Judges 20

One of my brothers was--and still is, I think--fascinated with ants. He kept ant farms, played the Maxis game SimAnt, and liked to draw maps of fictional ant colonies. So I couldn't help learning a bit about ants as well. One of the most intriguing aspects of ants is that they're superorganisms. Basically, each ant can't survive for long on its own but is instead specialized to perform a specific set of tasks essential to the larger body, or organism--which in ants' case is the colony. Each individual ant, then, is not important. The death of the ant is like the untimely death of a human cell--temporarily inconvenient, perhaps, but far from catastrophic. Therefore, each ant sacrifices any sense if individuality for the greater good of the colony. (It's no surprise, then, that the movies A Bug's Life and Antz took this theme of individualism vs. the collective and ran with it, adding a healthy helping of anthropomorphism.)

I feel like the soldiers in some of these Biblical battles come across as ants--many of them die, but it's all for some greater purpose. Sure, you could say this about most other warfare, but God's involvement in Biblical battles throws this issue of sacrifice into greater relief. When the Israelites fight the Benjamites (to avenge the abuse and death of the concubine in the previous chapter), they get their behinds handed to them the first two days, losing 40,000 of their 700,000 soldiers to the 400,000 Benjamites. Here's the thing: God actually told the Israelites to fight these first two days and who to send out. These demoralizing defeats did get the Israelites to supplicate themselves before God (verse 23) and offer sacrifices (verse 26), but at the cost of 40,000 lives--human lives. It's tempting to say that God sacrificed all these soldiers to teach the rest of Israel a lesson, and equally easy to parrot the typical "God works in mysterious ways" nugget. But even though the mind of God is unfathomable, it's also worth remembering that our life on Earth is not the be-all and end-all; if those dead soldiers had faith in God, then their deaths just meant the beginning of their time with Him in heaven.

On the third day of fighting (there's the number three again), the Israelites use pretty much the same trick they used against Ai back in Joshua 8: They lure the Benjamites out of the city, ambush them, and than have a contingent burn the city while it lies defenseless. Evidently, the overconfident Benjamites weren't up on their history.

But the sad thing is that this battle, costing thousands of lives, needn't have happened at all. The Benjamites refuse to hand over the "wicked men of Gibeah" who had abused the concubine to death in the previous chapter (verse 13). Such clannish behavior reeks of illogical obstinacy and pride, protecting "one's own," no matter their ignominious deeds, against justice. As I know all too well, stubbornness builds when emotion clouds one's judgment--not a good thing. Why worry about The Shadow clouding one's mind when we can cloud our own minds just fine?