April 12, 2012 – Judges 9

You see this scene in several movies.  The enemy gathers a village or group, locks them in a building, and then burns it down.  The latest on I remember is in “The Patriot”, the Mel Gibson movie about the Revolutionary war.  The problem is, or at least from what I read, there are no accounts of anything like that happening in the Revolutionary War.  I read that the earliest accounts of something like that occurring were found in Nazi Germany.  Now I have to rethink that because here we have that exact thing happening prior to King David of Israel.  Abimelech traps all the citizens in a crypt and burns it down around them.  This whole chapter is brutal, from the killing of 70 brothers to Abimelech asking to be run through.  Scenes like this or situations of such turmoil seem so remote from us because of where we live, but if you watch any news or films about what is going on in other parts of the world, these scenes and this turmoil would not be so foreign.  A movie that I am reminded of is “Hotel Rwanda”.  How close it comes, I don’t know, but if it is close at all, the conditions of that situation would put it at a very close level to the savagery we see here.  And that is not so far into the past, occurring in our life time.  Yet we find it so hard to relate because we are on the other side of the planet.