vows

89:6.3There is no more tragic and pa­thetic ex­pe­ri­ence on rec­ord, il­lus­tra­tive of the heart-tear­ing con­tentions be­tween an­cient and time-hon­ored re­li­gious cus­toms and the con­trary de­mands of ad­vanc­ing civ­i­liza­tion, than the He­brew nar­ra­tive of Jeph­thah and his only daugh­ter. As was com­mon cus­tom, this well-mean­ing man had made a fool­ish vow, had bar­gained with the “god of bat­tles,” agree­ing to pay a cer­tain price for vic­tory over his en­e­mies. And this price was to make a sac­ri­fice of that which first came out of his house to meet him when he re­turned to his home. Jeph­thah thought that one of his trusty slaves would thus be on hand to greet him, but it turned out that his daugh­ter and only child came out to wel­come him home. And so, even at that late date and among a sup­pos­edly civ­i­lized peo­ple, this beau­ti­ful maiden, af­ter two months to mourn her fate, was ac­tu­ally of­fered as a hu­man sac­ri­fice by her fa­ther, and with the ap­proval of his fel­low tribes­men. And all this was done in the face of Moses’ strin­gent rul­ings against the of­fer­ing of hu­man sac­ri­fice. But men and women are ad­dicted to mak­ing fool­ish and need­less vows, and the men of old held all such pledges to be highly sa­cred.

89:3.5All through the olden times men sought in these ways for ex­tra cred­its on the self-de­nial ledgers of their gods. It was once cus­tom­ary, when un­der some emo­tional stress, to make vows of self-de­nial and self-tor­ture. In time these vows as­sumed the form of con­tracts with the gods and, in that sense, rep­re­sented true evo­lu­tion­ary prog­ress in that the gods were sup­posed to do some­thing def­i­nite in re­turn for this self-tor­ture and mor­ti­fi­ca­tion of the flesh. Vows were both neg­a­tive and pos­i­tive. Pledges of this harm­ful and ex­treme na­ture are best ob­served to­day among cer­tain groups in In­dia.

89:7.1Moses at­tempted to end hu­man sac­ri­fices by in­au­gu­rat­ing the ran­som as a sub­sti­tute. He es­tab­lished a sys­tem­atic sched­ule which en­abled his peo­ple to es­cape the worst re­sults of their rash and fool­ish vows. Lands, prop­er­ties, and chil­dren could be re­deemed ac­cord­ing to the es­tab­lished fees, which were payable to the priests. Those groups which ceased to sac­ri­fice their first-born soon pos­sessed great ad­van­tages over less ad­vanced neigh­bors who con­tin­ued these atro­cious acts. Many such back­ward tribes were not only greatly weak­ened by this loss of sons, but even the suc­ces­sion of lead­er­ship was of­ten bro­ken.