Israel dispatched the force of 12,000 men to serve justice on Jabesh-gilead, by putting to the sword the inhabitants, including the women and the little ones—all the inhabitants of the town, except the virgins of marriageable age, who could provide wives for the remaining Benjamites and thereby allow the rest of the Israelites to keep their oath not to give their daughters in marriage. This really has nothing to do with justice. It is just a manoeuvre to solve their current dilemma in a way that looks legitimate. It can be justified legally. But it is morally shady, to say the least.1 Actually, it is grotesque. This language, devote to destruction,
is holy war language. It is what Israel was supposed to do to its enemies. Yet, between the beginning and end of the book of Judges, Israel has had a wholesale reluctance to implement holy war policy against the Canaanites. But, lo and behold, here they are, eager to execute holy war with savage abandon against their very own unsuspecting kinsmen.2 And it is applied to almost utter extinction. It is terrible. And it shows who is king in their lives: their own hearts. They act according to their own morality, committing an act of murder.
11 This is what you shall do: every male and every woman that has lain with a male you shall devote to destruction.”