No King in Israel (46)

Three interesting verses early in Exodus: Moses had reluctantly accepted the Lord’s commission to lead Israel out of Egyptian slavery into the land God had promised them. He, his Midianite wife Zipporah and their young son Gershom then began the trek to Egypt to present God’s agenda to Pharaoh. On the way, “the Lord met him and sought to put him to death”. Zipporah wisely intervened, emergency-circumcised her son and touched her husband’s feet with the bloody foreskin, averting the crisis.

Readers get totally confused, and rightly so. We do not have all the necessary information in the immediate context.

So, yes, much about the account is obscure, including God’s motives, some of the pronouns used, and the nature of the danger to Moses. Nevertheless, the story reveals a critical truth about representing God to others: you can’t do it unless you clean up your own act first.

Moses was a man under God’s covenant with Abraham, a covenant that required a singular act of obedience from all his descendants: “Every male among you shall be circumcised.” Whatever we may not fully understand about this incident on the way back to Egypt, we understand from Zipporah’s timely response that her husband had neglected to circumcise Gershom. He was in violation of the Abrahamic Covenant, presuming to confront the sins of the Egyptians without taking the first thought for his own.

Something similar is going on in Judges 20, and it too ends in bloodshed.

III. Two Historical Vignettes from the Period (continued)

b. Benjamin becomes Sodom (continued)

Judges 20:1-7 — From Dan to Beersheba

“Then all the people of Israel came out, from Dan to Beersheba, including the land of Gilead, and the congregation assembled as one man to the Lord at Mizpah. And the chiefs of all the people, of all the tribes of Israel, presented themselves in the assembly of the people of God, 400,000 men on foot that drew the sword. (Now the people of Benjamin heard that the people of Israel had gone up to Mizpah.) And the people of Israel said, ‘Tell us, how did this evil happen?’ And the Levite, the husband of the woman who was murdered, answered and said, ‘I came to Gibeah that belongs to Benjamin, I and my concubine, to spend the night. And the leaders of Gibeah rose against me and surrounded the house against me by night. They meant to kill me, and they violated my concubine, and she is dead. So I took hold of my concubine and cut her in pieces and sent her throughout all the country of the inheritance of Israel, for they have committed abomination and outrage in Israel. Behold, you people of Israel, all of you, give your advice and counsel here.’ ”

Anachronism Time

Readers who pay close attention to timelines will get as far as the middle of this first verse of Judges 20 before stopping and saying, “Say what?” The expression “from Dan to Beersheba” appears nine times in the OT historical books and once in the Prophets. From Judges 18 on through the rest of Israel’s time in the land, Dan was Israel’s most significant northern city and Beersheba its most significant southern city. Saying “from Dan to Beersheba” was like saying you had studied a subject “from A to Z”. It meant the whole thing, the entire Israelite nation.

The timeline problem here is that when all Israel gathered to the Lord as one man at Mizpah in this chapter, the most significant northern city in Israel was not called Dan. If the Phinehas of this chapter who ministered before the ark of the covenant was the Phinehas of the Pentateuch (and I believe he was), then these last three chapters of Judges took place early in Israel’s history in Canaan, as I have argued in a previous post, while Dan became Dan many years later. At the time of this incident, the northern city later called Dan was called Laish and Dan (the tribe) battled to maintain its territory in Israel’s south. Why then does the writer of Judges use the phrase “from Dan to Beersheba”?

Again, we are running into the sort of anachronism that occurs numerous times throughout the OT historical books. The book of Judges did not become an accepted part of the OT canon until hundreds of years after the events it describes. As with most OT history, Judges was written much later than the events it chronicles, and probably based at least in part on written sources long lost, for an audience familiar with Dan as a city in Israel’s far north and with “from Dan to Beersheba” as a common expression. The writer of Judges did what almost all historical writers of scripture did, which was to accommodate the understanding of the audience for which they wrote, as described in this post.

