PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I need to start.. Trying.

The reader is referred to Judges 11:29-40.  The problem of the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter is easily resolved when one reads the vow, recorded in verse 31, carefully.  Jephthah vows that the first living creature he sees, after being given a victorious battle, will be the Lord's; and he will offer it as a burnt-offering.  The offer, therefore, contains two clauses:  the commitment to the Lord, and the offering of a proposed consummation.  The vow does not, in any way, promise the consummation in terms of the burnt-offering, but only vows to offer the living creature.  The vow was kept:  Jephthah offered his daughter, perhaps formally, but the declination of the offer had already been set forth in the law of Moses, in Deuteronomy 12:31 and elsewhere.  The Law of Moses also made provision for certain sanctified people to serve the Tabernacle; and some scholars presume that Jephthah's daughter was consecrated to that service for the rest of her life.  By seeing the vow in terms of the offer, the problem is solved; because no vow binds God to acceptance.  Jephthah kept his promise; his daughter kept her life; and God's law kept the solution bloodless.

The phrase "shore its fragments" is an allusion to a line in the fifth section of T. S. Eliot's great poem, The Waste Land.

I realize that the office of Church clerk is not established in the Bible; and, of course, did not exist in its present form during the time of the New Testament.  I suggest, however, in what I hope is an original conjecture, that Tertius, in serving as Paul's secretary, at least in the writing of the Roman epistle, was, in some aspects, clerk of the Corinthian church at that time.