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

[(Anonymous)]

This is what I get from Judges:
Judges shows sin, rape, violence and bloodshed. Why did this happen? The answer is simply because every man was doing that which was right in his own eyes. God's law was set aside (as in OT law- lets not get into where our laws today originate from...we are talking about judges in the bible so it is their law which then was gods law). Each man thought he knew better than his neighbour and even better than God as to how the human race should live. Even the religious leaders in judges taught falsehood and directed people away from the law of God.

Judges depicts how people fell into sin, were enslaved by an oppressor, cried out to god for help and god sent a leader (or judge) to deliver them. At the end of this cycle they were faithful and stable, but it wasn't long before people slipped back into the same vicious cycle.

I have difficulty with judges myself, but from reading it shows me what can happen to a society when its citizens do whatever they choose and blind themselves to the needs of others. It is a good lesson to learn whether you are a believer or not.

[raven-moon.livejournal.com]

No, Judges shows a deeply interpreted account of a loose confederacy of patriarchal tribes returning to inter-tribal squabbling in the absence of a strong leader, whereupon a series of bloodthirsty warlords took on the dubious mantle of supposedly divine leadership to make a series of power grabs and brutal offensive as well as defensive wars. At that point in history, the Yawehist sacrificial cult was still rather a small player regionally speaking, and plenty of other cultural groups existed alongside it, cross-pollinating and cross influencing each other. If you think that at this point the 'Israelites' comprised anything like a single, cohesive, socio-political body, you are very mistaken. There were many, many tribes and localized cultural groups shifting throughout the area at the time, and for centuries before and after.

Incidentally (operating on the assumption that this is the same anonymous poster to whom I was earlier replying) you are the one that set out OT law as the foundation for modern law, and therefore tried to spin it into some sort of 'fundamental natural law' which is everywhere acknowledged as the core or human law. As that's incorrect, I addressed it. If you want to have a different discussion that's fine, but you went there.