A Portrait of Jephthah’s Daughter

Finding the Female Gaze

Abstract

Judges 11:29-40 is among the most disturbing texts in the Hebrew Bible. It conveys the
gruesome story about Jephthah’s daughter who becomes the victim of her father’s vow to
YHWH, sacrificing whoever greets him first in return for victory in battle. Many biblical
scholars in their laudable attempts to recover her within Scripture’s patriarchal lens contextualize
the world behind and within the text. However, scholars are restrained, relying on the narrator’s
male gaze and decision to bind her nameless identity to her father. While Scripture’s male
testimony remains critical to constructing her portrait, it does not need to be limited to it. In the
story’s reception history, only nineteenth-century artists singly capture the woman herself,
freeing her association with Jephthah on the canvas. Artists such as James Jacques Joseph
Tissot’s Jephthah’s Daughter and Tom Roberts’ A Study of Jephthah’s Daughter imagine her
reaction to the news of her impending death. While their depictions of Jephthah’s daughter
attempt to distance her from the male gaze, the paintings evoke the viewer to embody Jephthah’s
eyes. However, there remains an unexplored female gaze lingering in the background, the voices
of the text’s silent women who stood behind Jephthah’s daughter. They danced with her, but they
were not the first to greet him. From their gaze, one can begin to imaginatively construct the
unnamed woman. In my portrait of Jephthah’s daughter titled, Elizabeth’s Gethsemane Moment,
relies upon biblical scholarship as well as the insights extrapolated from Tissot and Roberts’
portraits to create the female gaze from the perspective of the women who stood behind her. This
paper argues that imagining the female gaze reveals an empowering Christoformic woman who
lays down her life in the place of the expendable.