Ambrose of Milan

A proud retort was made, and plans for peace were changed to war. In the first and second encounters, when many were harmed by a few, the Israelites considered yielding, since the battles were so unfavorable. There were four hundred thousand men warring against twenty-five thousand of the tribe of Benjamin, and they strove with seven hundred Gabanites [Gibeonites] experienced in war. When two battles were unfavorable, Israel with eager spirit did not lose hope of victory nor of vengeance for the hope they had fostered.Superior in cause and number they yet fell back defeated in the battle’s outcome, and, feeling that God was offended, they tried with fasting and much weeping to gain a reconciliation of heaven’s favor. Begging the Lord’s peace, they returned more boldly to war, and they to whom prayer had given courage and who had entertained much hope were now able to do what they planned. On a pretext of withdrawing their front lines, setting ambushes at night in the rear of the city, where a segment of the enemy was located, they followed as some retired and thus were provided with an opportunity for invading the unprotected city. Fires were quickly set and flared up while raging flames and waves of heat revealed the sight of the taken city. 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. Not even a minority of the women stayed clear of that struggle, but all the women of the tribe of Benjamin, along with boys and girls of every age, were wiped out by sword or fire, and an oath was taken that no one would give his daughter to a man of that tribe in marriage, so that all chance of repairing the name was abolished.

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.