Judges 21:15

Study note

Setting — The narrator records the Israelite people's reaction immediately after the civil war and the forced provision of wives from Jabesh-gilead. The text describes the national response to the near-elimination of the tribe of Benjamin.

The words — נִחָ֖ם (ni.Cham) = it had compassion/grieved [H5162]; פֶּ֖רֶץ (Pe.retz) = a breach/void [H6556]. The Hebrew uses ni.Cham to describe the people's compassionate mourning, and Pe.retz to denote the breach Yahweh permitted among the tribes.

The thread — The grief over a tribe's loss runs to Judges 21:6, where Israelites declare a tribe cut off, and to Judges 21:17, where elders insist on preserving heirs to prevent tribal extinction. The allowance of a divine breach echoes the judgment motif in 1 Chronicles 15:13, where God's anger follows human failure to follow prescribed order.

Why it lands — The text states that Yahweh permitted a breach in Israel's tribes and the people mourned the consequence. It requires the reader to recognize that tribal near-annihilation was a sovereign outcome of civil conflict, not a moral endorsement of the violence.

Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.