Gibeah

Gibeah was a small town in Benjamin's territory, a short walk north of Jerusalem on the road toward the hill country of Ephraim. Judges 19 tells what happened there without softening it. A Levite traveling home with his concubine chose to lodge at Gibeah rather than in a foreign city, expecting safety among his own people. No one in the town square would take them in until an old man from Ephraim offered his home. That night the wicked men of the city surrounded the house, and when the Levite sent his concubine out to them rather than face them himself, they abused her until morning. She was found dead or dying at the doorstep. The Levite cut her body into twelve pieces and sent them throughout Israel's territory as a summons to judgment. Israel answered as one nation. The tribes gathered at Mizpah and demanded Benjamin hand over the guilty men of Gibeah. When Benjamin refused and mobilized for war instead, the resulting battle nearly erased the tribe from Israel. The first two days went against Israel, with 22,000 and then 18,000 men killed in the fighting. On the third day an ambush burned Gibeah to the ground and broke Benjamin's army, leaving 25,000 Benjamite swordsmen dead and only 600 survivors who fled to the rock of Rimmon. What followed was almost as painful as the war itself. Israel had sworn not to give any of their daughters to Benjamin in marriage, and now grieved that "a tribe is cut off from Israel." The solution the assembly found, seizing women from Jabesh-gilead and then from the dancers at Shiloh's yearly feast, kept the tribe alive but settled nothing about what had caused the crisis. Judges closes on the same note it opens with: "there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes." Gibeah did not stay a byword only. A generation or two later it became the hometown of Saul, Israel's first king, and later still his capital, the place he ruled from and the place where he sat under a tamarisk tree with his spear in hand. And centuries after that, the prophet Hosea could still say Israel had corrupted itself "as in the days of Gibeah," trusting that his readers would know exactly what he meant without another word of explanation.