Judges 21 Dating

Hey all, where we last left off, the Israelites just finished massacring the Benjaminites. It sounds like maybe 600 survived by hiding at the rock of Rimmon for four months. Meanwhile, the rest of the Israelites took an oath to not give a daughter in marriage to a Benjamite ever again. Unfortunately, this, as with many of the oaths taken in the Bible, proved to be problematic.

In Judges 21, the Israelites feel some level of remorse for dealing with the Benjamites so harshly. There is a lot of wailing and such about cutting off a tribe of Israel. So eventually, it seems like the consensus is that this cannot be. They can’t just end the Benjamite line. However, as it just so happens, all the men of Israel took that pesky oath to not give Benjamites anyone to marry. It’s also verboten to marry outside of the Israelite people group and with good reason considering how that always seems to go (false gods and baby sacrifice seem to pop up when the Jews marry foreign women).

So, the whole thing turns into a bit of a crisis. No one wants to break their silly, hasty oath that God didn’t ask for in the first place. Fortunately, in typical Biblical fashion, the people of Israel devise a plan that’s honestly not the worst thing they’ve ever come up with. After some scheming, they realize that the people from Jabesh Gilead never came to the Mizpah assembly that they had before the Benjamite massacre. And just like that, they had a solution to their problem.

So, they send 12,000 fighting men with instructions to go to Jabesh Gilead and put to the sword those living there, including women and children. Specifically, “This is what you are to do… Kill every male and every woman who is not a virgin.” So, the gang of boys heads off to go do that and shockingly, they manage to find 400 young women who have never slept with anyone. They kill everyone else and bring those 400 back. So that’s fun.

This raises some obvious questions. Such as… how exactly do you know who is and who isn’t a virgin? According to the internet, we still don’t have a great way of doing that. If a mother is with a child, she probably isn’t a virgin. Short of that, we have the age-old hymen check. However, as everyone on the internet will tell you, an intact hymen is only a one-way test. A well-developed intact hymen is good evidence of no penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse. However, a ruptured hymen can occur as a result of sports, horseback riding, etc. Some women can also just not have them. So, a woman without one or a ruptured one could still be a virgin.

To the reader, it quickly becomes apparent how messy of a process this whole operation was. Some girls were probably taken on account of being too young to be sexually active. Those would be freebies. For the others, it was probably a hit or miss. I can imagine that undercarriage inspections were conducted. I don’t think they would have been able to go on personal testimony just because the incentive to lie was so high. What woman would say that she’s not a virgin if she knows she’s going to be killed for it? The majority of modern women won’t even tell the truth about their sexual experiences when asked and they’re certainly not under the pain of death. There is no doubt that some non-virgins were taken as virgins and some virgins were probably killed.

Before we continue, to the modern reader, the next obvious question is, what’s the big deal with virginity anyway? To me, that seems rather obvious. Granted, I’m a male, so I have a bias, but that’s helpful in this case. It all comes down to the paternity problem. The whole thing breaks down nicely with game theory but we’re not going to do that on account of time. Men do not want to provide resources to children who are not theirs. Women, on the other hand, want the highest quality children they can get. Even if this means settling for a loser and then trying to sleep with the village hero. Those two things make the paramount importance of virginity crystal clear. This is especially the case if you’re an evolutionist shill.

So how does a man know if a child is his or not? Blood or DNA testing now but that wasn’t an option back then. That leaves a man with just observation, timing, and watching the kids develop. And this is where virginity comes into play. If a woman is a virgin, then you can be sure that any children she bears are your own provided you’re the only one sleeping with her. So essentially, it removes one set of variables from the equation. Beyond that, there’s a bunch of pair bonding research and what naught but I’m skeptical of it so we’re going to continue with the story. The key takeaway is that virginity is important to men because men don’t want to raise other men’s children.

Having now massacred the village of Jabesh Gilead, the Israelites managed to secure 400 virgins for the Benjamites. Unfortunately, there were 600 Benjamites so the Israelites were still short 200 virgins to make this operation work. On account of their oath to God to not give any daughters to the Benjamites, none of the men of Israel can do anything about it. Or so it seemed.

Ever creative in the stupidest ways possible, they come up with a way around the oath problem. There was a festival going on in Shiloh. So, the Israelites instruct the Benjamites to “Go and hide in the vineyards and watch. When the young women of Shiloh come out to join in the dancing, rush from the vineyards and each of you seize one of them to be your wife. Then return to the land of Benjamin. When their fathers or brothers complain to us, we will say to them, ‘Do us the favor of helping them, because we did not get wives for them during the war. You will not be guilty of breaking your oath because you did not give your daughters to them.’”

