The Vow and the Victim

She came out dancing to greet her father. His promise had already sealed her fate.

For generations, the Order of the Eastern Star has honored Jephthah's daughter, the heroine it calls Adah, as a model of fidelity and courage. Scripture never gives her a name. It tells her story in twelve verses that have troubled readers for three thousand years. And it leaves a question the chapter lecture does not raise: Was her father right to keep his word?

In The Vow and the Victim, Dr. Douglas Reece, a Mason, minister, and president of Wycliffe School of Theology, answers that question from Scripture. Scripture values truthful promises, but it never makes fulfilling every vow the highest moral good. Faithfulness to God includes refusing any promise that requires sin, injustice, abuse, or sacrificing another person's well-being.

The book turns on a distinction drawn in Psalm 15: God praises the person who "swears to his own hurt and does not change." Jephthah's vow did not cost Jephthah. It cost his daughter her life. So the question running through every chapter is simple: Whose hurt is being sworn to?

Inside you will discover:

- Why vows carry real spiritual power, from Jacob at Bethel to Hannah at Shiloh

- Jephthah's world, the vow he made, and what God did and did not require

- The courage, truthfulness, and faith of the daughter herself

- How the Law of Moses anticipated rash vows and provided a way out

- Herod, who kept a deadly oath, and Saul, whose people refused to let him keep his

- Wisdom for marriage, church membership, fraternal obligations, and oaths of office

- What to do when keeping one promise means breaking another, and how to repent of an unwise commitment

- How to protect people from spiritual coercion and how Christ keeps every promise at His own cost

Written with respect for the Order, this book does not quote or describe its private work. It draws only on what the Order presents publicly and on Rob Morris's own published writing. It is written for Eastern Star members who are also Christian believers, and for pastors, Christian counselors, Masonic families, and Bible-study groups. Each chapter ends with discussion questions and a reflection prompt, and the appendices include a 14-week or 7-week group study guide, a discernment worksheet, and an index of vows and oaths in Scripture.

Remember her rightly-not by praising the vow that took her life, but by becoming people in whose communities such a vow would never be kept.