The War Against Benjamin

After the deaths of Joshua and Eleazar, Phinehas prophesied that, by God’s will, they should entrust the leadership to the tribe of Judah, and that this tribe should destroy the race of the Canaanites; for the people were then anxious to learn what the will of God was. Judah also took the tribe of Simeon to help it, on this condition: that when those who had been tributary to the tribe of Judah had been killed, they would do the same for the tribe of Simeon. [a] At this time, however, the Canaanites’ affairs were flourishing, and they awaited the Israelites with a great army at the city of Bezek, having put the command in the hands of the king of Bezek, Adoni-bezek — the name means “Lord of Bezek,” for Adoni in the Hebrew tongue means “Lord.” They hoped to get the better of the Israelites because Joshua was dead. But when the Israelites — I mean the two tribes just mentioned — joined battle with them, they fought gloriously, killed more than ten thousand of them, and put the rest to flight. In the pursuit they captured Adoni-bezek, and when they had cut off his fingers and toes, he said: “So I was not to stay hidden from God forever, as I find by what I now suffer — I who was not ashamed to do the same to seventy-two kings.” They brought him alive as far as Jerusalem, and when he died they buried him. Then they went on taking the cities, and when they had taken most of them, they laid siege to Jerusalem. They took the lower city, though only after a considerable time, and killed all its inhabitants; but the upper city could not be taken without great difficulty, because of the strength of its walls and the nature of the place. [b]

For this reason they moved their camp to Hebron, and when they had taken it, they killed all its inhabitants. Until then a race of giants had survived there, with bodies so large and faces so wholly unlike other men’s that they were astonishing to see and terrifying to hear of. Their bones are still shown to this very day, unlike anything credibly reported of other men. They gave this city to the Levites as a special reward, together with the land for three thousand feet around it; but the land belonging to it they gave as a free gift to Caleb, as Moses had commanded. This Caleb was one of the spies Moses sent into the land of Canaan. They also gave land to live on to the descendants of Jethro the Midianite, Moses’ father-in-law, for they had left their own country to follow the Israelites and had gone with them through the wilderness. [c] The tribes of Judah and Simeon took the cities in the mountain country of Canaan, and, of those in the plain and near the sea, Ashkelon and Ashdod. But Gaza and Ekron escaped them: lying in flat country and having a great number of chariots, they inflicted heavy losses on those who attacked them. So these tribes, having grown very rich from this war, went back to their own cities and laid aside their weapons. [e] But the Benjamites, to whom Jerusalem belonged, allowed its inhabitants to pay tribute. So both sides left off, the one from killing and the other from risking their lives, and they had time to farm the land. The rest of the tribes followed the example of Benjamin and did the same; content with the tribute paid to them, they let the Canaanites live in peace.

The tribe of Ephraim, however, made no headway in besieging Bethel and achieved nothing worth the time and trouble they spent on the siege. Still they kept at it, sitting down before the city, though it cost them great hardship. After some time they caught one of the citizens who had come out to get provisions, and gave him assurances that if he would hand the city over to them, they would spare him and his relatives. On those terms he swore to put the city into their hands. So the man who betrayed the city was spared with his family, and the Israelites killed all the inhabitants and kept the city for themselves.

After this the Israelites grew soft and unwilling to fight their enemies any longer, and gave themselves to farming the land. Since it produced great plenty and wealth for them, they neglected the proper ordering of their settlement and indulged in luxury and pleasures, and no longer took care to hear the laws that governed their public life. At this the Deity was provoked to anger and declared to them by an oracle, first, that they had spared the Canaanites contrary to his will, and then that those Canaanites, whenever they had the chance, would treat them very cruelly. But the Israelites, though grieved at these warnings from God, were still very unwilling to go to war. Because they received large tributes from the Canaanites, and luxury had made them unfit for hard work, they let their aristocracy be corrupted too. They did not appoint a senate for themselves, or any of the other magistrates their laws had formerly required, but were wholly given to farming their fields to get wealth. This great license of theirs brought a terrible civil strife upon them, and they went so far as to fight one another, on the following occasion. [f]

There was a Levite, a man of common family, who belonged to the tribe of Ephraim and lived there. He married a wife from Bethlehem, a place belonging to the tribe of Judah. He was very fond of his wife and overcome by her beauty, but he was unhappy in this, that she did not return his affection. She was averse to him, which inflamed his passion for her all the more, so that they quarreled constantly; and at last the woman grew so disgusted with these quarrels that she left her husband and went to her parents, in the fourth month. Her husband was very distressed at her leaving, because of his fondness for her. He came to his father- and mother-in-law, settled their quarrels and was reconciled to her, and stayed there with them four days, being kindly treated by her parents. On the fifth day he resolved to go home, and he set out in the evening, for his wife’s parents were reluctant to part with their daughter and delayed until the day was gone. [g]

