Judges, Ruth: Revised Edition (The NIV Application Commentary)

by K. Lawson Younger

The annual festival of the LORD provides the context. This festival may have been a local one, or in light of the reference to vineyards (21:20), it may refer to the Feast of Tabernacles.96 Block suggests that because of the ambiguity on the part of the narrator, this festival may have been a further indication of the Israelite move toward Canaanization.97 The elders instruct the Benjamites to hide in the vineyards, and when the girls of Shiloh come out to dance, seize98 a wife from these girls of Shiloh. The Benjamites need not worry about the girls’ fathers.99 The elders have anticipated this and have a plan. They will use the Mizpah oath against the girls’ fathers: “Do us a kindness by helping them, because we did not get wives for them during the war. You will not be guilty of breaking your oath because you did not give your daughters to them” (v. 22). Isn’t this big of the elders?! The implication is that if the fathers do not accept the abductions, the elders will hold them guilty of giving their daughters to the Benjamites, and they will come under the oath’s curse (cf. 21:18b). As in the previous case of Jabesh Gilead, this is a case of using one aspect of the oath in order to circumvent another aspect—again, legally justifiable, but morally reprehensible. With the Benjamites “seizing”100 wives, the fathers are not technically “giving” them to the Benjamites. The legal intimidation of the threat of the oath’s curse eliminates the fathers from making any objection (...