Judges 19

Judges 19:1-21

Subdivision 2. (Judges 19:1-30; Judges 20:1-48; Judges 21:1-25.)Breach between man and man: the Benjamite war. We now come to the sins against the second table of the law. The breach with God sunders all links at once, and the whole framework of society shows itself as ready to fall to pieces. The story here is a sickening one; and if it is thus given us in detail, there must be corresponding need on our part. It does not follow that it will furnish proportionate material for such notes as these, the lesson being so strictly a moral one, and needing so little an interpreter. But what a world is this, in which such scenes can be! The thing we need is to trace them to their root, and let the shock which they produce make us cling close to those paternal arms, which, circling us all, alone can hold us fast to one another. We hear once more of Mount Ephraim and of Bethlehem-judah: the figure of a Levite is again prominent, and not with honor; but the place of Laish is now filled by Gibeah, and the tribe connected with it in shame is not Dan but Benjamin. But all Israel is here, in one way or other, involved; and the shadow left upon the people is a dark and terrible one.

1. We have first the account of the awful deed at Gibeah. The Levite and his concubine are evidently intended to convey to us the general laxity. The woman is hardly lighter than the man. The five days of eating and drinking at Bethlehem have their moral significance: then the departure, when too late; the notice of Jerusalem as a Jebusite city, twice apparently recovered out of the hands of the Israelites, and Judeans and Benjamites having been driven out from their partial hold upon it. It is now a city of the stranger; but no more strange than Gibeah of Benjamin, with its ominous lack of common hospitality.

The one who receives them at last is an Ephraimite; and touched, perhaps, by the recognition of one from his own locality. His Levite character seems not to be in the traveler’s mind,* -though he is afraid, as well he might be, of the Canaanite city.
There follows the horrible outbreak,which makes him realize that the Israelite city is as bad as any Canaanite one. All through it is a repetition of the Sodomite outrage, but without the angel-guard that insured things there. The old man, their host, repeats Lot’s offer. The Levite, for his own safety’s sake, abandons his concubine to the insane fury of the crowd. The morning finds her dead, with her hands stretched, imploring and in vain, over the violated threshold. Then comes the call for judgment, -itself brutal, and effective in its brutality. The doubly dishonored body makes its own ghastly appeal, and all Israel is summoned to give its answer. 2. And not in vain is the summons. Israel gather, by their representatives, from Dan to Beersheba, save only the tribe involved, and the Levite at Mizpeh recounts the awful story, -reticent, naturally, however, as to his own part in it. The people respond with prompt determination, and all the men of Israel are gathered against the city, knit together as one man. But Benjamin refuses the appeal to them, and gathers to the defense of Gibeah with sullen resolution. They are practiced warriors, and seem to build upon it, though but little more than a fifteenth part of the combined forces opposed. Israel has, too, the house of God; and it is not a moment doubtful on which side He will be. How fearful must be, then, the condition of those that can thus fling themselves into the adverse ranks! The united people, on the other hand, do not neglect to consult the divine oracle. They inquire as to who shall lead on the attack upon Benjamin, and are answered, “Judah shall be first.” But to be fit to be used of God to deal with evil involves much more than readiness to be His instrument. They are too ready, as we see in the result. Their wrath is too prompt, too implacable, too unsparing. Theirs is the reckless haste of vengeance, and not the solemn discrimination of divine judgment. They remember not their own sins, bring no sin-offering to God, no tears of penitence.

They build on their numbers; no doubt on the justice of their cause, also, but in self-righteousness and without self-suspicion. Thus they go up to smite, and they are smitten heavily, disastrously. Benjamin, the wrong-doer, is wholly victorious. Then, indeed, they go up and weep before Jehovah, and seem to remember that Benjamin is their “brother,” and inquire, shall they go up against him any more? They are answered, simply, “Go up”; and when they go are again smitten almost as heavily as before. Their losses in these two encounters far exceed the whole number of the men of Benjamin, -exceed them by half as many again. What a lesson as to the hasty and self-righteous judgment of real iniquity! Yet the word from Jehovah was, none the less, “Go up”; and such judgment of it is as imperatively necessary today. But it must be judgment all round, -self-judgment before any other. And now they come up once more before God, and weep, and offer at last burnt-offerings and peace-offerings, fasting that day till even: and they are heard of God, and obtain the assurance that tomorrow Benjamin will be given up into their hand. Remembering the connection of Bethel with the life of Jacob, and the discipline to which he is made to bow -that it is here the ark of God is at this time, and not at Shiloh, the place of “peace,” -must be surely significant. And now we see on the part of Israel a self-distrust they had not before. The stratagem at Ai is repeated, and with a like result; for Benjamin, elated with their previous victories, easily fall into the snare, and are only awakened at last, too late, when they see Gibeah going up in flame to heaven. Destruction falls overwhelmingly upon them: only six hundred men escape to the cliff of Rimmon. The rest -with women and children, everything in their cities the merciless edge of the sword devours. For one awful crime of Gibeah, thousands of innocent lives pay forfeit.

But the state, everywhere, we see is frightful. All this time the insult to God in Dan abides unnoticed: a web of heathen cities is suffered to entangle them with the abominations of Baal and Ashtaroth-worship, while indiscriminating judgment extirpates almost one tribe in Israel. The facts need here but the briefest comment. 3. At last, when the sword has done its reckless work, and a few hundred young men, stripped of all that they held dear in life, alone remain, the people wake up to realize the result of their own handiwork; and to inquire, as if of an inscrutable Providence, why this had come to pass. And now they find themselves bound by their own past acts, in which they must seem to have deliberately contemplated the extinction of a tribe, which they had almost accomplished, and of which they are quite ready to throw the blame on God. They had bound themselves, under a curse, not to give a wife to a Benjamite. And now, instead of bringing this in penitential sorrow before God, and seeking to be loosed from their folly, they take the matter once more into their cruel hands. The inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead had sent no aid to Israel in the war; and this, with another of their desperate oaths, they had adjudged a crime worthy of death. One oath is made the means of evading another; and they send an expedition against the unfortunate city to inflict the ban of utter destruction upon it, reserving only by an exception which they had no right to make, but which condemned their wholesale and pitiless slaughter -four hundred young maidens for wives to Benjamin. But this is not enough, and they must have another expedient. Scrupulous oath-keepers as they are, who must not give their daughters, they consider it all right that the Benjamites should steal them; and actually suggest a festival to Jehovah as a good opportunity for them to do this! Then they will intercede for them with the aggrieved relations: and this is the plan that is finally carried out. This is Israel, the people of God: infirm and wavering where good is to be accomplished; quick and decisive where patience and forbearance would become them; tolerant of what is only against God; fierce and unsparing in judgment, save only of themselves; scrupulously keeping an insane oath, yet managing to evade it by a jesuitry that deceives no one. Such is the people of God, and such is Christendom today; and such it has been. Let us search our hearts as we read the record, -not given as a record without purpose in it. How solemn is the repetition at the end of what has been the text of these closing chapters: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did what was right in his own eyes.”