The warning of Judges – Christian Today

The older I get, the more I treasure the Bible. Recently re-reading the Old Testament book of Judges brought home to me the reality about human nature and our desperate need for the divine Messiah.

Judges is about within the 200-year period between the Israelites’ conquest of the Promised Land in around 1200 BC and the establishment of the monarchy in Israel in 1000. It is a time of spiritual and moral chaos within the land because the Israelites repeatedly fall into idolatry and disobedience until God raises up a judge (a military leader) to avoid wasting them from the pagan nations that subjugate them. But when the judge dies, the Israelites revert to idolatry.

The last five chapters of Judges are an account, each shocking and satirical, of the corruption of a nation. The narrative concludes with the statement: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25 – King James Version).

What did that seem like? In this narrative, gang rape followed by a brutal civil war. Judges 19 describes a gaggle of men belonging to the Israelite tribe of Benjamin gang-raping the concubine of a travelling Levite within the town of Gibeah. Reminiscent of an incident in pagan Sodom as narrated in Genesis 19, the gang initially desired to commit homosexual rape on the Levite. But the Levite offered them his concubine as a substitute.

The Levites were the Israelite tribe set apart to oversee the worship of the one true God, the Lord Almighty, Yahweh, who had rescued his chosen people from slavery in Egypt and brought them to the Promised Land. Things have gotten so bad that a Levite has a live-in girlfriend, quite than a wife, whom he’s willing to supply up as rape fodder to a gaggle of Israelites who prove to be worse than pagans.

The men of Gibeah abused her all night until the morning when she fell down dead on the door of the home where the Levite was staying.  The man then cut up her body into 12 pieces and sent a bit to every of the 12 tribes of Israel.

Their response is described in Judges 19:30: “And it was so, that each one that saw it said, There was no such thing done nor seen from the day the youngsters of Israel got here up out of the land of Egypt unto at the present time: consider of it, take advice and speak your minds.”

The results of their deliberation was civil war between the tribe of Benjamin, who occupied a strip of land a number of miles north of Jerusalem, and the opposite Israelite tribes. Judges 20:48 describes the brutal overreaction by the victorious majority:

“And the lads of Israel turned again upon the youngsters of Benjamin, and smote them with the sting of the sword, as well the lads of each city, because the beast, and all that got here at hand: also they set on fire all of the cities that they got here to.”

The narrative ends on a satirical note. The Israelites, having originally pledged not to present their daughters in marriage to the surviving men of Benjamin, change their minds. Their first recourse is to violence. They attack Jabesh-Gilead, an element of Israel that had not taken part within the war, and carry off the virgins there as wives for the Benjaminites. But there aren’t enough women to go round.

So, they then give you an absurd scheme to permit the Benjaminites to cover within the vineyards near Shiloh while an annual religious festival was happening and grab a dancing girl. Judges 21:23 describes the scene: “And the youngsters of Benjamin did so, and took them wives, in accordance with their number, of them that danced, whom they caught: they usually went and returned unto their inheritance, and repaired their cities, and dwelt in them.”

The narrative powerfully describes how fallen human nature plays out without strong spiritual, moral and, in a nation state, legal restraints. In the context of the unfolding biblical story, Judges surely raises the very contemporary query: how can any nation that rejects the Lord’s chosen King expect to flee the implications of unrestrained human nature on the loose?

Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.