Bible Strands
Judges 21:14
And at that time the Benjamites returned and were given the women who were spared from Jabesh-gilead. But there were not enough women for all of them.
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — The narrator records the immediate aftermath of the civil war, noting that surviving Benjamite men returned from the rock of Rimmon to receive wives from the Jabesh-gilead survivors. This moment occurs after the Israelite congregation sent a peace message to the fugitives and before the community grieves the structural void the Lord created among the tribes.
The words — The Hebrew verb וַיָּשָׁב (vaYāšāḇ) literally means "and he/they returned," marking the Benjamites' physical and legal restoration to their clan. The participle חִיּוּ (ḥîyyū) translates to "they preserved alive," specifying that the Jabesh-gilead women survived the prior slaughter.
The thread — The account directly continues Judges 21:12–13, where four hundred virgins were located and a peace message was dispatched, and points forward to Judges 21:15, where the people grieve the demographic void. It also recalls the earlier flight to the rock of Rimmon documented in Judges 20:47.
Why it lands — The text demands recognition that tribal survival here depends on forced, insufficient provision rather than covenantal order. It requires the reader to observe how institutional breakdown produces desperate measures that leave the community structurally incomplete.
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The Hebrew words
King James Version
And Benjamin came again at that time; and they gave them wives which they had saved alive of the women of Jabesh–gilead: and yet so they sufficed them not.
Cross-references
- 1 Corinthians 7:2 But because there is so much sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.
- Judges 20:47 But 600 men turned and fled into the wilderness to the rock of Rimmon, where they stayed four months.
- Judges 21:12 So they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead four hundred young women who had not had relations with a man, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh in the land of Canaan.