Judges 21:25 and Ethical Relativism: Why Everyone Did Right
Short answer: Ethical relativism is the belief that right and wrong are decided by each person or culture rather than by a standard outside us. Judges 21:25 describes exactly that condition: "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes." The verse is not a compliment. It is a diagnosis, repeated at Judges 17:6, and it sits at the end of a book that shows what happens when no one answers to anyone. Scripture does not treat morality as a private preference. Proverbs 14:12 warns that a way can seem right to a man and still lead to death, and Romans 1 describes humanity suppressing the truth it already knows. The Bible's answer is not a tighter rulebook but a rightful King.
The sentence that closes the book of Judges
Judges ends with a line that sounds almost neutral at first reading. Judges 21:25 says, "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes." The same sentence appears earlier at Judges 17:6. Its placement matters. The book does not end with a triumph or a reform but with a description of social chaos, and the writer offers this as the explanation. What preceded it was not merely political confusion. Judges 19 through 21 records a horrific sequence of abuse, tribal war, and desperate improvisation, and the narrator gives the reader the reason underneath it all.
The phrase about a king is not primarily a plug for monarchy, since Israel's later kings were frequently worse. It is a statement about accountability. In those days, no human authority stood over Israel, and the people took that absence as permission. Each person became the judge of his own case. The result was not freedom but a spiral in which the strongest took what they wanted and the vulnerable paid for it. That is the recurring pattern of the book, and the final verse tells us why it kept happening.
Notice how the writer frames the problem. He does not say everyone did what was right. He says everyone did what was right in his own eyes. The standard has been relocated from an external word to an internal impression. What felt correct to the individual became the measure of correctness. This is the definition of ethical relativism in practice, long before anyone gave it a modern name. The book of Judges is not an ancient curiosity; it is a case study in what a society looks like when this principle runs unchecked.
The details of the narrative reinforce the point. People make vows they cannot keep, tribes nearly exterminate each other, and at the end they are still improvising solutions that create new problems. The narrator never pauses to congratulate anyone. He simply notes that the absence of a ruling authority produced a moral free-for-all. Anyone who has watched a community, a family, or a conscience operate without an external standard will recognise the pattern immediately. The book ends here on purpose, leaving the reader to feel the weight of it.
What everyone did right in his own eyes actually produced
It helps to look at what preceded the summary sentence. Judges 17 introduces a man named Micah who steals silver from his mother, then returns it and receives a blessing. He sets up a shrine with an idol and a hired Levite. Later, men from the tribe of Dan steal both the idol and the priest, and the priest is pleased to go where the money and opportunity are. None of these men express a flicker of concern about whether their actions are lawful before God. The question is never asked.
Judges 19 then tells of a Levite and his concubine travelling, an inhospitable town, and a night of gang violence that ends in the woman's death. The man dismembers her body and sends the pieces throughout Israel to summon the tribes. The response is horror, but the horror produces a war, and the war produces a near-genocide, and the near-genocide produces another crisis of wives for the survivors. Each step is improvised, and each improvisation creates the next atrocity. No one consults God until after the damage is done.
This is the moral logic of relativism worked out in a narrative. When every person is his own measure, the only remaining currency is power. The strong take, the weak are taken from, and the community has no shared court of appeal to settle disputes. Israel had a covenant with God and a law from Sinai, but the book shows what happens when those are functionally ignored. The final verse explains that the ignoring was the whole problem. The standard existed; they simply did not treat it as binding.
Modern readers should resist the temptation to read Judges as an attack on a particular political system. The deeper point is theological. A people who will not answer to a rightful authority will answer to appetite, fear, and whoever has the most swords. The writer wants us to feel how bad things become when no one may be told no. That is the fruit of ethical relativism, and Judges lets us watch it ripen.
Proverbs 14:12 and the way that seems right
Proverbs 14:12 says, "There is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death." The proverb does not say the way looks wrong. It says it seems right. This is the danger. Self-assessed morality is not obviously sinister; it is plausible, reasonable, and often accompanied by sincerity. The person on that road is not usually cackling. He is doing what appears best to him, and that appearance is precisely the problem. The proverb's warning is that sincerity is not the same thing as safety.
The last phrase is blunt: in the end it leads to death. The proverb is speaking in the wisdom tradition's characteristic way, describing the usual outcome of a path rather than promising an immediate result. Sin's consequences often arrive late, which is exactly why the way can seem right for so long. A man can order his life around his own judgment for decades before the fruit appears. Wisdom literature warns us to evaluate the end of a road, not merely its surface.
