The Chapters Churches Skip

Hook

A City Learning What Comes Next From Its Neighbor’s Example

The Rapid Support Forces have spent months tightening a siege line around El-Obeid, in Sudan’s North Kordofan — a city that sits at the crossroads linking Darfur, Kordofan, and the country’s center, which is exactly why the militia wants it (Al Jazeera, 2026). Roughly half a million people are trapped inside, and around a fifth of them, roughly 105,000, already fled one earlier siege before landing inside this one.

Everyone inside that perimeter has a documented reason to know what a siege like this tends to end with, because a city not far away already showed them. El-Fasher fell to the same militia in October 2025, after a siege of similar length. What followed was not simply capture. The UN Human Rights Office confirmed roughly six thousand killings in the aftermath and warned the real number was almost certainly higher. Amnesty International described the pattern of violence as ethnic cleansing, and a separate, independent United Nations fact-finding mission concluded, in a February 2026 report, that the assault bore the “hallmarks of genocide” (Health Policy Watch, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026).

So when the same force began massing around El-Obeid this summer — sustained, near-continuous drone strikes on a city holding half a million people, according to reporting in July — those trapped inside were not guessing at their odds. They had a precedent, a body count, and months of warning, watching the same playbook run a second time in view of the entire world (Al Jazeera, 2026).

There is something close to unbearable about that particular kind of foreknowledge — a horror repeating itself in full view of people who can name every stage of it in advance, and who can do almost nothing to interrupt the sequence once it starts. Scripture has a phrase for the conditions under which this keeps happening, stated twice, bracketing the ugliest stretch of one of its strangest books: no king, and everyone doing what was right in his own eyes.

We have spent this series inside the Book of Judges watching that vacuum swallow one leader after another — Abimelech seizing what no structure existed to deny him, and in the previous installment, Samson carrying, alone, a deliverance no council or army ever built to share. This time the book does something it has not risked before. It stops following one flawed judge and turns to the whole nation at once — and what it shows across its final five chapters is a people with a genuine grievance discovering that being right about the original wrong does not automatically make every action taken afterward right as well.

Historical Case

A Question Kansas Tried to Let Settle Itself

Six years before the first shots of the American Civil War, settlers were already fighting a smaller and stranger war. It was over a stretch of prairie that had no business deciding the nation’s future on its own. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 handed the question of slavery in the new territory to “popular sovereignty.” Whichever settlers arrived first and organized loudest would decide it themselves. Stephen Douglas, who championed the idea, meant it as compromise. It let settlers decide the question locally, rather than forcing Washington to choose a side that might break the country in half. But a compromise built with no enforcement mechanism behind it is still, functionally, an abdication, whichever way its author intended it.

There is a particular kind of failure hiding inside that decision, worth naming plainly. Some questions are not actually questions of preference, however convenient it would be to treat them that way. Letting a neighborhood vote on where to put a park is a preference question. Letting a territory vote on whether an entire class of human beings could be legally owned was never that. No language Congress used to describe the process changed what it actually was. Popular sovereignty did not resolve a moral question by putting it to a vote. It simply relocated the fight from the Senate floor to the Kansas prairie. There, rhetoric could no longer settle anything; whoever arrived with more guns would settle it instead.

What arrived, accordingly, was not really a democratic contest. Pro-slavery Missourians crossed the border by the thousands on election days, voting in a territory where they did not live. Meanwhile, abolitionist societies in New England financed rival settlements built explicitly to outnumber them. Kansas ended up with two competing legislatures and two constitutions. Neither side trusted the other’s process, and no federal authority was willing to force a resolution. What resulted was an armed standoff wearing the costume of a policy dispute (Etcheson, 2004).

The violence did not stay symbolic for long. In May 1856, a pro-slavery posse several hundred strong sacked the free-state town of Lawrence. They burned its hotel and press while, by most accounts, deliberately avoiding bloodshed. Two nights later, John Brown led a small band to the cabins along Pottawatomie Creek. They dragged five pro-slavery settlers into the dark and killed them with broadswords in front of their families. It was retaliation aimed less at the men actually responsible for Lawrence than at whoever happened to be standing on the wrong side of the county line.

