“Then the whole congregation sent word to the children of Benjamin who were at the rock of Rimmon, and announced peace to them.”
—Judges 21:13
While the book of Judges intends to relate the history of the children of Israel during the tumultuous time before Israel had a king, it is not merely a book of history. Its more spiritual purpose, expressed in Judges 2, is to chronicle the ebb and flow of Israel’s spiritual state over the four hundred years between Joshua and David, illustrating its fickle allegiance to God and His covenant. As Judges 2 recounts, the Israelites followed a frustrating cycle of increasingly sinful rebellion, defeat, deliverance, and repentance. When the judge was righteous, the people followed suit, but as soon as he died and was replaced by a less upright man, they soon returned to their iniquities.
The narrative that spans Judges 19–21 tells the story of a terrible incident and its horrible aftermath during one of these periods of idolatrous rebellion. It is an appendix to the book, clearly out of chronological order from the rest of the text; it takes place early in the period of the judges when Aaron’s son, Phinehas, served as high priest (Judges 20:28). The atrocity, which occurs in Gibeah in the land of Benjamin, was a gang rape and murder of a Levite’s concubine by a pack of homosexual “sons of Belial” (Judges 19:22-28). To make Israel aware of the Benjamites’ horrible crime—and to arouse the people’s wrath—the Levite divided the concubine’s body into twelve pieces and sent a piece to all twelve tribes. The incensed tribes gathered at Mizpah and declared war on Benjamin “to repay all the vileness that they have done in Israel” (Judges 20:10).
It was a short but costly war for both sides. Over the first two days of battle, the Israelites lost forty thousand men, and on the third day, the tribe of Benjamin alone lost twenty-five thousand men, leaving it with only six hundred men, who fled to the wilderness and hunkered down in the rock of Rimmon. After the victorious Israelite army swept through Benjamite territory, killing everyone they found and burning the cities to the ground (Judges 20:46-48), the tribe was nearly annihilated.
Then, still outraged, the Israelite men swore not to give their daughters to the Benjamite men as wives. But how would they keep the tribe from going extinct? Taking a census of those gathered at Mizpah, they found that no one from Jabesh Gilead in the territory of Manasseh had attended or sent warriors to help in the fight against Benjamin. In retribution, the Israelites decided to march on the town and kill its inhabitants except for its maidens, of which they gathered four hundred (Judges 21:1-12).
At this point, the Israelites sent word to the six hundred Benjamites hiding in the caves in the rocky fastness of Rimmon and made a peace settlement with them. The four hundred maidens of Jabesh Gilead were likely an opening bargaining chip during the negotiations, and the subsequent ruse to kidnap an additional two hundred maidens during the upcoming festival in Shiloh may have been the result of a counter-demand from the Benjamites (Judges 21:16-23). So, the narrative begins with the heinous abuse of one woman and concludes with the kidnapping and forced marriages of six hundred young women. Such is the perverse thinking of those considered wise—”elders of the congregation” (Judges 21:16)—in those days.
Judges is a cautionary tale of true history of what happens when people or even an entire nation ignores God. Share on XThe lesson is to understand what happens when people—any people—try to live without constituted government. The narrative sets the stage with, “And it came to pass in those days, when there was no king in Israel . . .” (Judges 19:1; emphasis ours throughout) and ends with “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). The time of the judges was lawless, anarchical. There was no authority to which people could turn for justice, no rule of law, no coordinating authority. It was each man for himself and descended into the survival of the fittest.
However, Israel did have laws and constituted authority—God’s law and God Himself as King! The people simply did not acknowledge Him and His way, so they lived as if He did not exist. As David notes in Psalm 14:1, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none who does good.”
Judges, using real history, is a cautionary tale of what happens when people, or even an entire nation, ignore God. At best, instability reigns; at worst, the descent into barbarism, chaos, and death is breathtakingly swift. Even though Judges 21:13 speaks of peace between Israel and Benjamin, it was merely a desperate attempt to end a series of abominations that, had they run their course, would have concluded with extinction.
