Today's reading in the One Year Chronological Reading Plan is Judges 19-21.
These chapters are not easy reading. We start off with a Levite whose experience in the town of Gibeah echoes the story of Lot (Sodom and Gomorrah), where the angels visit him and the people surround the house and ask him to send the men out so they can have sex with them. Lot, in the first story, offered his daughters. In this story, the host offered his daughter and the Levite's concubine. I had a hard time reading this part. It says she was raped and abused throughout the night. I can't imagine how awful that must have been for her. And yet, this must have been part of God's plan. God confirmed to the rest of the Israelites three times that they were to wage war against the Benjamite tribe because of this disgraceful (disgusting, revolting, horrendous, brutal, violent - take your pick) act.
I think what struck me most about these chapters is the grief that the Israelites felt at having to destroy one of their tribes. And yet God had been very clear in the Law that they must purge evil from among them in order to keep themselves from falling into the same behaviours. How often are the sins that we must purge from our lives things that we don't really want to let go? I'm thinking often. The sins we don't commit or rarely commit are things that aren't that important to us. But things like gluttony, sexual sin, the love of money or power, just to give a few examples, are things that are very enticing to us and difficult to give up. The Israelites were griefstricken to destroy one of their tribes. They "checked" on God's answer by asking again. They wept. And yet, when the time came, they were true to God's will and they destroyed the towns and cities and killed almost an entire tribe of their people. How often are we unwilling to give up our "pet" sins, even though it requires less of us than was required of the Israelites in these chapters? The only things we have to "kill" are our fleshly desires, which we often find terribly difficult. When I read these chapters, I thought "Wow. These people had to KILL, in hand-to-hand combat (no grenades or tanks or missiles with which to do it from a distance), a tribe of their own people in order to rid themselves of sin. I've never had to do anything like that, and yet there are certain things that I find terribly difficult, at times, to keep myself from indulging. How weak am I?"
The other thing that I particularly took note of was that the elders looked for, and found, a loophole to not giving their daughters as wives to the Benjamites. They didn't want the Benjamites to be wiped out completely, or go elsewhere to find wives from among other people, so they had the fathers and brothers of the women of Shiloh agree to allow their daughters or sisters to be carried off without giving them to the Benjamites in marriage. A couple of quick things about this:
1) Pretty sneaky. I wonder what, if any, consequences there were for this lawyerly loophole-finding.
2) I know women didn't have much in the way of rights then, and many of them were married off by their fathers or brothers to men they didn't know at all, or hardly knew, but I imagine it must have been pretty scary for some of them to be just grabbed and carried off by some man and have to be his wife. Of course, there are many women who've chosen poorly when they chose their own husbands, and there are many women whose husbands were chosen for them who ended up having wonderful, loving marriages, but I think I'd have a hard time being scooped up and carried off like that.
Tomorrow's reading is Ruth 1:1-4:12.
5 comments:
You know what struck me most about that whole Gibeah story? Israel purged the evil, yes, but still at a HUGE cost ~ they lost almost 15,000 more soldiers over that 3-day battle than the Benjamites did.
I also found it interesting that God TOLD them to fight each of those three days. Effectively, He sent them into battle those first two days to lose. Most likely, Judah sustained the heaviest casualties, since God had said the men from Judah would lead the Israelite army.
I found this very curious. Is this an example of the good being punished along with the wicked as an example to the rest of the people? Or is this pointing, once again, to the work of the Savior on the cross? The innocent troops paying with their lives to atone for the sins of the few, to redeem the whole nation?
David Guzik's commentary from Blue Letter Bible says this:
i. God used this to humble the whole nation. They had to understand that the horror of the crime at Gibeah was not merely the result of the sin of one group of men, or one city, or even one tribe. The whole nation had to be humbled because they first thought that the sin problem was only in Benjamin. Israel had to see that that nation as a whole had a sin problem.
ii. After the first failure, Israel was sorry and wept. But it was only after the second failure that they put their repentance into action by fasting and made a sacrifice for sins. Sorrow and weeping are not enough if they are not matched by real repentance and taking care of the sin problem through sacrifice - the sacrifice of the cross.
Thanks, Tammi! I noticed at the end of the last chapter it repeated that everyone did as they saw fit. I'm sure, as it says above, that the other 11 tribes had plenty of sin to atone for as well!
I had the thought while reading that so many of them died during the fight in order to pay for the wickedness of the entire nation.
This is truly such a horrible passage - what a horrible outcome to this story.
The maddening thing too is that the Levite did not accept any responsibility for sending his concubine out into that mob.
Yeah, how come he comes off looking like HE was the one who suffered the injustice in all this??!!
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