Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Judges 21:16
Then the elders of the congregation said, How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin?
16. the elders of the congregation ] See on Jdg 20:1, and cf. Lev 4:15. That this half of the verse does not belong to the old story is further shewn by the reference to wives for the Benjamites who had not secured any of the 400 virgins from Jabesh; like the last words of Jdg 21:14 ; Jdg 21:16 a is a harmonizing addition. 16b may well continue Jdg 21:15 and belong to A.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
For them that remain; for the two hundred who are yet unprovided of wives.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
16. the elders of the congregationsaid, How shall we do for wives for them that remainThough theyoung women of Jabesh-gilead had been carefully spared, the supplywas found inadequate, and some other expedient must be resorted to.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
Then the elders of the congregation said…. This being the case, that there were not wives enough for them, they were obliged to consult again, and consider of another expedient to provide for them; and this motion came from the elders of the people, not only in years, but in office:
how shall we do for wives for them that remain: the other two hundred, who had none:
seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin? and so no wives to be had there; and as for the Israelites which came to Mizpeh, who were of all the tribes of Israel, they had solemnly sworn that they would not give any of their daughters to them, and therefore it was a very difficult thing to provide wives for them.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
| The Virgins of Shiloh Surprised. | B. C. 1409. |
16 Then the elders of the congregation said, How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin? 17 And they said, There must be an inheritance for them that be escaped of Benjamin, that a tribe be not destroyed out of Israel. 18 Howbeit we may not give them wives of our daughters: for the children of Israel have sworn, saying, Cursed be he that giveth a wife to Benjamin. 19 Then they said, Behold, there is a feast of the LORD in Shiloh yearly in a place which is on the north side of Beth-el, on the east side of the highway that goeth up from Beth-el to Shechem, and on the south of Lebonah. 20 Therefore they commanded the children of Benjamin, saying, Go and lie in wait in the vineyards; 21 And see, and, behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances, then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife of the daughters of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin. 22 And it shall be, when their fathers or their brethren come unto us to complain, that we will say unto them, Be favourable unto them for our sakes: because we reserved not to each man his wife in the war: for ye did not give unto them at this time, that ye should be guilty. 23 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 the cities, and dwelt in them. 24 And the children of Israel departed thence at that time, every man to his tribe and to his family, and they went out from thence every man to his inheritance. 25 In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
We have here the method that was taken to provide the 200 Benjamites that remained with wives. And, though the tribe was reduced to a small number, they were only in care to provide each man with one wife, not with more under pretence of multiplying them the faster. They may not bestow their daughters upon them, but to save their oath, and yet marry some of their daughters to them, they put them into a way of taking them by surprise, and marrying them, which should be ratified by their parents’ consent, ex post facto—afterwards. The less consideration is used before the making of a vow, the more, commonly, there is need of afterwards for the keeping of it.
I. That which gave an opportunity for the doing of this was a public ball at Shiloh, in the fields, at which all the young ladies of that city and the parts adjacent that were so disposed met to dance, in honour of a feast of the Lord then observed, probably the feast of tabernacles (v. 19), for that feast (bishop Patrick says) was the only season wherein the Jewish virgins were allowed to dance, and that not so much for their own recreation as to express their holy joy, as David when he danced before the ark, otherwise the present melancholy posture of public affairs would have made dancing unseasonable, as Isa 22:12; Isa 22:13. The dancing was very modest and chaste. It was not mixed dancing; no men danced with these daughters of Shiloh, nor did any married women so far forget their gravity as to join with them. However their dancing thus in public made them an easy prey to those that had a design upon them, whence bishop Hall observes that the ambushes of evil spirits carry away many souls from dancing to a fearful desolation.
II. The elders of Israel gave authority to the Benjamites to do this, to lie in wait in the vineyards which surrounded the green they used to dance on, and, when they were in the midst of their sport, to come upon them, and catch every man a wife for himself, and carry them straight away to their own country, Jdg 21:20; Jdg 21:21. They knew that none of their own daughters would be there, so that the parents of these virgins could not be said to give them, for they knew nothing of the matter. A sorry salvo is better than none, to save the breaking of an oath: it were much better to be cautious in making vows, that there be not occasion afterwards, as there was here, to say before the angel that it was an error. Here was a very preposterous way of match-making, when both the mutual affection of the young people and the consent of the parents must be presumed to come after; the case was extraordinary, and may by no means be drawn into a precedent. Over hasty marriages often occasion a leisurely repentance; and what comfort can be expected from a match made either by force or fraud? The virgins of Jabesh-Gilead were taken out of the midst of blood and slaughter, but these of Shiloh out of the midst of mirth and joy; the former had reason to be thankful that they had their lives for a prey, and the latter, it is to be hoped, had no cause to complain, after a while, when they found themselves matched, not to men of broken and desperate fortunes, as they seemed to be, who were lately fetched out of a cave, but to men of the best and largest estates in the nation, as they must needs be when the lot of the whole tribe of Benjamin, which consisted of 45,600 men (Num. xxvi. 41), came to be divided again among 600, who had all by survivorship.
