The writer constructed this section parallel to the previous one (vv. 5-15) to highlight the dilemma Israel continued to face.370About 200 Benjamites still needed wives. Verses 16-18 repeat the dilemma that the Israelites' "wife oath"had created (v. 1).
The elders of Israel proposed a second plan (v. 19; cf. vv. 8-9). It would give the Benjamites wives without causing the Israelites to break the letter of their "wife vow,"though it violated a more basic law. The problem with this plan was that it required the forcible kidnapping and raping of 200 women from Shiloh. Undoubtedly if the elders had sought the Lord's counsel He would have given them a better plan. There is no evidence in the text that they did so.
The annual feast of Yahweh was probably the Passover ". . . as the dances of the daughters of Shiloh was apparently an imitation of the dances of the Israelitish women at the Red Sea under the superintendency of Miriam (Ex. xv. 20)."371Another possibility is that this was the Feast of Tabernacles ". . . in the time of the vintage-harvest."372A third option is that it was a festival of the Israelites' own making.373
Verses 20-22 record the Israelites' command to the assailants (cf. vv. 10-11). The fathers and brothers of the women would complain because of the treatment these women would receive and because these men would not receive doweries from their sons-in-law as was customary. The Israelites also expected these fathers and brothers to find some consolation in the fact that they had not technically broken the "wife oath."
This second provision of wives proved to be sufficient for the Benjamites (v. 23; cf. vv. 12-14) even though the plan involved the violation of basic human rights.
With this resolution of the problem the Israelites returned to their homes (v. 24; cf. v. 15).
"There is a certain rightness and a certain wrongness about what Israel does. They justifiably requite Jabesh-gilead with unjustifiable severity (vv. 5, 10). They stand consistently upon their wife-oath (vv. 7, 16-18) but trample happily upon the rights of the Shiloh girls and their families (vv. 19-22). It is a mix of consistency and confusion. . . .
"The ambivalence pervading chapter 21 simply fits the pattern of incongruities throughout the story from the beginning of chapter 19."374
"Through Moses Yahweh had warned that if the Israelites stoop to behaving like Canaanites, then they can expect the same fate (Deut 8:19-20). The narrator never declares so outrightly, but the present account, coming as it does at the end of the book affirms the total Canaanization of the tribe of Benjamin and the Israelites' falsely based sympathy for their brothers."375
