The Need for a Faithful King

Judges ends in sorrow. Israel came to Bethel and wept severely: Yahweh, the God of Israel, why has this happened in Israel, that there should be one tribe lacking in Israel today? Their own oaths had created the problem. At Mizpah they had sworn, None of us will give his daughter to Benjamin as a wife, and Benjamin had only six hundred surviving men. The chapter says the people grieved for Benjamin, because Yahweh had made a breach in the tribes.

The chapter does not say they sought God's guidance; the elders worked around their vows. A second oath had condemned anyone who did not come to Mizpah. Jabesh Gilead had sent no one, so twelve thousand men struck the town and took four hundred young virgins for Benjamin. Still short, the elders told the Benjamites to lie in wait in the vineyards during the yearly feast of Yahweh at Shiloh and catch the daughters who came out to dance, arguing that the fathers had not broken their oath because they had not given them.

The narrator does not praise these plans; they were wrong. Israel preserved a tribe by harming many innocent people, and then every man went to his own inheritance. The final verse repeats the theme of the whole closing section: In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes. The judges had brought temporary rescues, but the people's hearts remained unchanged. Judges leaves readers longing for a faithful king who would rule in God's way.