Neither side considered itself the aggressor. Each community received its own side’s atrocity as proof the other side had started it. That made the next atrocity feel less like an escalation than an overdue correction. By the time the wider war began in 1861, the territory had already spent seven years rehearsing a similar logic in miniature — one that would later scale up across a continent. A governing body had refused to settle the actual question. Rival groups made competing claims to legitimate authority. Neighbors had stopped being able to imagine the people across the county line as still, in any meaningful sense, on the same side.

Historians still argue over how much of the national war Kansas actually caused, as against merely foreshadowed. What is harder to dispute is the structure underneath both: a moral question a governing body refuses to settle does not stay dormant. It gets settled anyway, by whoever picks up a weapon first. The settlement it produces is rarely the one anyone who started it originally wanted.

Biblical Lens

The War Israel Fought Against Itself

Judges saves its darkest material for last, and it is not hard to see why so few sermons make it this far into the book. The final five chapters have no named judge, no deliverer raised up by God, no familiar cycle of oppression and rescue. Instead they offer a slow catalog of a nation improvising its own morality one household at a time. Both ends of the section carry the same diagnosis: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6; 21:25).

It would be easy to read that refrain as a straightforward argument for monarchy, and the book that follows clearly wants a reader thinking in that direction. But Judges never actually promises that a throne fixes what is broken here. Saul gets a crown and loses himself to it. David gets a crown and still orders a man’s death to cover an affair. Even Solomon, wiser than either, ends his reign having built altars to foreign gods for the sake of foreign wives. The absence of a king is certainly part of what these chapters are diagnosing. Whether a king would have been the cure is a question Judges leaves open, on purpose, for the books that come after it to keep testing.

The unraveling starts small and private. A man named Micah steals silver from his own mother. He returns it out of guilt, and watches her dedicate it to cast an idol for his personal shrine — complete with an ephod, household gods, and eventually a wandering Levite Micah hires as his own private priest. “Now I know that the LORD will do me good,” Micah says, “seeing I have a Levite to my priest” (17:13). He treats an actual priesthood the way a man might treat a lucky charm, purchased rather than consecrated. Micah has not repented of anything. He has simply found a more official-looking way to keep doing what he was already doing.

That corrupted priesthood does not stay contained to one household for long. When the tribe of Dan goes looking for territory, its scouts find Micah’s shrine. Danite warriors simply take the idols and the priest by force, offering him a promotion: priest to an entire tribe rather than one man’s house. He accepts without visible hesitation. The text names something it rarely bothers stating this directly: this priest was Jonathan, grandson of Moses himself (18:30). The corruption running through these chapters is not happening at the margins of Israel’s religious life. It is running straight through the family line that was supposed to be guarding against exactly this.

Then the book turns from private corruption to public horror, and the shift in register is unmistakable from the first sentence. A Levite traveling home with his concubine chooses to lodge for the night in Gibeah, a town of his own people. He assumes Israelite hospitality will be safer than a nearby Canaanite town. An old man takes them in. That night, men of the city surround the house demanding to abuse the Levite — staging and language deliberately echoing Sodom, a scene readers of Genesis would recognize instantly. The host offers his own daughter and the concubine in the visitor’s place. In the single worst act of the entire book, the Levite pushes his concubine out to the mob himself.

The mob assaults her through the night and leaves her at the doorstep by morning. What the Levite does next is almost too clinical to narrate directly. He carries her body home, cuts it into twelve pieces, and sends one piece to each tribe of Israel as a summons — not a plea for grief, but a call to arms.

“And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel.” (Judges 19:29, KJV)

What happens next is, on its surface, the one moment in this stretch of the book that looks like it might redeem the pattern. Every tribe except Benjamin gathers as one body — a rare, almost startling picture of national unity around a genuine atrocity, the kind of collective outrage the book has not shown Israel capable of anywhere else. They demand Benjamin hand over the men responsible. Benjamin refuses, and closes ranks around its own.

It is worth sitting with how justified Israel’s anger actually is at this point, because that is what makes everything after it so much harder to sort out. This is not a case of a mob inventing a grievance. A woman really was tortured to death. A town really did shelter the men responsible. A tribe really did choose loyalty to its own over accountability for an atrocity. Israel’s cause at Mizpah was not the mistake in this story. The mistake was assuming that because the cause was righteous, everything done afterward in its name would be righteous too.

