Judges 11:40

And it was And it became, altering the verb from fern, to masc. The verse is wrongly divided. For wentrender used to go (frequentative).

to celebrate So translated to agree with Judges 5:11 (rehearse), the only other place where the word occurs: the Versions give to lament. In both places the rendering is merely inferred from the context. There is no sufficient reason to doubt that Jephthah's sacrifice was an actual incident in history; but the yearly festival which commemorated his daughter's fate may have had a remoter origin. It is not unlikely that the incident was associated in the course of time with a primitive myth; for there are traces elsewhere of human sacrifices being connected with an annual mourning for the death of a god. In the parallel story of Iphigenia the heroine is really a form of an early goddess identified with Artemis. The present narrative suggests to some scholars reminiscences of Tammuz-Ishtar worship, which celebrated the annual death and revival of the divinity. In later times the daughter of Jephthah was worshipped by the Samaritans in Sichem as Korç, the heavenly virgin; Epiphanius, adv. Haeres. iii. 2, 1055. A. Jeremias, Das A. T. im Lichte d. Alten Orients2, p. 478.