Thgis passage is from 2 Kings 16:3:

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1 In the seventeenth year of Pekah son of Remaliah, Ahaz son of Jotham king of Judah began to reign. 2 Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem sixteen years. Unlike David his father, he did not do what was right in the eyes of the LORD his God. 3 He walked in the ways of the kings of Israel and even sacrificed his son in [a] the fire, following the detestable ways of the nations the LORD had driven out before the Israelites.
Yes, the Bible does say, more than once, that it is forbidden to sacrifice one's son and one's daughters. However, as the above passage shows, a man could certainly be censored for sacrificing his son, but to the very best of my knowledge, no biblical character is ever censored for having sacrificed his daughter. Only the sacrificing of a son was bad enough to warrant special mention. The importance of not sacrificing one's son is made clear enough in the story about Abraham and Isaac. The comparative triviality of sacrificing one's daughter is made clear by the story about Jephthah and his daughter.

Like I said, too, there was a clear difference between men and women, in that only really the men had made a covenant with God. The men in Israel belonged to God, including their sons, but their daughters and women belonged to God by proxy. They belonged to men who belonged to God, and God needed them to make more sons for him. Because of that, it was definitely an inconvenience for God if the men killed their daughters, because that made it harder for new generations of Isreaelis to have sons.

As for the observation that Jephthah's daughter knew no man, it just means that she was a virgin when her father killed her. That is all it means. The only thing that can be added is that she died without producing a son for God.

There is no celebration of celibacy in the Old Testament. Women were meant to have children, preferably sons. There are no virgin priestesses or other female virgins who serve God in the Old Testament. God didn't want the women's virginity. He wanted their sons. The idea that Jephthah would allow his daughter to live yet force her to remain a virgin is ridiculous. Certainly Jephthah could have forced her to do this, but he could never do it to please God, or to give God a gift or a sacrifice. In biblical times, an old childless virgin was no blessing. If anything, forcing Jephthah's daughter to become an old childless virgin would be blasphemy. Therefore it is not at all strange that Jephthah's daughter would lament her viriginity. The Bible is full of women who want to have sons, and there are several who grieve and pine because they can have no children. Producing children, particularly sons, was the purpose of a woman's life. Dying without having been given the chance to have sons was indeed a horrible thing for a woman. Her life would be a wasted life, a life without purpose. No wonder Jephthah's daughter lamented her virginity.

If Jephthah wanted his daughter's life to be a blessing, he would have given her away in marriage, so that she could have sons. If he killed her - and he did - it was because he had vowed to give God a burnt offering, and his daughter was the one who had to be that burnt offering.

Ann