III. They undertook to pacify the fathers of these young women. As to the infringement of their paternal authority, they would easily forgive it when they considered to what fair estates their daughters were matched and what mothers in Israel they were likely to be; but the oath they were bound by, not to give their daughters to Benjamites, might perhaps stick with some of them, whose consciences were tender, yet, as to that, this might satisfy them:– 1. That the necessity was urgent (v. 22): We reserved not to each man his wife, owning now that they did ill to destroy all the women, and desiring to atone for their too rigorous construction of their vow to destroy them by the most favourable construction of their vow not to match with them. “And therefore for our sakes, who were too severe, let them keep what they have got.” For, 2. In strictness it was not a breach of their vow; they had sworn not to give them their daughters, but they had not sworn to fetch them back if they were forcibly taken, so that if there was any fault the elders must be responsible, not the parents. And Quod fieri non debuit, factum valet—That which ought not to have been done is yet valid when it is done. The thing was done, and is ratified only by connivance, according to the law, Num. xxx. 4.
Lastly, In the close of all we have, 1. The settling of the tribe of Benjamin again. The few that remained returned to the inheritance of that tribe, v. 23. And soon after from among them sprang Ehud, who was famous in his generation, the second judge of Israel, ch. iii. 15. 2. The disbanding and dispersing of the army of Israel, v. 24. They did not set up for a standing army, nor pretend to make any alterations or establishments in the government; but when the affair was over for which they were called together, they quietly departed in God’s peace, every man to his family. Public services must not make us think ourselves above our own private affairs and the duty of providing for our own house. 3. A repetition of the cause of these confusions, v. 25. Though God was their King, every man would be his own master, as if there was no king. Blessed be God for magistracy.
Fuente: Matthew Henry’s Whole Bible Commentary
Hypocritical Solution, vs. 16-25
The culmination of the whole affair of the Levite and his concubine has now been reached. The men of Israel had gathered at the tabernacle in Shiloh to settle their problem. They surely must not have consulted the Lord sincerely, for the solution they finally reached appears actually ludicrous. The record is silent as to any address of the Lord at all to resolve the situation. It is hard to imagine that the elders who issued the decision had consulted with the high priest, Phinehas, who had shown such zeal and wisdom when dealing with the long-ago problem at Baal-peor (Num 25:6-8).
The Israelites dared not violate their oaths in swearing against giving any of their daughters to be wives of the Benjamites. They decided to advise the Benjamite men who were still without wives to steal themselves a wife at Shiloh at the time of the yearly feast. They were to hide in the vineyards alongside the road where the young girls of the surrounding area would come to dance and celebrate the feast. They should then rise up and each one catch a wife as he could, and run off to the land of Benjamin with her. Then when the girl’s father or brothers came to protest the elders would tell them to let the matter go, for they had failed to save their wives alive during the war. After all, they had not given the girl of their own will; she had been stolen and no oath had been violated.
The remaining Benjamites agreed and got them wives in this manner. The manner in which the Israelite men safeguarded their oath is hypocritical at the least, but it satisfied them. They now disbanded their army and returned to their homes. The last verse again emphasizes the whole reason for these things, There was no king in Israel, and every man did what he considered to be right. When God does not reign in the lives of His people, their decisions as to what is right will be like those of the Israelites, a series of repeated error.
The lessons of this last chapter of Judges include these: 1) It is foolish to try to undo one wrong deed with another; 2) we are never justified in setting aside God’s law for any purpose; 3) cruelty against the innocent because they reside with the guilty is contrary to God’s Word; 4) acting without seeking God’s will never begets the right solution.
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
(16) How shall we do . . .?They want to keep their vow in the letter, while they break it in the spirit. The sense of the binding nature of the ban was intensely strong (Exo. 20:7; Eze. 17:18-19), but, as is so often the case among rude and ignorant people, they fancied that it was sufficient to keep it literally, while in effect they violated it. Similarly in Herodotus (iv. 154), Themison having sworn to throw Phronima into the seathe intention having been that she should be drownedfeels himself bound to throw her into the sea, but has her drawn out of it again. Their want of moral enlightenment revealed itself in this way, and still more in having ever taken this horrible oath, which involved the butchery of innocent men, and of still more innocent women and children. In point of fact, the cherem often broke down under the strain which it placed on mens best feelings (1Sa. 14:45) as well as on their lower temptations. The guilt of breaking a guilty vow is only the original guilt of ever having made it. What the Israelites should have done was not to bathe their hands in more rivers of fraternal blood, but to pray to God to forgive the brutal vehemence which disgraced a cause originally righteous, and to have allowed the remnant of the Benjamites to intermarry with them once more. As it was, they were led by ignorance and rashness into several vows which could not be fulfilled without horrible cruelty and bloodshed, and the fulfilment of which they after all casuistically evaded, and that at the cost of still more bloodshed. As all these events took place under the guidance of Phinehas, they give us a high estimate indeed of the zeal which was his noblest characteristic (Psa. 106:30), yet a very low estimate of his state of spiritual insight; and clearly to such a man the fulfilment of Jephthahs cherem by sacrificing his daughter (see Note on Jdg. 11:39) would have seemed as nothing compared to the extermination of tribes and of cities, involving the shedding of rivers of innocent blood. But why should we suppose that the grandson of Aaron, in such times as thesewhen all was anarchy, idolatry, and restlessness, against which he either did not strive or strove most ineffectuallyshould stand on so much higher a level than his schismatical and semi-idolatrous cousin, the wandering grandson of Moses?
