Israel Preserved Intact: Just when it looked like one crisis was averted, another came to light. It is, however, not surprising, for that is how it is when chaos prevails, when “what is right in a person’s eyes, he/she does” (21:25). At the end of the book of Judges, the Israelites do not seem to be able to extricate themselves from the miry bog that they have gotten themselves into. Though they appear to call out to God for help, they still rely on their own absurd solutions that only make matters worse. We will see in this chapter that the same people who fought a holy war because some Gibeahite men kidnapped an Israelite woman and ravished her until she died, themselves murdered all of the women of Benjamin and all the married women of Jabesh Gilead, not to mention having kidnapped four…