Judges 21:4-12 - Whom has failed to assemble before the Lord?

21:4,5

Having made an oath not to give their daughters in marriage to the Benjamites, they now make another oath, this time to kill anyone who failed to assemble before the Lord. On the surface this seems like a good thing to do, but when there is oath upon oath it is a sign that something deeper is wrong. Today our response to things going wrong is to pile regulation upon regulation, but this rarely solves the problem because it does not get to the root of the matter.

21:6-12

The tribe of Benjamin had been severely punished, but the rest still had this sense that there were meant to be twelve tribes. So they want to rebuild the tribe of Benjamin. In order to do this the remnant of the tribe needed to have wives, but their earlier oath made this rather difficult. So they come up with an horrendous solution. One tribe had not assembled before the Lord at Mizpah, the one from Jabesh Gilead. So they slaughtered the tribe, all except the virgins, of whom there were four hundred.