The Operatic Drama of Scripture

The music we are about to hear is an oratorio from Rome in the 1640s. The word “oratorio” really means a sacred opera. There may not be costumes or stage machinery, but the music and emotions are genuinely operatic, and they are uniquely suited to express the operatic qualities of this story from the Old Testament.

The story comes from the Book of Judges, Chapter 11. Jephte, or Jephthah, was a judge: a leader of Israel in the years before Saul became Israel’s first king. Now Jephte was of illegitimate birth, the son of a prostitute, and as the story begins, he had been cast out and was living as a kind of outlaw warlord. At that time, Israel was at war with the Ammonites, a nation within the present-day borders of Jordan. The elders of Gilead go to Jephte and beg him to save them. Jephte agrees. He then makes a terrible, rash, and ill-advised vow that if he does defeat the Ammonites in battle, he will sacrifice whoever, or whatever, comes out of his house to meet him on his return. It turns out that he is met by his only daughter, and although she is granted two months reprieve to wander the mountains and lament her fate, after that, she is duly put to death. The Bible never even tells us her name. 

Now, there is some debate about what Jephte actually promised. A number of scholars, both Jewish and Christian, insist that his vow was only to consecrate or dedicate to the Lord the first person to come out of his door, and that he would only have made a sacrifice – that is, kill – if it had been an animal running out to greet him. This is the same sense in which Samson was consecrated – in other words, that person would lead a life set apart, a sort of monastic existence,and would never marry or have children.

However, the early Christian fathers taught that Jephte really did kill his daughter as a human sacrifice. That is certainly Carissimi’s interpretation too, and it makes for a genuinely operatic spectacle. The ill-considered vow is exactly the same as in Gluck’s Iphigenia and Mozart’s Idomeneo, and in fact all those stories may have had a common origin in the ancient world. Jepthe’s daughter stands at the beginning of a long line of sacrificial heroines in opera – from Handel’s Theodora, to Bellini’s Norma, Verdi’s Aïda, and even Wagner’s Brunnhilde.

So why did Carissimi decide to compose music for this seemingly horrible story, and what does this story have to tell us today?

​First, Jepthe is larger-than-life, a man of excess, living outside the bounds of civilized society, and behaving in outrageous ways. Yes, he achieves victory, but at a frightful cost. He offers us a cautionary tale about the perils of putting one’s trust in military strength. It is hardly necessary to add that this is not a story meant to glorifying the military triumphs of ancient Israel, and it is absolutely not about the modern-day state of Israel. Jephte’s war is a terrible thing, and both the winners and the losers are left with grief and loss.

Second, Jephte’s vow is a way of putting God to the test. This is a concept that occurs many times in the Old Testament, in stories that teach us different things. Jephte puts God to the test by treating his relationship with God as transactional: if I promise God something really big, God will have to give me something equally big in return. This is what’s sometimes called the divine vending machine – shrinking the all-powerful God of the universe to the limits of our own vision. Of course God doesn’t work this way, and it’s a sin of pride to think that God owes us anything in return for what we offer. God’s salvation is freely given, not earned by our own merits.

On another level, Jephte’s vow puts God to the test by deliberately taking an extreme risk. He tries to force God into a corner, thinking he’s guaranteed that nothing truly bad could result – or else God would have to intervene to stop it. Unlike in the story of Abraham and Isaac, though, there is no divine intervention, and Israel is forced to deal with the awful consequences of his actions.

This brings us back to our reading from Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus responds, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test”. Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness goes to the heart of what we mean when we say Jesus is a king. He refuses fame and political authority over kingdoms, and unlike Jephte, he refuses to put God to the test by jumping off a building and trying to forceGod to save him. That is not true faith, quiet confidence, trust in God’s purpose. That is a public spectacle that arrogantly demands something of God. Like Jephte, if we try making demands of God, we may find that God does not play by human rules, and will not magically save us. 

The grandiose, over-the-top, operatic gesture is not the way. Instead, humility and quiet faith are the hallmarks of the reign of Christ.

This is how Paul described Jesus’ kingship: 

“… being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name.”

Amen.