This proverb is sometimes quoted as a proof text against trusting any human instinct. That is close to its point, but it needs care. The proverb is not a blanket statement that every intuition is wrong. It is a warning that a path can be sincerely chosen and still end in death. The correct response is not to distrust all judgment but to submit our judgment to a standard we did not write. Proverbs assumes there is a way that is right, and that it can be known and walked.
Ethical relativism denies that assumption. If there is no way that is truly right, then the proverb is meaningless, because no road can be said to lead to death any more than another leads to life. But Scripture will not let us hold both. Either there is a way that ends in life, or the warning is empty. The proverb's existence is itself an argument that morality is not ours to invent.
Isaiah's woe on redefining good and evil
Isaiah 5:20 pronounces a woe: "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" The prophet is not describing people who have no moral categories. He is describing people who have inverted them. They still use the words good and evil; they have simply reversed the assignments. This is a more advanced stage of relativism than mere private preference. It is the public redefinition of the moral vocabulary itself.
The verse that follows adds a second woe, to those who are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight, as Isaiah 5:21 puts it. The two woes belong together. The inversion of good and evil is not the work of fools who know no better. It is the work of the self-declared wise. The people who reassign moral labels believe they see more clearly than the tradition they inherited. Isaiah pronounces a woe on that confidence, not a commendation.
This has direct bearing on ethical relativism. In its softer forms, relativism says each person or culture should define its own values. Isaiah says that when people actually do this, the result is not neutral diversity but the naming of evil as good. Lying becomes strategic communication. Cruelty becomes strength. Sexual disorder becomes authenticity. The vocabulary is not abandoned; it is repurposed. The prophet's woe is a warning that this repurposing invites judgment.
It is worth noticing the sensory language: darkness and light, bitter and sweet. These are not matters of opinion. No one argues that sugar is bitter because it tastes that way to him. The prophet chooses categories that are publicly knowable to make the point that moral categories are meant to be knowable too. To reverse them is not to exercise freedom; it is to call light darkness and expect to see. The woe is because the reversal is both wrong and disastrous.
Romans 1 and the suppression of what is known
Romans 1:18 says, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." Paul's argument is not that humanity lacks moral information. It is that humanity holds truth down. The word suppress implies effort. Something is being pushed back, kept from view, and the reason given is unrighteousness. The problem is not ignorance but resistance.
Paul goes on to say that what can be known of God is evident, because God revealed it, and that his invisible attributes are perceived in the things that are made. The conclusion is that people are without excuse. This is a direct challenge to the relativist's central claim. If moral knowledge is merely a human construction, no one can be held accountable for missing it. Paul says the knowledge is available, and the failure to honour it is blameworthy. Relativism, on this reading, is not a neutral philosophical option but a form of suppression.
The passage then describes the downward sequence. People did not glorify God or give thanks, their thinking became futile, and their hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for images. This progression is important. To refuse the true standard is not to stand above all standards. It is to put something else in the place of God, whether an idol, a self, a culture, or an appetite. Something always rules.
Paul's diagnosis explains why moral debate so often stalls. If the issue were purely intellectual, evidence and argument could resolve it. But if truth is being suppressed for moral reasons, then the resistance is not finally about information. This does not relieve us of the duty to reason carefully. It does mean that no argument alone will convert a heart that has decided it will not answer to God. Romans 1 is the theological explanation of Judges 21:25.
Why self-made morality cannot stay private for long
Ethical relativism often presents itself as a modest and tolerant position. If everyone has his own values, the reasoning goes, then no one imposes on anyone else. In practice this does not hold, because moral systems do not stay in the privacy of the individual. They require shared institutions. To have property, marriage, contracts, or courts, a community must agree on what is right and wrong. Someone must decide, and the relativist has no principled ground for who that someone should be.
This is what Judges illustrates. Once each person is his own measure, disagreements cannot be adjudicated by appeal to a common standard. They are settled by whoever has the greater power. The Levite's concubine had no standing to appeal. The tribe of Dan took what it wanted. The surviving Benjaminites were given wives by force because a vow had to be kept. Each decision was locally reasonable to those making it, and together they produced catastrophe. Moral autonomy for the strong becomes moral exposure for the weak.
History and everyday experience confirm the pattern that Scripture describes. When a society abandons a shared moral standard, it does not become neutral. It transfers authority to another source, whether legislation, majority opinion, corporate consensus, or the loudest voice. The standard does not disappear; it changes hands. The question Judges forces on us is not whether there will be a king but which one. The absence of an acknowledged authority is not the absence of authority.