That assumption does not announce itself. Israel’s forces lose the first two engagements badly, despite outnumbering Benjamin many times over. Benjamin’s army includes seven hundred left-handed slingers so precise they “could sling stones at an hair breadth, and not miss” (20:16) — a detail the text seems almost to admire, before the slaughter that follows makes the admiration feel obscene in hindsight. On the third assault, an ambush finally breaks Benjamin’s forces completely. What began as a demand for accountability against specific men in one town ends as the near-annihilation of an entire tribe: every Benjaminite city burned, its livestock destroyed, only six hundred men escaping to a rock called Rimmon.

Notice what has happened to the boundaries of responsibility along the way. The crime belonged to a mob in one city. The punishment fell on an entire tribe — women, children, the old, the never-consulted — because the tribe declined to hand its own countrymen over. The circle of who answers for a wrong keeps widening, in this story, until whether a given person was actually guilty of anything stops being the question anyone is still asking. That is the shape of collective punishment, and Judges shows it happening under the banner of righteous grief, carried out by people who had every reason to be genuinely aggrieved.

Chapter 21 is where the moral exhaustion becomes hardest to look away from. Israel, having very nearly erased one of its own twelve tribes, is suddenly gripped by remorse at what it has done. But instead of confronting the vow that trapped it — a rash oath at Mizpah never to give their daughters to Benjamin in marriage — the nation engineers its way around the vow rather than repenting of it. Someone notices that the town of Jabesh-Gilead sent no representatives to the war assembly, technically violating an earlier oath to punish anyone who stayed home. Twelve thousand men then kill every inhabitant of that town except its virgin women; the survivors distribute four hundred of them to the surviving Benjaminites as wives. It is still not enough. For what remains of the shortfall, the elders sanction the abduction of young women dancing at a yearly festival in Shiloh. They instruct the surviving Benjaminite men to hide in the vineyards and seize wives by ambush. The text never treats the women involved as people whose own consent might matter to the outcome. It handles them the way a shortage of supplies gets handled — a resource to be located and allocated, so that a political problem Israel itself created can finally be closed out.

By the end of chapter 21, three separate groups of people have paid for a war they had no part in starting: the concubine whose death began it, the residents of Jabesh-Gilead who died for an attendance record, and the young women of Shiloh who were never asked. None of them is named beyond a place or a role. All three exist in the text primarily as the cost of somebody else’s justice.

That refusal is what makes these five chapters so hard to preach and so easy to skip. There is no tidy moral here, no judge whose imperfect faith still gets counted as a kind of victory. There is only a nation that had every reason, at the start of chapter 20, to believe it was finally doing the right thing together. By the end of chapter 21, it had produced two further atrocities in the name of repairing what its own righteous war had broken.

Pattern Insight

The Rule Nobody Wrote Down

Social psychologists who study how ordinary people participate in atrocity have several names for pieces of what happens across chapters 20 and 21. No single one of them explains the whole tragedy. Group identity hardens the line between us and them. Dehumanization makes it easier to treat a shortage of wives as a logistics problem rather than a crime against actual women. Albert Bandura’s research on moral disengagement names a third piece specifically: the habit of reframing harm as service to a cause, judging it by comparison to something worse, and gradually shifting responsibility onto whoever is nearest at hand until the original wrongdoing barely registers as a factor anymore (Bandura, 1999). Bandura helps name one mechanism running underneath this story. He does not, on his own, account for everything happening in it.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, nearly a century ago, that groups are consistently less capable of restraint than the individuals who compose them. A collective conscience, once mobilized around a cause it believes is righteous, will tolerate cruelties no single member of that collective could justify alone (Niebuhr, 1932). Chapters 20 and 21 read like an illustration he never got to cite.

All of these mechanisms share a missing piece, though — one Israel never builds across five chapters: a way of knowing when the punishment is finished. The war at Mizpah has a clear rule for how to begin. Gather, demand, and if refused, fight. It has no comparable rule for how to end. It offers no answer, prepared in advance, to the harder question underneath the whole campaign: who decides when justice has actually been satisfied, and how would anyone recognize that moment if it arrived? Without an answer to that question sitting in place before the anger starts, the war simply keeps finding new debts to collect — Benjamin’s cities, then Jabesh-Gilead’s households, then Shiloh’s daughters — because nothing in the process was ever built to say, at any point, that enough had already been done.

