The book ends without a deliverer. A Levite and his concubine stop for the night in an Israelite town, and the town behaves like Sodom — the men surround the house, and by morning the woman is dead. The Levite cuts her body into twelve pieces and mails them across the country, and the nation goes to war against one of its own tribes and nearly destroys it. The last verse offers no comfort, only a diagnosis: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
A study in Judges 19-21 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 8 min read
There Was No Man That Took Them In
“And when he went in, he sat him down in a street of the city: for there was no man that took them into his house to lodging… behold, the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about… saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him.”
Judges 19:15, 22
The scene is written to sound familiar. A traveller sits unwelcomed in the square; one old man takes him in; the men of the town surround the house demanding the guest — word for word the horror of Sodom (Genesis 19:4-8). Only this is not Sodom. It is Gibeah, in the tribe of Benjamin, in Israel. The nation set apart to be different from Canaan has become indistinguishable from the city God burned.
There Was No Such Deed Done In Israel
“And it was so, that all that saw it said, There was no such deed done nor seen from the day that the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt unto this day: consider of it, take advice, and speak your minds.”
Judges 19:30
The Levite is no hero either — he pushes his concubine out the door to save himself, and in the morning loads her body on his donkey. His method of raising the alarm is grotesque: her corpse divided into twelve parts, one to each tribe. It works. The whole nation is shocked into assembling. But a people that needs this to be moved has already lost the ability to be shocked by anything smaller.
Israel Went To War Against Benjamin
“And the people came to the house of God, and abode there till even before God, and lifted up their voices, and wept sore; and said, O LORD God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that there should be to day one tribe lacking in Israel?”
Judges 21:2-3
Benjamin closes ranks around the men of Gibeah rather than give them up, and Israel — after two bloody defeats and a night of weeping before God at Bethel — nearly annihilates the tribe: six hundred men left alive out of tens of thousands. Then, appalled at what they have done, they scheme to find wives for the survivors so a tribe of Israel will not vanish. Every step is a fresh wrong laid on the last. There is real evil in Gibeah; there is no wisdom anywhere in the response.
Every Man Did That Which Was Right In His Own Eyes
“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
Judges 21:25
The last verse of the book, and its verdict. It is repeated four times through these final chapters: no king in Israel. Partly it looks ahead to David. But Israel already had a King — the one Gideon named when he refused the crown (Judges 8:23) — and the real problem was never a vacant throne; it was a nation that would not be ruled. “Right in his own eyes” is the whole disease. The cure is not a better man on a throne but a people who will let God be God.
“The Lord had declared to Israel, ‘Ye shall not do … every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes;’ but ye shall ‘observe and hear all these words which I command thee.’… In deciding upon any course of action we are not to ask whether we can see that harm will result from it, but whether it is in keeping with the will of God.”
Ellen G. White · Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 634