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
16. Wives for them that remain Two hundred were yet destitute of wives, for the virgins of Jabesh numbered but four hundred, and the remnant of Benjamin were six hundred.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
‘ Then the elders of the congregation said, ‘How shall we do for wives for those who remain seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin?’
Compare Jdg 21:7. The Ban had (in their view, but some must have survived) resulted in the killing off of all Benjaminite women. Thus the problem was how to obtain wives for the two hundred still without them. This is the first mention of the elders, as rulers of the tribes as opposed to military chiefs (Jdg 20:2), although they must have been present at all major decisions made. Things were returning to normal.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Jdg 21:16 Then the elders of the congregation said, How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin?
Ver. 16. How shall we do for wives? &c. ] Now all their care was for a recruit for Benjamin. A public person should be public spirited; and as Cato did, Toti genitum se credere genti. Selfish people are like those envious Athenians, who sacrificed for none but themselves and their neighbours of Chios.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Israel’s second sufficient solution: a technical loophole 21:16-24
The writer constructed this section parallel to the previous one (Jdg 21:5-15) to highlight the dilemma Israel continued to face. [Note: Davis, Such a . . ., p. 224.] About 200 Benjamites still needed wives. Jdg 21:16-18 repeat the dilemma that the Israelites’ "wife oath" had created (Jdg 21:1).
The elders of Israel proposed a second plan (Jdg 21:19; cf. Jdg 21:8-9). It would give the Benjamites wives without causing the Israelites to break the letter of their "wife vow," though it violated a more basic law. The problem with this plan was that it required the forcible kidnapping and raping of 200 women from Shiloh. Undoubtedly, if the elders had sought the Lord’s counsel, He would have given them a better plan. There is no evidence in the text that they did so.
"Preoccupation with legalistic and technical obedience to certain rules or laws without an accompanying sense of the principles of faithfulness and love that undergird such laws and temper their rigid application is a recipe for disaster." [Note: Dennis T. Olson, "Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections on the Book of Judges," in The New Interpreter’s Bible, 2:887.]
"The rape of one has become the rape of six hundred." [Note: Trible, p. 83.]
The annual feast of Yahweh was probably the Passover ". . . as the dances of the daughters of Shiloh was apparently an imitation of the dances of the Israelitish women at the Red Sea under the superintendency of Miriam (Ex. xv. 20)." [Note: Keil and Delitzsch, pp. 461-62.] Another possibility is that this was the Feast of Tabernacles ". . . in the time of the vintage-harvest." [Note: Cundall and Morris, p. 212.] A third option is that it was a festival of the Israelites’ own making. [Note: Block, Judges . . ., p. 580.]
Jdg 21:20-22 record the Israelites’ command to the assailants (cf. Jdg 21:10-11). The fathers and brothers of the women would complain because of the treatment these women would receive and because these men would not receive dowries from their sons-in-law as was customary. The Israelites also expected these fathers and brothers to find some consolation in the fact that they had not technically broken the "wife oath."
This second provision of wives proved to be sufficient for the Benjamites (Jdg 21:23; cf. Jdg 21:12-14) even though the plan involved the violation of basic human rights. With this resolution of the problem the Israelites returned to their homes (Jdg 21:24; cf. Jdg 21:15).
"There is a certain rightness and a certain wrongness about what Israel does. They justifiably requite Jabesh-gilead with unjustifiable severity (Jdg 21:5; Jdg 21:10). They stand consistently upon their wife-oath (Jdg 21:7; Jdg 21:16-18) but trample happily upon the rights of the Shiloh girls and their families (Jdg 21:19-22). It is a mix of consistency and confusion. . . .
"The ambivalence pervading chapter 21 simply fits the pattern of incongruities throughout the story from the beginning of chapter 19." [Note: Davis, Such a . . ., p. 226.]
"Through Moses Yahweh had warned that if the Israelites stoop to behaving like Canaanites, then they can expect the same fate (Deu 8:19-20). The narrator never declares so outrightly, but the present account, coming as it does at the end of the book affirms the total Canaanization of the tribe of Benjamin and the Israelites’ falsely based sympathy for their brothers." [Note: Block, Judges . . ., pp. 582-83.]