This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[155]
When it was related to the Israelites what the inhabitants of Gibeah
had resolved upon, they took their oath that no one of them would give
his daughter in marriage to a Benjamite, but make war with greater fury
against them than we have learned our forefathers made war against the
Canaanites; and sent out presently an army of four hundred thousand against
them, while the Benjamites' army-was twenty-five thousand and six hundred;
five hundred of whom were excellent at slinging stones with their left
hands, insomuch that when the battle was joined at Gibeah the Benjamites
beat the Israelites, and of them there fell two thousand men; and probably
more had been destroyed had not the night came on and prevented it, and
broken off the fight; so the Benjamites returned to the city with joy,
and the Israelites returned to their camp in a great fright at what had
happened. On the next day, when they fought again, the Benjamites beat
them; and eighteen thousand of the Israelites were slain, and the rest
deserted their camp out of fear of a greater slaughter. So they came to
Bethel, 1
a city that was near their camp, and fasted on the next day; and besought
God, by Phineas the high priest, that his wrath against them might cease,
and that he would be satisfied with these two defeats, and give them the
victory and power over their enemies. Accordingly God promised them so
to do, by the prophesying of Phineas.
1 Josephus seems here to have made a small mistake, when he took the Hebrew word Bethel, which denotes the house of God, or the tabernacle, Judges 20:18, for the proper name of a place, Bethel, it no way appearing that the tabernacle was ever at Bethel; only so far it is true, that Shiloh, the place of the tabernacle in the days of the Judges, was not far from Bethel.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.