BRAGADAYJAH 755
Jephthah having subdued the Ammonites,
the men of Ephraim gathered together and confronted Jephthah and asked him why
he had not called them to go with him in the fight against the Ammonites. And
in the process they threatened to burn Jephthah’s house with fire. And Jephthah
replied and told them that at the time when he and the children of Israel were
under threat from the Ammonites, he did call on the men of Ephraim for help,
but they did not respond by helping him. In fact, he told them when he saw that
he could get no help from them, he took his life in his hands and ventured
forth against the Ammonites, and the Lord delivered them into his hands, so why
he asked the men of Ephraim are you now come to fight against me? So Jephthah gathered together all the men of
Gilead, fought against, and smote the Ephraimites because they said, “You
Gileadites are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites and the Manassites.
And the Ephraimites took the passage of the Jordan, thus cutting off the
Ephraimites from escaping; and it was so that when an Ephraimite who was escaping
came that way pretending to be a Gileadite, he would be asked to pronounce a
certain word, Shibboleth, which due to a defect in aspiration he could not
pronounce properly, but called it Sibboleth, which revealed that he was in fact
an Ephraimite, and resulted in him being slain. And there fell on that day, on
the field of battle and on the banks of the Jordan, forty two thousand
Ephraimites.
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