Battle of Gibeah
| Battle at Gibeah | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of Book of Judges | |||||||||
 "A Levite and his wife are given lodging in the city of Gibeah." |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
| Confederated tribes of Israel | Tribe of Benjamin (rebelling) | ||||||||
| Units involved | |||||||||
| None specified | 700 elite troops, Slingers. Only specific type mentioned. | ||||||||
| Strength | |||||||||
| 400,000 | 26,000 | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| ~40,060 | ~25,100 | ||||||||
The Battle of Gibeah is an episode related in the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible. The battle was triggered by an incident in which the concubine of a man from the Tribe of Levi was raped by members of the Tribe of Benjamin and later died. The Levite had offered his concubine to the mob in his place. In the morning he found the concubine unresponsive on the doorstep. He later cut her body into twelve pieces, and sent the pieces throughout all the territories of the Israelite tribes.
The outraged tribes of Israel sought justice, and asked for the miscreants to be delivered for judgement. The Benjamites refused, so the tribes then sought vengeance, and in the subsequent war, the members of Tribe of Benjamin were systematically killed, including women and children; when Benjamin was nearly 'extinguished', it was decided that the tribe should be allowed to survive, and all the men from another town, Jabesh Gilead, who had refused to take part in the punishment of the Tribe of Benjamin, were killed, so that their daughters could be wed to the surviving men of Benjamin. The first king of Israel, Saul, was descended from these surviving men. Due to this war, the Tribe of Benjamin was subsequently referred to as "the smallest of all the tribes."
A Levite from the mountains of Ephraim had a concubine, who left him and returned to the house of her father in Bethlehem in Judah. Heidi M. Szpek observes that this story serves to support the institution of monarchy, and the choice of the locations of Ephraim (the ancestral home of Samuel, who anointed the first king) and Bethlehem, (the home of King David), are not accidental.
According to the King James Version and the New International Version, the concubine was unfaithful to the Levite; according to a note in the Septuagint and in the New Living Translation and the New Heart English Bible she was "angry" with him.Rabbinical interpretations say that the woman was both fearful and angry with her husband and left because he was selfish, putting his comfort before his wife and their relationship, and the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges argues that the translation as 'angry' "suits the context, which implies a quarrel, but not unfaithfulness, on the woman’s part". The Levite travelled to Bethlehem to retrieve her, and for five days her father managed to persuade him to delay their departure. On the fifth day, the Levite declined to postpone their journey any longer, and they set out late in the day.
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