No King in Israel (42)

One of the more interesting features of this final, very unsavory episode in Judges is that while it gives us both the spiritual nadir and narrative climax for the book, it is chronologically out of sequence. Rather than coming at the end of the period when the judges governed Israel, I believe the culling of the Benjamites actually occurred some 300 years prior; before Samson, Jephthah, Gideon and many others lived, fought and ruled.

How do we know this? By the major logistical difficulties placing it anywhere else creates.

III. Two Historical Vignettes from the Period (continued)

b. Benjamin becomes Sodom

The Chronology of Judges Considered

There are at least four problems with reading the three-chapter story of the culling of the Benjamites as if it belongs where the reader would normally think (and where some Bible scholars accept) it belongs, at the end of the book:

1/ The Phinehas Problem

The priest who inquired of the Lord on behalf of the Israelites when they fought against Benjamin was Phinehas “the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron”. Along with others, I assume this is the same man commended by God for driving a spear through a rebellious fellow Israelite and his Midianite consort in the book of Numbers; the man who later went to war against Midian; who is mentioned repeatedly in the book of Joshua; and who, for his efforts on behalf of his people, was bequeathed an entire town in the hill country of Ephraim. If Phinehas were still alive during the culling of the Benjamites, the event must have occurred within a few years of Israel first taking possession of Canaanite territory. That, or Phinehas lived and served as priest for a few hundred years. In those days, not so likely.

Now of course, as Bible historians are fond of telling us, many characters have similar names, and the words “son of” often denote a more remote descendant rather than a child. So perhaps the Phinehas mentioned in the final chapters of Judges is not the Phinehas of Numbers and Joshua. After all, Eli, who lived hundreds of years after the original Phinehas, named one of his sons Phinehas too. Unfortunately, this suggestion doesn’t help us much. A second and much-later Phinehas in the Aaronic line solves only one of four problems.

2/ The Saul-as-King Problem

The book of Judges rolls right through Ruth into 1 Samuel without significant interruption or intervening years. (Ruth fits best into the Judges chronology earlier than later.) But quite early on in 1 Samuel, we find Israel’s first king is, of all things, a Benjamite. Even more surprising, the book specifically identifies him as a Benjamite from Gibeah, the city in which this fiasco takes place and which triggered a civil war.

It is difficult but not impossible to imagine public sentiment in Israel turning on a dime such that its people would accept a man from Gibeah as their king only a few decades after the tribe of Benjamin had provoked a civil war and caused the death of tens of thousands of their Israelite brothers. Weirder things have happened. But Saul seems a much more plausible choice if hundreds of years had passed, wouldn’t you think?

3/ The Repopulation Problem

Moreover, it is quite impossible that Saul’s coronation as king could have occurred only a generation or so after the culling of Benjamin. There simply wasn’t enough time between the two events to allow his tribe to repopulate its territory consistent with the later books of history. It is well established throughout Samuel and Kings that while the tribe of Benjamin was still the smallest in Israel in Saul’s day, it already had “clans” to speak of, and posed a formidable political presence and vigorous fighting force. More than a few Benjamites were thorns in David’s side both before and during his reign.

In fact, the ten-tribe / two-tribe division of Israel that occurred under Rehoboam predated David’s reunification of the nation. The only difference was that Ephraim led the later northern kingdom. Who led the early version? That would be Benjamin. For a tribe to become so prominent in Israel only a few decades after rebuilding around a core of 600 survivors of a near-genocide seems implausible at best. For comparison purposes, the second Numbers census taken prior to entering Canaan gave Benjamin 45,600 fighting men twenty years old and upward, sixth from last among the tribes numbered. The lowest number of fighters in that census came from Simeon, at just over 22,000.

4/ The Judge Problem

Even more tellingly, the text makes not a single mention of the office of judge throughout chapters 19-21, though it is to a judge that the aggrieved Levite in our story would have most logically appealed, had there been one to appeal to. Instead, the tribes act through their chiefs and elders in these chapters, just as they operated immediately after Joshua’s death.

This is especially telling because it’s apparent certain judges like Samson and Jephthah operated locally rather than nationally, a feature of the book that helps explain several overlaps between periods of judgeship necessary to make the number of years between Joshua and Saul come close to adding up. Those who reject an early culling of the Benjamites could argue that the ruling judge during the civil war period was simply not present in chapters 20 and 21 because he was “only” a local judge and his tribe did not attend. However, chapter 20 plainly tells us “all the tribes of Israel” participated in the culling of Benjamin. If a judge had existed in those days, he would have been there.

Dispensing with Historical Chronology

For all these reasons, then, it appears that the writer of Judges 19-21 dispensed with historical chronology in his last few chapters. It seems reasonable to ask why he might do such a thing. Here are a few suggestions:

1. The Bible is not primarily a history book. Scripture is full of history, but it is always history with a definite purpose. The abundance of apocryphal Old Testament-era writings remind us how much of Israel’s history the Bible leaves out: literally hundreds of years’ worth. Why? Because the message the Holy Spirit desired to send to the world is most effectively made through the events he has preserved for us. The things he did not preserve are redundant or irrelevant to God’s purposes, though they are certainly of great interest to Jewish scholars. The same principle holds true with respect to the order in which these events in Judges and elsewhere are retold: their arrangement is not strictly linear, but this is a deliberate choice on the part of the writer. It is not a failure of historical accuracy.
2. When you put like things side by side, their connection becomes more obvious. A story about the Benjamites and Gibeah placed in chronological order would have been just one of many similarly-themed tales in Judges. But Judges is not organized that way. Because the story of Israel’s first civil war has been placed where it is (right next to the first chapters of Samuel), the attentive reader has difficulty missing the obvious: that God chose Israel’s first king from a tribe well-known for its effectiveness in battle and survival against all odds, but saddled with a well-deserved track record of impetuousness, brutal violence and a tin ear where the voice of God was concerned. Saul came with all the standard Benjamite equipment, both good and bad. (The probability that we are looking at a deliberate juxtaposition of related events increases when we consider the original Hebrew book order, which has the combined books of Samuel immediately following Judges, while Ruth is included in a different grouping.)
3. The organization of Judges is both thematic and climactic. If Judges is not linear in its history, and if that reordering of events was deliberate, it follows that the writer organized the book thematically rather than chronologically. In fact, this is the case: the book methodically draws attention to the desperate need for someone to both shepherd and restrain God’s people. The Law of Moses was a great thing, but it required consistent interpretation and enforcement. “There was no king in Israel,” says the writer of Judges, over and over again as the book builds to its climax. In chapter 17, this means the divinely ordained priesthood was in disrepair: Israelites kept idols and anyone could be made a priest. In chapter 18, this means might made right: the tribe of Dan took whatever they pleased, be it property or land, simply because they could. In chapter 19, it means all pretense of civility and morality had been abandoned: the breakdown of Israelite society was well underway. In chapters 20 and 21, it means brother killed brother and the contrivances of clever men replaced the search for God’s will.

Once we observe thematic organization in Judges, we will not be surprised to find that the story that most effectively serves the Holy Spirit’s narrative of decline, debauchery and rampant individualism is also the climax of the book.