Wrestling with Textual Violence: The Jephthah Narrative in Antiquity and Modernity

A story of a judge who sacrifices his virgin daughter is of course an issue both in ethics and in gender studies. Such is the biblical narrative of Jephthah. Sjöberg undertakes a comparative analysis of six different versions of the Jephthah narrative: the biblical tale in the book of Judges, the Jewish telling in Pseudo-Philo's Liber antiquitatum biblicarum (first century CE), Josephus's report in his Jewish Antiquities (also first century CE), Handel's oratorio Jephtha (1751), the British...