Sacrifice of Jephthah’s Daughter (Sacrificio de la hija de Jefté)

Jephthah the Gileadite was called upon to lead the Israelites in battle against the children of Ammon. He asked Jehovah to deliver his enemies to him and, in exchange for this victory, he offered as a holocaust (burnt offering) the first person who met him at the door of his house. However, when he arrived back home, victorious, it was his only daughter who came out to greet him. The girl accepted her fate but asked her father for two months' grace so that she might go into the mountains and lament her virginity. At the end of this period, she was finally sacrificed, without ever having been with a man (Judges 11).

If this is a work by Goya, it would have served him as a practice run for the realization of the painting of the same name which is now in the Varez-Fisa collection, Sacrifice of Jephthah's Daughter. This later composition was a noticeably improvement in terms of its sense of drama and its monumental scale.

For the artistic commentary on the series as a whole, see Moses and the Brazen Serpent.