“And the Children of Israel said: Who is there among all the tribes of Israel that
came not up in the assembly unto the LORD? For they had made a great oath
concerning him that came not up unto the LORD to Mizpah, saying: He shall
surely be put to death.”
Judges 20 covered the Civil War, one that pitted the tribe of Benjamin against all of the other
eleven tribes of Israel combined. Before that catastrophic and bloody war, certain things
transpired, as Abravanel explains here in Judges 21. That is, even though our chapter follows
Judges 20, nevertheless, chronologically speaking, things recorded here relate to it and
supplement it.
Recall, we learned in Judges 20 that the eleven tribes sought to diffuse the bad blood between
Benjamin and his brethren on the heels of the Concubine from Gibeah Affair. “And the tribes of
Israel sent men through all the tribe of Benjamin, saying: What wickedness is this that is come
to pass among you? Now therefore deliver up the men, the base fellows that are in Gibeah,
that we may put them to death…” Had Benjamin delivered the culprits to the Children of Israel,
normal relations between all twelve tribes could have restored. But they didn’t and it hadn’t.
Consequently, Judges 20 chronicles the internecine battles that ripped a nation asunder.
Here, we share one aspect of Abravanel’s comments on Judges 21: Jabesh-Gilead (belonging to
the tribe of Manasseh). On the eve of the war to punish Benjamin for gross malfeasance, Israeli
leadership called for full military mobilization. Every tribe was to participate – on penalty of
death for dereliction of duty. “And the Children of Israel said…concerning him that came not up
unto the LORD in Mizpah, saying: He shall surely be put to death.”
Notwithstanding the obvious importance of equitably shouldering military duties, Abravanel
asks here: Why did the Hebrew top brass issue death warrants for those eligible men who failed
to appear at the conscription headquarters in Mizpah?
After a full-blown investigation into the identity of the draft dodgers, the Children of Israel
tracked down Jabesh-Gilead. They had sat out the war with Benjamin. Herculean efforts to
ascertain the holdouts bespeaks a truism: Hebrews place great stress on and took great pains to
keep their oaths – “for they had made a great oath concerning him that came not up unto the
LORD to Mizpah…”
Abravanel unpacks this passage. Note, he writes, the verse says “unto the LORD to Mizpah” and
it doesn’t say “to fight against Gibeah.” The import, Abravanel suggests, is this. The convocation
in Mizpah was, essentially, a religious one. Jewish leaders called for the people to ascend to
Mizpah for purposes of self-introspection – “unto the LORD to Mizpah.” However, had the
reason behind the gathering to do with military mobilization, the verse would have said: “to
fight against Gibeah.” But that was not the wording.
Abravanel continues. If, in fact, the convention had been to procure troops for war, then it
would not have been so strange that some men shied away. That is because some men are
cowardly. They hide rather than appear before a draft board. Yet, that was not the case here.
Men turned their back “unto the LORD to Mizpah.” Such conduct cannot be condoned. Hence it
aroused the Jewish leadership’s ire. Absence amounted to a religious affront.
We circle back and address Abravanel’s question posed above: Why was it paramount in the
minds of the Hebrew leaders to seek out and ostracize Jabesh-Gilead after the civil war
concluded? For brevity, we bring here the first of the four rationales that Abravanel provides.
It is crucial to understand the mechanics of Biblical oaths and vows. The Hebrew tribunal
operated under the assumption that the oath had been uttered in public (“For they had made a
great oath concerning him that came not up unto the LORD to Mizpah, saying: He shall surely
be put to death.”) It means that public oaths, in contrast to private or personal oaths, don’t have
escape clauses. Enter one more key factor: There was no king in Israel. Had there been a
national leader, that king or judge would have been capable of pronouncing a vow as a national
obligation, as well as authorized to retract or void it. Abravanel puts in one more piece. It is
that, in theory, a similarly-sized convention could have abrogated the oath, an oath that had
been pronounced before the war with Benjamin. But, after the war, and after tens of thousands
of war casualties, the next public gatherings, perforce, would not have matched the magnitude
of participants when compared to before the war. Bottom line: Hebrew leaders felt the oath
could not be rescinded.