It would be fair to ask, here, whether all this talk of structure and process amounts to a polite argument for waiting too long. Should a grieving Levite, or a family watching drone strikes gather overhead, sit patiently while some committee finishes deliberating? That objection deserves a direct answer rather than a shrug: justice needs both moral urgency and institutional restraint. Choosing between them is exactly the false choice this story keeps warning against. The alternative to righteous anger was never meant to be indifference. It is anger carried inside a process disciplined enough to say, eventually and specifically, that this much and no more will be done in its name.

Bleeding Kansas ran on a recognizably similar structural gap a century and a half before Bandura or Niebuhr had a name for any part of it. Each side justified Lawrence, then Pottawatomie, as an overdue correction for what came before. Each side’s memory conveniently began at the exact moment its own side was wronged. Neither trusted any shared authority enough to call the exchange finished. Sudan’s current war carries a version of the same architecture at a scale that is difficult to hold in the mind at all. The RSF’s assault on El-Fasher followed the same militia’s earlier, well-documented ethnic-cleansing campaign in West Darfur in 2023. By most independent assessments, El-Obeid’s current siege is the same strategy running a second time on a new city, because nothing has yet interrupted the sequence structurally (New Statesman, 2026).

The comparison should not be pushed further than it holds. The RSF’s campaign in Darfur is not a community turning on its own members, the way Israel turned on Benjamin or Kansas turned on itself. It is closer to naked conquest — one armed faction imposing its will on a population with no meaningful power to resist. Both situations still share the same missing piece: no authority, anywhere in the system, capable of telling either side that a line had been crossed and enforcing what came next. Kansas lacked a federal government willing to say so. Israel lacked a king, or any structure functioning like one. Sudan lacks an international order willing to back its own warnings with anything besides statements.

None of this means Judges is predicting what happens next in North Kordofan. Scripture is not being used here as a machine for forecasting the news; that kind of reading tends to flatter the reader far more than it honors the text. These five chapters offer something harder and more durable than prediction: a way of recognizing the moral conditions under which one atrocity keeps becoming the seed of the next one. That is true in a desert three thousand years ago, or in a besieged city this week, wherever grievance is allowed to run without ever being asked how it will know its own completion.

Closing

What a People Owes the Next Crisis

There is no king in these final chapters, and Judges never quite promises that a king would have changed the outcome. What it shows instead, patiently and mostly without interrupting itself to render a verdict, is a structural gap where accountability should have lived. No court could try the men of Gibeah without the whole nation improvising a war in its place. No mechanism could correct a rash vow at Mizpah except another vow just as rash. No way remained to grieve what had been done to Benjamin except arranging fresh harm to smooth it over.

A community does not need to be a nation to build the same gap. A church that disciplines no one until an outrage becomes public will eventually improvise a response the way Israel improvised at Mizpah — sized to how loud the anger has gotten rather than to what actually happened. A family, a workplace, a friendship that has no ordinary way of naming a small wrong while it is still small will eventually try to settle everything at once, at the worst possible moment. Whoever happens to be standing closest ends up absorbing a correction that was meant for someone else entirely.

El-Obeid is still standing as this goes to print. It is still holding roughly half a million people inside a siege line built by a militia that has already shown, in full documented detail, exactly what it intends. Nothing about that outcome is decided yet, and nothing here should be read as though it already is. These five ancient chapters offer the plainer and more local warning underneath the larger one: a genuine grievance is not the same thing as a finished case for how far its answer is allowed to go. A people who wait for the crisis itself to draw that line usually discover, the way Israel did at Jabesh-Gilead and at Shiloh, that closing the account costs almost as much as the wrong it was meant to settle.

Related reading in this series: The Weakening, on what carrying unaddressed weight does to a body over time, and The King Nobody Wanted, on the earlier collapse this same vacuum produced.

Notes
1. Al Jazeera, “El-Obeid under siege by RSF: Could this be Sudan’s next el-Fasher?” July 6, 2026.
2. Health Policy Watch, “Sudan’s Catastrophic Civil War Enters Fourth Year,” June 10, 2026.
3. New Statesman, “Inside Sudan’s perpetual war,” February 5, 2026.
4. Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (University Press of Kansas, 2004).
5. Albert Bandura, “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, no. 3 (1999): 193–209.
6. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932).
7. Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth, The New American Commentary, vol. 6 (Broadman & Holman, 1999).