They had one servant who went with them, and a donkey on which the woman rode. When they were near Jerusalem, having already gone almost four miles, the servant advised them to find lodging somewhere, in case some misfortune should befall them if they traveled at night, especially since they were not far from enemies — that hour often giving reason to suspect danger even from those who are friends. But the husband did not like this advice, nor was he willing to lodge among strangers, for the city belonged to the Canaanites; he preferred to go about two and a half miles farther and lodge in some Israelite city. He had his way, and came to Gibeah, a city of the tribe of Benjamin, just as it grew dark. No one living by the marketplace invited him to stay; but an old man came in from the field — a man of the tribe of Ephraim who lived in Gibeah — met him, and asked who he was, why he had come there so late, and why he was looking for food for his supper after dark. He replied that he was a Levite bringing his wife home from her parents, and told him that his home was in the tribe of Ephraim. So the old man took him in to lodge with him, because of their kinship, because they lived in the same tribe, and because they had met in this way by chance.

Some young men of Gibeah had seen the woman in the marketplace and admired her beauty. When they learned that she was lodging with the old man, they came to the doors, despising the weakness and small numbers of the old man’s household. When the old man asked them to go away and do no violence or outrage there, they demanded that he hand over the strange woman to them, and then no harm would be done to him. When the old man pleaded that the woman was his kinswoman and a Levite, and that they would be guilty of horrible wickedness if they let themselves be overcome by their pleasures and so offend against their laws, they despised his righteous warning and laughed him to scorn. They also threatened to kill him if he stood in the way of their desires. Then, finding himself in great distress and yet unwilling to abandon his guests and see them abused, he brought out his own daughter to them. He told them it was a smaller breach of the law to satisfy their lust on her than to abuse his guests, supposing that by this means he would prevent any harm being done to those guests. When they did not abate their eagerness for the strange woman at all, but insisted absolutely on having her, he begged them not to commit such a crime. But they took her away by force, and giving still freer rein to their violence, they carried the woman off to their house, raped her the whole night, and let her go about daybreak.

She came back to the place where she had been lodged, in great anguish at what had happened. She was deeply grieved at what she had suffered, and did not dare look her husband in the face for shame, for she reckoned that he above all would be beyond comfort at what had happened. So she fell down and died. But her husband supposed that his wife was only fast asleep, and, thinking nothing sadder had happened, tried to raise her up, meaning to comfort her, since she had not given herself to these men’s lust willingly but had been dragged away to their house. As soon as he saw that she was dead, he acted as sensibly as the greatness of his misfortune allowed. He laid his dead wife on the animal and carried her home; and cutting her limb by limb into twelve pieces, he sent them to every tribe, and charged those who carried them to tell the tribes who had caused his wife’s death, and of the outrage committed by that tribe.

The people were greatly disturbed at what they saw and what they heard, never having experienced such a thing before. Moved by a tremendous and just anger, they gathered at Shiloh, and assembling in a great congregation before the tabernacle, they resolved at once to take up arms and treat the inhabitants of Gibeah as enemies. But the senate restrained them, persuading them that they ought not to make war so hastily on people of their own nation before they had talked with them about the charge laid against them. For it was part of their law that they should not lead an army even against foreigners who appeared to have done them wrong without first sending an embassy and testing whether they would repent. So they urged them to do what they ought, in obedience to their laws: to send to the inhabitants of Gibeah and ask whether they would hand over the offenders; if they handed them over, to be content with punishing those offenders; but if they scorned the message sent to them, to punish them by taking up arms against them. So they sent to the inhabitants of Gibeah, accused the young men of the crimes committed against the Levite’s wife, and demanded those who had acted against the law, so that they could be punished as men who had justly deserved to die for what they had done. But the inhabitants of Gibeah would not hand over the young men. They thought it too shameful to give in to other men’s demands out of fear of war, boasting that they were inferior to no one in war, neither in numbers nor in courage. The rest of their tribe were also making great preparations for war, for they were so insolently mad as to resolve to meet force with force.

