Dr. Claude Mariottini has written a three-parter on the difficult text in Judges 11. As he explains, the difficulty is not so much what happened to Jepthah’s daughter, but how to make sense of it.
The Sacrifice of Jephthah’s Daughter
The Fate of Jephthah’s Daughter
The Virginity of Jephthah’s Daughter
Somebody needs to for the intersections between this story, the Binding of Isaac, and the Greek legend of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigeneia. I think you’d learn a lot about attitudes toward sacrifice (and not just human sacrifice) in the ancient world.
