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

Re: I get it now!

[wolfpurplemoon]

I don't see that it's a great thing that people without a ruler just go and do awful things, and also I'm not sure that's at all true. If it was then the human species and society would not have survived long at all.

But, thanks for dropping by.

Re: I get it now!

[(Anonymous)]

Keep seeking :) You'll get your answers if you're genuinely looking for them. And when you get your answers, you'll be blown away. And then you're going to meet people with questions. And you'll try to explain, but you won't quite be able to or they won't all understand. It's just something that has to happen in your heart before it happens in your head.