It was a period of anarchy and perpetual war. Without a head, and without cohesion, it seems strange that they did not perish utterly or become absorbed by the older population of the land. That the nation should have survived admits of only one explanation. It possessed a common faith, a common sanctuary, and a common code of sacred laws. As in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire the Church preserved the fabric of society, and eventually brought order out of chaos, so, too, in ancient Israel, the nation owed its continued existence to the law which had been given by Moses. Only the iron fetters of a written law, with its organised priesthood and sanctions, and, above all, the knowledge that it existed, could have prevented the process of political and social disintegration from rapidly running its course. Had the religion of Israel been merely that result of evolution which is dreamed of by some modern writers, and the law of Moses the invention of a later age, there would have been no Israel in which a religion could have developed, or a code of laws have been compiled. The outward unity of the tribes in Egypt and the desert was shattered by the settlement in Canaan, and all that remained was the inward and religious unity that had been forced upon them by the genius of an individual legislator. The place of the political head and leader was supplied by the organised cult and elaborate code of laws which he had bequeathed to the nation. To all external appearance, indeed, Israel had ceased to be a nation, and had been reduced to a scattered and anarchical collection of marauding tribes; but the elements which could again bind them together still existed—the belief in the same national God, the rites with which He was worshipped, and the priesthood and sanctuary where the tradition of the law was preserved.
That this is no imaginary picture is proved by the Song of Deborah. The Song is admitted by the most sceptical of critics to belong to the age to which it is assigned, and consequently to reflect the ideas of the Israelite shortly after the settlement in Canaan. No composition of the Exilic period could be more uncompromising in its monotheism, and its assertion that Yahveh alone is the God of Israel. And the Song further assumes that the tribes of Israel, disunited though they otherwise may be, are nevertheless bound together by a common faith in the one national God. Nor is this all. Israel still possesses, even among its northern tribes, ‘legislators’ like Moses, and scribes who handle the pen (Judg. v. 14). Writing, therefore, is still known and practised even among a people so oppressed by their enemies that ‘the highways were unoccupied,’ and the fellahin of the villages had ceased to exist. Laws, too, were still promulgated in continuation of the laws of Moses, and the people of Israel are ‘the people of the Lord.’
And yet there was another side to the picture. While Zebulon and Naphtali were hazarding ‘their lives unto the death’ ‘on behalf of Yahveh,’ there were tribes and cities which forgot their duty to their God and their brethren, and ‘came not to the help of the Lord.’ Such was the case with the inhabitants of Meroz; such, too, was the conduct of Reuben and Gilead, of Dan and Asher. The description given by the compiler of the Book of Judges of the condition of the tribes after the death of Joshua cannot be far from the truth. They were planted in the midst of enemies whom they had found too strong to be destroyed or driven out. On all sides of them were ‘the Philistines, and all the Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hittites that dwelt in Mount Lebanon from Mount Baal-Hermon unto the entering in of Hamath.’[[279]] ‘And the children of Israel,’ we are told, dwelt among them, and ‘took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served their gods. And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Ashêrahs.’[[280]] Even more expressive are the words with which the Book of Judges ends: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.’ It was an age of individual lawlessness; the bands of society were unloosed, and none was strong enough to lead and control. Outside the influence of the representatives of the Mosaic law there was neither curb nor order.
Two incidents have been recorded which throw a lurid light on the manners and character of the age which immediately followed the settlement in Canaan. In one of them we hear of a Levite of Mount Ephraim ‘who took to him a concubine out of Beth-lehem in Judah.’ Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, had succeeded his father Eleazar as high-priest at Shiloh (Judg. xx. 28), where ‘the ark of the covenant’ had been placed. The concubine proved unfaithful to the Levite, and eventually fled to her father’s house in Beth-lehem. Thither the Levite followed her, and persuaded her to return with him to his home. The woman’s father, however, highly pleased at the reconciliation, continued to press his hospitality upon his guest, and it was not until the afternoon of the fifth day that the Levite succeeded in getting away. The evening soon fell upon him, and, rejecting the advice of his slave that he should spend the night in Jerusalem, on the ground that it was ‘the city of a stranger,’ he pressed on with his concubine to Gibeah, which belonged to Benjamin. It had been better for him, however, to have sought hospitality from ‘the stranger’ rather than from his own people; for, in spite of the fact that he had with him food in plenty both for himself and for his asses, he was left to spend the night in the street. But at the last moment an old man, who was not a native of Gibeah, came in from his work in the fields, and seeing the Levite in the street, asked him and his companions into the house. While they were eating and drinking, the rabble gathered about the house and demanded that the man should be brought out to them that they might ‘know him.’ It was a repetition of the scene enacted in Sodom when the angels visited the house of Lot, with the difference that the actors were Israelites instead of Canaanites, whom the Hebrews had been called upon to destroy for their sins. In vain ‘the master of the house’ intreated his fellow-townsmen not to act ‘so wickedly,’ offering them his own daughter as well as his guest’s concubine in place of the guest himself. Finally, however, they were satisfied with the unfortunate concubine, whom they ‘abused’ all night, and then left dead on the doorstep of the house. The first thing ‘her lord’ saw when he opened the door in the morning was the woman’s corpse. This he placed on his ass and carried to his home, where he divided it into twelve pieces, which he sent ‘into all the coasts of Israel.’[[281]] The horror of the deed, or perhaps of the visible proofs with which it was announced, aroused the Israelites, and they demanded the punishment of the guilty. The crime had been committed against a Levite, whose brethren were to be found wherever the Israelites were settled, and who had on his side the priesthood of the central sanctuary at Shiloh. He was, too, a Levite of Mount Ephraim, and the sympathy of the powerful tribe of Ephraim was accordingly assured to him. The Benjamites, however, refused to hand over their fellow-tribesman to justice, and the result was an inter-fraternal war. Before the tribes had conquered half the country which had been promised them, they were already fighting among themselves.
