Jabesh-gilead pays for absence, and four hundred women are spared for seizure

Absence from Mizpah is turned into a massacre order

They say, What one is there of the tribes of Israel that came not up to Mizpah to the LORD? Behold, no one came to the camp from Jabesh-gilead to the assembly. The people are numbered, and there is none of the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead there. The congregation sends twelve thousand of the most valiant and commands them: Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children. This is the thing you shall do: you shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that has lain by man.

A missed assembly plus their own death-oath becomes authorization to kill a town that was not Gibeah. Children are in the command. No word of God in this scene orders the expedition.

Four hundred young women are spared for seizure

They find among the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead four hundred young virgins who have not known man by lying with any male. They bring them to the camp to Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan. The whole congregation sends to speak to the children of Benjamin who are in the rock Rimmon and to proclaim peace. Benjamin returns at that time, and they give them the women whom they have saved alive of the women of Jabesh-gilead. Yet so they suffice them not.

"Saved alive" is not rescue. Survival is selection by sexual status for forced transfer. The narrator never records their ages beyond "young," their consent, a humane process of identification, or their later life. Virginity is a filter men use, not a measure of worth.

The people repent again, because the numbers still fail

The people repent them for Benjamin, because the LORD had made a breach in the tribes of Israel. Grief remains focused on tribal continuity. The shortfall of women, not the massacre or the captives' terror, drives the next plan. Repair that creates new bereaved women is not repentance in any sense worth imitating.