One thing to note was the two “oaths” the eleven had entered into. One oath was designed to bring the nation together (21:5). The other expressed their disgust with the tribe of Benjamin (21:1). On one hand, these oaths attempted to make national laws that applied to the situation at hand. They are trying to deal with not having a king. This happened on other occasions in the Judges.
On the other hand, the oaths were an attempt to garner the Lord’s help. The oath for national unity was a call to come up to the LORD at Mizpah to discuss and deal with the Benjamites. It was called “a great oath,” threatening death to those who did not join the effort. We don’t want to spend too much time on the validity of these oaths. Neither of them leaves any “wiggle room,” so to speak. None of us will give our daughters to Benjamin; anyone who fails to come will be put to death. These are the kinds of extreme promises one makes to God when they want His help and are not sure they deserve it. I would just say that the wise thing would have been to seek God’s leading, and to commit themselves to making offerings of thanksgiving at Shiloh when it was over.
Ultimately, they ended up with a worse scenario, the loss of one of the tribes in Israel. Based on the two oaths, they could have foreseen this coming; although it might have been hard to really feel how hard it would be to destroy Benjamin. Nevertheless, they found themselves in a situation that is common when everyone did what was right in his own eyes. They are between a rock and a hard place, where there are no ideal or perfect answers.
The result is another Judges scenario that is strange and almost laughable. First, they didn’t want to lose a tribe, even though they had seemed intent on killing all of them. So what to do? Second, one oath promised death to those who did not show up; so perhaps we can get wives for the Benjamites from there; except that we vowed to kill them all. So what to do? Third, the other oath promised not to give the Benjamites any wives from the eleven tribes; but we still need two hundred women! So what to do?
In each case, they devised a way to “triangulate” (as President Clinton termed his approach to getting things done) or to adopt a “dialectical” solution (as Marxist theory puts it). Bring together two ideas, neither of which is acceptable, and devise a third. So, they killed a bunch more of their own people, but not all, saving out the marriageable girls. Then they played a trick on themselves, looking the other way, while the Benjamites kidnapped a bunch of girls at the festival at Shiloh. They ended up violating the two oaths, but made it possible to rationalize it all in their irrational minds. By Jesus' day, the Jewish leaders had become quite adept in making up rules to get around the word and will of God (Mark 7:6-9).
The one thing they did not do was to return to Mizpah and inquire of the LORD. That’s what you have to do if you are really going to be “one nation under God” instead of a nation where everyone follows their own path.
This had been how it was before the flood: every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (Gen. 6:5). Years after the time of the Judges, when Israel did have a king, they were still doing what was right in their own eyes: each one follows the dictates of his own evil heart, so that no one listens to Me (Jer. 16:12). What is needed, if we are to be God’s people, is what Isaiah called for: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD and He will have mercy on him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon (Isa. 55:7). We must be people of God’s word, in truth!
In these days of anarchy, let us do what is right in the eyes of our God!
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