Battle of Gibeah

The Battle of Gibeah is an episode in the Book of Judges. The battle was triggered by an incident of gross inhospitality on part of the Tribe of Benjamin, in which a concubine belonging to a man from the Tribe of Levi was raped to death by a rowdy mob. The Levite had offered his concubine to the mob in place of himself (whom the mob originally sought to "be intimate with"), saying "bring out the man that came into your house, so that we may be intimate with him" and then locked the door for the night. In the morning the Levite found his dead concubine at the door, and butchered her into twelve pieces, and sent the pieces throughout all the territory of Israel.

The outraged tribes of Israel sought justice, and asked for the miscreants to be delivered for judgement. The Benjamites refused, so the tribes then sought vengeance, and in the subsequent war, the members of Tribe of Benjamin were systematically killed, including women and children; when Benjamin was nearly 'extinguished', it was decided that the tribe should be allowed to survive, and all the men from another town, Jabesh Gilead, that had refused to take part in the punishment of the Tribe of Benjamin, were killed, so that their daughters could be wed to the surviving men of Benjamin. The first king of Israel, Saul, descended from these men. Due to this war, the Tribe of Benjamin was subsequently referred to as "the smallest of all the tribes."