The story begins with a Levite and his concubine, and it ends with the death of all but 600 men from the tribe of Benjamin and a unique method of getting brides. Chapter 19 - 21 of the book of Judges detail the events, but a brief synopsis is sufficient for our current discussion.

When the Levite and his concubine rested in Gibeah, a Benjaminite town, the men of the town tried to rape the Levite. When they were unable to do so, they raped and killed his concubine. As a result, the Levite gathered the rest of the tribes of Israel to attack Gibeah, but the Benjaminites fought on the side of Gibeah instead. Thus outnumbered, they were slaughtered. Only 600 Benjaminites survived.

The other tribes, not wanting to make the Benjaminites extinct, made peace, but then discovered that the Benjaminite men needed wives so they wouldn’t die out. Since all the other tribes had vowed not to give their daughters to the Benjaminites, they ultimately settled on having the Benjaminites kidnap young virgins to take for their wives (that way, they weren’t given them, but no one would punish the kidnapper either).

The very last verse in Judges sums up the motivation for this “solution.” It says:

In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Relativism, in other words, is the genesis of the problem. People had no standards, and thus the only solution was to kill one another, and then to kidnap survivors. Indeed, if the only standard is what is right in your own eyes, then nothing that anyone did in that story was actually wrong. It was simply action and reaction, nothing more.

If, however, there are universal standards, then we can measure and judge whether anyone in the story acted nobly. But only if the standard is not relative. Relativism must lead to behavior like that found in the end of Judges. It is the only logical outcome of anarchy.