CHAPTER 21

(1406 B.C.)

SORROW

¹Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpeh, saying, There shall not any of us give his daughter unto Benjamin to wife. (A circumstance not mentioned before was now brought forward, as is another in Verse 5.)

²And the people came to the House of God, and abode there till evening before God, and lifted up their voices, and wept sore;

³And said, O LORD God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that there should be to day one Tribe lacking in Israel? (When people are governed by excitement, and not by the Word of God, they bind themselves by oaths which lead to difficulty, and even to bloodshed.

It is true that the Benjamites merited punishment, because their refusal to judge the evil at Gibeah showed that they thought little of it, or that they sympathized with it. And again, had Israel followed the Word of the Lord from the beginning, and had they waited upon God for direction, how different would be the history of this Chapter!)

⁴And it came to pass on the morrow, that the people rose early, and built there an Altar, and offering Burnt Offerings and Peace Offerings (the men of Israel are now functioning correctly; they are depending on the slain lamb).

⁵And the Children of Israel said, Who is there among all the Tribes of Israel who came not up with the congregation unto the LORD? For they had made a great oath concerning him who came not up to the LORD to Mizpeh, saying, He shall surely be put to death (referring to those who refused to fight the Benjamites).

⁶And the Children of Israel repented them for Benjamin their brother, and said, There is one tribe cut off from Israel this day.

WIVES FOR THE BENJAMITES

⁷How shall we do for wives for them who remain, seeing we have sworn by the LORD that we will not give them of our daughters to wives? (Evidently, all the women of Benjamin had been killed, causing the death toll to rise to astronomical proportions. What a horror!)

⁸And they said, What one is there of the Tribes of Israel that came not up to Mizpeh to the LORD? And, behold, there came none to the camp from Jabesh-gilead to the assembly.

⁹For the people were numbered, and, behold, there were none of the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead there.

¹⁰And the congregation sent thither twelve thousand men of the valiantest, and commanded them, saying, Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children.

¹¹And this is the thing that you shall do, You shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman who has lain by man. (Again, several thousand people are killed. And the truth is, none of this was necessary. The Lord did not tell them to do this thing. If they made a rash vow, which they evidently did [Vs. 5], they should have asked the Lord to forgive them, which He most definitely would have done, and let the matter rest; however, the men of Israel were, no doubt, very angry, considering their losses, that the men of Jabesh-gilead did not participate. So, they would kill them, and so they did!)

¹²And they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead four hundred young virgins, who had known no man by lying with any male: and they brought them unto the camp to Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan (evidently they had taken the Tabernacle back to Shiloh).

¹³And the whole congregation sent some to speak to the children of Benjamin who were in the rock Rimmon, and to call peaceably unto them (20:47).

¹⁴And Benjamin came again at that time; and they gave them wives which they had saved alive of the women of Jabesh-gilead: and yet so they sufficed them not (there were not enough women to go around).

¹⁵And the people repented them for Benjamin, because that the LORD had made a breach in the Tribes of Israel (it is true, but it was the fault of all the Tribes of Israel, and not of God).

SHILOH

¹⁶Then the elders of the congregation said, How shall we do for wives for them who remain, seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin?

¹⁷And they said, There must be an inheritance for them who be escaped of Benjamin, that a Tribe be not destroyed out of Israel (the word inheritance should have been translated succession, thereby reading, there must be heirs to succeed and, therefore, we must find wives for them).

¹⁸Howbeit we may not give them wives of our daughters: for the Children of Israel have sworn, saying, Cursed be he who gives a wife to Benjamin.

¹⁹Then they said, Behold, there is a feast of the LORD in Shiloh yearly in a place which is on the north side of Beth-el, on the east side of the highway that goes up from Beth-el to Shechem, and on the south of Lebonah. (Williams says, It gives a sad picture of the condition of the nation at this time that, although the Benjamites lived within a short distance of Shiloh where the Tabernacle was pitched, yet so complete was their neglect of it that the minute directions of Verse 19 had to be given them to enable them to find it; and, further, the mention of only one yearly Feast God having commanded three was an added proof of departure from His Word.)

²⁰Therefore they commanded the children of Benjamin, saying, Go and lie in wait in the vineyards;

²¹And see, and, behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances, then come you out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife of the daughters of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin (these dances showed how heathen customs had invaded the House of God; for no such dancing was ordained in the Book of Leviticus; it is all a mournful illustration of that today, which professes to be the House of God; all too often, amusement displaces worship).

²²And it shall be, when their fathers or their brethren come unto us to complain, that we will say unto them, Be favourable unto them for our sakes: because we reserved not to each man his wife in the war: for you did not give unto them at this time, that you should be guilty (could be translated, You need not fear the guilt of the broken oath, because you did not give your daughters, so as to violate the oath, but they were taken from you by force).

²³And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them wives, according to their number, of them who danced, whom they caught: and they went and returned unto their inheritance, and repaired the cities, and dwelt in them.

²⁴And the Children of Israel departed thence at that time, every man to his Tribe and to his family, and they went out from thence every man to his inheritance.

ANARCHY

²⁵In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes. (As should be obvious, the lessons of this Book are painful, but yet necessary. These lessons teach us that our Faith must ever be registered in Christ and what He has done for us at the Cross. That being done, the Holy Spirit will have latitude within our lives. To be sure, prayer and the study of the Word will then become prominent within our experience. Let it ever be understood that no height of Christian experience, nor miraculous manifestations, as glorious as they might be, can keep the soul from falling. Only daily fellowship with God, meditation upon and obedience to His Holy Word, and the ever-present Power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, which can only come about, as stated, by Faith in Christ and the Cross, can preserve the Christian from spiritual declension.

It is a solemn truth that experiences of the past, as wonderful as they may have then been, are useless to the heart that is out of fellowship with God. Israels history abundantly illustrates this fact. God help us to learn from the myriad of illustrations given in this Book, as painful as they are!)