The story of the Levite of Ephraim throws a yet more melancholy light on the morals of the Israelites. The wife of this Levite is outraged and murdered by a band of men at Gibeah, of the tribe of Benjamin. The husband cuts the corpse into twelve pieces, which he sends to the twelve tribes of Israel. And all men, when they saw it, said, “There was no such deed done since the day when the Children of Israel came up out of Egypt.” The Benjamites are required to give up the culprits, they refuse and take up arms, to the number of twenty-six thousand men. The other tribes put four hundred thousand soldiers in the field, according to the Bible, and inquire of Jehovah who shall march first to battle. Jehovah appoints the tribe of Judah. But twice in succession the Benjamites come forth out of Gibeah and gain the advantage over the enormous army of Israel, which loses forty thousand men in two days. The people go up to Bethel, where the Ark of the Covenant then was; they fast, they offer burnt offerings, and Jehovah promises them the victory. The attacking force surrounds the enemy, and defeats them with such slaughter that only six hundred men escape and take refuge in the wilderness. The victors burn all the cities of Benjamin and put all their inhabitants to the sword. After this vengeance, however, they regret the annihilation of a whole tribe, and offer terms of peace to the six hundred survivors of the Benjamites. At the beginning and at the end of this narrative the Bible says that in those days there was no king in Israel, and that every man did that which was right in his own eyes. The author imagines that thus he can explain the atrocities he has related; but there was no king in the Greek cities either, and nothing of this kind took place there. We may be astonished that a nation which “rose up as one man to punish a crime and blot out a stain from Israel” should not be able to unite to repulse a foreign foe. But this contrast is not enough to cast doubt upon the Bible narrative; it is unhappily true that an age and a country may witness at one and the same time the most merciless reprisals in civil war and the most deplorable weakness in face of the outside world. The Philistines had already subjugated the southern tribes, Dan, Judah, and Zebulun; they were now menacing those of the centre.