Judges21chapter 21

Judges 21:1-3

The oath is reported here for the first time, though it was sworn back at the muster of 20:1 where all Israel gathered to the Lord in Mizpeh. Israel then asks God why one tribe is lacking, putting the loss as something that came to pass rather than as something the army did in chapter 20. The place they weep in is called the house of God, which is Bethel in the Hebrew, where 20:27 puts the ark and 20:28 puts Phinehas the son of Eleazar standing before it, and that priest's name sets these chapters near the beginning of the period rather than at its end.

Judges 21:4-5

They build an altar before they offer, which Clarke reads as evidence that the place held no standing altar of its own at that time. Then a second oath surfaces, also unrecorded when it was sworn, laying death on any man who failed to come up to Mizpeh. Two oaths are now on the record inside five verses, and the rest of the chapter is spent working around the first one by means of the second.

Judges 21:6-7

They call Benjamin their brother, which is the word Phinehas used at 20:28 while asking whether to go out against him one more time. The grief is over the outcome rather than the sentence, since 20:48 had put the towns of Benjamin to the sword and to the fire and left the six hundred at the rock with nothing to go home to. Verse 7 states the deadlock the remaining eighteen verses answer: they have sworn by the Lord, and their own oath now stands between Benjamin and a next generation.

Judges 21:8-9

The way out begins with a roll call rather than with a prayer. The people are numbered, one town is found missing from the assembly, and absence at the muster is the whole charge the text records against it. Jabesh sits east of the Jordan in Gilead, on ground the war against Benjamin never touched.

Judges 21:10-12

The order given to the twelve thousand carries the wording of Deuteronomy 13:15, smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, which is the law written for an Israelite city that has gone after other gods; the offence named in this chapter is failure to appear at Mizpeh. The sparing of the unmarried women follows the Midian formula of Numbers 31:17-18, kill every woman that hath known man and keep the rest alive, and it is applied here to a town of Israel. Verse 12 brings the four hundred to Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan, the same phrase Joshua 22:9 uses to mark the west side of the Jordan off against Gilead.

Judges 21:13-14

Peace is called to the six hundred at the rock Rimmon, where 20:47 says they had held out four months, and the captive women are handed over. Four hundred does not cover six hundred, and the text says so without softening it, so they sufficed them not. The town raided here returns twice in the story of the first king: Saul the Benjamite rescues Jabesh from Nahash the Ammonite at 1 Samuel 11, and the men of Jabesh take his body down from the wall of Bethshan and bury his bones at 1 Samuel 31:11 to 13.

Judges 21:15

This is the second time in ten verses that the people repent for Benjamin, and the sentence lays the loss on the Lord, that he had made a breach in the tribes of Israel. The same phrase falls twice more in Scripture, of Uzzah at 2 Samuel 6:8 and of the first attempt to carry the ark at 1 Chronicles 15:13, and in both of those places the breach comes from inside Israel rather than from an enemy.

Judges 21:16-18

Then the elders of the congregation said: The elders restate the problem and add a reason for solving it, that there must be an inheritance for them that be escaped, since the territory allotted to Benjamin at Joshua 18:11 to 28 would otherwise pass to nobody. Verse 18 gives the oath in its sharpest form, cursed be he that giveth a wife to Benjamin, in the wording of the twelve curses read out from Ebal in Deuteronomy 27. They keep the letter of it and look for another road, and the last seven verses are that road.

Judges 21:19-21

The feast is fixed by four landmarks, north of Bethel, east of the highway that runs from Bethel to Shechem, and south of Lebonah, which is more direction than a man living in the land would need. Which feast it was is not stated, and Barnes takes it for one of the three pilgrim feasts while Gill argues from the title feast of the Lord that it cannot be a fair or a market. Shiloh kept a yearly gathering that Elkanah is still keeping at 1 Samuel 1:3, and the elders turn the dance of its daughters into an ambush, with Benjamin told to lie in wait in the vineyards.

Judges 21:22-23

The answer to the fathers is drafted before the raid happens, and its argument turns on a single word of the oath: nobody gave a daughter, so nobody falls under the curse of verse 18. Benjamin takes wives according to their number, goes back to its own inheritance, and rebuilds the cities burned at 20:48. Barnes sets the scene beside the seizing of the Sabine women at a Roman festival as Livy tells it, which is the nearest parallel he finds outside Scripture.

Judges 21:24-25

Every man goes back to his tribe, his family and his inheritance, which is the word the elders used at verse 17 for the thing Benjamin had to be kept alive to hold. Then the closing sentence falls for the fourth time in the book, at 17:6, 18:1, 19:1 and here, and the two that carry the second half stand at the first verse of this closing block and at its last. King in Israel occurs first in all of Scripture at 17:6, in the book that says there was none, and the demand for one is made at 1 Samuel 8:5.