Judges 11:1 - Meaning and Application

When we left the leaders and people of Gilead at the end of the last chapter, they were looking for a commander. They had agreed that whoever would lead their army against the Ammonites should, by common consent, become head over all the people of Gilead. The task was hard, so it was right to offer a strong reward to the man who took it on.

All the people agreed that Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty warrior and the best man for the job. Yet he had three disadvantages. First, he was the son of a prostitute (Judges 11:1), that is, of a woman who was not his father’s wife. Some think his mother was a Gentile, and Josephus says he was a stranger on his mother’s side. If his mother was a prostitute, that was no fault of his, though it was a shame he had to bear.

People should not be blamed for the unhappy circumstances of their birth or family line, as long as they are seeking by their own worth to remove that shame. A son of a prostitute, if born again, that is, made new by God, will be accepted by God and welcomed into all the privileges of his children. Jephthah could not read in the law the mark placed on the Ammonites, the enemies he would face, that they should not enter the Lord’s assembly. But in the same passage he also met something that seemed to speak against him, that a bastard should be excluded in the same way (Deuteronomy 23:2, 3). Yet if that law means, as is most likely, only children born from incest and not from fornication, then it did not apply to him.

Second, his brothers had driven him out of his own country. His father’s lawful children, insisting on the strict rule of the law, forced him out and gave him no share in the inheritance (Judges 11:2). They gave no thought to his great gifts, which deserved an exception and would have made him a strong help and honor to their family. If they had looked past his illegitimacy and given him a son’s portion, he would have been a blessing to them.

Few would have guessed that this rejected young man was meant to become Israel’s deliverer and judge. Yet God often lowers the people he plans to raise up, and makes the stone the builders rejected become the cornerstone. Joseph, Moses, and David, the three most notable shepherds of Israel, were all pushed aside by men before God called them to high office.

Third, during his exile he became leader of a band of men (Judges 11:3). Since his brothers had driven him away, his strong spirit would not let him beg or work as a slave. He had to live by his sword. Soon, because of his courage, other men in desperate straits and with the same bold spirit gathered under him. They are called vain men, meaning men who had wasted their property and now had to find a way to live.

These men did not go with him to rob and plunder, but to hunt wild animals, and perhaps to make raids on lands that belonged to Israel but had not yet been taken, or on lands that had somehow wronged them. This is the man who must save Israel. That people had made themselves, by their idolatry, children of unfaithfulness and strangers to God and his covenant. So although God would deliver them when they repented, he chose to do it through a bastard and an exile, to humble them and remind them of their sin.