The most horrible story in the Bible is told in Judges 19-21. Here we read the tragic tale of a reluctant young bride who is assaulted, raped, and murdered by criminals from the tribe of Benjamin. The unfeeling husband dismembers her body and sends the pieces throughout Israel in witness to the foul deed. The other tribes unite to punish the guilty, and demand that Benjamin hand over the criminals. For reasons that are not recorded, “the Benjaminites would not listen to their fellow Israelites.” (Judges 20:13b) They gird for war instead.

In the course of that war tens of thousands of Israelites are killed. The tribe of Benjamin is wiped out, except for a small remnant of 600 men who flee to the Rock of Rimmon. Israel mourns the destruction of their brother tribe, and eventually uses more war and trickery to arrange wives for the remnant, so that the tribe of Benjamin will not die out completely.

This happened in roughly 1,100 BC. Perhaps the Benjaminites were unaware that a similar fate had befallen another city about 100 years earlier – a city that had also refused to correct its own wrongdoing, but had armed themselves defiantly for war instead. The name of that city was Troy.

As recounted in Homer’s Illiad and brought again to life by Brad Pitt and Eric Bana in the movie Troy, a few Trojans had committed a grave sin against their neighbors. Prince Paris of Troy had stolen away Queen Helen of Sparta from her lawful husband Menelaus. Instead of returning Helen with apologies as by all rights he should have done, King Priam resolved to fight the Greeks instead. Nobody claimed that stealing another man’s wife was right, but they held their nationalism above what was right and wrong.

And for that sin, they died.

I find this stuff fascinating even if nobody else does. This thought is still under development, but what I see here is a pattern in history. Here’s how it works:

  1. A small band of people commit a crime, a deed that everybody agrees is wrong. The victims are members of another ethnic or nationalist group.
  2. The offended group (Israelites, Greeks) demands punishment of the guilty persons.
  3. The offending group (Benjaminites, Trojans) refuses these demands. They turn the problem into an ethnic/nationalist conflict instead. In doing so, they bring the guilt for the original crime upon themselves.
  4. The offended group prevails in war. After great loss of life on both sides, the offending group is utterly destroyed. 

The Book of Judges and the Trojan War are relevant today. In Darfur the Janjaweed militia commit atrocities against Sudanese villagers. The U.S. and U.N. demand that Khartoum disarm the militia. In response, the Sudanese government attempts to whip up nationalist feeling and portray the conflict as the nation of Sudan against those nasty Western imperialists.

In April in Fallujah, Iraq, terrorists murder four American contractors and hang their mutilated bodies from a bridge. No rational person claims this is right, but when coalition forces demand the murderers be turned over for justice, the leaders in Fallujah beat the drums of ethnic/nationalistic/religious war instead. They portray the crime in terms of Islamic jihad, instead of some out-of-control terrorists committing crimes that Islam forbids. The original guilt was confined to a small group of people, but by offering sanctuary to terrorists and not fixing their own problem, the Fallujans have taken the guilt upon all themselves.

We saw the consequences of the same history pattern this week: The city of Fallujah depopulated and severely damaged by the coalition assault. Thousands of terrorists killed (no regret there). Many civilians wounded and killed.

I saw this same pattern occur in Serbia during the 1990s. Ethnic and nationalistic pride were held higher than what was right and wrong. Muslim civilians were massacred at Srebrenica. Serbia later paid the price. Unfortunately, so did lots of innocent people. If the Taliban had turned over bin Laden they would probably still be in power.

The moral lesson here is that if you don’t fix your own moral problem, somebody else will. And you probably won’t like the way they go about fixing it.