The Benjamites at first were successful, and their opponents were defeated with considerable slaughter in two successive battles. Then they fell into an ambuscade: the main body of their troops being drawn away after the retreating enemy towards the north, while an ambush rose up from ‘the meadows of Gibeah’ in their rear, and set fire to the city. The retreating foe now turned back; and the Benjamites, enclosed as it were between two fires, were cut to pieces almost to a man. Six hundred only escaped ‘towards the wilderness unto the rock of Rimmon,’ where they maintained themselves for four months. Meanwhile ‘the men of Israel’ treated their Benjamite brethren like Canaanitish outcasts, smiting ‘them with the edge of the sword, from the men of each city even unto the beasts and all that was found; and all the cities they came to did they set on fire.’
Benjamin was almost exterminated. A few men alone survived. But at the outset of the war they had been placed under the same ban as the Canaanites, and a solemn vow had been made that no Israelitish woman should be married to them. When peace was restored with the practical annihilation of the guilty tribe, the prohibition was evaded by a stratagem, which, however inconsequent it may appear to the European of to-day, was fully in keeping with the ideas of the ancient East. Jabesh-Gilead had refused to take part in the war against Benjamin, and the victors accordingly resolved to take summary vengeance upon it. The city was taken by surprise, and every male in it massacred in cold blood, as well as ‘every woman that had lain by man.’ About four hundred unmarried maidens were carried off to Shiloh, and there forcibly married to the surviving Benjamites. But even these did not suffice, and the Benjamite youths were consequently encouraged to hide in the vineyards near Shiloh, and there capture and make wives of the maidens of the place who came out to dance at the yearly ‘feast of the Lord.’ The place, we are told, was northward of Beth-el, ‘on the east side of the highway that goeth up from Beth-el to Shechem, and on the south of Lebonah.’
Recent critics have seen in this story merely a popular legend intended to account for the fact that marriage by capture was practised among the Benjamites. We might just as well assert that the story of Gunpowder Plot is a legend which has grown out of the customs of the 5th of November. The critics have not even the justification that marriage by capture was common among the Israelites. In fact, this is the only instance of it which we meet with in the Old Testament history of Israel—an instance so exceptional as to be inexplicable unless it had originated under special circumstances. It was certainly not the survival of an earlier custom common to the rest of the tribes, nor is there any trace of its having been general in the tribe of Benjamin itself. In fact, we look in vain for any other example of it alike among Israelites and Canaanites, or even among the Benjamites in any other period of their history.
It is true, however, that the account of the war between Benjamin and its brother tribes has passed through the magnifying lenses of later history. The exaggerated numbers of the combatants and the slain, like the use of the universal ‘all’ and ‘every’ where the partial ‘some’ is intended, are in thorough accordance with Oriental habits of expression. The modern resident in the East is only too familiar with such exaggerations of language, and in studying Oriental history due allowance must always be made for them. In the account of the war, moreover, its real character has been somewhat obscured. Benjamin has been regarded too much as a separate entity, distinct and cut off from the rest of Israel, rather than as the tribe which had once gathered round the sanctuary of Beth-On, and which continued to form the ‘southern’ frontier of the house of Joseph. The war against Benjamin, in fact, was like the war against Jabesh-Gilead—a quarrel not with a tribe, but with certain Israelitish cities. It is even possible that in this quarrel Jabesh-Gilead was from the beginning associated with Gibeah and the other cities of Benjamin. At all events, we find it so allied in the age of Saul. Saul’s first act as king was to rescue Jabesh-Gilead from the Ammonites, and it was the men of Jabesh-Gilead who took down the bodies of Saul and Jonathan from the walls of Beth-Shan and gave them honourable burial.[[282]]
The second incident, which tells us something of the manners of Israel in the years that immediately followed the invasion of Palestine, is recorded in language which has been little, if at all, altered by the compiler of the Book of Judges. The gruesome horror of the story of the Levite’s concubine is absent from it, but it equally shows how far from the truth is the idyllic picture sometimes painted of the first Israelitish conquerors of Canaan. It is again a Levite who is the central personage of the story. An Ephraimite named Micah, we are told, stole eleven hundred shekels of silver from his mother, but, terrified by her imprecations upon the thief, confessed the deed and restored the money. His mother thereupon informed him that the treasure had been dedicated to Yahveh by her on his behalf, in order that a graven and a molten image might be made out of it for him. Two hundred of the shekels were accordingly taken, and the silver employed to make the images. These were set up in the house of Micah, along with ‘an ephod and teraphim,’ and one of his sons was consecrated as priest. This, however, was recognised as contrary to the law, and when therefore a wandering Levite from Beth-lehem, ‘of the family of Judah,’ came seeking employment, he was welcomed by Micah, who asked him if he would be his priest. His wages for undertaking the office were to be ten shekels of silver each year, as well as ‘a suit of apparel’ and food. The terms were accepted, and ‘Micah consecrated’ him his priest. The provisions of the Mosaic law had been satisfied, and the Ephraimite complacently remarked, ‘Now know I that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest.’
His complacency, however, was of no long duration. The Danites, unable to establish themselves in the south of Canaan, sent out five spies from their camp near Kirjath-jearim[[283]] who on their way northward were hospitably received in Micah’s house. Here they found the Levite, with whom, it would appear, they had been previously acquainted, and asked him to inquire ‘of God’ whether their journey would be prosperous or not. The priest’s reply was favourable: ‘before Yahveh is your way wherein you go.’