The Abduction at Shiloh

"Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpeh, saying, There shall not any of us give his daughter unto Benjamin to wife." They weep at Bethel: "O LORD God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that there should be to day one tribe lacking?"

Jabesh-gilead did not come to the assembly. Twelve thousand men are sent: "utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man." They find 400 young virgins and bring them to the camp at Shiloh, and give them to Benjamin's survivors. "And yet so they sufficed them not."

"Behold, there is a feast of the LORD in Shiloh yearly." They tell the Benjaminites: "Go and lie in wait in the vineyards… 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." If the fathers complain, Israel will say they did not break their oath, because they did not give their daughters. The Benjaminites do so and rebuild their cities. "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes."

Not a marriage solution

The women of Jabesh-gilead are captives whose families were killed; the women of Shiloh are seized at a religious festival. The text calls it what it is: "catch you every man his wife." Reading it as a happy resolution misses the narrator's last line. God gives no command in this chapter; the elders devise the plan.

Shiloh's festival

Verse 19 gives unusual directions: north of Bethel, east of the road from Bethel to Shechem, south of Lebonah. Khirbet Seilun fits them and is securely identified with Shiloh; Iron I remains there include storage jars and cultic material. Vineyards and dances fit a grape-harvest festival, perhaps an early form of Sukkot (compare 1 Samuel 1:3).

Jabesh-gilead

Jabesh-gilead, east of the Jordan, is proposed at Tell el-Maqlub or Tell Abu al-Kharaz; it is not certain. Its later bond with Benjamin is striking: Saul of Gibeah rescues it (1 Samuel 11), and its men recover Saul's body (1 Samuel 31:11–13).

4QJudg-b

4QJudg-b (4Q50), a Qumran fragment of the 1st century BC or AD, preserves small parts of Judges 19–21 that Rezetko and others describe as close to the Masoretic text. The exact verses and letters it preserves still need checking against the published edition.