fellow-tribesman to justice, and the result was an inter-fraternal war. Before the tribes had conquered half the country which had been promised them, they were already fighting among themselves. The Benjamites at first were successful, and their opponents were defeated with considerable slaughter in two successive battles. Then they fell into an ambuscade: the main body of their troops being drawn away after the retreating enemy towards the north, while an ambush rose up from ‘the meadows of Gibeah’ in their rear, and set fire to the city. The retreating foe now turned back; and the Benjamites, enclosed as it were between two fires, were cut to pieces almost to a man. Six hundred only escaped ‘towards the wilderness unto the rock of Rimmon,’ where they maintained themselves for four months. Meanwhile ‘the men of Israel’ treated their Benjamite brethren like Canaanitish outcasts, smiting ‘them with the edge of the sword, from the men of each city even unto the beasts and all that was found; and all the cities they came to did they set on fire.’ Benjamin was almost exterminated. A few men alone survived. But at the outset of the war they had been placed under the same ban as the Canaanites, and a solemn vow had been made that no Israelitish woman should be married to them. When peace was restored with the practical annihilation of the guilty tribe, the prohibition was evaded by a stratagem, which, however inconsequent it may appear to the European of to-day, was fully in keeping with the ideas of the ancient East. Jabesh-Gilead had refused to take part in the war against Benjamin, and the victors accordingly resolved to take summary vengeance upon it. The city was taken by surprise, and every male in it massacred in cold blood, as well as ‘every woman that had lain by man.’ About four hundred unmarried maidens were carried off to Shiloh, and there forcibly married to the surviving Benjamites. But even these did not suffice, and the Benjamite youths were consequently encouraged to hide in the vineyards near Shiloh, and there capture and make wives of the maidens of the place who came out to dance at the yearly ‘feast of the Lord.’ The place, we are told, was northward of Beth-el, ‘on the east side of the highway that goeth up from Beth-el to Shechem, and on the south of Lebonah.’