The older I get, the more I treasure the Bible. Recently re-reading the Old Testament book of Judges brought home to me the truth about human nature and our desperate need for the divine Messiah.
Judges is set in the 200-year period between the Israelites’ conquest of the Promised Land in around 1200 BC and the establishment of the monarchy in Israel in 1000. It is a time of spiritual and moral chaos in the land as the Israelites repeatedly fall into idolatry and disobedience until God raises up a judge (a military leader) to save them from the pagan nations that subjugate them. But when the judge dies, the Israelites revert to idolatry.
The last five chapters of Judges are an account, both shocking and satirical, of the corruption of a nation. The narrative concludes with the statement: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25 – King James Version).
What did that look like? In this narrative, gang rape followed by a brutal civil war. Judges 19 describes a group of men belonging to the Israelite tribe of Benjamin gang-raping the concubine of a travelling Levite in the town of Gibeah. Reminiscent of an incident in pagan Sodom as narrated in Genesis 19, the gang initially wanted to commit homosexual rape on the Levite. But the Levite offered them his concubine instead.
The Levites were the Israelite tribe set apart to oversee the worship of the one true God, the Lord Almighty, Yahweh, who had rescued his chosen people from slavery in Egypt and brought them to the Promised Land. Things have got so bad that a Levite has a live-in girlfriend, rather than a wife, whom he is willing to offer up as rape fodder to a group of Israelites who prove to be worse than pagans.
The men of Gibeah abused her all night until the morning when she fell down dead at the door of the house where the Levite was staying. The man then cut up her body into 12 pieces and sent a piece to each of the 12 tribes of Israel.
Their reaction is described in Judges 19:30: “And it was so, that all that saw it said, There was no such thing done nor seen from the day the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt unto this day: consider of it, take advice and speak your minds.”
The result of their deliberation was civil war between the tribe of Benjamin, who occupied a strip of land a few miles north of Jerusalem, and the other Israelite tribes. Judges 20:48 describes the brutal overreaction by the victorious majority:
“And the men of Israel turned again upon the children of Benjamin, and smote them with the edge of the sword, as well the men of every city, as the beast, and all that came to hand: also they set on fire all the cities that they came to.”
The narrative ends on a satirical note. The Israelites, having originally pledged not to give their daughters in marriage to the surviving men of Benjamin, change their minds. Their first recourse is to violence. They attack Jabesh-Gilead, a part of Israel that had not taken part in the war, and carry off the virgins there as wives for the Benjaminites. But there are not enough women to go round.
So, they then come up with an absurd scheme to allow the Benjaminites to hide in the vineyards near Shiloh while an annual religious festival was taking place and grab a dancing girl. Judges 21:23 describes the scene: “And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them wives, according to their number, of them that danced, whom they caught: and they went and returned unto their inheritance, and repaired their cities, and dwelt in them.”
The narrative powerfully describes how fallen human nature plays out without strong spiritual, moral and, in a nation state, legal restraints. In the context of the unfolding biblical story, Judges surely raises the very contemporary question: how can any nation that rejects the Lord’s chosen King expect to escape the consequences of unrestrained human nature on the loose?
Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
