a man as an individual or a male person · conjunction + noun, common masculine singular construct
Israel
יִשְׂרָאֵל֙Yis.ra.'El
H3478
Jisrael · proper noun, a place name
again
הָפַ֔ךְha.Fakh
H2015
to turn about or over · verb, qal perfect, 3rd person masculine singular
men
אִ֣ישׁ'ish
H376
a man as an individual or a male person · noun, common masculine singular construct
Benjamin
בִּנְיָמִ֑ןbin.ya.Min
H1144
Binjamin · proper noun, a man's name
amazed
וַיִּבָּהֵ֖לvai.yi.ba.Hel
H926
to tremble inwardly (or palpitate) · conjunction + verb, niphal sequential imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular
saw
רָאָ֔הra.'Ah
H7200
to see · verb, qal perfect, 3rd person masculine singular
evil
הָרָעָֽהha.ra.'Ah
H7451
bad or (as noun) evil (natural or moral) · definite article + noun, common feminine singular absolute
come
נָגְעָ֥הna.ge.'Ah
H5060
properly · verb, qal perfect, 3rd person feminine singular
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Luke 17:27-28 They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came,…
Luke 21:26 Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shak…
1 Thessalonians 5:3 For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not…
2 Peter 2:12 But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly per…
Exodus 15:9-10 The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand…
Isaiah 13:8-9 And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth: they shall be amazed…
Isaiah 33:14 The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us sh…
Revelation 6:15-17 And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every fr…
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Judges 20:26–end
We have here a full account of the complete victory which the Israelites obtained over the Benjamites in the third engagement: the righteous cause was victorious at last, when the managers of it amended what had been amiss; for, when a good cause suffers, it is for want of good management. Observe then how the victory was obtained, and how it was pursued.
I. How the victory was obtained. Two things they had trusted too much to in the former engagements - the goodness of their cause and the superiority of their numbers. It was true that they had both right and strength on their side, which were great advantages; but they depended too much upon them, to the neglect of those duties to which now…
there came against Gibeah ten thousand chosen men--This was a third division, different both from the ambuscade and the army, who were fighting at Baal-tamar. The general account stated in Jdg 20:35 is followed by a detailed narrative of the battle, which is continued to the end of the chapter.
John Gill on Judges 20:41
And when the men of Israel turned again,.... Turned their faces to the Benjaminites, on whom they had turned their backs; and which they did on hearing the sound of the trumpet, or seeing the flame of the city, or both, and that in order to fight the Benjaminites, and smite them, as now was their opportunity:
the men of Benjamin were amazed; at this strange and sudden change of things, at the sight of the flame of their city behind them, and at the Israelites turning back to fight them, when they thought themselves sure of victory, as at other times:
for they saw that evil was come upon them; that they were in the utmost danger, between two fires, as we usually say, liers in wait behind th…
The Victory on the Third Day's Engagement. - Jdg 20:29. The account of this commences with the most important point, so far as their success was concerned: Israel set liers in wait (troops in ambush) round about Gibeah.
Jdg 20:30
They then advanced as on the former occasions.
Jdg 20:31-32
The Benjaminites came out again to meet the people (of Israel), and were drawn away from the town (the perfect הנתּקוּ without ו is subordinate to the preceding verb, and defines more precisely the advance itself, whilst the mode in which they were drawn away from the town is not described more fully till Jdg 20:32, Jdg 20:33), and began to smite the beaten of the people (who pretended to fly) as formerly u…
The Church Fathers
Their spirits broken, they faced the enemy. The men of Benjamin who thought they were shut in and surrounded, even before they were invaded from the rear, began scattering and fleeing to the desert, while Israel pressed after with doubled force and pursued them as they wandered in rout. About twenty-five thousand were slain, therefore, that is, almost all the men of Benjamin except six hundred who seized a fortification on a rough cliff and by virtue of its situation and with the help of nature and partly through fear were a terror to their victors. Success advises caution; in adversity, revenge is esteemed rather than victory.
After you found out what transpired in our court, you kept to yourself; therefore, I now summon, as it were, part of my own soul, for I have a friendly yet sorrowful complaint against you for the outrage done to chastity. Was it necessary for an unsurpassed, unheard-of case of virginity to be subjected to a sentence? Could it not have been dismissed? In other words, unless with injury to herself she had been handed over from honored modesty to an indecent surrender of her body, though she offered strong proof regarding herself, she would be exposed to ridicule and marked out as a wanton individual! You have tendered this privilege to virginity, honor of a sort, to which they are pleased to be summoned and invited who plan to recover this boon! Thus, they lose the liberty of a common reputation, nor do they protect themselves by the statutes of sacred or public law; they may not ask their accuser or oppose an informer but may only put on shamelessness and expose themselves to harm.Our ancestors did not think chastity so to be despised; rather, they showed it such reverence that they would wage war on violators of modesty. In fact, so great was their desire for revenge that all the tribe of Benjamin would have been destroyed unless the six hundred who remained out of the war had been protected by a natural hill. This is the expression found in the account of the sacred lesson whose meaning it is profitable to consider.
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Congregation — (Heb. kahal), the Hebrew people collectively as a holy community (Num. 15:15). Every circumcised Hebrew from twenty years old and upward was a member of the congregation. Strangers resident in the…
Gibeah — A hill or hill-town, “of Benjamin” (1 Sam. 13:15), better known as “Gibeah of Saul” (11:4; Isa. 10:29). It was here that the terrible outrage was committed on the Levite’s concubine which led to the…
Ambush · .At Gibeah — .At Gibeah
Benjamin, Tribe Of · Almost annihilated for protecting the men of Gibeah — Almost annihilated for protecting the men of Gibeah
Jews, The · Obliged to unite against enemies — Obliged to unite against enemies
Strategy · In war — In war
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
The Yisroelite troops retreated. Scripture now returns to the beginning of the narrative, reviewing and explaining how the twenty five thousand mentioned above12V.35. fell, and where they fell.
