Judges 21
Israel grieves the near-extinction of Benjamin, procures wives for the six hundred survivors by two improvisations, and the book ends with its terrible diagnosis.
Summary
The men of Israel had sworn at Mizpah: no one of us shall give his daughter in marriage to Benjamin. The people come to Beth-el and sit before God until evening, lifting up their voices and weeping bitterly. They say: O Lord God of Israel, why has this happened in Israel, that today there should be one tribe lacking in Israel? The next day they rise early and build an altar, offer burnt offerings and peace offerings. They say: who among all the tribes of Israel did not come up in the assembly to the Lord? The men of Jabesh-gilead did not come. The congregation sends twelve thousand valiant men and commands them to strike the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the sword, including women and children, but to spare every young woman who has not known a man. They find four hundred young virgins and bring them to the camp at Shiloh. They send an offer of peace to the six hundred Benjaminites at the rock of Rimmon. The Benjaminites return, and each man is given a wife from the daughters of Jabesh-gilead. But the four hundred are not enough for six hundred.
The people are sorry for Benjamin, for the Lord had made a breach in the tribes of Israel. The elders say: what shall we do for wives for those who are left, since the women of Benjamin are destroyed? How can there be an inheritance for those who are left in Benjamin? And we cannot give our daughters to them. Then they say: there is the yearly feast of the Lord at Shiloh, in the vineyards. They instruct the Benjaminites: go and lie in wait in the vineyards, and watch; when the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, come out of the vineyards and each of you seize his wife from the daughters of Shiloh and go to the land of Benjamin. And if their fathers or brothers come to complain, we will say to them: grant them graciously to us, because we did not take for each man of them his wife in battle, neither did you give them to them, else you would now be guilty. The Benjaminites do so; they carry off two hundred young women from the dancers and return to their inheritance, rebuild the cities, and live in them. The people of Israel depart each to his tribe and family, each to his inheritance. In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
- Judges 1Chapter 1 functions as a historiographical preface to the whole book, cataloguing the success or failure of each tribe to dispossess the Canaanites after Joshua's death.
- Judges 2Chapter 2 is the hermeneutical key to Judges.
- Judges 3Chapter 3 introduces the judge cycle in action for the first time.
- Judges 4Chapter 4 is the prose account of the same events that chapter 5 will sing.
- Judges 5The Song of Deborah in chapter 5 is widely considered one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew poetry in the entire Bible, possibly dating to the twelfth century BCE, nearly contemporaneous with the events it describes.
- Judges 6Chapter 6 is the opening of the Gideon narrative, which runs through chapter 8 and is the longest major-judge story in the book.
- Judges 7Chapter 7 is the central action of the Gideon narrative and one of the most memorable military scenes in the book.
- Judges 8Chapter 8 is the darkest portion of the Gideon narrative.
- Judges 9Chapter 9 is the longest chapter in Judges and the only episode in the book devoted to an anti-judge — a man who makes himself king by violence and holds it for exactly three years.
- Judges 10Chapter 10 performs two functions.
- Judges 11Chapter 11 is one of the most morally complex chapters in the Hebrew Bible.
- Judges 12Chapter 12 begins with a conflict that is structurally parallel to the Ephraimite quarrel after Gideon's battle in chapter 8, but this time Jephthah's response is not diplomacy — it is war.
- Judges 13Chapter 13 is the birth narrative of Samson, and it is the most elaborate annunciation scene in Judges.
- Judges 14Chapter 14 introduces the adult Samson and establishes the pattern that will govern the rest of his narrative: a desire for a Philistine woman, a display of supernatural strength, a riddle or trap, betrayal by intimacy.
- Judges 15Chapter 15 escalates the private vendetta between Samson and the Philistines into a series of increasingly spectacular acts of violence.
- Judges 16Chapter 16 is the climax and conclusion of the Samson narrative.
- Judges 17Chapter 17 begins the two-part appendix with which Judges closes, and the shift in tone is immediate.
- Judges 18Chapter 18 is the first of the book's two closing appendices.
- Judges 19Chapter 19 is one of the most disturbing chapters in the Hebrew Bible, and the text makes no attempt to soften it.
- Judges 20Chapter 20 is the longest military account in Judges and is remarkable for what it shows about what has gone wrong with Israel as a political and moral community.
- Judges 21Chapter 21 closes the book and extends the moral horror of chapter 19-20 in a different register: the horror of improvised solutions to self-inflicted catastrophe.