Accounts of human sacrifice are rare in the Bible. The practice figures prominently in only two biblical narratives, the tragic tale of Jephthah and his daughter (Judges 11–12) and the story of the execution of Saul's sons and Rizpah's vigil (2 Samuel 21), which we shall examine in Chapter 4. Whereas human sacrifice appears to have been practiced at various times throughout the ancient Near East, its place in the Bible is ambiguous. In Genesis 22, for example, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac but, at the last possible moment, intervenes to save the child. Exodus 22:29–30 calls for every first-born son to be given to the deity, though Exod. 13:13 allows for their redemption. As a rule, the Bible condemns human sacrifice (Lev. 18:21; 20:1–5; Deut. 12:31; 18:10), and in the actual biblical examples of it, which are few, it is viewed with horror (e.g., 2 Kings 3:27; 16:3; 17:17; 21:6). The Jephthah story stands apart as something of an anomaly: Jephthah vows a sacrifice to God in return for military victory, and the sacrificial victim turns out to be his daughter, his only child. The sacrifice is made to Israel's God, not to some pagan deity, and, surprisingly, no condemnation of the deed appears in the narrative.

When we turn from Saul's tragedy to Jephthah's, we thus find ourselves in a different atmosphere.