35 When he saw her, he tore his clothes in grief and said, “Oh no, Daughter! You’ve brought me to my knees! What disaster you’ve brought me! I made a foolish promise to the Lord. Now I can’t break it.”
36 She said to him, “Father, you made a promise to the Lord. Do to me whatever you promised since the Lord has punished your enemy Ammon.”
37 Then she said to her father, “Do me a favor. Give me two months for my friends and me to walk in the mountains and mourn that I will never have an opportunity to get married.”
38 “Go!” he said, and he sent her off for two months. She and her friends went to the mountains, and she cried about never being able to get married.
39 At the end of those two months she came back to her father. He did to her what he had vowed, and she never had a husband. So the custom began in Israel
40 that for four days every year the girls in Israel would go out to sing the praises of the daughter of Jephthah, the man from Gilead.