Even Holy Massacres Can Have Their Drawbacks

Number 14 of 17 in the *Twilight Zone* series:
The silly results of an intratribal holy war are examined.

by Farrell Till

In the Twilight Zone of biblical literature, silliness occurs in direct proportion to the length of the story. Our last two journeys into the Twilight Zone concerned events that followed the rape and murder of the Levite's concubine. After twice having Yahweh's counsel lead them into military disasters inflicted by the Benjamites defending the city where the atrocity against the Levite's concubine had occurred, the Israelites directed a third inquiry to Yahweh that brought them success, if a victory that had cost 40,000 lives can in any sense be considered a success. Anyway, in their third attack against the city of Gibeah, the Israelites withdrew in apparent defeat to trick the Benjamite forces into following them out of the city and into an ambush where "ten thousand select men from all Israel" were lying in wait (Judges 20:32-34). We are told that the battle was "fierce" and that "Yahweh defeated Benjamin before Israel" (v:35).

So the silliness continued. The Israelites lost 22,000 men the first day of battle and 18,000 on the second. On the third day, an Israelite diversionary force led the Benjamites out of the city, at a cost of 30 casualties (v:31), and into an ambush where 10,000 "select men" fought in "fierce battle"; then after all this, we are told that "Yahweh defeated Benjamin." Only in the Twilight Zone would a historian give a deity credit for a victory that had cost over 40,000 lives. Did it never occur to the writer of this fanciful little tale that an all-powerful god should have been able to defeat Benjamin without incurring thousands of casualties?  Apparently not. Perhaps divinely inspired writers just couldn't allow themselves to be bothered by little details like this.

The defeat of Benjamin was typically Yahwistic in its scope.  "Eighteen thousand men of Benjamin fell" during the ambush (v:44), and when the remnant fled toward the wilderness, the Israelites pursued and "cut down five thousand of them on the highways" (v:45). "Then they [the Israelites] pursued them relentlessly up to Gidom, and killed two thousand" more (v:45). Altogether, the Israelites killed 25,000 Benjamite soldiers that day (v:46), and only 600, who fled to the rock of Rimmon, managed to escape the slaughter (v:47).  The Israelites didn't pursue those 600, because they had more important things to do. They turned back against the civilian population "and struck them down with the edge of the sword--from every city, men and beasts, all who were found," and "(t)hey also set fire to all the cities they came to" ((v:48). It was a typical, take-no-prisoners massacre that no other term but Yahwistic can accurately describe. After all, we are assured in the inerrant word of God that "Yahweh defeated Benjamin" that day, so we can only conclude that burning the cities and massacring the civilian population were what Yahweh wanted. We must also conclude that, for some inexplicable reason known only to believers of Twilight-Zone literature, Yahweh also wanted 40,000 Israelites to die ridding the world of those ungodly Benjamites. If such conclusions puzzle you, just try to take comfort from knowing that you'll understand it all in the sweet by and by.

After the war with Benjamin was over, a harsh reality came home to the Israelite victors:They had all but destroyed one of the twelve tribes of their divinely chosen nation! So the only thing to do was go to the house of God, which the people immediately did and "remained there before God till evening" (Judges 21:2) "O, Yahweh, God of Israel," they cried out, weeping bitterly, "why has this come to pass in Israel, that today there should be one tribe missing in Israel?" Why had this come to pass? Did the inspired writer really expect us to understand that the people didn't know why this had come to pass, that it had come to pass because they had mustered an army of 400,000 to go against 26,000, and had killed everything in sight after the tide of battle had turned in their favor? Are we also to believe that none of the 360,000 Israelites involved in the massacring had at any time had a thought like, "Hey, if we keep this up, we're going to wipe out an entire Israelite tribe!" And while Yahweh was "defeating Benjamin" that day, did it not occur to this omniscient deity that in "defeating Benjamin," he was wiping out a tribe of his people whom he had chosen "above all the peoples on the face of the earth"   (Dt. 7:6)?  Who really knows? Perhaps in the Twilight Zone even omniscient deities don't worry about minor details like this when a good bloody massacre is in progress.

At any rate, the victorious Israelites realized that they had a problem.  The entire tribe of Benjamin was gone, except for the 600 soldiers who had fled to the rock of Rimmon in the wilderness. However, these 600 were all males, and no matter how important males were considered in biblical times, there was no way for 600 males to repopulate a tribe without females. But in the massacre of the civilian population, the Israelites had killed all of the Benjamite females. Yes, it was a real problem!

So why didn't the 600 Benjamite survivors repopulate the tribe by just marrying women of other nationalities? If this was what you were wondering, don't look now but your ignorance of the ways of Twilight-Zone gods is showing. Yahweh had expressly forbidden the Hebrews to marry foreign women (Dt. 7:3-4; Ex. 34:15-16; Josh. 23:12-13), so what Benjamites at a time like this would have dared marry foreign (gasp!) women and risked angering the temperamental Yahweh any more than they already had?

So why didn't the surviving Benjamites rebuild their tribe by marrying Hebrew women from other tribes? Well, for one thing, the other Israelites wouldn't have allowed it. You see, the Benjamites had offended the Israelites, and the ancient Hebrews just didn't know the meaning of the word forgive. Grudges often endured for generations, as did the 450-year-old grudge against the Amalekites, which finally culminated in the utter destruction of the entire Amalekite nation on direct orders from none other than Yahweh himself (1 Sam. 15). Furthermore, the Israelites had sworn an oath at Mizpah before the massacre of the Benjamites began that "(n)one of us shall give his daughter to Benjamin  as  a  wife" (21:1,7). In those days, people took their oaths seriously as exemplified in the story of Jephthah, who made an oath that later required him to sacrifice his daughter, his only child, as a burnt offering to Yahweh (Judges 11:29-39). An oath was an oath in Twilight-Zone days and had to be rigidly respected.

So as this excursion into the Twilight Zone comes to an end, we must leave Yahweh's chosen people grappling with a problem that almost defied solution. But never fear; they found a solution. There was never a problem that God's people couldn't solve with a little bloodshedding, but that's a story for our next journey into the Twilight Zone.