Judges 19-21

[wolfpurplemoon]

Judges has been a pretty grim read, but these last three chapters really up the revulsion.

* A man gives his concubine to a mob and they rape her until she dies. He then cuts her body into 12 parts and sends a part to each tribe of Israel. Which is awful enough.

* They come and ask him why he sent them body parts and he explains, so the tribe that the mob came from (the Benjaminites) is then slaughtered (not without losses for the other tribes though) leaving just 600 men. What the mob did was awful, but the reaction is ridiculously over the top as women and children are included in the slaughter.

* Noone wants to give these 600 men any women to marry, but they can't let a tribe die out so find some virgins in a city of Israel who didn't send any men to join in the slaughter. So everyone is killed expect the 400 virgin women. And then to make up the numbers the rest of the Benjaminites have to kidnap girls from the city of Shiloh.

The excuse for everything that has occurred in Judges seems to be this:

In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

Comments

[yukinoomoni.livejournal.com]

In "Judges", it's no secret that the majority of the judges involve actually use the visage of "God" as a mouthpiece, an image and anecdote, for what they, the judges, actually want. By saying that "God is ruler above all" is misinterpreting the entirety of Judges as a text, because in fact the Judges themselves were abuses of the "name of god" when they invoked "him" as their ruler.

The fact of the matter is that there is/was no god, and that these people abused the idea of it to play on people's hopes, dreams and beliefs in order to gain obedience in the name of that god, when really it was more about themselves. using scare tactics, mutilation, murder and rampage, all in the name of this god, was all false; it was in the name of power, for power, for the judges, and god is merely the figurehead, the invisible excuse, to control the populace.