I
The couple had a disagreement. The woman left her husband and went home to her father’s house, the husband came and made peace with his de facto wife and they traveled back home after 5 days. It was uncomfortable to travel in the heat, so the couple waited for the late afternoon to start out on their trip home. Naturally, night overtook them so they had to spend the night somewhere. There was no accommodation available and they decided to spend the night at the square where a kind stranger found them and offered his home, informing them that it was dangerous to be out at night in that neighborhood. The couple thankfully accepted the invitation and went home with the man, where they were offered refreshments and a place to sleep. They were in the middle of their meal, merrily eating and drinking when they were startled by someone pounding the door and demanding that the male visitor be brought out to them so that they may sodomize him. The man, the owner of the house pleaded to the outlaws not to harm his guests and offered them his virgin daughter and his guest’s wife. These depraved outlaws would not listen and surrounded the house, so the man grabbed his wife and shoved her outside the door. The men raped and abused her all night, only letting her go when morning came. She crawled to the door where she collapsed and lay unmoving. When her husband came out to find her so that they may continue with their trip home, she was already dead.
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II
You could have been reading this in a newspaper. You read stories like this all the time. Just a while back, the same kind of wickedness hit the local headlines. A young woman was abducted by 2 men while she was on her way home from work. Her lifeless body was later found in a grassy slope in Bulacan with 17 stab wounds. She was sexually abused.
When I first read the above story with my daughter, she was so amazed that this kind of heinous crime was already happening as far back as the Old Testament times. She thought that this level of moral and sexual depravity is common only to this generation. I guess I have been lacking in explaining to her the extent by which men (and women) can act on their depravity and timeline has no bearing on this. But this is another lesson for another time.
The thrust I am aiming for in this selection is entirely different. This story was taken from the Book of Judges, chapters 19-21. The main story (summarized in the first part of this entry) can be found in chapter 19, which on the surface was the cause of the next series of atrocities that were committed by the 12 tribes of Israel, but a reason, much more serious than this becomes apparent in the next chapters. Please read on to the last chapter of this book, chapter 21.
A lot of parents will agree that at a certain age, kids begin having trouble dealing with authority. My daughter is seventeen, just learning to be independent and has this habit of turning from a sweet girl to an obnoxious know-it-all pseudo-adult from time to time. She wants to make decisions on her own, which is good, but she must also learn to submit herself to authority and listen to wise counsels from her elders.
III
The setting for this story is during a period when Israel had no king. Chaos was the order of the day, and with no restraining laws from a governing body, decency, justice, humanity and truth became meaningless. The people listened to no one but themselves and their desires. The man in our story divided the body of his dead wife into 12 pieces and sent one piece to each of the tribes and demanded to be avenged. The tribe of Benjamin fell to moral and sexual depravity to such an extent that the other tribes considered it a disgrace for all the rest of them. They demanded that the perpetrators be delivered to them so that justice can be served. The Benjamites refused, and the council decided to mount a war against the whole tribe because they considered that refusing to surrender the men meant that that they were condoning the crime and were in effect saying that they would have done the same thing.
The 11 tribes went to consult the Lord in Shiloh, but only to ask who will go against the Benjamites first, not to inquire if warring against each other is acceptable. They were on the side of justice and they felt it was okay to go to war against Benjamites. They have four hundred men as opposed to the 26,000 men of the Benjamin tribe. Superiority in number was another factor why they thought they would win.
The Israelites asked not for God’s counsel, but only for God to decide who will fight first against the Benjamites. They did not ask for God’s protection, trusting in their strength and the rightness of their cause to insure their victory. But God did not say they will conquer. Thousands of men have died before they thought to pray and fast and asked God to go before them. Victory came at last, and only 600 men were left of the tribe of Benjamin. But thousands also died from the side of the rest of the tribes.
The people of Israel wept and repented for what they had done. The quest for revenge has been satisfied and after it, the realization of what they had done.
The 11 tribes swore not to give their daughters to the Benjamites in marriage, but they felt sorry for them and to insure that the tribe does not get completely cut off, they slaughtered a whole city, including the beasts, leaving only their virgins to become wives for the Benjamites, and since there were not enough women there, they proceeded to abduct them somewhere else.
IV
We should be thankful that we have a government to oversee that there is law and order, and that people are protected and criminal acts restrained because there is punishment awaiting those who commit crimes. It doesn’t absolutely inhibit criminals but without it, the resulting anarchy will be too horrible to contemplate.
We should learn to submit ourselves to authority, knowing that God has mandated the existing governments today.
Young people should submit themselves to the authority of their parents, honoring and obeying them. This is the first commandment with a promise.
Children and adults alike should submit to the authority that God has put over them like school, workplace and church.
We should be ready to accept counsel from others. It is not possible to be right 100% of the time and consulting others is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of maturity.
It is right to fight for freedom, truth and justice. The Israelites did, and they were right. But they went overboard and committed a monstrosity that did not only equal but exceeded what they were fighting against in the first place. It’s ironic that we sometimes are so focused on what we think we are fighting for, not realizing that we are doing the very same things that we abhor against others.
These 3 chapters offer many other points by which we can still learn many things. I focused on the danger of man left to his own devices, without any sort of authority and no sense of accountability. I suggest you read the 3 chapters and see what you can still learn.
