The moment Joshua and Eleazar the high priest died, Israel began to unravel. Josephus does not soften this. The generation that had conquered Canaan gave way to one that could not hold it together.
Phineas prophesied that the tribe of Judah should take the lead, with Simeon fighting alongside them. They struck first at the city of Bezek, where a Canaanite warlord named Adonibezek had assembled his forces. The Israelites killed over ten thousand soldiers and captured Adonibezek himself. When they cut off his fingers and toes, he made a chilling confession: he had done the same to seventy-two kings. "I was not always hidden from God," he said, "as I now find by what I endure." They carried him alive to Jerusalem, where he died.
The tribes pushed south to Hebron, where they encountered the last of the ancient giants—men whose bodies were so enormous and whose faces were so alien that Josephus says their bones were still being displayed in his own day, unlike anything people could believe. The city went to the Levites. The surrounding land went to Caleb, the old spy who had scouted Canaan decades before under Moses. The descendants of Jethro, Moses's Midianite father-in-law, also received territory—they had abandoned their homeland to follow Israel through the wilderness.
But prosperity bred complacency. The tribes grew rich from Canaanite tribute and stopped fighting. They abandoned the aristocratic government Moses had designed—no senate, no magistrates, just farmers getting wealthy and ignoring the law. God warned them. They ignored the warning.
Then came the horror at Gibeah. A Levite man traveling with his concubine stopped for the night in a Benjamite town. The men of Gibeah surrounded the house and demanded the woman. They took her by force and abused her through the night. She died at the doorstep by dawn. The Levite cut her body into twelve pieces and sent one to each tribe (Judges 19:29). All Israel erupted. Four hundred thousand soldiers marched against the tribe of Benjamin—their own brothers. The Benjamites, outnumbered but defiant, won the first two battles, killing twenty thousand Israelites. Only on the third day, after fasting and prayer at Bethel, did God grant Israel victory. They slaughtered nearly the entire tribe—every city, every woman, every child. Only six hundred Benjamite men survived, fleeing to the rock of Rimmon.
Then came the remorse. Israel had sworn no one would give a daughter to Benjamin in marriage, effectively condemning the tribe to extinction. They found a loophole—four hundred virgins from Jabesh Gilead, whose people had refused to join the war. For the remaining two hundred men, they devised a scheme: let them hide in the vineyards at Shiloh during the festival and seize the dancing women for wives. And so the tribe of Benjamin survived, barely, rebuilt from the wreckage of civil war.