I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.
Today, I am reading and commenting on Judges 20-21.
When news spread about the gang rape in Gibeah, the men of Israel were outraged. They vowed to punish the wrongdoers. So, they massed as an army, without inviting the tribe of Benjamin (of which the men of Gibeah were a part). This is where things went wrong. Rather than assemble a group to discover the facts in order to call to account those responsible for this terrible crime, they gathered an army in the heat of the moment. Having gathered an army, they sent word to Benjamin demanding that they surrender the accused parties (we know from the account that those accused were, at least for the most part, guilty, but that would have been less clear to a rational person at the time). While the warriors of the rest of Israel were guilty of a rush to judgement, the warriors of Benjamin were guilty of the opposite. They reflexively defended their fellow tribesmen. The failure of either side to avoid reacting emotionally led to a tragedy of near irreversible proportions. The tribe of Benjamin was almost wiped out.
When they realized what they had done, the other tribes of Israel sought, and found, solutions to the problem they had created. I had mentioned earlier that throughout the time of the judges Israel did not act as a unified group. Each of the judges led just a few of the tribes. None of them exerted authority over all of Israel. This event seems to represent a change in that because we see in First Samuel that Israel has begun to act as a unified nation once more. Which shows us that even our mistakes serve to advance God’s plan.
