The Baptist Quarterly Review

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Article V. THE STORY OF JEPHTHAH'S DAUGHTER. BY REV. CHARLES W. CURKIER. There is a fascination in the story of Jepthah's daughter that time does not dull. Even the casual reader does not escape its sad attractions. The brief story brings before one the person of the warrior-father returning to his home in...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Article V. THE STORY OF JEPHTHAH'S DAUGHTER. BY REV. CHARLES W. CURKIER. There is a fascination in the story of Jepthah's daughter that time does not dull. Even the casual reader does not escape its sad attractions. The brief story brings before one the person of the warrior-father returning to his home in the glory of conquest and the pride of having redeemed his place in the nation. Out from the entrance of his home, dancing with joy at his safe return and his success in battle, comes the blooming Jewish maiden who is the pride of his heart and the hope of his house. But the love that made her ear keenest to detect her father's coming and her step quickest to run in greeting, becomes the means, in God's mysterious providence, of her taking off. First from her father's house, she must be her father's offering?for the vow must be kept though hearts do break and hopes are crushed. Jephthah's rashness had cost him dear; and his Alas, my daughter is the moan of a heart beholding the innocent crushed by the wrong of the guilty. Two months of respite?how full of bitter sorrow to both who can tell are followed by the last cruel rites of sacrifice, and the soul of the maiden wings its flight from earth, the victim of an unholy vow and a perverted fidelity. The story, as it is told in our English Bible, makes the fate of the maiden clear. And yet the question is an ever recurring one, whether we may not take the seeming want of precision in the final words of the story as a foothold for the hope that she was not offered in sacrifice. Desire struggles with evidence to establish the conclusion that in some way her life was spared. The wrongful vow underwhich she was sacrificed, the cloud ot mystery in which her fate is held to be enwrapped, her youth, her filial love, and her...