שופטים, פרק כ׳, פסוק מ״ו

The bloody civil war reaches its tragic conclusion with the near-total destruction of the army of the tribe of Benjamin. A summary of the final battle presents the devastating toll, noting the deaths of twenty-five thousand courageous fighters struck down by the Israelites [ביאור שטיינזלץ].

However, the numbers presented at the end of the campaign raise a clear mathematical difficulty. The total casualty count is listed as twenty-five thousand, yet an earlier account mentions twenty-five thousand one hundred fallen. Furthermore, the original army of Benjamin numbered twenty-six thousand seven hundred men. With only six hundred survivors fleeing to safety, there is an unexplained gap of one thousand one hundred soldiers.

The primary approach among commentators is that the omission of the one hundred casualties is simply a matter of rounding. The total reflects a general count by the thousands, bypassing the smaller details [רד״ק, מצודת דוד]. It is also possible that these one hundred men were individuals who died at different stages throughout the fighting and were therefore not tallied with the main group [רלב״ג].

As for the remaining one thousand unaccounted fighters, the answer lies in the specific timing of the casualties. The count of twenty-five thousand refers exclusively to the soldiers who died on the final, decisive day of battle. Although the Israelites suffered heavy losses during the initial days of the war, the army of Benjamin also took casualties. The missing one thousand men were killed during those earlier battles [מצודת דוד, רלב״ג]. Additionally, some of these missing troops may not have died in the early fights, but rather perished while hiding in caves in the days immediately following the war [מלבי״ם].