This is why the Christian has a responsibility to argue publicly and not merely to retreat. If there is a real moral order, then our neighbours are not served by silence about it. They are served by patient, truthful reasoning and by lives that display the standard's goodness. We do this with humility, because we are not the standard ourselves. But we do it with confidence, because the standard is not ours to create and therefore not ours to abandon.
Is there a standard that is not arbitrary?
The strongest objection to moral relativism is that it cannot explain the moral seriousness we all experience. When we say that abusing a child is wrong, we do not ordinarily mean that our society dislikes it. We mean it is wrong. That intuition is not proof by itself, but it is a clue. Scripture accounts for it by saying that human beings are made in God's image and that his moral character is the standard against which actions are measured. Morality is personal because it is rooted in a person.
This matters because an impersonal standard would be arbitrary. If moral rules were simply built into the universe as brute facts, no reason could be given for why they are good. But if they reflect the character of a good God, then good is not an arbitrary decree. It is an expression of who he is. Judges 21:25 notes that no king was in Israel, which points forward to the need for a rightful ruler. The Bible's answer to moral chaos is not a list but a Lord, one whose character defines the good.
This is why Christians have historically insisted that ethics is not finally a matter of rules but of relationship and redemption. The problem in Judges was not only that people lacked a rule. It was that they lacked a king, and they were content to be their own. The gospel addresses both. It provides a King who is trustworthy, and it provides forgiveness for the times we have crowned ourselves. Ethical relativism cannot offer either. It can only leave each person alone with his own judgments, and then with their consequences.
Faithful Christians differ on how to apply these principles to particular disputed questions, and it is honest to say so. What Scripture will not permit is the assumption that right and wrong are finally determined by individual preference. On that, Judges, Proverbs, Isaiah, and Romans speak with one voice. The way that seems right is not the same as the way that is right, and the difference is not academic. It is the difference between life and death.
Biblical fidelity check
The passages establish several things plainly. They establish that a standard of right and wrong exists independently of human opinion, that God holds people accountable to it, and that moral knowledge is genuinely available to us. They establish that sincerely following one's own judgment can end in ruin, and that the refusal to submit to God's authority is a moral failure, not merely an intellectual one. They establish that the absence of acknowledged authority produces abuse and chaos in a community. These are the load-bearing claims of the passages, and they are not incidental.
The passages do not establish the opposite claim, that every use of personal judgment is sin. Wisdom requires judgment, and the same Proverbs that warn against self-assessed paths also command prudence and discernment. Nor do the passages settle specific contested applications, such as which political arrangements best restrain evil or how believers should weigh disputed matters that Scripture does not explicitly address. A common misreading treats Judges 21:25 as a proof text for monarchy, or as a slogan against all questioning of inherited tradition. That is wrong, because the verse is about the absence of divine authority, not about a particular human government. The rightful King Israel needed was God himself.
Other passages that speak to Judges 21:25
Three related studies help fill out the picture. For the question of God's justice and the accountability that relativism denies, see God’s Sovereignty in Salvation: Mercy, Justice, and Humility Before Romans 9. For how believers weigh money and business in light of a real moral standard, see How can Christians invest ethically? A Biblical Guide. For cases where the Bible gives no explicit command, see How should Christians make ethical decisions when the Bible is not explicit? A Biblical Guide. And for the way wisdom literature states general outcomes rather than guarantees, see How to interpret proverbs as wisdom rather than guarantees: A Step-by-Step Guide.
Frequently asked questions
Do Christians simply adopt the morality of their culture?
No. Christians are called to submit to God's revealed standard, which has repeatedly corrected the cultures that received it. That standard was not invented by any one society and has often stood against the majority opinion of the day. Christians have sometimes failed to obey it, and those failures are real and should be acknowledged. But the ideal is not cultural conformity. It is conformity to God's character as Scripture reveals it, tested against the text rather than against current consensus.
Does Judges 21:25 prove that Israel needed a human king?
Not directly. The verse laments the absence of a king, but the book of Kings shows that Israel's human kings were often faithless. The deeper need was for God to be acknowledged as ruler. The statement is a theological diagnosis of moral chaos, not a political manifesto. It prepares the reader to want a righteous king, and the rest of Scripture points toward a king whose reign is just, which is ultimately fulfilled in Christ.
Can someone be morally sincere and still be wrong?
Yes, and Proverbs 14:12 is written precisely to say so. A way can seem right to a person and still lead to death. Sincerity concerns the integrity of the person, not the accuracy of the map. This is why the remedy is not greater sincerity but a trustworthy standard. Scripture consistently treats sincerity as insufficient on its own, and it directs us to God's word as the means by which our judgments are corrected.
