Biblion Bible Commentary
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Benjamin Almost Destroyed
Judges 20:29-48
29 Israel set ambushes all around Gibeah. · WEB
The ambush that took Ai takes Gibeah, and the victory runs on past justice into extermination — six hundred men on a rock are all that remain of a tribe.
Israel set ambushes all around Gibeah Judges 20:29.
The third day's tactics are Joshua's at Ai, move for move: the feigned flight, the enemy drawn from the city, the ambush breaking cover, the smoke signal, the turn Joshua 8:15–21. Benjamin reads the retreat as a third victory — they are struck down before us, as at the first Judges 20:32 Judges 20:39 — until the column of smoke rises behind them: the whole city went up in smoke to the sky, and they saw that disaster had come on them Judges 20:40–41.
Yahweh struck Benjamin before Israel Judges 20:35.
The narrator assigns the victory to God — the promised deliverance of the third oracle Judges 20:28 — and gives the arithmetic: twenty-five thousand one hundred of Benjamin fall that day. The chase runs to the wilderness, gleaning fugitives on the highways Judges 20:42–45 — gleaned is a harvest word, used here of killing men.
But six hundred men turned and fled toward the wilderness to the rock of Rimmon, and stayed in the rock of Rimmon four months Judges 20:47.
Six hundred survivors on a crag. And then the verse that turns judgment into annihilation: the men of Israel turned again on the children of Benjamin, and struck them with the edge of the sword — including the entire city, the livestock, and all that they found. Moreover they set all the cities which they found on fire Judges 20:48.
This is the step past every warrant. The assembly's demand had been the guilty men of Gibeah Judges 20:13; what is executed is the destruction of a tribe — its towns, its women, its children, its animals, the treatment reserved for a city gone over to idols Deuteronomy 13:15 applied wholesale to brothers. No oracle commands it; God's word had promised victory, not extermination. The fury that lost forty thousand men in two days does not stop at justice on the third, and the next chapter opens with Israel weeping over what its own zeal has done Judges 21:2–3 — grief for a wound that was self-inflicted twice over, once by Benjamin's solidarity with evil and once by Israel's vengeance outrunning its commission.
held with reason What this mark means