His concubine played the prostitute against him, and went away from him to her father's house to Bethlehem Judah, and was there the space of four months.
Now no king in Israel. You see Israel was intended by God to be a theocracy. God wanted to be the king. He wanted the people to submit to His rules, to His reign, but the declaration "there was no king in Israel" meant that the people were not submitting to God. Thus there was confusion, everybody was doing what he felt was right and there was great confusion. These things that are told here are not told in a sense of condoning what's happening, in fact they're told in the other sense of condemning what they're doing. But just showing the confusion that existed during this particular period of the history of the children of Israel. And the whole purpose is just to relay actually the confusion that exists during this period of time.