Jephthah's Daughter: Interrogating the Text, Interrogating Our Lives

ABSTRACT Jephthah's Daughter: Interrogating the Text, Interrogating our Lives grew out of the experience of teaching a course in Women and the Bible. It explores the relationships among a biblical “text of terror,” student reactions to it and feminist methodology and hermeneutics. Unwilling to simply set aside the scripture even with its violence, the author suggests that the application of feminist biblical hermeneutics to biblical texts illuminates not only the texts themselves but also the lives of contemporary women. The story of Jephthah's daughter resonates with the experience of many women who have suffered at the hands of a male relation, and can have liberating possibilities in the present if it is read as a profound critique of male power and its abuse.