Benjamin was the youngest son of Jacob and Rachel, and the only full brother of Joseph. This tribe was almost exterminated in an ancient Israelite civil war in which the Benjaminites were sufficiently fearless and foolhardy to fight all the other tribes at once. This senseless civil war is discussed in Judges 19-21. The Benjaminites were fierce warriors. Although the Benjaminites were outnumbered 400,000 to 26,700, they won the first two battles as they routed the combined forces of the other tribes. Judges 20:21-25 records that the Benjaminites decimated the armies of the other tribes, killing 40,000 of them. The Israelite tribes had to fast and obtain God’s divine help to defeat the Benjaminites. At the end of this needless war, the entire tribe of Benjamin was reduced to only 600 men.
From that time on Benjamin’s population lagged far behind the other tribes, and they were the smallest tribe in Israel at the time one of their members, Saul, was made the first king of Israel (I Samuel 9:21). When the tribes of Israel divided into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Benjamin remained with the tribe of Judah (I Kings 12:21). After Judah went into captivity, a contingent of Benjaminites returned with the Judahites to rebuild the Temple and Jerusalem (Ezra 1:5, Nehemiah 11:3-4). However, even as most of the tribe of Judah remained in Asia, most of the Benjaminites also remained in Asian locations…
