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THIS ARTICLE is the product of a persistent hunch that there is a literary relationship between two biblical narratives about dying daughters. The first, the story of the sacrifice of the daughter of Jephthah (Judg 11:34-40), has received ample attention from theologians and throughout Western history.1 Ancient Jewish sages pondered the question of the biblical hero's culpability for offering up his own child.2 Early Christian writers interpreted the daughter as a Christ figure, who gave up her life to save her people.3 In the past thirty years, feminist interpreters have struggled with the import of a tale of human sacrifice in which the killing of the child is not denounced, as it is in the many other biblical references to the practice (e.g., Lev 18:21; Deut 18:10; 2 Kgs 17:17; 23:10; 2 Chr 33:6; Jer 32:35; Ezek 20:31; 23:37), or stopped, as it is in the even more famous story of the Aqedah (Gen22:l-19).4
In contrast, the second story, about the raising of the daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:21-24, 35-43//Luke 8:40-42, 49-56//Matt 9:18-19, 23-26), has received relatively little scholarly attention; a search on the ATLA Religion Database rendered only eight peer-reviewed English-language articles that devote substantial attention to it published since 1948.5 Feminist exegetes have approached it as one of many Gospel stories in which Jesus interacts with female characters,6 and recently Amy-Jill Levine has drawn attention to the way in which some Christian feminists have fallen into the anti-Judaic snare of reading the tale in terms of Jesus' heroic defiance of "Jewish purity laws" relating to contact with women and corpses, neither of which is highlighted in any version of the story.7 Despite the lively interest in the intertextual echoes of the Jewish Scriptures in the NT writings, however, the possibility of a literary relationship between the two stories of dying daughters of prominent Israelite men has not been explored.
In this study, I argue that there is an intertextual relationship between Judg 11 :34-40 (LXX) and the story of Jairus's daughter. The primary emphasis will be on the earliest, Marcan version of the Jairus narrative (Mark 5:21-24, 35-43), but the Lucan and Matthean iterations (Luke 8:40-42, 49-56; Matt 9:18-19, 23-26) will also be invoked. In addition, two...