Essentially, they’re getting around the oath on a technicality. The oath they took under their own volition, not at the request of God. It’s a joke at this point. At any rate, the Benjamites play ball. The text goes, “While the young women were dancing, each man caught one and carried her off to be his wife.” The chapter ends with, “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.” That’s the summary of the whole book of Judges.

That also wraps up the whole saga. What started with Levi the Levite taking a concubine as a wife ended with tens of thousands of people dead, several cities burned to the ground, two separate massacres, and the kidnapping of several hundred girls. If this isn’t a cascading catastrophe, I don’t know what is. The whole situation from start to finish is positively repulsive to modern sensibilities. Yet every action that takes place in the story makes sense within that cultural context.

This post is about dating so that’s what we’re going to talk about now, but I wanted to set the stage with all of that first. A lot of people on the internet like to complain about how dating is such a disaster now. I agree that it is indeed a disaster, but like always, there are tradeoffs. I think what we have going on now is better than waiting in a vineyard for an opportunity to kidnap a future wife.

I first heard this on the Whatifalthist YouTube channel. I’m not sure where he got it from, but he said that the strategy of civilization perpetuation is to sacrifice young women to young men to keep the young men from destroying the civilization. A young woman who is angry at the world tends to hurt herself. A young man who’s angry at the world tends to hurt the world.

You can see this born out in the demographic traits of school shooters. They’re almost all angry young men. This is the way it is, and this is the way it’s always been. There’s a reason why military-age young men are a red flag.

A society consists of young, middle-aged, and old men and women who are either married or unmarried. All of these groups act in different ways that have consequences. The easiest dimension is the married vs unmarried axis. Marriage tends to increase responsibility and cohesion. A married person cares more about family and society than an unmarried person. The male vs female axis also isn’t bad. Men tend to be more aggressive and rational. Women tend to be more compassionate and emotional. On the age axis, young people tend to be the most miserable. Middle-aged people tend to have it best. Old people tend to have it worse than middle-aged people, but they usually have wealth and wisdom at least which puts them ahead of the young people.

When you break it all down like this, the people in the society wielding military power are the young and middle-aged, married and unmarried, men. With most of that power going to the young because there are more of them. Focusing just on the young married men vs the young unmarried men, the key behavior difference is that that young unmarried men have the least to lose if society is destroyed and the most to gain.

The classical response to defuse this situation is to sacrifice the young unmarried women to the young unmarried men to convert the young unmarried men into married men. This is the big-brain strategy of civilization because you’re sacrificing a group with no military power to pacify the group with the most military power. That’s what we call a good deal.

And that’s exactly what’s happening here in the book of Judges. The Israelites sent a band of 12,000 “fighting” men to Jabesh Gilead to kill the men there and take the women who weren’t capable of defending themselves. Later on, the Benjamites get another 200 women from Shiloh. Once again, we have young men praying on 200 young women who can’t defend themselves.

I find this a bit amusing. These days people get worked up when you say that men and women are different. Said people getting worked up about this are people who don’t value truth. When I was a kid, I was abhorred at the thought of someone killing a whole village and then carrying off 400 girls. I found the kidnapping of the Shiloh virgins only slightly less horrible. At least then no one was killed. Now as an adult with more experience in the world and with women, I no longer feel that bad about it.

I still very much think it’s a bad thing. However, women don’t have to be the way that they are. They choose to be the way that they are and what they get is the price they pay for their choices. That is to say, if women were more noble, this sort of thing couldn’t even happen. If it were well known that women wouldn’t under any circumstances submit to conquest, then they wouldn’t be taken as trophies of war. If they didn’t act like objects they wouldn’t be treated like objects.

To spell it out as clearly as possible in this context, if the 400 women from Jabesh Gilead and the 200 women from Shiloh were principled enough to commit suicide or fight to the death over being taken captive as a war bride, then they wouldn’t have been taken captive. If women acted that way in general, they wouldn’t be taken advantage of, and young unmarried men wouldn’t have nearly the monopoly on military force that they do. But instead of doing this, most young women are happy to betray anything and everything to keep living and to have a cushy life. It’s kind of why you see Ukrainian women on OF and Ukrainian men in the trenches.

So how does this relate to modern dating? Simple, it’s a good reminder that things are a lot better than they could be. Even though it currently feels like a dumpster fire, we’ve come a long way since Judges 21.