When the Israelites were told what the inhabitants of Gibeah had resolved, they took an oath that none of them would give his daughter in marriage to a Benjamite, but that they would make war on them with greater fury than we have learned our forefathers made war on the Canaanites. At once they sent out an army of four hundred thousand against them. The Benjamites’ army was twenty-five thousand six hundred, five hundred of whom were excellent at slinging stones with their left hands. So when the battle was joined at Gibeah, the Benjamites beat the Israelites, and twenty-two thousand of them fell; and probably more would have been killed, had not night come on, prevented it and broken off the fight. The Benjamites went back to the city with joy, and the Israelites returned to their camp in great fright at what had happened. The next day, when they fought again, the Benjamites beat them; eighteen thousand of the Israelites were killed, and the rest deserted their camp for fear of a greater slaughter. So they came to Bethel, a city near their camp, and fasted the next day. They begged God, through Phinehas the high priest, that his anger against them might cease, that he would be satisfied with these two defeats, and that he would give them victory and power over their enemies. And God promised them to do so, through the prophesying of Phinehas. [l]

So they divided the army into two parts. One half they placed in ambush around the city of Gibeah by night, while the other half attacked the Benjamites. These fell back before the assault, and the Benjamites pursued them, while the Hebrews retreated slowly, wanting to draw them wholly away from the city. The Benjamites followed them as they retreated, until even the old men and the young who had been left in the city as too weak to fight came running out with them, eager to help overcome their enemies. But when they were a long way from the city, the Hebrews ran no longer but turned back to fight them, and raised the signal they had agreed on to those lying in ambush, who rose up and fell on the enemy with a great shout. As soon as the Benjamites saw that they had been deceived, they did not know what to do. Driven into a hollow place in a valley, they were shot down by those who surrounded them until all were destroyed except six hundred, who formed themselves into a close body, forced their way through the midst of their enemies, fled to the neighboring mountains, seized them and stayed there. The rest, about twenty-five thousand, were killed. Then the Israelites burned Gibeah and killed the women and the males under age, and did the same to the other cities of the Benjamites. Indeed, they were enraged to such a degree that they sent twelve thousand men out of the army with orders to destroy Jabesh-gilead, because it had not joined them in fighting the Benjamites. Those who were sent killed the fighting men, with their children and wives, except four hundred virgins. To such lengths had their anger carried them, because they had not only the suffering of the Levite’s wife to avenge, but the slaughter of their own soldiers.

Afterward, however, they were sorry for the disaster they had brought on the Benjamites, and appointed a fast on that account, although they believed those men had suffered justly for their offense against the laws. So they sent envoys to call back the six hundred who had escaped. These had settled themselves on a rock called Rimmon, in the wilderness. The envoys lamented not only the disaster that had befallen the Benjamites but their own loss too in this destruction of their kin, and persuaded them to bear it patiently, to come and unite with them, and not, so far as it lay in them, to cast their vote for the utter destruction of the tribe of Benjamin. They said to them: “We give you leave to take the whole land of Benjamin for yourselves, and as much plunder as you can carry away.” These men sorrowfully admitted that what had been done was by the decree of God and had happened because of their own wickedness. They accepted the invitation and came down to their own tribe. The Israelites also gave them the four hundred virgins of Jabesh-gilead as wives. [o]

As for the remaining two hundred, they deliberated how they might get enough wives for them, so that they could have children by them. Before the war began they had sworn that no one would give his daughter as a wife to a Benjamite. Some advised them to disregard what they had sworn, because the oath had not been taken with deliberation and judgment but in a passion; they thought they would do nothing against God if they could save a whole tribe that was in danger of perishing; and perjury, they said, was a grievous and dangerous thing not when it is done out of necessity, but when it is done with wicked intent. But when the senate recoiled at the very name of perjury, someone told them he could show them a way by which they could get the Benjamites enough wives and still keep their oath. They asked him what his proposal was. He said: “Three times a year, when we meet at Shiloh, our wives and our daughters come with us. Then let the Benjamites be allowed to carry off and marry whatever women they can catch, while we neither urge them on nor forbid them. When the parents take it badly and ask us to punish them, we will tell them that they were themselves the cause of what happened, by neglecting to guard their daughters, and that they ought not to be too angry at the Benjamites, since anger was allowed to run too high already.” The Israelites were persuaded to follow this advice, and decreed that the Benjamites should be allowed to steal wives for themselves in this way. So when the festival was coming on, these two hundred Benjamites lay in ambush before the city in twos and threes, waiting for the virgins to come, in the vineyards and other places where they could stay hidden. The virgins came along playing, suspecting nothing of what was coming on them and walking without any guard, and those who lay scattered along the road rose up and seized them. In this way these Benjamites got wives, took up farming, and took good care to recover their former prosperity. So this tribe of the Benjamites, after being in danger of perishing entirely, was saved in the way described, by the wisdom of the Israelites; and it soon flourished, quickly grew into a multitude, and came to enjoy every other kind of happiness. Such was the end of this war.