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

[saveau.livejournal.com]

There is a group of trolls that hang out in the atheist comms and love to throw those accusations about, especially when someone makes a substantive point (one of their contentions is that to be against religion is inherently anti-Semitic). They then run back to their own comm to congratulate each other for having done so. I was sarcastically imitating them as an ironic salute to your very articulate post. I thought they were sufficiently well-known that the ironic humor would be be self-evident; that they are not so known to you makes me a bit envious of you. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

[raven-moon.livejournal.com]

Sorry, and I'm so glad! (I actually went to your profile, and was quite baffled!) I half-wondered if that were the case, but I have gone on the assumption that someone was joking before and been wrong, so.... ROTFL!

Thank you, and I'm glad to meet you!