mimetic crisis. She was sacrificed and then, annually her death was commemorated by Israelite women. This paper presents that the annual commemoration is not a simple lamentation for her death but, more importantly, to expose that the daughter was a scapegoat for patriarchal mimetic violence.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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