Catholic Commentary
Benjamin's Failure to Drive Out the Jebusites
21The children of Benjamin didn’t drive out the Jebusites who inhabited Jerusalem, but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day.
Judges 1:21 records that the tribe of Benjamin failed to drive out the Jebusites from Jerusalem, allowing them to remain as cohabitants in the city. This failure represents a breach of the divine covenant, as God had commanded Israel to dispossess the Canaanite inhabitants, and the phrase "to this day" indicates this situation remained a visible, unresolved problem in the narrator's time.
Benjamin could not — or would not — expel the Jebusites from Jerusalem, and that compromise became permanent, embedding pagan corruption in the very city God intended to be holy.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates this verse through its integrated understanding of original sin's continuing effects (concupiscence) within the baptized soul. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that even after Baptism, "an inclination to sin called concupiscence" remains (CCC §1426), meaning the Christian life is precisely the ongoing effort to "drive out" disordered attachments that persist after the initial gift of grace. The Jebusites in Jerusalem are thus a vivid scriptural icon of what the Council of Trent defined against the Reformers: that the remnants of sin remain after justification not as formal guilt, but as a real battlefield requiring sustained moral and spiritual effort (Decree on Original Sin, Session V).
St. Augustine, in The City of God, meditates at length on the two cities — the City of God and the earthly city — and their intermingling in historical time. Benjamin's Jerusalem embodies precisely this intermingling: the holy city is not yet wholly holy. Augustine's framework reminds Catholics that the Church Militant lives within this tension until the eschaton, and that vigilance against the "Jebusites within" is the permanent condition of pilgrimage.
St. John Chrysostom notes in his commentary on Pauline passages (cf. Rom 7:14–25) that the soul which tolerates small encampments of vice eventually finds them fortified. Pope St. John Paul II, in Veritatis Splendor (§102), echoes this patristic insight by warning that moral compromise — choosing partial obedience — gradually corrodes the integrity of conscience. Benjamin's "living with" the Jebusites is the scriptural precedent for exactly this spiritual danger.
For a contemporary Catholic, Judges 1:21 poses an uncomfortably direct question: Which Jebusites have I allowed to remain in my Jerusalem? Every baptized Christian is called to be a holy city — a dwelling place of God — yet most of us have identified areas of sin, disordered habit, or spiritual compromise where we have struck a truce rather than sought conversion. Perhaps it is a persistent pattern of speech, an attachment to a form of entertainment that corrodes charity, a habit of half-hearted prayer, or a relationship whose boundaries slowly erode moral clarity. Benjamin did not celebrate the Jebusites; it simply stopped fighting them. Complacency, not malice, is often the enemy of holiness. The practical challenge of this verse is to name the specific "Jebusites" cohabiting with us in the city that belongs to God — and to bring them before the Lord in regular Confession and prayer. The Sacrament of Penance is precisely the ongoing campaign of dispossession that Judges calls for. Do not let the compromise become permanent; do not let "to this day" describe your soul.
Commentary
Literal and Narrative Meaning
Judges 1:21 stands within a catalogue of failures (vv. 19–36) that interrupts the initially hopeful account of Judah's military successes (vv. 1–18). The repeated formula — "[tribe X] did not drive out the inhabitants of [place Y]" — functions as a liturgical lament, each repetition deepening the reader's sense of covenant breach. Benjamin's failure is given particular prominence because Jerusalem (here called by its pre-Israelite name, reflecting Jebusite ownership) sits on the border between the territories of Judah and Benjamin (Josh 15:8; 18:16). The tribe charged with holding this strategic and eventually sacred high ground cannot — or will not — complete its divine commission.
The verb translated "drive out" (Hebrew: yārash, to dispossess or take possession by displacement) is theologically loaded throughout the Deuteronomistic history. The Lord had explicitly commanded Israel to yārash the inhabitants of Canaan (Deut 9:3–5), not out of ethnic superiority, but because of the moral corruption of those nations and the lethal spiritual danger their cult practices posed to Israel. Benjamin's failure to yārash is therefore not merely a military shortcoming; it is a failure of trust in God's promise and a breach of the covenant conditions laid down in Deuteronomy.
The phrase "to this day" ('ad hayyôm hazzeh) is a standard Deuteronomistic formula confirming that the anomaly being described was still observable when the text reached its present form. It anchors the theological failure in historical, visible reality: the Jebusites are not a distant memory but a present, ongoing problem embedded in the city that God intended for his people.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
At the allegorical level, the Jebusites inhabiting Jerusalem alongside Benjamin typify the persistence of sin and its near-occasions within the life of a person or community that has accepted God's covenant but has not fully surrendered every interior territory to his dominion. The Fathers of the Church consistently read the Canaanite nations as figures of the vices and disordered passions that must be rooted out from the soul. Origen, in his Homilies on Joshua, teaches that the spiritual war of conquest is nothing less than the soul's ongoing battle to subject every thought and desire to Christ — and that half-measures produce exactly the contamination Judges describes.
Jerusalem itself deepens the typological resonance. The city that Benjamin leaves contaminated is the very city that will become Zion, the City of God, the seat of the Ark, and ultimately the site of the Crucifixion and Pentecost. David will later succeed where Benjamin failed, capturing the Jebusite stronghold (2 Sam 5:6–9) — a detail the New Testament tradition reads as a type of Christ's reclaiming of humanity from the dominion of sin. Benjamin's failure thus prepares the reader to desire a greater son of the covenant, a true conqueror, who will complete what the tribes could not.