Fellow pedants, don’t let that quirk knock you off your pins. If you pay attention as you read the OT, you’ll see this same device used over and over again.

400,000 Men that Drew the Sword

Bible historians estimate Israel’s population at various points in its history by looking at the number of soldiers the nation could field. The Sinai census of men “twenty years old and upward, every man able to go to war in Israel” totaled 603,550. After forty years of wandering in the wilderness, a second census documented only a slight reduction, to 601,730. Here, only a few years later, if we add the number of Benjamite soldiers to those opposing them, we get a total of a mere 426,000 fighting men.

This apparent reduction of Israel’s fighting men by almost a third in a very short period may be explained one of two ways. Either: (1) Israel experienced a major population reduction in the process of taking Canaan, or (2) the great army gathered at Mizpah represented only a portion of Israel’s available troops.

I suspect the latter is the case. The text does not claim every available Israelite showed up at Mizpah to fight Benjamin, it simply tells us every tribe contacted was represented there. In fact, not everyone came. Chapter 21 tells us not one man from Jabesh-gilead gathered to Mizpah. This being the case, it seems safe to say others were not there who could have been.

Assembled as One Man at Mizpah

There was more than one city named Mizpah in ancient Israel. This one seems to have been the Mizpah in Benjamin (rather than the Mizpah in Gilead), a city that became a significant gathering point at this and other times in Israel’s history, possibly because it was centrally located. Samuel gathered Israel to Mizpah at least twice, the first time to encourage national repentance and prayer, and the second time to identify Saul as Israel’s first king. After the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, Gedaliah was appointed governor in Mizpah.

Mizpah was a perfect fit for the gathering in Judges 20 because of its proximity to Gibeah. It also explains how Benjamin heard that Israel had gathered against it. When several hundred thousand armed men appear right on your doorstep, word tends to spread fast.

The Levite’s Story

Upon request, the Levite tells his sordid tale. It’s a brief summary of the last half of the previous chapter. We find out several things we could not be sure of last chapter. That: (1) the leaders of Gibeah were involved in the assault, not just the local riff-raff; (2) their intention was murder, not merely gang rape; and (3) the Levite’s concubine died from her injuries at the scene. One can infer the latter from chapter 19’s narrative, but it’s not explicitly stated there.

As is usual when we retell tales to maximize sympathy, the Levite casts himself in the most positive possible light. There’s no sad confession of his own poor judgment, cowardice or failure to defend a woman. But sin has an infectious aspect. The wicked choices of some men bring out the worst in others.

Judges 20:8-11 — A Plan Conceived

“And all the people arose as one man, saying, ‘None of us will go to his tent, and none of us will return to his house. But now this is what we will do to Gibeah: we will go up against it by lot, and we will take ten men of a hundred throughout all the tribes of Israel, and a hundred of a thousand, and a thousand of ten thousand, to bring provisions for the people, that when they come they may repay Gibeah of Benjamin for all the outrage that they have committed in Israel.’ So all the men of Israel gathered against the city, united as one man.”

So we move from “every man did what was right in his own eyes” to “the people arose as one man”. Note that they agree about only two things at the outset: their emotions (“repay Gibeah”) and their stomachs (“bring provisions”). Unity is usually a good thing, but this is prayerless unity, confessionless unity and worshipless unity. The people make their decision without reference to God.

Consider: It’s next to impossible that the citizens of Benjamin went from comparative innocence to base depravity overnight. Nor is it likely they did so on their own. We have the rest of Judges to remind us how often all Israel failed to seek the Lord and obey his law. Perhaps other tribes had not gone so far downhill as Benjamin at this point, but all were surely guilty of overlooking a problem that would not fix itself, and of letting it develop into a crisis. Going into battle without first seeking the Lord, the twelve other tribes were in a position something like the man in the parable who tries to take the speck out of his brother’s eye while he has a log in his own. When the blind lead the blind, everyone gets hurt.

Moses learned that lesson. Israel would soon learn it too.